![](http://www.infomercantile.com/blog/pics/north-sea-map-1927.jpg)
In the 1920s, the American Farm Bureau Federation toured northern Europe; this was the map of their travels. From The Bureau Farmer, September, 1927.
In the 1920s, the American Farm Bureau Federation toured northern Europe; this was the map of their travels. From The Bureau Farmer, September, 1927.
Bemidji, Minnesota: home of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, but the giant pair were still twenty years away when this postcard was mailed in 1916. In the 1910s, it was still a community on the grow, trying to develop roads and railroad access. A new depot was built a few years earlier than when this postcard was mailed and railway passengers were probably one of the main customers of such mementos of midwest travels. Cameras of the time were not particularly efficient at night, so this photo was probably a daytime photo that was underexposed and colored to make it look like ‘night’. In the 1910s, Either Third street has changed significantly, or the view is from a different spot: Google Maps doesn’t help.
These are a child’s-sized pair of glasses with very little wear. I imagine that, due to their width, the child was under 5 years old. The right lens has a dramatic impact point just to the outside edge of center, which would indicate (to my uneducated eye) that the child had fallen forwards, and turned their head to the left to diffuse the impact, but not fast enough. The glasses hit the ground first, pushing in the right nosepad and exploding the glass into an orb-weaver’s handicraft of cracks. As the head kept moving, the nosepad pressed in as far as it could, the lens flexed down the center line in the now-weakened glass and created a crescent-moon crack from top to bottom.
The proud parents of this future baby-boomer weren’t about to erase this momentous occasion from history: the glasses were marked with the date of the event, placed in their glasses-case, and kept for posterity. May 10th, 1945, will go down in infamy as the day Junior fell down and broke his new pair of glasses.
“A Terrible Meeting With A Buffalo”, from The Book of Knowledge, 1910s. Caption text here.