We bought our house in 1987, bought our fireplace tools - identical to the ones in this picture - at that time. No reason for any change....

In my peer group in North Baltimore in the mid 50s the coins in your loafers meant something.

The exact meanings are lost in the cobwebs of my senior moments but it went something like this.

.00 meant no girlfriend and not looking.
.01 meant looking but not too hard.
.05 meant seriously looking.
.10 meant going steady.

If I had gone to New York at the time subway tokens would have confused me to no end and probably would have put a scar on my permanent record.

Over on the bottom shelf - as a bookseller I still this one very often. What's interesting is that several of the books were newly published at that time, and they still look older and worn. (I have this complaint with time period movies- they show full bookcases of "old" books, and they look old. But they would have been published recently at that time, so shouldn't they look new?)

I know that look. The cat may look asleep, be he's actually plotting mayhem, once she releases him.

[The cat is squinting from the photographer's flash. -Dave]

but no pennies in his loafers. And while the cat looks like it's asleep, the little girl's dimples look really sweet.

with that stranglehold.

I'm about the same age as these two, probably more the sister's age, and I lived in Georgia (Augusta) at this time, too. As the son of an Army officer, we felt we were pretty middle class, and we thought of kids like this as "rich" kids. The giveaways to us back then are 1) they lived in a house with a fireplace, 2) and they had wall-to-wall carpet. It's amazing how things that were luxuries only 60 years ago are commonplace now.

Sears Silvertone TV

The model is of an Iowa-class battleship (USS IOWA, USS NEW JERSEY, USS MISSOURI, or USS WISCONSIN)

All of the above are still afloat as museums.

The plastic model kits for these ships are perennially popular with American boys because they were the last and best true battleships built by the US Navy. Everything about them is superlative.

As you look at the ship model in the photo, note that, like most boys his age, he wasn't quite able to get all the joints glued correctly: there's a gap between the afterdeck and the topsides.

Oh, and Nice Cat, too!

Sylvania TV?

I probably built that same battleship a few years later. And a year or so after that either blew it up with firecrackers or shot it up with BB guns. Then torched it for good measure.

Our family had the same shovel, poker, broom fireplace kit.