A 100-year Throwback in Photographs

by Skip Cohen

I shared these images back in 2015 but ran across them recently in my office stash. They're too much fun not to share again. 

Meet my grandparents and their hardware store in Fairport Harbor, Ohio. Fairport is a little town on Lake Erie, and I'm guessing these photographs are from the early 1920s. It was called Rogat Hardware, and they also had a small furniture store next door, Fairport Furniture. When I was a kid, I used to help out on Saturdays and before the major holidays.

In the photo below, you'll notice the guns over on the left. Once I was old enough to learn how to work the cash register, it wasn't uncommon for me to make a sale of ammo, along with anything else that was purchased. Times were simply different from what they are today.

Nails were sold by the pound; window shades were cut to your window size as well as glass. Bikes and grills were always sold completely put together with air in the tires! And it wasn't unusual for somebody to be short on cash at the register and for my grandfather to put it on their account - no credit check - just a handshake.

If you haven't gone off searching for your own throwbacks today - what are you waiting for? When I find actual prints like these, it's like discovering gold. Think about it for a second - if these were digital files, they'd be lost somewhere on a jump drive!

Happy Throwback Thursday!