Jackpot right under my nose

Go back and look at my first post. It was indeed horrific but also entertaining. Lots of funny kids watches and weird fashion stuff. It was collected as crap to use in art projects.

This is really cool and I'm glad you got this time to spend bonding with you MiL and your kids as well. After my mom passed away I found a big box of watches up in the attic as well as the garage and there were a few great ones. Also, there were a couple of well-worn fake Rolexes from my grandfathers ... apparently that was big in the day, you wore your fake Rolex to work, both worked in chemical factories (dad's worked for cyanamid and mom's worked for squibb) and you wore the real one out on the town. Still I smashed them with a hammer once I knew they were terrible fakes. A nice Hamilton pocket watch was in there. The box in the garage was full of old JnJ yearly pins as well as ones from Squibb. Along with a bunch of watches and old costume jewelry. I kept some good ones and left the rest for the estate sale.

My biggest loss was that no one told me about this stuff. I literally didn't even know it existed. I kept many pieces for myself but any stories about them are my own. I wish my mom had told me about any of these things and that's what was probably the hardest of all in finding the box of treasures. Sure, a few I knew about or could tell exactly who they belonged to and why, but a really cool engraved bracelet with my gramp's initials on it? So awesome, but I know nothing about it.

So, yeah, I was going somewhere between the tears I think.

Oh yeah, find out the stories now. Tell the stories now. Enjoy these things with your family so they know why you involved yourself in these stupid trinkets.

You can bring it to the next GTG lol

Thanks Rev. I don't have many stories but most of my watches came from my MiL/her father and mean a lot to me because of that connection. It's what sent me down the rabbit hole and I can't imagine ever letting any of that stuff go. I didn't get any stories about watches from Opa but last time I saw him he showed me his large collection. Opa didn't really speak English and I don't speak any German. We communicated about watches just fine though with grunts and hand gestures. I remember he had a gold-colored pie pan Omega that I wanted. Still do 😀. I remember I could feel the rotor clunking around and at the time had no idea why that would be. I don't know who ended up with it but I'm sure one of the uncles has it. I showed him my Hamilton Khaki Field Automatic that I was somewhat proud of and he felt it and just said, "Mmm, schwer (heavy)." He liked to collect automatics, mostly light-weight dressy stuff on straps and didn't care for manual winders. He also showed me some of his watch books. I remember taking pictures of the pages about Minerva.

He also sat a bunch of us down and told us some stories for a couple hours. Opa didn't speak much English so I got the translated version. He told us his story from the war (the second one). Long story short, he was about 13-14 and too young for the army. It was the end of the war and the army came through the schools and scooped up anyone over a certain height to be cannon fodder. Opa was tall so off he went. Luckily the war ended soon after so he didn't really do anything (or get killed) but he had to walk home like 500 miles. Some American GIs gave him a ride for a bit. He specifically said one of them was a black man (first he'd ever seen) who of course the German propaganda machine had told him all kinds of horrible things about. Said the guy was super friendly and nice to them, gave them food and a ride as far as they could. Bunch of kids caught up in a shitstorm. Now I'm oversharing again but I always found Opa's war story very interesting. I wear one of his watches just about every day.

Oh yea, did you see my picture on page 2? The GP was a 25 year service watch from Cyanamid and the owner was one of my MiL's patients a long time ago. When I first saw the Folex my immediate thought was, STOP! Hammer time! But I think I may save it for JDubs now. Or maybe we raffle it off at the G2G. 😁