I learned an appreciation for something yesterday. Embroidery samplers are pretty cool. I never would have given them any thought but a nice woman told me all about this sampler at an estate sale. -- They're basically embroidered or stitched practice pieces done by young girls a long time ago. They usually consist of rows of ABC's, numbers, small pictures or patterns. The interesting part is that they usually have the girl's name, location and date stitched in as well. The one I was looking at was Elizabeth Cranston, Aged 12. Connecticut, 1797. Yeah that's pretty cool.
So I checked online last night and there have been samplers sold at auction for upwards of a million dollars. The most expensive one was by a girl in the colonies who was burned as a witch in the 1600's. Another was by a girl who became a serial killer in 1700's England. If I can figure out who Elizabeth Cranston is I might have something.
One other thing I learned yesterday was that my distant cousin was a bit of a kook. He was an avid Nazi artifact collector and in the 1960's he was convinced he had the gun that Hitler killed himself with. Yesterday I found out that it was of course not that gun. But it was an amazing thing none the less.
His plan was to start a Nazi museum and have people from all over the world come and see his amazing collection which also included a Car owned and driven by Hitler, several of Hitler's original paintings, clothing and photos by the hundreds. But the center piece was of course the most collectible and arguably most important gun of the 20th century.
The only problem was he lived in Swift Current. So no one ever came to his quonset museum to see what was in reality the largest and best collection of Nazi stuff ever collected in one place. My cousin was not discouraged by the lack of interest until the leading expert on Nazi stuff said the gun wasn't the one Hitler killed himself with. It was a nice gun. A genuine AH plated correct in every way pistol likely owned by the Fuhrer himself. But not THE gun.
In the coming months he began parting out his collection and selling everything a bottom dollar. Flags, knives, belt buckles, asparagus servers, Eva Braun's underwear, a treasure trove of...well...crazy stuff you'd not expect to find at a farm outside Swift Current. So needless to say he did not get top dollar. But he was free of the stuff that had burdened humanity so terribly and which over time became his personal burden.
Years later the pistol that wasn't the one that ended the horror of fascism, death, destruction and holocaust turned out to be a very important pistol after all. In 1944 a team of assassins was sent to Berlin to kill Hitler. And by all accounts they had come closer than any other. They entered an apartment where Hitler was known to live in Berlin. The proverbial coffee pot was still boiling. They had missed him by only minutes. One of the team members, a Canadian soldier whose name is included in the provenance of the weapon, snatched the nickle plated pistol from the desk where Hitler had been working. It was an incredibly brave, daring and risky mission. The team made it out of the apartment but was shredded in the coming days as they attempted to gain passage from Berlin amid the bombing and shelling being hailed on the city by the Russians who had been rapidly approaching all winter.
The gun made its way back to Canada as a war trophy and changed hands a few times. What was never in question was the provenance of it...straight from Hitler's desk snatched by a mercenary conducting the most important operation of the entire war. The allies had asked the Russian army to hold off on bombing Berlin for a week to allow them to operate safely. But of course the gotterdammerung couldn't be halted. Not for four people. And not in the middle of the end of the world.
A short 20 years later the gun left my cousin's possession in rural Saskatchewan. It left likely in a box with a few other things picked over by an astute collector who over time gathered the notoriety of the gun and sold it for hundreds of thousands. I never met this particular cousin but had always heard he was strange and never made any attempt to contact the members of his family, his friends or community. He lived alone and isolated until he died not too long after he sold the balance of his collection.
Until yesterday I had assumed the family legend of this guy owning Hitler's suicide gun was not possible. But that was what my family believed...that we had once own this special gun and our crazy cousin sold it for cheap. It had become sort of legend in my weird family history...a tree that should have likely been chopped down a few generations ago. But here we are. And so I Googled the guy and sure enough, a small, local Swift Current newspaper story published a story about him several years ago explaining the history, the real history of an amazing gun.
We like to pretend we are interesting in my family. We pretend we are important. I've had relatives appearing in a world history of their own creation before. An uncle who worked on the Manhattan project...from his house in Edmonton. And a radar enthusiast great uncle who has proof of ufo's and who was forced to live in isolation under observation by NASA. My Nazi collecting cousin from Swift Current, in his mind, been the one entering the bunker in the last days of April and who had witnessed the ending of all great evil. The only problem was the world that emerged, the real world, didn't match his great expectations.
|