Shari Johnson, Publisher
A trip down any country road in Calhoun County could lead you to an adventure of various sorts, but one of my favorites is the discovery of new folks that add to the story of why West Virginia is one of the greatest places to live. I met Marc Siduit and his wife Elaine at a Republican meeting, two outspoken individuals who add color to the community, mainly that of red, white and blue, but in addition, their love of history and an unbelievable collection of antiques make a stop in their home a saga of 19th and 20th century memories.
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While the White sewing machine is not too antiquated, this display brought back so many memories for me regarding my own mother who spent much of her life sewing for our family. 
No self respecting West Virginia home would be complete without a collection of cast iron skillets 
Wash tubs are more often seen in the gardens of our community with summer flowers, but the galvanized and copper tubs washed babies and britches for centuries before being shelved in the gardening section of a Hardware store. The top version had dual purpose as a canner when not being used for the laundry. 
Not like any spinning wheel that I remember, Marc’s father brought this version from his home overseas. 
Among the many novelty Coca Cola items, both old and new are toy and marketing pieces as well as a table top juke box in working order. 
The metal crate came from a New Jersey dairy that Marc was familiar with, bearing a paten from the C.E. Erickson Company 
Glass lid with label from a dairy in Fayetteville, West Virginia 
Long before the McDonalds take out containers, the dairies that the original concept of take out containers. 
D.E. Erickson Companies y patent 
Wooden Butter churns and mop buckets
Many of the items in the collection are that which you could find in the homes of countless citizens in our community. But what makes the items interesting is that they are displayed in a manner that would cause anyone over the age of 50 to reminisce of childhood memories and anyone younger to ask, “What on earth is that?” I won’t say that I knew them all, but I had witnessed many of them in use during my six decades of life.
Marc was born in Belgium and Elaine in New York City. Elaine worked in a school system with special needs children, and they have two sons. As a forty-one year and 10 month veteran of the U.S. Navy, Marc Siduit could tell stories of his own. He was member of the special teams unit MIUW (Mobile Insure Undersea Warfare) group of only 72 and veteran of the Vietnam war; but he much prefers following the stories of priceless pieces of history such as the Napoleonic Soldiers below.
The soldiers are barely an inch high and cast in lead. Each of the one thousand, one hundred soldiers are hand painted in wonderful detail. Yes, you read that correctly – 1100! Because they were cast in lead Marc believes they were created in the late 1800’s or early 1900’s. It was acknowledged in the early 1900s that lead-containing paint was a main source of lead poisoning among children and the use of paints indoors and on products such as children’s toys or cribs was banned in several countries by the end of the 1920s.
(Photos below) It would come as no surprise that Marc is not a fan of modern communication devices. His aversion comes from the sheer panic of people when the power is down for more than a few hours and their cellphones can’t be recharged. He wonders how these people would survive a catastrophic event? Which is why he is a fan of the older versions of communication. A 1890 post office mail box from Baileyville, WV is filled with various correspondence, a nostalgic rotary phone and a couple of ticker tape roles from the days of telegraphs are good for creating conversation. The Boy Scout communicators would have been a form of texting incomprehensible for most of today’s youth but a fun way of getting a badge in the earlier Boy Scout groups. Morse code has been in and out of the Boy Scout requirements for over a hundred years. During that time, Morse has changed from a career skill to a rewarding hobby, from a vocation to an avocation. Also during that time, radio has grown to include voice communications, data communications, and broadcast. Morse was a requirement for First Class for 61 years, 1911 to 1972. It returned as an option from 1979 to 1990 during the skill award period of BSA advancement.
The box of wooden mail tubes and the one Marc hold in his hand were handcrafted and used to transport manifestos by train or air during war times.
As a child I remember my mother collecting green stamps and cashing them in for various products she could not have otherwise afforded. The plaid stamps pictured below are from Dayton, Ohio. Plaid Stamps were redeemable stamps, earned through purchases at a wide variety of establishments (largely supermarkets), with which a wide variety of consumer items could be gained – As were the somewhat more famous Green Stamps of that era, plaid stamps were a form of what was called Trading Stamps; they in fact dated back decades before their heyday of the fifties and sixties.
Other items in the photos below are random general store items and a beautiful working register from a department store. A childhood memory came flooding back into my mind was from the TopOmatic home cigarette roller. My Uncle Carol Hardway would allow us to roll his cigarettes on a Loredo Cigarette machine in the late 60’s, early 70’s. The same uncle allowed 5 year old me to shave him with a straight razor; clearly we were not the best decision makers!
Government issued currency is certainly the most widely used method of payment, but in areas where mining occurred there was a substitute known as script. It was issued by companies for payment and could only be spent in their company stores. Mines had their own coin as well, each dye cut coin represented a specific mine and could only be used in their store.
War ration books were issued to every family during war times and had stamps that would allow the purchase of certain rationed items. Food was in short supply for a variety of reasons: much of the processed and canned foods was reserved for shipping overseas to our military and our allies; transportation of fresh foods was limited due to gasoline and tire rationing and the priority of transporting soldiers and war supplies instead of food; imported foods, like coffee and sugar, was limited due to restrictions on importing.
The roll of bus tokens came from Charleston, WV, like used for the city bus service.
A few random pieces of interest was a momma giraffe Waterford Crystal piece that caught my eye with its sparkle. A very large light switch with a very large price tag that came off of a train engine and a shoe polish area that included shoe polish from one of the many companies owned by Muhammad Ali
No self respecting general store would be complete without a toy department. Marc’s houses some very popular toys of the past, including the Beetles and their Yellow Submarine Collectors card albums.
The photos in this story’s collection are only a small representation of Marc’s memorabilia collected displayed. We spoke for 4 hours, in what seemed like only minutes.
We closed out our meeting over donuts and coffee in Marc’s tap room filled with some of his favorite collections which included a Jules Bonheur bronze sculpture. It’s a lesson for us all that we should never assume beneath the surface of an old country home along an old country road that there is not an adventure lying in wait.
