Sunshine and clouds mixed. High 81F. Winds SSW at 10 to 20 mph..

Partly cloudy. Low 67F. Winds SSW at 10 to 15 mph.

I have a rather remarkable antique that’s dear to me. It’s a marble top chest of drawers, and I’ve had it since I was first married, to my first husband, Bob Crain. The year was 1971. We’d just moved into our apartment in married housing at Indiana University Bloomington, and we were furniture hunting. We looked in the paper and there was this store in some sleepy little town nearby that had great prices, so we checked it out.

This was rural Indiana, a laid back, welcoming place perfect for a couple of dirt poor newlyweds. The store was nestled in a woods off a country road. As I remember, the owner, a tall, lanky fellow, was just as friendly as could be, and tickled to help two young people just starting out.

“What are you kids looking for?” he asked.

He showed us around, and we ended up with a table and chairs, some lamps and the marble top dresser. Even at the age of 20, I had an eye for antiques, and this one was simple but beautiful. Dark wood, three carved drawers with brass drop handles, and a white marble top that weighed a ton. When I inquired as to how old it was, the store owner shrugged and answered, “Old.”

I looked at the price — $49. You couldn’t do better than that.

So, I’ve had that dresser for 51 years. It’s followed me everywhere, through lord knows how many dwellings, through two marriages, cross country from Indiana to Los Angeles and, after 30 years in California, back to the midwest and Michigan. I recently moved it to my new apartment in Shelby, where it looks great in my large living room.

The only problem is, with the recent spike in humidity, the bottom drawer is totally stuck. Even my brother, who at one time owned a woodworking and furniture-making shop, couldn’t get it open.

“You’ll have to wait until the weather gets cooler,” he said.

“Well, considering how old it is, I can’t complain,” I remarked.

Somewhere over the years, I’d had the dresser appraised. It turned out my $49 find dated from the Civil War period and was worth, like, hundreds of dollars. I guess I could have sold it and made a bit of a killing, but I’d grown to love that old chest of drawers. It had become a part of me, a comforting reminder of the happy days of my youth, and somehow a testament to endurance.

Think of all that dresser has lived through. Nearly 160 years of history. Lincoln’s assassination. The country’s centennial, and bicentennial. The big conflicts, from the Civil War to Afghanistan. The inventions that changed the world – electricity, the telephone, the phonograph, the automobile, the airplane, all the way to computers and smartphones and driverless cars, and 70-inch TVs, and regular trips to the moon.

And still, it lives on, an impassive witness to the centuries, quiet and content in yet another living room. It will, no doubt, outlive me.

But what I find most incredible about that dresser is that it’s still functional. It’s as useful to me as it was to some family in 1862.

Yeah, they made stuff to last way back when. Another example of a still-functioning antique that I have is my stereopticon, aka the stereoscope.

If you ever had a Viewmaster when you were a kid, you had a modern version of this invention. Remember how you inserted a card with various slides, looked through the viewer, and, like magic, saw scenes in 3-D?

The Viewmaster was made of plastic and was basically designed as a kid’s toy. I had one when I was growing up, and took lots of trips with it, to exciting cities and far off lands. You got slides of places like Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon and Disneyland and even outer space, and when you looked through the viewer, it was as it you’d stepped into the scenes, they were so real.

People of 150 years ago experienced the same thrill with the Viewmaster’s predecessor, the stereoscope, a viewing device that shows cardboard slides, or stereographs. Mine dates from the 1870s, and is the Holmes model.

In 1862, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.--the father of Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.--patented the Holmes Stereoscope, which became the most popular stereoscopic device in the world. You hold it up by its wooden handle and look through an ornately carved metal viewfinder that rests on a wooden stick and has a place to insert the stereograph, a thick rectangular piece of cardboard with two images.

It’s so fascinating that when it comes to human beings and 3-D, basically nothing has changed since that clever old mathematician of ancient Greece, Euclid, discovered the mysteries of binocular vision. No matter how sophisticated society has become, when we look through a stereoscope, we’re just as enthralled as our ancestors of a few thousand years ago. Like them, we gasp and wonder, “How do they do that? How do they make these pictures seem so real that I actually feel like I’m there in them?”

I bought a bunch of period slides to go with my stereoscope, and it’s the next best thing to a time machine, transporting you back to the wonderfully quaint universe of the late 19th century.

One box of the cardboard slides is entitled, “25 Colored Stereographs Guaranteed to Be Genuine Reproductions of All the Most Interesting Sights of the World.” In one, Victorian tourists dressed to the nines in furs and muffs and long coats and top hats enjoy the brisk air of the Alps. In another, a Brahmin sits cross-legged alongside a road in Bombay, India. There are exquisite Japanese gardens and temples, scenes from the famous museums of Paris, and breathtaking views of the Sistine Chapel.

Such exotic sites were once the domain of only the wealthiest members of society. But with the invention of the stereoscope, virtually anyone could now see the world, for no more than a few dollars. The stereographs were far more than photographs. Their three-dimensional quality gave them such a potent illusion of reality that they satisfied any and all yearnings for adventure.

Last night, I had my friend Pierre to dinner. Afterwards, I took out my stereoscope and stereographs and we had fun going back in time. Pierre, who had never seen a stereoscope, was fascinated to be able to view, in 3-D, what the world was like 150 years ago.

“This is so cool!” he enthused.

Like my old marble top dresser, my stereoscope still has a place in the modern world. In fact, in our perilous age of economic uncertainty, pandemics, and travel terror, it just might come in handier than ever.

I’ll send ya a postcard from Bombay.

Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items.

Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup.

Error! There was an error processing your request.