Our Story

Back in the 1930’s a man named Harold Bentley varnished postcards onto scraps of wood from his shop, put nice edges on them, and then cute little hooks that made pretty little hanging tchotchkes. He would take other scraps of exotic wood and do carvings on them in fancy script with old Amish sayings. He also took color pages out of magazines and glued them to flat scraps and painstakingly made jigsaw puzzles out of them. Harold then sold these items out of the trunk of his car to Five & Dimes all over the Northeast to support his family during the Great Depression. I know all this because Harold Bentley was my mother’s father. An interesting postscript to this story is that my mother – raised on a ramshackle farm near Utica, NY – found one of the pieces made by her father on a wall in the house in Poughkeepsie that my father grew up in! His mother had purchased it at the Poughkeepsie Woolworths many years earlier when my father was still a schoolboy.