May 2006 News from Readers

The collection of 26 Ohr pots on the Beau Rivage Casino’s barge in Biloxi, Mississippi, was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, but that was not the barge that landed on a gallery of the Ohr museum under construction there (see Kovels, December 2005). Marjorie Gowdy, executive director of the new Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, wrote to tell us that all of the museum’s pottery is safe and sound in temporary storage at the Mobile (Alabama) Museum of Art. Construction of the Ohr museum will start again soon and its Ohr pottery should be back in Biloxi by 2008 or sooner.

We mentioned vintage cashmere sweaters in our March issue, and a Palm Desert, California, reader wrote to tell us she owns cashmeres from the 1950s with three different labels- Braemar, Hadley, and Bernhard Altmann. She added: I don’t know why I kept them. I guess when you work for $1.25 an hour and cashmere sweaters and wool skirts are high school style, it leaves the memory of how long it took to save for one sweater.

Richard, a reader from Wayzata, Minnesota, added to our information about the prone Donald Duck figurine pictured in our June 2005 issue: I personally purchased that figurine at the Brayton Pottery in Laguna Beach, California, in January 1938. I know it’s hard to believe, but I still have it and it still has the Brayton identification on the bottom, a metallic silver palette-shaped label. It was a magic shop in a magic city in those days-a small shop operated by the Braytons to offer only the wonderful pottery they produced.