Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 5:57PM 
Since this portrait was done by W. C. Newton of Oberlin, OH, there is a good chance that the suave character and pose is of a student or faculty member at Oberlin College. Quite the dandy! The sharp detail, excellent tonal range and plain background suggest c. 1910, but it could be much earlier – he wouldn't look at all out of place riding a high wheel bike wearing this cap and cutaway jacket!
Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 12:46PM 
Not difficult to understand why this photo from a family album survived – for at least as long as anyone remembered who these characters were, it must have caused some laughs as it was clearly meant to do.
The style of most of these helmets was used throughout Europe in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries, but a military expert could recognize the crests and say what nationality. I would suggest a pre-WWI date for the photo based on the clothes (yet the one soup bowl helmet looks WWI and the bucket style helmet more reminiscent of WWII). The young boys have bows on their shoes and heavy wool fabrics are being worn even though it is not winter.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 3:06PM 
In case you were expecting the 1980s rock band!
REO was started by R.E. Olds in 1905 (his former company, in which he was no longer involved, became Oldsmobile), building cars and trucks until 1975. The Speed Wagon was a light truck – the precursor of today's pickup truck – made after 1910 and continuing for some years. Manufacture of cars ceased in 1936 after the worst years of the depression and competition forced the company to concentrate on trucks. The Speed Wagon had several forms including fire trucks.
This looks like the 1917 model Speed Wagon which was a 3.25 ton vehicle with canvas top, canvas roll-up sides and snap closure isinglass doors, here shown tied back. It cost $1125. The name is painted on the ends of the gas tank which is mounted behind and below the windshield where the dashboard would normally be.
The truck in this photo is carrying both bottled milk and milk in cans; since there is no company name visible it may have supplied products to retail food stores rather than home delivery, but who knows. Why the spare mount only has a rim instead of a complete tire is a good question – what good would that be if you had a flat? Note that the rear tires have tread for traction but the front tires are smooth. The REO name was pronounced as a single syllable even though it was based on Olds' initials (the Olds name was never used for this company because of conflict with the other Olds company name)
Monday, August 24, 2009 at 9:46AM 
A cabinet card so odd in its composition and particulars that it leaves you thinking, "Surely there is some allegory here that escapes me!" Sisters, not identical twins despite their twin dresses, divided by a table, a book and two potted plants framed by a backdrop painted assembly-line-style on a bad day by some hacks. They wear watches: the woman on the right has hers pinned to her bodice while the one on the left has hers on a chatelaine and holds it a la The Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland – "I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date!"
Their (1910) hair styling is only slightly different. The dresses may be off the rack and the same size – the woman on the right is several inches taller, has a higher waist and longer legs, causing the hem to fall those inches higher from the floor (or maybe this was by choice?). They wear identical bows and brooches but we won't know about the shoes.
I cropped the image considerably, especially at top (yes, there was more of that lovely background – just in case someone walked in who was eight feet tall, or acrobats wanted to pose with one standing on the other's shoulders). It occurs to me that this image could be sliced vertically down the center to make two more attractive individual portraits.
Saturday, August 22, 2009 at 2:55PM 
In a past post (Shatternooga ChooChoo) I promised to show some of people's penchant not only for viewing the scene of a train disaster but the compulsion to climb all over the wreckage as if it were some giant broken toy.
A logging train that jumped the rails into the ditch with the tender and first car overriding the cab which looks as if it may have been sheared off by the impact.
As if this were a good place for a picnic or outing, men and boys and at least one woman, pose on the wreckage of two engines (very unlikely that anyone in them survived); the boy sits on the dislocated diamond stack of the one on the right; about as many people as can fit are standing on the boxcar upper left. Strange human behavior, and as I commented previously, train wreck photos sold then – and now. Each print is from unrelated wrecks, 1890s to 1910.