- Today, we are pleased to introduce Joe Kapler
as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's
"History Sandwiched In" lecture series.
Joe is the Wisconsin Historical Society's
curator of cultural history.
He's been with the Society since 2001
and oversees a wide variety of Society collections,
including paintings, furniture, and decorative arts,
as well as developing content for exhibitions,
publications, and other Society initiatives.
Here today to explore the history of the Evergleam Aluminum
Christmas Tree, please join me in welcoming Joe Kapler.
[applauding]
- I want to echo Katie's comments there
regarding the cold weather.
It seems seasonally appropriate,
but thank you for taking the time
and making the effort to come in today.
I generally work at the Historical Society's
headquarters building,
which is eight blocks away on Library Mall.
So I make the trek back and forth,
up and down State Street an awful lot,
and today was particularly brisk.
It didn't matter which direction you were facing either.
The wind was in your face.
So, I will talk today for
35-40 minutes,
and we'll talk about, obviously, why we're all here,
shining, aluminum Christmas trees.
I'll leave a little time for Q&A,
and if you have to leave before 1:00,
if you have to leave at one o'clock, feel free.
Please do so.
And I'll stick around for more questions and answers
after that, and then, obviously,
since what we're talking about is right outside the doors,
I encourage you to take advantage of the opportunity
while you're here and visit the exhibition.
So Katie mentioned a little bit of my background,
and I don't know where aluminum Christmas trees
fall into art, decorative arts, material culture.
And I'm not sure it matters
because one heck of a great story.
And let's not classify it too much,
and let's just talk about a great Wisconsin story,
a great Wisconsin business story, really.
So here they are.
Aluminum Christmas trees.
And these are three from the
Wisconsin Historical Society museum's permanent collection.
Actually three of the more special trees.
Color, true taper.
On the far right,
you'll learn a little bit about that guy as well.
This is our sixth exhibition on these trees,
either featuring or including aluminum Christmas trees,
since 2005.
And then, this year, a different theme to it.
We've titled the exhibition Evergleaming.
Obviously a clear play on the brand name.
The tag line,
"The enduring love affair with the aluminum Christmas tree."
And we'll kind of conclude with why we picked that tag line.
But here we are in 2016 and we're still talking about them,
and we're probably talking about them more now
than perhaps even they were spoken about then.
So let's start our journey.
I'm just going to run through here real quick kind of
some key dates, and then the rest of the presentation
will be fleshing these points out.
But just to kind of set the stage regarding the trees
and kind of their place in American history.
They're often confused as 1950s aluminum tree,
and they're 1960s really.
And that's because in December of 1958,
the head of sales for Aluminum Specialty Company,
aluminum goods and manufacturing novelty
household goods company out of Manitowoc,
had already been in business
for a little over 50 years at that point.
Their head of sales was down in Chicago
going by a Ben Franklin, looking in the storefront
and sees a shiny, aluminum Christmas.
Hmm, we make aluminum products,
we make aluminum Christmas decorations.
Buys one, takes it back to Manitowoc,
and has the engineers look at this, kind of deconstruct it.
The one that was in Chicago,
it was made by Modern Coatings, Inc.,
another aluminum goods type of company.
And they made and sold early trees,
early relative to the story.
And Aluminum Specialty thought
maybe we could do a little better, a little more affordable.
And they had lots of reasons to think that.
And we'll see them as they play out.
And so they quick, in a couple months,
banged out a prototype in time for the New York Toy Fair,
which is going to be in March of 1959.
And this is where the Christmas season,
decorations, toys, all that is launched.
Manufacturers, makers of toys and goods and products
and Christmas paper and all that meet with retailers,
buyers for retailers, and they meet in New York
and they do this in March
ahead of the following December's Christmas season.
The tree was a big hit amongst the buyers.
And they taking orders right there,
and then kind of getting a gauge.
Retailers know their customers.
That's the idea there.
And Aluminum Specialty thought, hmm, this could be.
They threw out many ideas a year and even prototype
a fewer number but, still, this one, this could be good.
So they made a couple hundred thousand in the summer
and fall of 1959 on a hunch, really,
but an informed and reasoned hunch.
And then first year, 1959 Christmas, they sold those trees.
And people loved them.
And then they knew they had something to work with,
and they were an innovative company and nimble,
and we're going to see how they refined this product
and took a good idea to make it a great idea.
Took, you know, a hundred-dollar idea
and made it a million-dollar idea.
So then, throughout the 1960 season on,
massive innovation, massive output.
In the peak years in the early '60s, three shifts.
Having trouble securing storage space,
so they would store trees in boxcars of trains
before they could get shipped out.
And then accessorize, accessorize, right?
All the accompanying accessories to these trees
to animate them.
And we'll see what some of those looked like.
And that happened in the early 1960s.
Sales peaked probably about 1964,
but throughout the decade diversification of tree
types, styles, colors.
We'll see a whole bunch of those here.
And obviously we have a really nice representation.
30 trees in total, including the wonderful trees
out on the front window facing Capitol Square.
Viewable from the sidewalk.
If you haven't seen those, if you missed those,
those are really great trees,
and they show kind of the depth
and the range of their versatility,
Aluminum Specialty's versatility.
1965, the trees are becoming popular.
They're getting into the American pop cultural consciousness
and had an appearance on Charlie Brown Christmas Special.
And we'll talk about that
and whether or not it had an effect.
Late '60s, Specialty, along with other makers of trees.
By this time there are 12-15 or so different makers
of aluminum Christmas trees around the country,
including also Murrow in Manitowoc also making trees.
So two Wisconsin companies.
But Aluminum Specialty, the Evergleam,
was kind of the Coca-Cola of the marketplace.
60%-65% of the marketplace sales.
Others started making real artificial trees in that
they were meant to mimic an evergreen tree.
Plastic, vinyl, easy to use, that type of thing.
So declining sales,
declining interest for a variety of reasons.
And production ceased around 1971, 1972.
Keep some of these dates in the back of your heard
because we're going to come back to them.
And then these trees kind of faded away in attics
or basement storage closets
or the garbage or into people's memories.
And it wasn't until the early 1990s
that a pair of Manitowoc
photographer/ artists/ educators/ instructors
because to collect the trees.
They're from Manitowoc.
They knew of the story.
They began to collect the trees,
document the story through their wonderful images.
And we'll meet them in a bit here shortly.
And they published the story,
the first publication kind of post-contemporary.
It was 1997.
A very small magazine they published in 1997.
And then turned that effort
into the books "Season's Gleamings" in 2004.
And I doubt we're here today and those trees
are in there today or on sale on eBay
if it wasn't for the book Season's Gleamings
and the result of attention and coverage that it received.
And starting in 2005 we did our first exhibition.
We scrambled to get eight trees.
We thought that was pretty great.
We didn't yet know the scope and the scale of this story,
of Specialty's output.
So we were thinking that's pretty good.
And to get to 30 now, we're proud of that.
20+ are in the permanent education collections
of the Wisconsin Historical Society.
And then there's some other trees that come
from private collections as well.
So we're going to take a little trip
back to the early 1960s here.
In the upper left, that's the sales crew.
1962 at the New York Toy Fair.
And, yes, it looks exactly like Mad Men.
[laughing]
I wonder if the producers went to this image,
which is online.
And you'll see one of the whippersnapper
sales crew right here.
Jerry Waak.
This is 1962.
Jerry worked the central part of the United States,
Ohio, selling to retailers.
And he was pretty innovative in his sales concepts
and ideas and moved a lot of trees.
So, at lower right, that's Jerry right there in front
of the room, now head of sales for the toy division.
Trees were good to Jerry.
Jerry was good to trees, and trees were good to Jerry.
Jerry is addressing buyers there in that image.
If you look, they're in the background there.
This is 1969.
So you see Evergleams as well as their new,
here you see their new artificial trees in the back as well.
What were they selling?
And so the following we're going to look through
here a bunch of catalog pages that were graciously made
available to us by collectors,
people who collect trees or accessories or the catalogs.
There isn't, from historian's standpoint,
there isn't the pile of documentation
and company records to go to.
We have the trees and we have catalog pages
and we have people, the folks who participated.
We talked with them.
We can hear their stories.
So here we're going to look at a bunch of these.
So there it is, on the left, the Evergleam.
Kind of the most popular,
probably about a six-foot straight needle tree.
Probably most popular if we use eBay today as a judge
of what's still around and kind of extrapolate
and assume that's just a distillation of what was produced.
The straight needle, very, very popular.
On the right, you see long needle.
So, slightly different.
33% longer needles.
[laughing]
So you're going to see that Aluminum Specialty
could make many, many tweaks and modifications
really to diversify their products.
Long needle swirl, silver fountain.
So you see they're doing treatments of the branches.
It's just kind of like a diamond ring.
More angles, more facets, reflect more light.
And then on the far or, excuse me,
on the right there, the fountain tree.
Pompom style treatments on the ends of the branches.
Here are their specifications.
This is great documentation in terms of information,
of what they're making, how they're making it.
But then, also, it's a little window into
what they thought the value of their product was.
And I'm going to look on the kind of pink
or light red boxes over here.
I'm challenged to either take my glasses off to look at
that screen or to take my glasses off
to look at this screen here.
But what they're selling is sturdy and durable and safe,
as well as something kind of new and different.
Each super hard, extra bright aluminum branch
individually sleeved packed.
Sturdy, safety-tipped aluminum branches
fastened firmly on rods with Scotch tape.
[laughing]
And then talk about the foil covered hardwood trunks.
From the curator's perspective, foil with tape?
You're killing us.
We're trying to keep these things around forever.
You have to handle these with care
if you want to keep these things intact.
I doubt they ever thought in 50-60 years
people were going to be putting this in museums and
someone's going to be in front of a room talking about them.
They may have used, I don't know,
something a little, perhaps, actually more durable.
The diversification kind of continues.
The tree on the left,
the Slim Line you see up here at the upper right.
So it's probably a six-foot tree,
but they're using shorter branches
probably that were sold on the two-foot or the four-foot.
Not really much of a massive, you know,
change in their ability to produce or manufacture,
but it's completely different looking product.
It's a new, I suppose if you have a small,
cramped space, something like that.
On the far, or excuse me,
on the right-hand side, all new for '62.
Pretty much writes itself, I suppose,
but you're looking at some of the accessories there.
And I think in this next image you'll see some more.
But first, on the left there, I think they attempted to,
the Silver Spruce.
And it looks like it's just,
the branches were assembled in reverse.
They're pointing down. [laughing]
I don't know if that's an attempt to replicate
a spruce tree as opposed to the more popular pine tree.
[laughing]
It looks a little shaggy here in this image.
And on the right, you see great images
here of the accessories.
Not just a stand but a rotating stand.
A rotating stand that played music.
And then the key to what made these something,
you know, kind of special is the color light wheels.
The intention, and you see in the marketing here,
is that you, to decorate,
you splash colored light or moving colored light.
You move the tree or you move the color or you do both.
And you play music with it and animate these things
as opposed to hanging ornaments
on a traditional Christmas tree.
And so we don't have up this year but we do have acquired,
we have the tri-lights, the turbo lights, the Satalite.
So, clearly, down here at center right,
the Sata Lite playing up,
S-A-T-A-L-I-T-E, playing on space age.
This would be early 1960s.
Fairly simple.
We do have those in our permanent preservation collection.
And what you'll see out here and in the front window
are modern, up to date, modern wiring, all that.
We want to show the effect,
but we're not going to use vintage wiring,
products with vintage wiring.
Late in the '60s,
in response to these other manufacturers making more trees,
perhaps better trees, higher end tree,
Aluminum Specialty introduced the true taper.
Kind of their Cadillac.
Meant to be at a higher cost level
because it's a higher level product.
A lot of branches.
You can see the density there.
Probably 139 branches on a six-foot tree
as opposed to maybe 91 branches.
And then there are multiple.
The first tree that has multiple sizes.
So you do get a thick kind of appearance.
And there is one on the far wall.
When you leave later and when you look
at the forest of trees there, it sticks out.
It's unlike the others.
And then the frosty branch there.
And that's just a lot of crimping
on that simple aluminum chaff that makes up a needle.
Again, it just makes more angles.
More spots for gleaming light.
Some wreaths.
Again, aluminum.
It's the same material,
just fabricated a little differently,
assembled a little bit differently.
And then their product packages.
These, I don't think a lot of them were made.
Again, if we use eBay as an indicator of what's still around
and what was then made, these rarely show up.
There are two out here right on the other side of that wall.
And they are on loan to us from,
I pointed out Jerry Waak earlier, the head of sales.
He has lent those trees for this show
as well as the two-footers in the case there,
kind of those tabletop trees as well.
One of the last innovations
to the aluminum Christmas trees are the dual color.
Blue-green and burgundy-blue.
There is a spectacular one right out here when you come in.
It's a four-footer, but its color and its condition,
it just really pops.
It's far more visually impressive
than this catalog page here.
And then the burgundy-blue,
I haven't heard from anybody that has ever seen one
or have one surface on eBay or elsewhere.
They made one because they took a photo of it
and put it in a catalog. [laughing]
But, you know,
maybe one of the last ones to be discovered, perhaps.
Here we are, late 1960s,
you see in the upper left there, that's that Evergleam.
That's evergreen.
So they are transitioning to plastic.
That latest in one word: plastic, right?
And this is, again, trims like a real tree.
It's meant to have that traditional look
but have the convenience of one tree.
You don't have to grab one every year.
The needles don't fall off.
So it's kind of transitioning to that.
Late '60s I imagine, you know,
convenience is a major motivation for consumers.
And that probably had a bit to do with the demise
of the massive popularity of the aluminum tree.
So what do they look like in households?
Social media, everyone pulls out their parents' pictures
and sticks them up on the web,
and parents have no idea.
[laughing]
If you look at these trees here,
and I have yet to find a contemporary,
a period image that shows one dimly lit
with a color wheel on it.
I suppose that'd probably be very hard to capture.
What you see, what most people do is have the aluminum,
at least in the photographic record available in Pinterest
and social media, at least in that record,
is get the aluminum tree but decorate it
like they had been other trees.
Aluminum Specialty didn't produce ornaments
except for red bows.
You'll see a red bow tree in the front window.
And there are the blue frost tips.
Those aren't ornaments.
That's just a different color treatment
on the ends of the branches.
Some pretty great images there.
So why so successful?
I ask this question a lot.
A couple points I think that we're really comfortable with
because we know the manufacturer's story very well.
We've talked to a lot of these people,
and it's probably easier to study that perspective than it
is a million, two million,
three million buyers' perspectives.
Usability and affordability.
They did take Modern Coatings, which was first to the
marketplace, but a little clunky, a little cumbersome.
Aluminum Specialty knew that it had to be easy for a person
to grab it off the shelf, put it in the cart, take it home,
assemble it, reassemble it,
and they knew they wanted to get there.
And they were able to do that quickly in the early '60s,
and we're going to see exactly how that played out.
Access to markets.
Again, the company had been around for over 50 years.
They had been.
Every year they're going out and pitching the buyer
from the Columbus, Ohio, Ben Franklin chain.
"Hey, have you seen this here?
This is the latest and greatest for '57."
And this is coast to coast.
Establish sales networks.
This is business.
It's not quite widgets and gadgets,
but it's a similar kind of concept here.
They were able to move a lot of product then fairly easily,
fairly quickly.
Again, the innovation, which I hinted to earlier,
and then also you saw in those catalog pages
the changes in the, you know.
Somebody might want, I don't know,
a pink tree or a colored tree,
so they made gold and green and pink.
And then the dual color.
You know, kind of keep moving.
I think.
I know that it wasn't a huge cost or effort to the company
to switch up their tooling or to switch up their process
just a little bit
could make a very different looking product.
And then, from a consumer perspective, something different.
And that's a phrase Jerry Waak
and others in Manitowoc like to say.
Christmas decorations is a very traditional marketplace,
and they have been.
Basically the last big change was Coca-Cola
branding Santa Claus red, and not a lot has changed.
If there is a segment of the market that was looking for
something different besides the green Christmas tree
and the strands of garland and the strands of light later,
this was very different,
and maybe there's a market there that they could hit.
At the same time, it's consistent with, in the 1960s,
kind of that emerging aesthetics of clean, metallic.
What today we love and call mid-century.
So they had something that's a little bit different out here
in a traditional marketplace,
yet was not completely in left field
because they could kind of borrow
from aesthetic demands elsewhere in the marketplace.
So, you know, is that why this is big?
It hit perfectly right here?
Perhaps.
But, ultimately, you'd need to ask one million, two million,
three million people why they bought the tree that they did.
Patent drawings are another good resource, research tool.
Here, when we look, filed in September of 1958,
but, yeah, filed in September of 1958.
And you see this is Clarence Reese
and some others that came up with this concept.
They are calling it an artificial tree.
So Mr. Reese and some others put this together.
And then, by 1958 and 1959, Modern Coatings in Chicago
owned the rights to this copyright.
So it's pretty simple drawings there.
It's kind of the concept.
You see that patent number upper right.
Here it is.
Here it is right here.
This is what made these trees so easy to use.
The usability aspect.
So what you're looking at are, those are the branches.
And this has to do with, you know, a long branch,
medium branch, and a shorter branch.
And this shows you where you would drill
the holes and at what angle.
So if this is the trunk and that's vertical
and that's plumb, this right here says 10 degrees.
So that's 10 degrees off of plumb.
And it progressively gets larger down here.
That says 70 degrees.
So 90 degrees would be horizontal.
So it's just a little bit like this.
So that means you take the trunk out of the box,
put up the stand, set it in place,
and then one branch, one hole.
There's no thinking.
Just make sure you don't miss holes.
You put it up,
and when you're done you have a tapered looking tree.
It's really simple.
Ingeniously simple.
There's high res versions of these on the US Patent website.
So this is what it looks like when you're assembling.
This is right out here a couple years ago.
These are Milwaukee Journal Sentinel images
when we did our last major show three years ago.
We like to start assembling branches at the bottom.
Some of these taller ones would be a little tippy.
Again, these stands are not robust.
So we like to start at the bottom
and kind of work our way up.
This is a 1959 aluminum Christmas tree made by Aluminum
Specialty in its package after it was used.
And this, I think,
is a great study in product packaging and usability.
So you got the box, you had to cut along a dashed line.
There's all these branches all out together,
smashing into each other.
They had bases and you had to [popping]
put each branch back in each base.
Then you're done, you had to keep that plastic,
not throw it out.
Hopefully you put it over,
and there was a cardboard piece on top.
And it takes, you can see this out here,
we have this on display,
it takes three feet by three feet
of storage space to store that.
So the next major, the other major innovation is this.
A one-cent idea.
A paper sleeve.
And I'll pass this around.
We'll need it back because a branch is going to go in this.
I'll start this around.
A paper sleeve.
This is the point I still have to make about history.
You just assume, of course, they always had paper sleeves.
It seems so obvious.
No, someone had to think of it, produce it, and then,
of course, the same gentleman here, no, excuse me,
a different, here he is back here,
Clarence Reese also part of this as well.
And this is a little bit later, but in '60-'61,
Modern Coatings also had the rights to this patent.
So it made it super easy to store and protect.
One way.
Always go the correct way.
[laughing]
You'll see a hands-on tree out there
that you're welcome to explore.
And then you'll see what happens.
We acquired it
because it was in poor conditions for use in hands-on.
You'll see what happens
if you jam them all in the other way.
What a simple, simple fix.
So not only is it protected but then you.
There's just another drawing of what the packaging would
look like as well as a little more detail in the needles.
But then what that created
was a much smaller storage system.
1959, six-foot, straight needle Evergleam.
1961, '60-'61, six-foot, straight needle.
The same tree.
This is less, this is a quarter of the volume.
It's far safer. You could pick this up.
You could drop it. Oops.
No big deal.
This, you know, this, again,
making a thousand-dollar idea into a million-dollar idea.
So it wasn't Aluminum Specialty's brainchild,
but they had the output ability, the nimbleness,
the production capacity, the access to markets,
and a little bit of capital to enter into
a licensing agreement with Modern Coatings,
who didn't have what I just ticked off
for Aluminum Specialty.
And voilą.
This case is right out here back towards the back.
You can see it's a great kind of study
in importance of product packaging.
And then this is the underside of one of those packages.
So they hadn't branded it yet.
So it's a stainless aluminum Christmas tree.
Not that exciting, but 94-branched.
So, very typical.
In the following season,
after they'd sold a couple hundred thousand on a hunch,
knew that there was probably a winner idea here,
got the licensing arrangement with Modern Coatings,
and then I'm sure had the marketing folks put together
kind of branding, and this is where they landed.
The Evergleam, softened it up with greens and a white box.
Greens and red colors.
Kind of traditional.
Maybe that blue and white was a little too much.
A little stark.
And then they haven't changed their, never changed their
packaging throughout the run of their production.
So that's obviously a tree there.
And this is from one of the revolving stands.
A box for one of the revolving stands in the collection.
As I mentioned, sales peaked about 1964.
Coincidentally not, I don't know,
but aluminum Christmas trees were in
the popular consciousness to the point where
the Peanuts guy got involved, so to speak.
Or at least Charles Schulz did.
And so this Christmas special aired in December 1965.
Millions and millions of viewers.
To give you the quick synopsis,
the Peanuts gang putting on their Christmas program.
Charlie Brown was thinking something's not quite right,
we need a Christmas tree.
And Lucy thinks it's a fabulous idea that Charlie
gets a Christmas tree, and I want to get this right,
said, Get the biggest aluminum tree,
you can find, Charlie Brown.
Maybe painted pink.
Charlie of course sighs, and he grabs Linus and they head
to the tree lot and this is what they discover.
This is the large lot
of presumably aluminum Christmas trees.
And they start walking.
You're looking at kind of two frames from the program.
Linus flicks one of the trees, as they walk by,with his finger.
Clank! A real hollow, metallic clank.
That's not, if you were to flick a tree,
that's not at all how they sound.
And Linus, in his manner, says,
"Do they even make wooden ones anymore?"
[laughing]
And we know how this goes.
When they wander through the forest of
aluminum Christmas trees, and then we see in the far right.
You recognize that one.
And, of course, Charlie Brown determines that little tree
in its glory
better represented the true meaning of Christmas,
and picked that tree up
to take it back to the set to complete their program.
Did Charlie Brown kill the Christmas tree?
Or the aluminum Christmas tree?
Who knows?
Again, we have to ask lots of people back then.
Okay, I mentioned then that they kind of sat dormant
until those photographer artists in Manitowoc,
Johnny Shimon and Julie Lindemann,
were documenting the aluminum Christmas tree story.
And here's a photo of Richard Thompson
from 1997 in his living room.
That's it. That's the alpha Evergleam.
That's the prototype that they refined well enough
to take to New York Toy Fair.
In our business, the alpha thing never exists.
No one goes, "Oh, I've made it.
"This is going to become a huge seller, and we should
probably put this in a closet and keep it sitting."
That never happens.
In this case, it has.
And Mr. Thompson has for every year
always displayed it in his living room in Manitowoc.
And this is a great photo from 1997.
And here are, it's Julie Lindemann and Johnny Shimon,
instructors at Lawrence University, artists, photographers.
Julie passed away a little over a year ago
after a long bout with cancer.
But it was their book, seen on the right,
Season's Gleamings, that photo book that launched this.
The book and the immediate attention.
National media certainly.
Here's our guy Jerry Waak and his wife Germaine.
A lot of this media they came to Manitowoc to seek out
the folks, and Jerry is tremendous in sales
because he can tell great stories and Jerry can still,
he's a wonderful resource.
And so they have a number of Evergleam products,
and this is one in their home
and a four-footer in their home in Manitowoc.
CBS News Sunday Morning was the first national program
in that December of 2004 to do a major segment on their,
you know, five, six, seven-minute extended feature.
ABC World News Tonight came here.
They came to Manitowoc.
They came here and did a piece for 2005, set up here.
And then, since then, you know, certainly then
but then since then, ones that I'm very familiar with
I would say are 50+ local, regional,
national stories, media stories.
Not necessarily the social media but authors,
photographers, photo journalists.
And then, of course, these syndicated coast to coast
in print, when that used to mean something.
But that speaks to a resurgence.
And then here, more recently,
it's a ubiquitous presence on the internet.
This is a screen grab of their lead in
to that CBS News Sunday Morning show.
In 2005, we published, researched, and put together
an online kind of article about the Evergleam story,
and we led with the pink tree.
We want clicks too.
[laughing]
And that became, essentially, the first researched,
vetted piece on the history, and that has been replicated.
And what that has meant is we hear from people all the time
all over because if you go to the internet,
if you get past eBay and kind of other.
If you're looking for content, this is where you go.
And we're happy to be that keeper of that story.
Just a couple screen grabs from, you know, local news.
You see Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Los Angeles Times.
Just indicative of interest.
I've done many, many television or radio shows.
Folks who want to come here and folks who just want to,
you know, the drive time from Fargo, North Dakota,
where they just want to talk
about the aluminum Christmas trees.
[laughing]
That doesn't happen very often in the things that we do.
We get a lot of local and regional coverage, obviously,
but it's not often that stories where people want to
just talk about it over the air.
And this is one of them.
Social media is now the place.
And, of course, Pinterest.
Just hundreds and hundreds and thousands.
And this is where enthusiasts gather together and share.
These are visually compelling things.
You know?
It's not like we're the, I don't know,
the Cigar Crate capital of the world.
That's not quite as nearly as interesting
and conducive to online social media.
Blogs and websites.
Here's a couple that I was just flipping through.
And the one on the left is 2015.
It's a couple and they're artists
and this is them last year.
They had a post on their.
It could be anywhere in the world, and their Christmas
in their home now features a vintage Evergleam.
The one on the right I think is from Kansas 2008.
Just all over the place you could pull these.
I just grabbed a couple to share.
And then this one here, closer to home.
You're seeing Patty Pierce, who is about eight years old
in this photo, and her older sister Sherry took this photo.
You can tell as a historian because it's three,
four feet high.
It's not mom or dad shooting down.
It's down at the kid level.
It's a four-foot tabletop.
And Sherry, a couple years ago, posted.
These are Sherry Pierce Sterner out of Walworth County,
these are her words,
"To be honest, I never thought I would wax nostalgic
"about a four-foot aluminum Christmas tree.
"Something my 10-year-old purest self
"thought as an abomination.
"I love real trees.
"Tall ones that graze the ceiling, smell all piney and cold
"and eventually got all prickly and brown
"and dropped all their needles into the carpet.
"I loved it when my parents added bubble lights
"and we got to toss on silver icicles."
She starts explaining the details of the photo.
Patty's holding a Chatty Cathy.
So that's about as 1960-ish Christmas as you can get there.
[laughing]
And she concludes: The 1950s and 1960s have receded
far enough into the faltering memories of baby boomers
and their surviving parents and are just history
to everyone else, so that the decades
have acquired something of a Mad Men cache.
And I kind of mentioned that at the beginning.
I almost wish, though, that I had one to put up today.
But they've gotten too darned expensive.
[laughing]
Not an uncommon story with antiques or collectibles
I actually spoke with her recently,
and she wasn't able to make it today.
Other regional, national and regional,
McHenry County is in suburban Chicago.
This is their exhibition last year.
A lot of Evergleams but any aluminum Christmas tree.
Actually, more than double the size of this one,
according to that.
I didn't see it. I would have liked to.
These folks, they've been around a while.
They're in North Carolina.
I think they have a different take.
We like to present them for what they are.
They like to present them for what
they're interpreting the trees.
[laughing]
Last year in Manitowoc, Evergleams on Eighth,
a program with downtown retailers working with
private collections put aluminum Christmas trees
in the windows in storefronts and visited.
Looked wonderful at night and in the day.
But really a huge part of this is eBay.
It's a place where people just go to window shop
and see what's out there.
It's how these things are rescued, salvaged,
discovered in basements and attics,
brought to the fore because you can sell them perhaps
or you can maybe say, "You know what, that's really cool."
"I like this. Let's put these up."
Or "I remember these as a child, let's try this this year."
And, as a historian, I use eBay,
we're not appraisers and all that,
but we use a marketplace like this
to keep an eye on trends and all that.
What we definitely know, though,
is that the story isn't ending any time soon.
So why so enduring.
Why do we put that phrase in our tag line?
The volume of production.
It's a numbers game.
They made millions.
Certainly thousands.
Tens of thousands, 100,000.
Many still exist.
The easy and protective storage.
Things stayed safe just inherently.
Today, again,
it's the same thing I think appealed in 1959 as today.
It is something different.
Christmas decorations are still very traditional.
Currently here in the 21st century,
any mid-century is highly collectible,
highly desired, highly tradable.
And, as I mentioned, that online community and marketplace
where enthusiasts gather together, share stories.
You look at the posts and then you read the comments below,
just ticking through people
from all over chiming in their memories.
The irony being some of the criticism at the time
of aluminum Christmas trees is that they were cold
and commercial, and for the folks we hear from today
who loved the trees, they're warm and nostalgic.
[laughing]
Maybe that's the effect of time.
So, to revisit those first dates,
1959 these were launched into production.
They ended production about 1971.
That's 12 years.
2004 is when Johnny and Julie published Season's Gleamings.
This is 2016.
It's also 12 years.
The second act is as long as the first act,
but what's different now is that interest is not doing this.
Interest is not waning.
Interest is increasing in attention, media, social media,
the marketplace, you know, the resale marketplace.
How long with this second act go?
I don't know.
But it's been our pleasure to be available here at
the Wisconsin Historical Society Museum
to kind of be part of not only of that sharing of the story
but in one way to be the keepers of the story as well.
So to put on this production again this year,
I encourage you here, and we'll be done shortly,
to check it out.
There is the photo opportunity in the corner.
The 1960s vintage living room.
Those are props we acquired.
Vintage material but we acquired it.
You can plunk down, grab yourself an Old Fashioned,
and have your photo taken.
[laughing]
You can't spill it.
I'll give you a little tip there.
You can't spill it.
And maybe that's your photo for next year's Christmas card.
So, I wanted to thank you for taking the time to come in
on a chilly day, and we'll have questions here shortly.
And I'll also be available outside when we're all done.
So, thank you very much.
[applauding]