The National Lead Achievement Award

Hells yeah the Hal Niles Orchestra played at the National Lead Retirement Picnic! Who'd you think they were gonna get? They were so hot they almost burned the lead paint I mean wood paneling off the wall!

National Lead is indeed dead. It closed 25 years ago and now their 400 acre site is contaminated to holy hell. We didn't know back then that it was bad. We thought it was a wonder metal. We put it in everything. I remember reading some article where these early explorers all died en route to the place they were exploring. For hundreds of years people thought they were murdered or what not, it was an unsolved mystery. Until, that is, they did modern day tests on the remains and realized it was from the canned goods--cans made of lead.

How about lead toys? Those are fun! Here's an old National Lead advertisement. "Lead whistles back and forth in every play on the baseball diamond. It is at the bottom of every football scrimmage. It leaps back and forth across the tennis net. Lead influences every stroke a golfer takes, and is the fisherman's helper..." In the nursery "the little boy's eyes shine with excitement as he takes his new lead soldiers out" and "his sister peacefully plays with her new dolls with lead-weighted eyes and her miniature furniture and other toys often made of lead." [Note: lead poisoning can cause dullness of eyes and mind.] (December 1923)

And that's it for The National Lead series. Check back for another series of random photographs of random shit I bought for some random reason and we'll explore them further with the help of Le Superhighway de Information! Or not.