Welcome to the Prairie Pinks, Topeka's Depression glass club since 1975. We are 45 members, from newlyweds with their first pink sugar bowl to collectors who have been at it longer than some of our dealers have been alive. We meet every month, we put on a show every October, and we talk about glass more than our families think is reasonable.

I'm Florence Stirling, and I edit our monthly newsletter, the Prairie Pinks Pages, and now this page as well. I was a teller at a bank here in Topeka for thirty-one years, so I am used to counting things carefully and spotting what doesn't look right, which is the whole of collecting glass, if you think about it. I bought my first piece in 1971 at a farm auction east of town: one green Cameo sherbet dish, in a box lot with a coffee grinder and a dozen canning jars, for a dollar and a quarter. My husband Alfred wanted the coffee grinder. I wanted the sherbet. Today I have 112 pieces of green Cameo, and Alfred has built me two china cabinets and says he will not build a third. We shall see.

Our show is the biggest event of our year, and the club's only fundraiser. This year our show chairman, George Talton, has signed up 26 dealers from Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Iowa, Colorado and Arkansas, which is the most we have ever had. You will find all the major patterns and colors, plus kitchen glass, Jadite, elegant glass and some pottery.

A request from the committee: please carry large purses in front of you in the aisles, and if you must pick up a piece, pick it up by the body, not the handle or the rim. These pieces have survived sixty-five years. Let us not end that on our watch.

We meet the third Tuesday of every month at 7:00 p.m. in the community room at a bank downtown (the one where I worked, and where they still let me in). Each meeting has a short business portion, a program, and show-and-tell, where members bring their latest finds and we all admire them or, kindly, tell the member what she has actually bought. Refreshments are served on Depression glass, naturally. Visitors are always welcome.

Dues are $10 a year per person or $15 per couple, and include the newsletter. Pay Anne Conyers, our treasurer, at any meeting.

Depression glass is the inexpensive, colored glassware that American factories turned out by the carload in the late 1920s and the 1930s. It was made by machine, pressed or poured into molds, not blown or cut by hand, which is why it was cheap. The patterns were often molded right into the glass to imitate expensive etched crystal, and the colors were meant to cheer up a kitchen table at a time when not much else was cheerful: pink, green, amber, blue, canary yellow, and later opaque colors like the pale green Jadite and the blue Delphite.

Very little of it was bought at full price. It sold for a nickel or a dime a piece at the five-and-dime, and a great deal of it was simply given away: packed in boxes of oatmeal, handed out at movie theaters on "dish night" to fill the seats, given to customers at filling stations with a tank of gas, or thrown in with the purchase of a stove or a washing machine. My mother got a whole pink luncheon set, one piece at a time, at the picture show on Wednesday nights.

Because it was mass-produced and cheap, it isn't perfect. Look closely at a genuine piece and you will often find tiny bubbles, fine lines called straw marks, slightly uneven color, and mold seams. Those are not flaws to a collector. They are part of how you know it's old.

There were others, of course, but these six made most of what you will see at our show. Our Pattern of the Month page has the details on seven of the favorites.

Every collector has a hole in her set. If you have any of these, or see them at a sale, please write and I will pass it along.

Pattern of the Month  ·  Reproduction Alerts

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since January 1998

Questions about the club, the show or a piece of glass?
Write to Florence at [email protected]
(I answer every letter. I do not identify glass from descriptions over e-mail. Bring it to the show.)

Last updated September 21, 1999