Interesting Objects: Toby Mugs

As I get older, I have been more conscious of the stuff I own. As I collect mementos through my journeys in life, I have the growing concern that I have too much stuff. One day, as I was looking through some of my things it occurred to me that the reason that I have some of these items is because of the story behind them. To clarify, I do not mean merely a souvenir from a trip I took, but something that has a deeper meaning. I could part with all the refrigerator magnets that I have collected to represent the places I have travelled, but not these objects. At least, not with some deeper reflection on the value they hold. Some of those items I will never part with such as my Grandfather’s pipe stand. What follows is my attempt to catalogue a few of these interesting things. In the movie Twelve O’Clock High, Dean Jagger’s character Major Harvey Stovall finds a toby mug in a shop window identical to the one in the 918th Bomb Group’s officer’s club. The toby mug, a masked Robin Hood, sits…