Just Time for a Northern Quickie

Here are some pics from my recent trip into the Massachusetts area. I’ve never been up here before so it was a bit of a change for me. Everyone kept telling me that I missed the turning of the leaves, but I still thought they were beautiful! You can tell that some of the trees have finally shed their leaves outright, but for the most part there were still plenty of colors to behold no matter where you went.

There is a lot of history right here where I am at. Most of it seems to be related to electricity and mills. Here is a quick picture of the Crane Paper museum, which was part of the original mill. Crane paper has the distinct honor of being the only mill that produces the specialty “paper” that our currency ends up being printed on. You are probably already aware that it’s not really paper but a textile like cloth. In fact, the original paper that the mill produced was from recycled rags. The guy I was working with has an original ad that read something to the effect of “ladies, don’t throw your rags away.” They also print all the stationary that the White House uses. Surprisingly enough, even though they pretty much ARE the town of Dalton, I couldn’t get my hands on any of their stationary!

A last little tidbit is this guitar. Now, I know it doesn’t look very special from the photo and if you know anything about guitars you might pony up a few bucks for it if you saw it at a garage sale. If you knew even more about guitars you might check the model and serial numbers and realize that you had a pretty special “one off” production guitar and pony up even more dollars for it.

And then if you were really serious you would take it to have it appraised, which is just what the guy I was working with did. After he told me about it, I guessed at a value of around $75,000. He said that’s what he thought, too. After having it appraised though, he was informed a “serious collector” might pony upwards of $500,000 for it!!!! HOLY SMOKES! Like I said, it’s relative. My guess is that a realistic price for it is probably around $250,000. He let me play it a bit, and it was pretty nice. Nothing extrodinary, though. The neck was a bit wide – like that of a classical. But it had a great tone. Check out some of the pics of it. Yes, that is a real rosewood body. Sorry the pics aren't great, it was kind of on-the-fly.