The Ultimate Penn State 1920s Scrapbook

Auction: June 2005

Home
Past Auctions
June 2005
Football

Consign Your Best Items with Lelands. We Also Pay Cash on the Spot! Learn More Here.

The Ultimate Penn State 1920s Scrapbook

The sheer exhilaration and pride of attending Penn State in the early-to-mid 1920s is reflected in this remarkable, meticulously compiled scrapbook of one student who seemingly packed every single piece of State minutiae he could find into its bulging pages. The student, V.A. Bielik, festooned the book with photos of classmates either singly or in groups, fraternity pictures and shots of sports teams including the Nittany Lion gridiron squad (which played in the 1923 Rose Bowl) and guys wrestling in clouds of dirt. Loving every minute, his diary in the book begins, proudly, "Arrived at Penn State," "Registered at Penn State" and "First day of school wearing 'the dink,'" and obtained signatures of dozens of classmates who shared their goals and ideas in a "Happy Thoughts" section (and caricatures of whom he added himself). There are also mounted school beanie, ties, posters, school songs, newspaper articles, drama club and military snapshots, grade cards, glee club tickets, invitations to fraternity smokers, buttons, decals and personal photos of him including a later one of him and fellow workers at a Bethlehem Steel plant where he worked as a lab technician. Also included is a priceless (for any Nittany nut) shirt also filled with classmates' names and on which he hand-painted a Nittany lion and "1926", and a large blueprint of a gas-engine project Bielik worked on at Bethlehelm. Blue scrapbook has "Pennsylvania State College, 1855" and the school symbol on the cover and is EX-NRMT with the interior pages firm and crisp-edged and the cover having some spearation of the spine from the back cover. Fabulous and quaint slice of academia life from the Roaring '20s.