Time Capsule - The Shingle

As various extended family households begin to be "tidied up" there are boxes opened, trash and treasures revealed.  Time Capsule will be an occasional glimpse into these.  I'm not sure who might find them interesting but you could say that about most real time capsules dug up years later....

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Today's artifact sits on a shelf in my living room.  But long ago it hung outside my father's medical office.

How long ago?  That's actually difficult to pin down.  He went to medical school during World War II on an accelerated program designed to turn out more military doctors.  He served in post war Germany and was still there during the Berlin Air Lift of '48 - '49.  He then returned to the States and did another year or two of training during which time he met a student nurse.  They married and some time in the early 1950's he started up a little practice in Minneapolis.  He "hung out a shingle" as the saying goes.  

And as you examine the sign more closely you can see that "shingle" is not far off the mark.  It is a simple board on which you can still see the saw cut marks.

The humble materials not withstanding this does seem to have been made by a professional.  I am always fascinated by little details and have studied this closely.  It looks to me as if the board was first painted black.  Then a thin coat of gold was placed over that layer or perhaps just over the lettering with a bit extra around the edges.  I think a thin layer of glue was then applied carefully and the sign coated with black grit....very much like what is on the shingles on your roof!  The white stuff peeking out here and there is probably the glue.

Below you can see all the layers, with the base black paint coming through in spots where the gold has worn off in the last 65 years.

The concept of "hanging out your shingle" is now just a familiar, archaic phrase.  But as you can see it was once literally true.  As an idiom it appears to go back at least as far as the 1830's and once applied more to lawyers than to doctors.  In each instance it carried on an older, European tradition of commercial signage, driven in part by prohibitions against doctors and lawyers advertising in earlier eras of our history.  With the proliferation of annoying ads (medical and legal being equally bad imho) this age seems to me as golden as the lettering on my dad's old sign.