ThayerRags

Good find there Rodney. They built them to last back then!

My wife’s first sewing machine was a Monkey Wards. She ordered it right outta the dang catalog in 1975, shortly after we got married, and paid the $44 for it using what was most of our wedding gift money to get it. It was a bare-bones basic zigzag with no case. Someone got confused at the Wards shipping department, and sent her one by mail and another one by truck freight. She was only billed for one, so she sent one back, and then had a terrible time explaining to Wards that she wasn’t due a refund. It took her over a year to get them to take that refund off of our Wards account. We didn’t dare spend it, for fear that they’d realize their mistake and want it back when we couldn’t come up with it.

She sold it in a yardsale in the early 90s, and we found a single photo in our mass of pictures that shows just enough of it that we think it was a Signature URR-266. In 2011 we found a Signature UHT-J266B made by Happy that looks like it too, so now we have that one displayed on a shelf in the sewing room. It’s a 3/4-sized machine, the bed is 6 1/2 x 12, but it weighs a whopping 26 pounds! It has a light bracket but no light, and no sign that there was ever a light fixture attached to it (no scuffing of the paint by screws). Maybe that was part of the reason they were only $44.

I mounted that first one in a small desk and the wife sewed anything and everything a growing family needed with that thing for over a decade. She replaced it with a snazzy free-arm machine in 1990. She ordered it right outta the JC Penney catalog, but then, that there’s another story.....

CD in Oklahoma