Realized $18.98 10/6/10
Tag: IA
1945 Storm Lake, Iowa Breeze high school yearbook
Realized $22.49 9/18/10
Red Wing Advertising Bean Pot Wiegert Palmer Iowa
Realized $32.00 9/7/8
Red Wing Advertising Bean Pot Fitzgerald Varina Iowa
Realized $5.78 11/14/10
Storm Lake Iowa High School Yearbook Breeze 1950
Realized $18.99 4/15/12
1936 Storm Lake Iowa High School Yearbook The Breeze
Storm Lake Iowa Breeze 1941 High School Yearbook
Realized $23.99 1/19/15
Storm Lake Iowa 1942 High School Breeze Yearbook
Realized $23.99 8/22/15
2 Caterpillar Cat Watch Fobs Kearns S.D. Gibbs-Cook Iowa
Selling two vintage Caterpillar Cat watch fobs. First is a Caterpillar fob in need of polishing, has been used. The back reads “Gibbs-Cook Equip. Co. Des Moines-Mason City Iowa” and is made by Metal Arts Co., Rock, N.Y. The second fob is a Cat D7E track-type tractor, the back reads “Kearns Machinery Co. in South Dakota”. This fob has a like new leather strap. Nice collectible fobs.
Realized $9.96 12/18/10
1948 Storm Lake Iowa Breeze High School Yearbook
Realized $20.99 9/18/10
Vulcan / Meet Your Ghost LP rare Spencer Iowa psyche
Realized $29.99 4/9/19
Some provenance:
Rainy Day Music, Spencer, Iowa, was established in November of 1987 at the same location as the former Merrie Melody, an Iowa store of not enough reknown today. According to the file card I still have, we accepted the first Vulcan LP into our inventory March 25, 1988.
My further records are a little incomplete as we switched our inventory over to computers in 1991 and a lot of our sales and inventory data wasn’t preserved when those computers wore out.
I estimate my entire career sales at well under 25 copies of this record, but I am unsure of how many my predecessor Terry sold (he’s still around, I should ask him shouldn’t I?).
As far as that goes, Lyle’s still easy to find, and maybe I should ask HIM………
Anyway, the years passed, we stashed a few copies and one day in 2001 Lyle asked me to buy a bootlegged copy of his record from a distributor in Germany over the Internet. That copy was twenty-five dollars, which inspired me to price the real McCoy at twenty-five dollars in my bins.
That copy went to Lyle at a price somewhat lower, as he needed one to give someone as a gift and he didn’t have any more copies of his own record.
Enter the modern era: My first eBay sale for a hundred dollars openly taunted bootleggers and dared them to obtain this nice fresh verifiable unplayed source material for their purposes and it didn’t take long before that deal was closed.
The two hundred dollar listing a year later didn’t take long either, and the three hundred dollar listing a year after that only waivered a little while.
I haven’t listed any since then.
It isn’t difficult to distinguish a real copy of this record from the numerous fifteen dollar bootlegs. Since it was only sold in one retail store, it isn’t difficult to establish its authenticity either, since that store was only owned by two individuals, the second of whom was this seller. If you ARE considering the purchase of this under-priced rarity and need further assurance of its provenance, further information about it is provided from links on my About Me page. I offer this record for sale once a year-this is the 2008 opportunity.
As you may research the record on the Internet, please bear in mind that nearly all of the information available about it originated with this seller, is republished without my permission, and I vigorously challenge the various statements about its pressing quantity as being overstated (most cut-and-pasters peg that at 200 copies, I think it was lower).
Earlier version of a listing which gets a lot of Internet cut-and-paste:
Vulcan, aka Lyle Steece, of Spencer, Iowa, US, recorded some stuff, made an album, and only sold it through one retail store. Guess whose retail store it was? Ok, there were actually two different guys who once owned the retail store, and I am the second one, but I can still authenticate the album by my personal association with the artist.
This album has been extensively bootlegged on the Internet (run a little Google search and see), but legitimate copies rarely made it much beyond Spencer, Iowa, and there aren’t many of those.
How can you tell a boot from the original, I hear you asking? After all, if nobody’s ever SEEN a copy, and the catalogs don’t include anything about it, what’s there to look for? Well, the first thing to look for is whether or not it’s sealed. Lyle couldn’t afford shrinkwrapping. The second thing to look at is the label, intentionally not produced
here. Lyle also couldn’t afford labels. He produced his own with a typewriter and a photocopier, and meticulously “whited-out” several spots on every label, having changed his mind about some wording after photocopying them. Then he pasted them to the records. Additionally, the original label lists a slightly different track list from the cover for side two (the cover is correct, except in referring to Meet Your Ghost as “Title Track”).
Meet Your Ghost covers come in several states (ALL marked “a re-issue”-Lyle got a little mixed up over what “reissue” meant): the Original, the Pasteover Version (being offered here), and a later re-issued re-issue (that one’s easy; it has a professionally printed label). Legitimate “second state” Meet Your Ghosts will feature a rubber hand-stamp at the bottom of the back graphic, which says “P.O. Box 5221”. Boots incorporate that address (if they use it at all) as another line of printing rather than as a rubber handstamp. The paste-over portion of the cover (visible in the photo of the back) features a photo of Vulcan which he apparently prefers to the photo originally used. It carefully obscures an earlier photo of the artist, as well as two statements: “Dedicated to Jimi Hendrix”, and “Produced By L.J. Silver”.
So, if no legitimate copies of this album come shrinkwrapped, how do we know that the copy being offered here is unplayed? Well, due to the hand-produced nature of the label, Lyle forgot to punch out the spindle hole on this one; it appears as photocopied circle, right where the spindle hole belongs. The lucky winner of this item, should there be one, gets to punch out that hole if they want to play the record. Nobody’s done that yet.
So, am I suggesting that this is investment grade material? After all, I’ve priced it a lot higher than most of my other records….This little baby is full of mysteries….like why does it say copyrighted 1982 on the cover, and 1985 on the label? Who is the girl on the cover? Who else played on the record? What kind of record is it, anyway (it’s Hendrix-like, in a sort of Iowa way)? How many copies of the record does the guy who owned the store before me have? Who knew anybody from Iowa ever recorded any psychedelic music?
No, I really wouldn’t expect someone who is just reading about this artist for the first time to be awfully interested in this item. But if you are a bootlegger, you NEED this reference copy of this record. You might need a copy of it if you are from Iowa. If you happen to know a lot about privately produced psyche rock records from the Midwest, you should
probably feel comfortable with the authenticity of this item. If you are Lyle himself, I am sorry, buddy-it’s time for me to cash in and I’m afraid the price has risen a little.
Mostly, however, I am just trying to raise the profile of this recording a little so I can offer it next year at twice the price.
Thank you for your consideration.
Artist/Title:
Vulcan/Meet Your Ghost
Label: North Star Productions ST 38456
Condition: Cover: The cover of this album was made by pasting a wrap-around graphic over a white cover. The paste job is not perfect, and there is a notable amount of bubbling, although it does not detract. Slight amount of natural toning, properly rubber-stamped on back. Also features a paste-over graphic on the back, obscuring original photo and some wording. Record: Never played, unless someone has perfected a technique for playing records without placing them on a spindle; label has not been punched for spindle-hole (this can easily be accomplished with a pen or pencil or similar object). Label features “white-out” alterations by the artist which are easily discernable from their texture and slight smudging of photocopier ink.
Tracks:
-
- Prelude
-
- High C’
-
- Lightning
-
- Noname
-
- Count On Us Next Time
-
- One Nighter
-
- Untitled Instrumental (2.b. Continued)
-
- Title Track
-
- The End
Dave Williams’ organic eggs: Storm Lake Iowa
Story by Dolores Cullen, Storm Lake Times, reprinted with permission.
Chickens on the Dave and Norma Williams farm scratch in the dirt and walk wherever they please. They wander into a shed, peck at organic feed, then hop into a nest and lay brown, organic eggs.
And Williams is happy to report that the 100 or so eggs laid each day by the Black Beauties are barely keeping up with demand.
A big break for Williams happened a year ago when his eggs made it onto the shelves of the Storm Lake Fareway store. The brown eggs, obvious in their clear, plastic cartons, cost around $3 – twice as much as eggs produced in big laying facilities.
“People like to buy them because they’re locally grown and organic on top of it,” said Fareway Store Director Bryan Baumhover. The eggs always sell out, especially last winter when cold weather was slowing down the layers.
Other Storm Lake grocery stores carry organic and cage-free eggs which are produced elsewhere.
For two years, Williams has been selling his eggs to One Stop Meat Shop in Sioux City. Last Friday he had 43 dozen delivered to the business. He’s had inquiries from as far away as Minneapolis. One place tried to make arrangements to pick up three cases a week. It never materialized, but it assured Williams that consumers want organic eggs.
“I’ve gotten calls from people in Sioux City,” said Williams. (His phone number is on each carton.) They tell him they like the taste of the eggs and that regular eggs have no taste at all. They like the bright yellow yolks that don’t flatten into the frying pan like the regular eggs do.
The term “range fed”
Callers often ask what range fed means. “I tell them it means that I open the door every morning and if they want to come out, they can.” To call his chickens range fed, he’s required to allow a certain number of square feet per chicken. They wander all over the driveway and up to the north side of the house, but seldom do they get out on the road. They eat bugs. (Dave said they never have crickets in the house.) They eat worms and he’s seen one eat a mouse.
“Chickens are dirty animals,” Williams said, comparing them to a white kitten who wanders among the flock.
“But animals are meant to be free,” says Williams. He doesn’t like the idea that most laying hens spend their entire lives crammed into small cages. In confinements, young chickens have to be debeaked to keep from cannibalizing eachother. For that reason, many of his customers pay the higher price for eggs from range fed hens.
And each evening at twilight, the chickens know enough to go back into the barn and shed outfitted for them.
“You have to be committed”
Williams’ farm, located a mile northeast of Storm Lake’s gateway lighthouse, is certified organic, and the green and white “USDA Organic” sticker on each egg carton represents years of hard work and persistence without much profit.
It takes three years of chemical-free farming to earn the certification. Williams puts up signs to keep the county from spraying his ditches. He has to see that spray planes keep their distance. Transitional ground at least 25 feet wide must be maintained between his land and his neighbors’. Last year he planted trees on his 30-foot buffer strip, but they all died. He’ll replant them again this year.
Keeping the weeds under control is the big challenge. Weeds have to be managed mechanically. He’s not afraid to try new things. This year he’s raising a few goats to help keep the weeds down. He uses chicken manure for fertilizer.
“You have to be committed to it,” says Williams of organic farming. “There’s other people that tried it. They see the weeds come up and spray ‘em and quit.”
He knows of at least two other successful organic farmers in the area though. One whose corn and soybean yields are as good or better than farmers who use chemicals.
A premium product
Williams believes that chemicals feed the plant, but rob the soil. “Organic feeds the soil, which in turns feeds the plant, which feeds humans and animals.”
Last year he raised corn, flax, field peas, oats and spring wheat. These grains are mixed with organic pre-mix and fed to his chickens. The flax makes the eggs lower in cholesterol, he says.
The field peas and flax didn’t grow too well, but in the future, he will buy these grains elsewhere and focus on his crops that are successful.
A system of paperwork goes with the organic label so he can produce a paper trail for anyone who is skeptical that he’s organic. An inspector comes to his farm yearly to check that he is following the specified requirements. Even with oversight, much is left to the honor system, which Williams says he takes seriously.
Confident that the market for organic eggs exists and that he’s virtually the only producer in the area, Williams plans to increase his flock this summer. Currently he has about 200 chickens. He may add another hundred.
He’s required to buy the chicks at two days old and start them on their organic regimen. He’s glad the winter is over. The cold weather reduced the daily egg output to only 40. The deep snow made it more than a chore to go out and collect the eggs, which he tries to do four times a day.
Old five-gallon buckets on their sides make do for nests. He cares for the chickens much like his grandmother did a generation ago. Williams washes and grades the eggs in his kitchen. They are refrigerated in his basement. It’s nothing fancy.
Williams also raises organic grass fed cattle. Customers pay $5 for his hamburger at the Sioux City meat shop. Others come to the farm and purchase halves or quarters, as they do eggs –straight from Williams.
“It’s a premium product,” he says, considering the fruits of his labor. “I’m doing people a service and that is a joy in itself.”
