This piece and some others live above George Dean's downtown on Clayton Street in a space now used for storage but once part of a dry goods establishment. Who is the artist? Perhaps I should try to find out. Perhaps no one could find out.

On my morning walk downtown, I ran into an old friend, Lois Player, who handles underwriting for WUGA and is a veteran of our town's retail sector. Lois wanted to show me the upstairs at George Dean's on Clayton Street. It's used only for storage at the moment, but had a previous life as part of a dry goods establishment. Some of the fixtures remain. Lois asked me to imagine bolts of cloth displayed for sale on the now-dusty shelves at a time before the near universality of ready-to-wear. A stately skylight dominates the center of the upstairs. Paintings and other pieces of art lie about, some of them Lois's own work, and some with unrevealed lineages . We had a look around, then descended the back stairs to the modern George Dean's retail space, where another pre-plastic artifact caught my eye. When this machine was born, Herbert Hoover was still President. FDR would win the office the next year, pledging to save the country from the economic calamity that had befallen it.