This is my favorite find this year, for so many reasons. Its from the Northern Electric company, which became Nortel, a huge telecom company in Canada (based in Ottawa) that literally went from top of the world to bankruptcy in the early 2000s, when Ottawa was known as "Silicon Valley North" (San Francisco, Cali, being Silicon Valley proper) The effects of Nortel folding up were felt for a long time in our little Canadian capital, i know a lot of former employees (and their fathers) who lost many a pension dollars after the fallout.
Anyways, in 1928, Northern Electric produced the first talking moving-picture sound system - not just in Canada - but the system for the Palace Theater in Montreal was the first anywhere in the whole of the British Empire! The piece below dates back to the late 1930s. Based on the very old newspaper articles stuck to the back of the mount (and the history of the person I got it from who was in radio broadcasting for decades), the piece I picked up comes from the Picadilly Theatre in Williamsburgh, Ontario, which opened in 1935. According to the Toronto Sun the first showing was The Glass Key, and the last in 1959 was Never So Few, a war film starring Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford and Steve McQueen.
Coincidentally, I did not know Williamsburg,about 45 minute drive from here, but doing some research and seeing the picture below, I realized last summer, my wife and I returning from a road trip, came across this old theatre. I immediately stopped and found a souvenir shop not far and asked the owner how much the large Picadilly sign was (pîctured). She said $5K! Nuts, but she did let me have a glance inside the old theatre, which was mostly in shambles. I was hoping to find some old posters (yeah right, just like the hundreds of people before me who had stopped to ask)!
Anyways, crazy that months later, and a hundred miles further, I find an original piece that ties the whole thing together. Its a heavy brass coated piece, already framed on original wood backing, I can`t wait to clean it up and hang it.
