Cuneo Oddities

These days, the Cuneo Mansion has a second-story room displaying the family's enormous silverware collection, including a server, holder and folk specifically for handling asparagus. Back when the Cuneos bought the house, it was John Cuneo Jr.'s room. He was about five years old when he took up residence in 1937, and the memory of the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh Jr. was still fresh.

So the Cuneos had an iron fence installed on the balcony outside his room to discourage would-be Bruno Hauptmanns. The fence is still there; this is what it looks like from outside.

In the mansion's library, as you'd expect, are a lot of books, including some of the leather-bound editions that the Cuneo Press used to produce. There's also a wood-paneled, solid-state Admiral TV, dating from the 1960s from the look of it, which looked a little out of place there underneath a portrait by Thomas Gainsborough. Then again, considering the fact that it's an American-made television set, it's just as much of a relic as anything else in the museum.

The last room of the tour was the utterly utilitarian kitchen, which looked like it was last updated in the '60s. But it contained older items here and there, including this presumably empty tin; pre-World War II, I'd guess:

It would be too easy to mock this, so I won't. I doubt that the claim "healthful food... on the alkaline side" was taken any more seriously when the tin was new than potato chips claiming to be "organic" would be now (for example). But I have to wonder what the copywriter saw in "alkaline." No doubt it tapped into some long-forgotten association with a now-discredited nutritional idea. In our time, because of advertising, "alkaline" goes with "battery" in a non-chemistry context.