expo 67 – Things I find in the garbage

Just down the road

February 2, 2025February 2, 2025 garbagefinds26 Comments

It’s been a classic Montreal January thus far – fairly cold, and a moderate amount of snow. I haven’t felt too motivated to get out there. Fortunately, it’ll be over by the time you read this post. February is always a little better, and by the time March comes around, you’ll start to see glimmers of spring.

My attention span has been shot lately, but I have put a bit of effort into cleaning up my random junk in the basement. It feels like a good task for January. I’m not sure when I’ll end up moving from my current spot, but it’s inevitable that I’ll move at some point … and when that time comes, it’ll be nice not to have so many loose ends down there.

Half of it is my own personal stuff. I finally tossed my high school yearbook, which was ruined in a flood several years back. Some things are just garbage! The rest are former finds – some things I wanted to keep for my personal collection, some things I had trouble researching, and other things I just didn’t have time to deal with. I’ve listed some of these items on eBay, put others in the yard sale pile, and kept some favourites for myself.

What do I collect for myself? Well, that’s a topic for another day. As is the potential impact of the orange guy’s tariffs on my garbage business.

This haul came to me around mid-December, not too far from home.

This old leather envelope held a bunch of old photographs, including four tintypes.

Apparently the heyday for the tintype was the 1860s-1870s, but some were produced up until the 1930s. Probably the only way to identify the exact time period would be to look at the fashions of the subjects. Zoom in for a closer look, and if you have any insights let us know in the comments!

The rest were carte de visite style photos, most of which were taken in Quebec City and Montreal.

There were more photos elsewhere. I picked out a few favorites to share here. That photo of the plane looks pretty old. Anyone know anything about that?

And then there was a bit of quality junk (as I like to call it). I saved a nice sterling silver rosary, a small silver funnel, a little hand clip that may also be silver, an old Zippo, some doodads for the yard sale bin…

… a couple fish-shaped pens, a Louis Marx budget bank, an old bottle of Eau Sauvage;

… and three bronze medals, one of which I sold for 50$.

They aren’t as old as they say, but they’re still nice re-strikes that probably date to the early 1900s.

Otherwise, one of these people worked for different local media stations. I found a few mementos, including two signed images of “Les trois Menestrels” and another of a different band I’m not familiar with.

Most interesting was a press pass from Expo 67. I’ve found a couple of these now – the other is still in quarantine (since late 2023, a little excessive most likely, but better safe than sorry) because it came from an apartment with bedbugs. These seem to be fairly uncommon, so they are likely worth something to a passionate Expo 67 collector.

That’s all for now. I’ll share some more finds soon enough!

Links

1. My eBay listings. Sign up for eBay (Canada, US). Search for something you want / research something you have (Canada, US). — These are Ebay Partner Network links. If you create an account or buy something after getting to eBay from these links, I get a small cut of the profit!
2. “Things I find in the garbage” on Facebook
3. Follow @garbagefindssells on Instagram (this is managed by a friend, I’ve quit Instagram for the time being)
4. Email: thingsifindinthegarbage@gmail.com. Note that I really suck at keeping up with my email.
5. Help support the blog, or just buy me a coffee! PayPal link below.

Hostesses’ refuse

October 21, 2015October 21, 2015 garbagefinds22 Comments

I haven’t been getting particularly lucky with my finds lately. However, a recycling bin in a nice part of town helped buck that trend. Inside was my best ever Expo 67 related haul. When I opened the bin I spotted a big stack of original 10×8″ photographs, many of which don’t look to be available anywhere on the internet.

The person who did the tossing apparently worked for Expo back in the day. It took me about a day to scan it all, and another day and a bit to get this post done. I’m sure passionate Montreal and Expo fans will really dig it, but if you’re not never fear – I’ll post more “normal” garbage soon!

Several of the photos were cool aerial views that captured the construction of the sites. This shot, which features a great backdrop of downtown Montreal might be my favourite of the bunch. In the foreground is Île Sainte-Hélène, one of the main locations for the fair. The island was greatly enlarged using fill dug out from the construction of the new subway system.

Many of the photos came with a short typewritten explanatory text. I was often unsure which text matched which photo, so I decided to just share most of the texts all together later on. It could be fun for some Expo fanatic to try to match the explanation to the photograph! Regardless, this one definitely matched the photo above.

This photo was definitely taken before the one below. The island is pretty bare here …

… but you can see buildings coming up in this one. Just a reminder, you can click on these photos and zoom in for a much better view!

These two show the emergence of the Cité du Havre buildings, including the Autostade (you can see it cut off on the left side near the bottom – it barely lasted 10 years before being demolished) and Habitat 67 (at the top of the peninsula). The latter is a Montreal landmark, and was a cool concept intended to revolutionize affordable housing.

For reference, this is Habitat 67 as it appeared in 2006. (Photo: Nora Vass, taken from Wikipedia).

A few photos featured actual people. This one might be the coolest because it features a Montreal sports legend (standing at right) and I couldn’t find another like it on the internet. I’ll let you guess who it is, and anyone who doesn’t know can check the comments for a quick answer. The guy at the left might be famous too for all I know – if you recognize him let us know! The woman in the centre is a Expo hostess wearing the classic uniform.

Another two featured women modelling outfits used at the British pavilion.

The majority of the photos though featured artist conceptions and models of pavilions and other Expo-related things. Some shots are better or cooler than others. I’ll share my favourite five shots in large format, and the rest (some of which are still very neat) in gallery format.

Among my favourites is the gyrotron; …

… the Ontario pavilion;

… the aforementioned Habitat 67;

… La Ronde (an amusement park);

… and Katimavik (Canadian pavilion). Here’s a bunch more. I’d share them all large format, but there’s so many that it would make this blog post exceedingly long!

There were duplicates of some photos, including three different copies of this Autostade model.

This photo of a model Expo Express train car is pretty cool …

… but this one might be even cooler. For whatever reason the artist decided to depict the background city like something you’d see on the cover of a cheesy 1960s sci-fi novel. I guess they wanted to make it look like something from the future, but it’s quite a break from the realistic portrayals in the other shots.

I otherwise saved some official Expo brochures and flyers, including a few printed in German …

… and some documents (press releases?) written in German and Spanish that appear to describe Expo.

The coolest document though was probably this Hostesses’ Handbook. It seems to be a fairly uncommon piece as I couldn’t find any others for sale on the internet, eBay included. I didn’t catalogue all the pages, but I got shots of a fair number which you can see below. For the gallery view, you have to scroll down and click “view full size” to get a zoomable version of the photo.

Phew! That was a lot of work but I figured it was worth the time. There’s a lot of neat stuff here, and it seems that many of these pieces are hard if not impossible to find elsewhere.

Below are the extra typewritten texts that went along with the photos, if anyone wants to try to match them!

I’ll have another post, likely the one featuring my recent sales up in the next couple of days.

Slide scanning – Expo 67

September 28, 2015 garbagefinds9 Comments

I spent most of last week doing some much needed organizing. This included tidying up a few different storage areas and purging stuff that wasn’t worth selling. I put this off for way too long, and still have lots of other things left to do! I’ll likely be relatively quiet on the blogging front again this week, but expect another post on Friday (or Monday if I get sidetracked).

I went on most of my usual rounds but didn’t focus so much on getting blogging material. I did come across some great stuff at one spot, and I’ll share that here sometime in the near future.

On Friday I picked up copies of some found slides I scanned a while back. I had copies of them previously, but they were accidentally made to be of a lower quality than I prefer. I like a photo you can click and zoom in on! All the photos are stills of Montreal’s Expo 67. I found most of them in St-Henri back in September of 2014. Most were marked as being taken in July of 1967. The last two I found at a place in Snowdon.

I thought it would be fun to post the scans here. If you enjoy these then you might also enjoy the scans I posted on my other (mostly inactive) blog back in May of 2013. Anyways, here you go!