Comments on: Tasteful Interior Decor, Hagerstown, Maryland, 1957

By: Caya

Caya — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 14:19:30 +0000

Reindeer don’t live in America, that I know of. Those are just regular deer, whitetail or something. I don’t think they are reindeer though.

By: Valerie Weich

Valerie Weich — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 04:05:54 +0000

Boy, this picture brings back a scary childhood memory! A friend of my father’s had a den that looked similar to this in the late 1960s/early 1970s. It wasn’t quite as “tack-o-rama” as this, but pretty darn close — only there were more mounted large fish and birds on the walls, as opposed to quite so many mounted deer heads. When my parents dragged me along to visit this couple, I was always relegated to the “Den of Death,” as I thought of it, while my parents visited with their friends in the even tackier Chinese-themed tchotchke living room. In those days, when your parents told you to “stay there and behave,” you did. It seemed like I had to sit in the Den of Death for hours, totally freaked out by the stuffed animals on the wall, and I think it was there at the tender age of 6 or 7 that the seeds of animal rights/animal activism, and “Don’t eat Bambi” were planted in my little brain.

By: Aaron Z Snyder

Aaron Z Snyder — Fri, 12 May 2006 22:07:36 +0000

I’m commenting on this bizarre and rather frightening picture mostly because I was born in Hagerstown MD in 1944 and “growed up” in Martinsburg WV, just 18 miles away. I always felt a stranger in a strange land in that part of the world. Seeing this picture gives me further proof that I had reason to feel strange. I went away to prep school in 1958. That was the beginning of my freedom. Glad to be in the Boston area!