Meticulous Musings: My grandmother's button collection

Friday, August 14, 2020

My grandmother's button collection

Last month, my grandmother, Joy Beets, passed away at the age of 93.

She had a fairly impressive button collection, which inspired me to begin one of my own. After my grandmother died, I inherited her collection.

I spent a day organizing her collection, which was fairly disorganized when I received it.

The collection includes two Eisenhower buttons, including one of the iconic, “I like Ike” buttons.

One button features Lizabeth Scott, “A Paramount Star.” She was a movie actress who was popular in the 1940s and ‘50s.

Another button was from the one hundredth anniversary of Lemon, Missouri, my grandmother’s hometown, which was held in 1977.

Most of the buttons are from the Smoky Hill River Festival, an annual celebration held in my hometown of Salina, Kansas. My grandparents lived in Salina for decades.

The oldest River Festival buttons in my grandmother’s collection were from 1979.

The collection includes River Festival buttons for every year from 1982-2003. For each of these years, my grandmother kept two buttons. One button was her own and the other belonged to my grandfather, Wally Beets.

My grandmother kept one button from the 2005 River Festival, the first festival that took place after my grandfather’s death in 2004.

The collection includes a button from the 1985 World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Kansas City Royals. There are also buttons for the Central Kansas Flywheels festival, held in Salina, from 1987 and 1992. There are two buttons from each year.

I consolidated my own River Festival buttons with my grandmother’s. That means I now have three buttons for 1997, 1999, 2000, and 2001. I was 5, 7, 8, and 9 years old during those River Festivals.

The 1997 buttons are interesting because each one features a different artistic depiction of the festival.