Just purchased earlier this month, I found a set of these large "cowboy buttons" while scavenging the antique shops in and around Phoenix, Arizona. Made of rootbeer Bakelite and crowned in starry, metal escutcheons as bold as sheriffs' badges, these come from a shop in Mesa where I spotted them in a darkened display case. "Why is Bakelite so gosh darn expensive?" asked a clueless saleslady while ringing me up. "Because it's vanishing piece by piece," I told her. "They stopped making the stuff in the 1940's and it's dying out!" What I didn't say to the saleslady is that Bakelite is inexplicably addictive. And that's the gosh darn truth.
-Sherbert McGee
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