SMAP 202 - The Duck Factory

Hello everyone. Welcome to Round 202 of the Show Me A Photo or SMAP Contest hosted by @nelinoeva. Check out this contest, in the link provided at the end of this post . Do read up and join us here.

The theme for this week is:

FREE THEME

There was a time when I used to work for a lumber company. That was ages ago. I was still single then. We had a customer, The Duck Factory, and all this outfit did was to make wooden ducks of all shapes and colors and exported them to the USA. At that time, I thought all ducks are either white or brown or a mixture of both as that was all I saw here in our country. So you can just imagine my surprise and actually, disbelief, when I saw some really multicolored wooden ducks. Like, are these even real? Do ducks of these kinds existed at all?

According to my boss, who lived abroad when he was in high school, these kinds really existed and he said the quality of the workmanship of the wooden ducks was quite excellent and are almost lifelike in appearance. No wonder most of the factory's customers were from stores who sold decoys.

Unfortunately, there were no cell phones then and the ones that existed were solely for phone calls. No camera, no internet, no anything that our cell phones now have. So I was not able to take any photos of them. But I bought a few to display in my apartment.

Through the years, after so many transfers from one home to another, from one city to another, and again for 4 more home transfers, only a few of the ducks I bought survived. They were either broken, got smashed in transit or storage or simply discarded because of damages. The only memories I have of them is a couple of photos which I took about 3 or 4 years ago (yes, cell phone cameras were already available lol).

I bought this in 1992 and according to the factory owner, this is called a Ruddy Duck. Its posture in this photo is in a mating call. Again, even this piece was discarded by my wife because it fell apart and couldn't be mended already. Too bad.

Here's the other one which is also a photo I entered in one of the contests here but not sure what. Either PhotoChain or SMAP or Alphabet Run.

I told my wife about this post and she said there was still one miniature duck left somewhere in the house. Excitedly I began searching for it.

I FOUND IT. Here it is.

I'm so happy there's still one piece left. As you can see it already has scratches and paint chips but more or less everything is as they were when I bought it. After 32 years. Wow, what quality.

For this Round I am submitting the last photo as my entry.

Well, that's all folks. Hope you enjoyed this post. Wishing you all a blessed Sunday. Stay safe, healthy and happy 😊

The link to the contest post is here.

(All photos are mine.)