re: Pictures from days gone by....

Swamp Angel, you would have been justified in going into more detail here about your grandfather, true csb:

I found your post on Furniture World's Forum (Link) site:

"From The Swamp Angel, 3/13/2014 2:34 AM
I am still learning a bit about Mengel. I can tell you this much though, the "Mengel Man" logo was designed by my grandfather, Robert Lee Tullis. He was a foreman for Mengel whose mainstay was on the front lines of cutting the timber required to manufacture the furniture.

He began his career with Mengel in Hickman, Kentucky, a small town on the banks of the Mississippi river. When catastrophe struck in the form of fire (if I recall correctly), the Hickman division was split and half were sent to Michigan and the other half to Mississippi and Louisiana. Fortunately (in my assessment) my grandfather was sent south.

His first assignment was in Basin, Mississippi, near Lucedale. There, Mengel cut cypress and tupelo to turn into quality furniture. It was here that he also took on the pseudonym "Swamp Angel" which he used as he wrote articles for the Hickman Courier, as well as local papers in south Mississippi. (I have usurped this pseudonym or my own purposes, although I readily admit that I am far inferior to this man whom I never had the opportunity to meet.)

As WWII came to a conclusion in 1945, he was transferred to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to continue harvesting cypress and tupelo in the swamps and bayous of Louisiana. It was here that my father graduated high school from Istrouma High School in 1947, and attended LSU to study petroleum engineering. (How strange it is that a turn of events has created generations of LSU TIgers from a family of Kentuckians since I followed in my father's footsteps and the next generation follows me.)

While my father was enrolled as a student at LSU, my grandfather was sent by Mengel to a small village in Africa known as Dunkwa in the British Gold Coast. (Now known as Ghana.) There, during the course of several trips between 1949 and 1951, he oversaw the harvesting of mahogany in the region and shipped it to the United States. The photos he took and the articles he wrote are no less than amazing in their account of the cultural differences and the respect he held for the indigenous people of the area.

I grew up in eastern Kentucky having been born a little more than eight years after the death of my paternal grandfather. I never had the opportunity to know him personally, but I have been blessed to have been told of his many adventures by my own father, by my Aunt Jane, and through the letters he had written to my grandmother, my father, and my aunt. The adventurous life he lived was a direct result of his employment with the Mengel Furniture Company, and he was grateful for the opportunity it afforded him.

Obviously, he was a "company man" since he found it his great pleasure to doodle away in the evenings and come up with "The Mengel Man" logo that began to adorn Mengel furniture in the 1930s or 1940s.

There are many tales with which I would love to regale lovers and owners of Mengel furniture products, but I am a generation plus eight years removed from the original Swamp Angel and my father has been gone from this earth for twenty years now. However, if I can get back to Laurel, Mississippi to fully "debrief" my Aunt Jane, I will return to tell all that I know of this portion of the Mengel story."