Tomorrows Treasures is a vintage store that has used treasures on display. While the title of the store is Tomorrows Treasures, I found a treasure from my yesterdays in there.
Let’s go there and I’ll explain as you scroll on down!
Here we are at Tomorrows Treasures. It’s located off of War Memorial Drive, across from the Circle K gas station right before you get to Sterling Avenue and Glen.
As you can see from the sign, they are open, so let’s go inside and see what’s happening!
There’s Jordan in the first photo, he and his father own this fine establishment and below him is my friend Mike Starcevic.
Mike and I worked at Fleming Potter together back in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s and he was there when they were cleaning the building out years ago and brought me this binder of labels from my dad’s office! That was a nice souvenir, but he clued me into an even better treasure that you’ll see soon. Just keep on scrolling!
As you can see, this store is huge and there’s treasures found in all of the packed display cases!
They have over twenty vendors in here that bring in unique and vintage items.
For you kids out there, that last photo is a phone from back in the day. Yeah, it was hard to put those things in our pockets!
There’s a nice supply of books to be found in here including local books about Peoria, Galesburg and there’s a copy of Baker’s Best from legendary Peoria writer Rick Baker!
Of course there’s creepy clown and doll stuff in here! Every vintage store has that going on!
Here’s a shot from the back of the store, a Life magazine from 1970 featuring the “Young Nixon” and another corner of the store packed with one-of-a-kind merchandise.
There’s also records and CD’s ranging from B.B. King to kiddie records to Dean Martin to a pre-rehab Jessica Simpson.
And finally, her I am with my personal treasure, this framed picture. The story behind the picture is below!
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Behind The Picture!
I completely forgot about this framed picture. It’s from 1986 when I had published a book with my friend Greg Owens called, “Gone With The Burp!” It was a joke cookbook and it was our follow-up to our successful “Trivial Trivia - The Idiot Edition” game. I wrote it and Greg did the illustrations and designed the book.
The story behind it is that my parents were traveling back to Peoria from San Francisco and for some reason my dad had the book with him. They were waiting for their flight in the bar at the airport and my dad saw Sid Caesar sitting at a nearby table. I was always a huge Sid Caesar fan and my dad new that.
So he went over, introduced himself and showed Sid the book and he told him that I co-published it with a friend and that I had written it.
He said Sid thumbed through the book and laughed at it and told my dad that it was a funny idea!
Here’s the cover of the book that Greg designed and a photo from a TV segment that WMBD did on the book.
My dad asked Sid Caesar to autograph it and here’s the message and autograph from Sid back in 1986.
My parents had this framed and surprised me with it at Christmas that year and I was thrilled with it.
When I moved to New York in 1993, I stored a bunch of stuff at my parents house that I couldn’t take to New York. This was one of the items.
When I moved back, I went and got most of what I thought was there but this must have been in a back closet or somewhere I didn’t know about and I had completely forgotten about it.
Last July my dad died and my brother Tom hired Tomorrows Treasures to clean the house out for an estate sale.
They cleared the house out and this picture ended up at their store.
A few weeks ago, Mike Starcevic discovered this and let me know, so I went over and got it back!
I had forgotten all about it and it was a wonderful to rediscover it and re-live the memory of my dad telling me about getting the autograph from Sid Caesar!
Thanks to Mike Starcevic and Tomorrow’s Treasures for bringing this memory back into my life!
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4929 N. Hamilton Road
Peoria
309-414-7578
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