My Grandfather's Beanbags.

My grandfather collected a complete set of 1899 beanbags, and our family still cherishes them.
He got them at the Columbian International Exposition in Cleveland when he was a boy -- or, actually, I think it was his father, my great grandfather, who got them when he was a young man courting Eleanor Roosevelt; when she threw him over for FDR he spent his entire fortune on the beanbags as a gesture of romantic despair. 
Grandfather, I guess, must have inherited them, being the oldest male child in the family at the time. Back in those benighted days the country was firmly in the hands of patriarchs and facial hair. A man who couldn't grow a mustache or learn how to treat women with a supercilious air was considered a traitor to the cause, and often sent overseas to eat German offal with sauerkraut until he developed some backbone. Horrible times; I'm glad I didn't live back then.
What I do know for sure about the provenance of those 1899 beanbags is that Grandfather threw them, one at a time, at J. Pierpont Morgan, back in 1931, just as Morgan was going into Congress to testify about the deepening Depression. One of the bags knocked off Morgan's black silk top hat, and another one hit him square in the beezer -- which eventually led to Morgan's death several years later from a nose clot. 
Grandfather was consequently arrested, tried, and convicted of assault with a deadly packet, and sentenced to ten years on Bloody Island, in the middle of the Mississippi River. The island soon washed away, all but several juniper bushes, and grandfather cut one of those bushes with his penknife and escaped downriver in the middle of the night.  Subsequently he refused to ever go near the Mississippi River for any reason, claiming that the bloodhounds were still tracking him along the river banks on both sides.

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Having spent some time in the Tilden Reserve Library after my catarrh relapse, studying the history of American beanbags, I can assert with complete confidence that grandfather's set was manufactured by Wyotte and Sons of New Haven just prior to the Spanish American War. The packet material is watered silk imported from Assam, hand-stitched together with hammock-grade jute fibers. And -- interesting fact! -- there are no 'beans' in those beanbags; each pouch is filled with yellow split peas, especially grown and harvested only for Wyotte and Sons from a bonanza farm in North Dakota. 
In the late nineteenth century most middle class families in America aspired to have at least one set of quality beanbags, like those manufactured by Wyotte and Sons. Not only were they highly ornamental when arranged on the parlor mantel, but they were essential for playing such standard family games as 'Cripple the Old Lady' and 'Waffles or Rats?' In a pinch, they could be dropped into the family stew pot to stretch out a meal when company dropped by unexpectedly at dinnertime.
Of course during World War Two most beanbags were requisitioned by the Army but grandfather was able to wangle a waiver for his beanbags, due to their lack of iodine. The set of six beanbags spent the war years on display in a glass cabinet in the lobby of AT&T's Atlanta headquarters -- in Jackson, Mississippi. Grandfather was employed by AT&T at the time as a crop duster and sub rosa factotum. He later bought the company and split it into bodegas.
As a very young child I remember being allowed to handle the beanbags while I sat on my grandfather's vestibule. They felt glossy and weevily. And they smelled of platitudinous vanilla. I felt a special bond with them, and with my grandfather -- made all the more poignant during the Butcher Rebellion, when he and I were trapped inside a Woolworths store on the outskirts of Lancashire. When the Vegans finally rescued us, he turned to me with tears in his eyes and said: "Surrender only to your passions, never to your enemies!"
 The beanbags are currently on loan to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. For tax purposes the family formed the Beanbag Charitable Trust several years ago, to handle the handling of the beanbags, with my father as Chairman. 
Grandfather, sadly, passed away last year from severe anthracnose. The family discussed burying the beanbags with him, but it was decided he would wish to share them with the world and not hide them in a crypt. Besides, his will stated he was to be buried with his entire desk blotter collection, amounting to over twenty thousand specimens, and there would not have been room for the beanbags anyways. Elon Musk has offered to place them permanently in orbit for us, and the family consensus seems to be to let him try it.