Gambling on the Lot, An Antique Hunters Folly

BUYING A BUNCH OF JUNK CAN TURN UP A "WINNER"

TAKING A CHANCE IS WHAT WE ALL DO, DAY TO DAY……ANTIQUE DEALERS LIVE WITH THIS CONSTANTLY…..MISTAKES CAN BE EPIC CAREER MISADVENTURES

AS I'VE TRIED TO MAKE CLEAR IN THIS COLLECTION OF BLOGS, ABOUT THE ANTIQUE PROFESSION SPECIFICALLY….., "COLLECTING" ON THE PERIPHERY…..,THAT WE HAVE QUITE A FEW CLOSELY GUARDED SECRETS, THAT LIKE MAGICIANS, WE SIMPLY WON'T REVEAL. WE ARE A BAND OF INDIVIDUALS, AND THE COMPETITION IS FIERCE. BUT MOST OF US HAVE DEVELOPED ATTITUDES THAT ARE COMFORTABLY APPOINTED IN BUSINESS SERIOUSNESS, AND AT THE SAME TIME, A HALF-JOVIAL ALERTNESS TO NEW SITUATIONS, SUCH THAT WE BRACE OURSELVES WELL IN ADVANCE, FOR THE EVENTUALITY OF WHAT CAN ONLY BE CALLED "GROSS MISADVENTURE." I WILL TELL YOU, THROUGH THIS SPRING SEASON, WHAT SOME OF THOSE AWKWARD MOMENTS HAVE MEANT FOR ME. SOMETIMES ITS A SERIOUS SITUATION THAT PREVAILS UPON US TO EMPLOY THE ALCHEMY WE'RE KNOWN FOR, AND THERE ARE MANY OTHER TIMES THAT IT JUST TURNS INTO A "I CAN'T BELIEVE I JUST DID THAT," SCENARIO. LIKE THE TIME I WAS MOVING A BOOK OFF A COUNTER IN OUR KITCHEN, AND A TINY CORNER OF THE SPINE, CAUGHT THE HANDLE OF A BEAUTIFULLY HAND-PAINTED VICTORIAN TEA POT, AND SHAZAM……IT CAME OFF WITH EASE. THE DAY BEFORE I'D SPENT A HUNDRED BUCKS AT AN AUCTION, WINNING THAT FOR "MY GIRL." SO THE RESPONSE WAS SOMETHING LIKE THIS….."MY GOD, MY GOD, YOU STUPID MAN AND YOUR STUPID BOOKS," SHE YELLED OBVIOUSLY, FOR THE BENEFIT OF OUR NEIGHBORS. IF ONE OF THE BOYS HAD HIT THAT CHINA PIECE WITH A BASEBALL, AND SMASHED THE POT ENTIRELY, SHE'D HAVE SOUNDED SO CONCILIATORY. AS FOR ME, THEY DON'T MAKE A DOG HOUSE THAT BIG.

I DON'T KNOW WHAT PERCENTAGE OF THE WORLD'S ANTIQUE DEALERS GAMBLE AT CASINOS. I COULDN'T POSSIBLY EXPECT, EVEN IF I LOOKED CLOSELY, TO FIND STATISTICS ON ANTIQUE DEALERS WHO PLAY POKER…..OR WHO PLAY THE PONIES. I MEAN, IT'S NO STRETCH OF THE TRUTH, TO SUGGEST ANTIQUE DEALERS GAMBLE NON-STOP IN THEIR PROFESSION. THE RISK MIGHT BE LOWER BECAUSE THEY'RE SMARTER ABOUT WHAT THEY SPECULATE ON, BUT LIKE ANY RETAILER, YOU CAN'T GO TO FAR IN ANY GIVEN WORK WEEK, WITHOUT, IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER GAMBLING FOR A PROFIT. THE DIFFERENCE WITH AVERAGE RETAILERS IS THE SUPPLY CHAIN. THE ANTIQUE DEALER UNDOUBTEDLY HAS PICKERS TO PROVIDE INVENTORY, BUT MOST OFTEN, THE ITEMS ARE NOT THE SAME. A RETAILER CAN ORDER BY THE THOUSANDS OR MORE. THE ANTIQUE DEALER IS LUCKY TO "GET WHAT THEY GET". WE DON'T HAVE A CATALOGUE TO ORDER FROM. OUR INVENTORY GENERALLY, IS WHAT WE CAN FIND OUT ON THE HUSTINGS, OR WHAT IS ON THE BACK OF THE PICKER'S TRUCK PARKED OUTSIDE THE SHOP. A LOT OF FOLKS DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS, WHEN THEY COME INTO AN ANTIQUE SHOP, AND EXPECT A CERTAIN VOLUME OF MATERIALS THEY'RE MOST INTERESTED IN……PILED TO THE CEILING. UNLESS YOU'RE A SPECIALIST DEALER, SELLING WEDGWOOD, OR FENTON GLASS, PEZ DISPENSERS (ONLY), OR VINTAGE CLOTHING, IT'S HARD FOR AN ANTIQUE DEALER TO PLEASE EVERYONE. DO ANTIQUE DEALERS PLAY THE STOCK MARKET? I END THIS PARAGRAPH WITH THE SAME DOUBT AS I BEGAN WITH……I DON'T HAVE THE STATISTICS TO BACK UP AN ANSWER. AS A WILD SPECULATOR MYSELF, I WOULD SAY ANTIQUE DEALERS, AS A GROUP, WOULD PROBABLY BE MORE INCLINED TO INVEST IN THE STOCK MARKET THAN PLAY POKER, THAN SPEND A LOT OF TIME AT CASINOS. THEIR DAY TO DAY GAMBLE, IS BUYING INVESTMENT PIECES. THEY DON'T BUY TO LOSE MONEY. AND WHEN YOU'RE MOST OFTEN, ONLY ABLE TO BUY SMALL QUANTITIES OF COLLECTIBLE MERCHANDISE, YOU HAVE LITTLE CHOICE, IF YOU WANT TO SURVIVE IN BUSINESS. WE HAVE TO BUY CAREFULLY, WITH FULL ATTENTION TO DETAILS OF EACH ITEM…..INCLUDING THE PING AND RING OF GOOD QUALITY CRYSTAL. CONDITION IS THE BIGGEST OF BIG DEALS. NO CHIPS, NO CRACKS, NO DAMAGE. IF FOR WHATEVER REASON A DEALER DOES ACCEPT SOMETHING, WITH DAMAGE, CHANCES ARE GOOD, HE OR SHE HAS AN ALMOST IMMEDIATE OUTLET ON THEIR CLIENT LIST, WHO WILL PURCHASE ITEMS TO RESTORE. IF WE GOOF UP AND MAKE A BAD PURCHASE, FINDING DAMAGE AFTER THE SELLER HAS LEFT THE BUILDING, WE'RE STUCK WITH A CRAPPY INVESTMENT. WE CAN CALL THE WHOLESALER UP AND COMPLAIN, AND THERE ARE NO REFUNDS. IF YOU BOUGHT IT OFF A PICKER, YOU MIGHT GET A CHANCE TO COMPLAIN ON THE VERY NEXT VISIT. THIS IS OUR GENERAL DISADVANTAGE, AND WHY WE HAVE TO BE ASTUTE ON OVER-THE-COUNTER PURCHASES PARTICULARLY. AND OF COURSE, IS IT STOLEN? WE HAVE TO ASK A LOT OF QUESTIONS.

So here's where an average antique dealer gambles most frequently, leaving many in the peanut gallery of auctions etc., wondering what kind of medication we're on. When I've written previously about auction job-lots, I'm not entirely sure other dealers know this term…….or whether it is just a regional Ontario thing. When I started going to auctions seriously, in the late 1970's, I didn't have much money to spend, but a hell of a lot of inventory to purchase, for our new Manitoba Street shop, in uptown Bracebridge, Ontario. Most of my furniture inventory was purchased "in-the-rough," because it was all I could afford. I put the sweat equity into the refinishing side of the business, and for the first three years, I sold almost a hundred percent of what I was able to refinish. Then I got a reporter's job in a community on the other side of the District of Muskoka, that actually paid me to write, and I left the business to my parents, who also found employment soon after, in the Town of Parry Sound. Point is, for that "experimental" antique shop tenure, I got pretty good scrounging antique sales, for whatever job-lots, and "picking rights," I could get. Here's how that goes, just in case you don't know, what a lot of antique-loving folks have to do to maintain their profession.

Often times, auctioneers will get frustrated if they're doing a large estate sale, for example, on their own. If they're concerned at all about timing, they realize they have to reach a certain number of sales per half-hour and per-hour, to get through the inventory, before everyone has left the property……or there is a sudden rain storm. So you will arrive at a situation as a bidder, when an auctioneer will start lumping things together, that he can't get bids on individually. Back in the seventies, I could get forty or fifty boxes of "junk" at one sale. If I stuck around to the end, I'd be invited to scavenge the leftovers. A lot of bidders, you see, will buy multiples of auction-ware, but will cull their purchases, and take only what they want, leaving the chipped china, broken chairs, rusty tools and sundry other bits and bobbs they don't want to haul home. This left a plethora of interesting finds, that with some invested effort, might be salvaged, repaired, restored and re-sold. During the sales, I studied the auctioneer very closely. I knew when Les Rutledge, from Gravenhurst, was getting mad at the audience. Actually, that was pretty easy to determine, because he'd get agitated by the crowd's reluctance to bid, he hated hecklers who would make loud comments he didn't find humorous, and distractions. Les was very focused, and he liked the cadence of his auction roll to go without interruptions. It was okay to talk before he started to sell another item, but not during. So when he got flustered, and it looked like he was going to step off the platform and smack somebody with his cane, inevitably he'd start rapid selling. Which meant for us dealers……pay attention or else. He'd almost double his speed of items sold per-hour.

What his speed increase meant, was that he wasn't going to linger on the uppermost bid, trying to get an increase. If the roll of bids finally hit a flat side, and he couldn't massage another quick bid, he'd just yell out, "Sold to Number 12." If by the way, you were a kind and considerate auction-goer, and you didn't piss Mr. Rutledge off, by golly, he could remember your number, and he'd shut down a bid if he thought you deserved a break. If you heckled him, your number was bypassed forever. Not for just a couple of retaliatory "bid misses." For eternity. So when he'd find himself getting backed-up with items to sell, box loads of kitchen collectibles, for example, he would start banking them together to make more attractive job-lots, to keep him on schedule. As a matter of some irony in the profession, Suzanne and I were big fans, and auction regulars, to events conducted by his son, Wayne Rutledge, of Huntsville, who had a more gentle approach to his audience, but still liked the idea of job-lots to speed things up. As for dealers, the job-lots we were able to get, often contained a significant number of salable items, some that were unknown to the auctioneer at the time of selling. For example, you'd be surprised what can be found in a jar of buttons. Well, seeing as many reading this column are collectors and dealers, I guess you do know. Especially from estates, we could find lots of military buttons in those jammed jars, including many hard-to-find button styles, that were valuable on the open market, plus coins, vintage game pieces, broaches, special pins, such as from the Red Cross etc. What looked like boxes of junk, were pretty much boxes of junk. The exceptions were the treasures we expected to find by experience. The gambles were measured. We always knew what we could invest, with a pretty fair knowledge how we could make our money back, on the average stuff, and profit from the half dozen or more gems found in the clusters of odds and sods.

At quite a number of auctions, I attended, from the late 1970's up to the end of the 1990's, it was common, especially at rural estate sales, to be given an opportunity to bid for "picker's rights," to buy the remaining items left in a barn or shed. The auctioneer and staff would be responsible for removing the bigger, more significant items from these out-buildings, to be included in the regular sale. But there were many occasions when there were too many small, damaged pieces left in these buildings, for the staff to worry about. The auctioneer would simply sell, to the highest bidder, the privilege of buying everything else in the buildings……except the structure itself. I've talked to people who have done this, and on each occasion that I stayed around to see what they got, during the clean-up, something major was found, to cover the cost of the opportunity to pick at will. I've never come across a case yet, when a picker, in this situation, didn't prosper with what they found. It was hard and dirty work, but well worth the effort.

A trio of half-arsed entrepreneurs in our region, decided to get into the second-hand game, as a means of making some future investment money. They all had good paying day-jobs, but they hatched this plan to make big-bucks, by purchasing entire building contents, off estates executors. So instead of using an auctioneer, to settle an estate, they'd offer a price for the whole works. It was a great idea for them, but not a new one, in the antique and second hand trade. It was a good plan in Muskoka, because no one was doing this at the time. It was either dispersal by auctioneer, by yard sale, or by dumpster pulled up to the side of the house. The only problem with these lads…..and they were all nice guys I had a lot of respect for…….just not in the antique trade, was their total lack of knowledge about the money side of the industry. They got involved with small bananas. A good place to start but they never got past the minor speculation. They'd buy cottage contents from a 1930's building, that was to be torn down, but the items inside were left by the last folks to use it…..meaning the vintage of contents was pretty shallow. They were getting 1960's and 70's items, not representative of the cottage's history…..which would have been nice and much more profitable. So we understudied with them, and made quite a few purchases of nostalgia items, and some other vintage fabrics that came with the cottages. They had rented a large barn type building, and all the left-overs we didn't want, got dumped there. The idea was to have regular "barn sales," or you could make an appointment to see what they had acquired. It should have gone okay. I think they were about twenty years too early for our region, because they had the right idea…..in so many areas, but they simply lacked the experience, trial and error provide folks like us.

So when the partnership got a little stressed out about the money they had invested, and the apparent inability to generate profits the way they wanted to, we started getting more calls from the trio, about taking some of the stuff off their hands. For example, they had a beautiful and large…..very large…..Victorian era pump organ. Sure it looked great, but the market for honking big pump organs is pretty small. They take up a lot of room, and chances are, there's going to be a mouse-damaged bellows, that needs a specialist to fix. Orb Kennedy was our master repairman around here, but he had passed away quite a few years before their organ acquisition. I do have a working pump organ in my living room presently, but mine has a perfect bellows. The first offer I was given was five hundred dollars. I laughed, picked up the "smalls" that I'd purchased at their barn sale, and jumped in the car fast, so they wouldn't carry-on the conversation. I didn't want the organ. No one else did either. All that summer and fall they labored to sell that organ. Every time I went to the sale at the barn….or saw any of the trio in the hardware store, grocery aisle, or restaurant, they came up with a revised price for the behemoth instrument. "No, No, No!" was my response, as was Suzanne's when they'd corner her, thinking she was the weaker of the duo. Not so. She turned them down an equal number of times. Then came the pause. Months went by and we hadn't heard a thing about the organ, and nary a barn sale to shop. I assumed the organ had found a home.

One day, while I was working in the garden, and covered in mud and manure, Suzanne called me to the phone. "It's them," she said. "They want to give you the organ." "Cripes, we don't have any room for the stupid thing," I mumbled, as I kicked off my shoes at the door, and wiped my brow with the manure that was once only on my hands and shoes. Well, we took the organ. They delivered it free of charge, set it in our front hallway, and had those painted-on sad faces that would have made a good model for a ceramic television lamp. I gave them fifty bucks and told them in no uncertain terms, to never again buy a pump organ, and if they did, to never tell me about it. They seemed okay with the fifty bucks which was a pretty substantial loss in fact from the $500 original asking price. I bet that on the average of what they had purchased, with this organ, they had still made a profit overall…..unless you put a price on aggravation. In that case they most certainly lost money.

It was just before Christmas one year, after we had "sold the organ for $100" at a yard sale, and moved to a new house in Bracebridge, that we got a call that the partnership was giving up the barn, and the second-hand profession. We were asked to make an offer for "picker's rights" to the barn, which we knew contained some interesting….but not valuable pieces. It was bloody cold with lots of snow, when Suzanne and I started poking through the building. It was tough slugging, and the inventory was scattered in boxes and bins all over the place. For the several hundred dollars we offered, (accepted), we were able to get enough out of it to triple our investment, which is pretty much the norm. Most dealers, who had to work this hard, in adverse conditions, would want to quadruple the profit. These lads were our friends, so we didn't feel right about knocking them down further. The gem of the whole affair, was the discovery of a magnificent pioneer-vintage crazy quilt, for a child's cradle. It was small and needed some repairs, but the blue and black velvets were stunning. These irregularly cut and sewn together quilt-blocks had once been Victorian clothing items, and this more than century-old-quilt was a nothing short of a museum piece. It had been folded up in the bottom of a box that nobody had ever looked into. It was assumed it was a box of bedroom knick-knacks, carried out of the barn for all their yard sales, over the two odd years, but nobody went past the chipped and broken articles on the top of the box, to see what was in the bottom. That's where Suzanne found the neatly folded quilt, that looked like a decorative piece of paper, when looking down into the container. It was much more than that, and the quilt was valued at $200. We sold it a year later to a quilt collector, at a sale we attended in the Village of Windermere. We did make an okay profit of the other items collected during that mission of hunting and gathering.

What really upset the lads, was that we didn't take everything in the barn. That's what they assumed it meant, when we purchased the lot. I informed them curtly, that "Boys oh boys, when did you hear me say, that I was going to take everything in the barn." And pay for disposal of their bad purchases. They had those sad faces again. I just winked and said, "that's business, nothing personal."

Les Rutledge had kind of an unspoken rule, at his auctions, that I learned by inexperience. When I started to sort through the boxes I had purchased, before setting off for home at the end of the sale, and having placed aside, a pile of items I didn't want, I looked to my right side to find two big shoes at the base of the pile. It was Les, rising from those shoes! And he said something like, "Now Mr. Currie (he knew me from working at The Herald-Gazette), seeing as I gave you a good deal on those boxes, I hope you understand that it means you own it all, and you can take it back to your house and then throw out what you don't want. I'm not going to clean up your mess." I never once argued with Les Rutledge, so I just loaded it all in the boxes, and trundled off to my car, while he twirled his trademark auction cane, satisfied he'd successfully educated a greenhorn, and run another profitable auction.