Silver School

Different state, new junk, same dilemma

I’ve reached a point in my junkman travels where even when I don’t seek the chaos of plunder, it finds me and pours into my life like floodwater. I got to Alabama Saturday night after a pleasant road trip to find an A/V cart full of World War II-era classical music records waiting for me at my sister’s house.

She’d just helped a friend clear out the house of a 102-year-old relative going into assisted living. There were 78rpm opera sets and LPs from the dawn of the “long playing” era, promotional Christmas albums given out by long-absorbed regional bank chains in the 1970s, and a teetering stack of the kind of CDs a senior citizen might accumulate – some Frank Sinatra, an uncommon Ray Stevens Christmas set, piano music recorded by local church ladies of similar vintage.

The music was snagged for my benefit, the equivalent of an unboxing video in my chosen wheelhouse, but it was hardly the star of her haul. She wound up with untold boxes of silver serving trays, utensils, postwar miracle kitchen gadgets and ornate ceramic pots and bowls. If her goal was to throw a Mad Men-era dinner party, she’d be all set.

Watching someone else navigate a large and cumbersome pile of new junk adds a whole batch of new thoughts to the usual running commentary in my own head about the stuff I work with every day. There’s a poignancy I always feel at estate sales, thinking about the fact that not long ago all this wasn’t an inventory problem, it was someone’s household, even if their routine had largely worn a path in the carpet past all of it, and it was no longer being polished and presented to friends and neighbors.

There’s the familiar quandary I see my sister in now, where she’s eager to look stuff up and dig through boxes, but gaining a gradual awareness of the awful banal education that must follow if she’s to do anything meaningful or potentially profitable with this pile. Dishes and utensils are among those boomer artifacts people under 70 have little use for, in a lot of cases. We marveled at a silver-plated cranberry sauce serving tray with its own uniquely patterned spatula, still in a fairly serviceable red retail box. What a cool piece of history, but also, who the hell needs a special dish for just that? Why not have a plate reserved only for tuna salad sandwiches?

She’s already shunting a lot of stuff directly to boxes set aside for a benefit yard sale my nephew’s scout troop is holding soon. I helped her take some pictures for Marketplace and started talking about maintaining an area for active inventory, answering often-nonsensical messages about her listings, when to mark down, how to meet up with folks, and her eyes glazed over. We posted three items and she was done with it for the day.

I’d already considered stopping in to one of my honey hole spots in Chattanooga, breaking my own new rule about not buying on this vacation, but bad traffic and a long detour at the Lookout Mountain Incline Railway made me change my mind. Now here was a ready-made stack to dig through, more potential fish stories and modest profits, another math problem to wedge into the back of a Subaru Crosstrek chosen for the trip at least partially to discourage the accumulation of more piles.

I get my sister’s trepidation. I do this for a living and there’s a small voice in my head demanding I take at least a sample of this hoard home to learn about and list. Some of my fellow junk dealers refer to this as “going to _____ school.” If you find, say, a pile of obviously nice wristwatches at a yard sale for almost nothing, you’d tell the rest of us “guess I’m goin’ to watch school,” with the implied promise of glorious fish stories to come when the first expensive one sells.

But if you were already trying to declutter your space, you don’t need to sell stuff to pay the bills, and the thought of talking to a bunch of random goobers lowballing you on candy dishes gives you the ick, it’s a perfectly reasonable reaction to drop out of school and shoot all this junk right back out the revolving door and into a yard sale. The leftovers from that event are going straight to a thrift store, so there’s no danger of boomeranging junk coming back into the house.

I don’t think I have it in me to go to silver school at this stage of my life. I have a fundamental love for the music and retro games and books I deal in now, but I’ve never given a shit about dishes or ornamental glassware. Seeing shelves full of it would only fill me with anxiety even if I occasionally made a little cash for my efforts. Hell, I’ve resisted learning more about 78s this whole time, the unplayability and fragility and bad condition of them quelling any urge I’ve had to pick them up from other estate sales.

But this 1943 opera set looks pretty amazing, I’m not gonna lie. The thought of trying to ship it gives me hives, but I’m sure there’s no harm in digging a little to determine the best way to clean the records and figure out if I can play them without investing four figures into my already-decrepit stereo rig. What’s the harm in auditing a few night classes at 78 school, right? Like Bilbo wanting one more peek at the Ring, I’m sure I can put the whole category back down before I get into any real trouble.