Collections

We’ve all seen the pictures of the homes of the hoarders, the out of control individuals swallowed by the mountains of garbage that they have accumulated, but were unable to dispose of, teetering piles of rubbish concealing walls that have not seen the light of day in years.  We all agree that no, that’s not us, no way, unh uh; just keep your nose out of my garage.

Some people are compulsive sorters, labelers and shelvers in their attempts to bring their hoarding under control. My father was one such, and I have inherited those tendencies, but I like to think they are under control.  When he passed on, I looked in his garage and found shelves full of labeled compartmented trays for nuts, bolts, screws, springs, washers, set screws, cotter pins, you name it.  As a small boy I remember going to McLendon’s with him every Saturday, and every time he needed one, he bought two, just in case. I still regret sending the pop rivets off to auction.

Half the battle of collecting stuff is being able to lay your hands on it when you need it, a battle that is lost when you spend hours or days digging through your pile looking for something you knew you had, but don’t quite remember where you put it.  With tools, it’s who you loaned them to.

Half the reward you get when you sell or give away some little gubbin you’ve been sitting on all these years, like those clear yellowed Lucite Stanley replacement plastic mallet tips in the original box that have lived in my toolbox for twenty years or so, comes from the justification that you were right, see?  Let the significant others of the world roll their eyes as they will, one successful placement of a part back in the tool to which it belongs, or one new home found for the odd Harley part, even if it means transportation from one pile to another, means all the rest of them could do the same, right?  It’s even better when you make a profit on the deal!

Beyond that, though, we also benefit society when we scoop up others’ discards and preserve them for the moment they regain their value.  Each finished part represents a certain amount of labor on someone’s part, which takes energy, which can neither be lost nor destroyed as long as the part avoids the landfill or the smelter.  The trick is in knowing where to draw the line.

Every swap meet I ever attended as a seller always winds up with the pack-up-and-head-for-the-barn load, and there is always a small pile of stuff there that just doesn’t deserve to go back in my pile; I’m tired of looking at it, and nobody is ever going to want that anyway, so where’s the nearest garbage can?  One of my favorite tricks was to go to one of the other sellers and say, “Hey, I gotta go, but I want to leave this pile here in my booth as freebies that anyone who wants can take.  Would you do me a favor and toss the remainders in that garbage can over there for me when you leave?”  They’d always say, “Sure, no problem!”, but they’d also have that look on their face that said, “Yeah, sure, after I dig through it first and see how much I want!”  Either way, the stuff would be gone and I’d be happy.

But the thing to remember is that everything you keep in your house or garage has a story, and everything has a hook that latches on and drags you down.  Some things, like your favorite motorcycle, have big hooks in deep while others, like the spare part for a tool you no longer own, have small ones that are easily dislodged.  When you pick up  a thing and consider it, and can’t remember where you got it and why you kept it, that’s a sign that you kept it too long, or never needed it in the first place, and an invitation to send it on down the road.  The beauty of Ebay and Craigslist and all their competitors is that they give people ways to get rid of stuff the best way, by turning them into cash.  The problem is when you can’t quite figure out how to do that. 

It is also true that, even if you give stuff away or send a load to the scrap metal yard, it feels almost as good as if you had sold it, because the hooks pulling out of your shoulders lighten your load an infinitesimal but noticeable amount.  Giving something to a friend who needs it returns double the pleasure to you as you do good and feel good about it.  That’s better than money.

We are marked by the things we collect as we become known by them.  Just let one Singing Bass show up on your wall, and the avalanche of beer bongs, fishing plaquards, NASCAR posters and cutesy country sayings on softwood is inevitable.  It’s like clickbait on Facebook.

And then there’s the problem of what happens to your collection after you die.  That old saw about “I want to live long enough to become a problem for my kids” takes its meaning posthumously.  The real difference, I suspect, is that one departed person’s pile is dealt with by use of an auctioneer, while another one requires a dumpster.  It could be considered a measure of success in your accumulation, an affirmation, if you will, of your judgement and discriminating taste if the auction catalog is larger than the dump load.

So the wisdom nuggeted here, if any, is that collections are nice, when they bring you pleasure and increase in value (hah!), but it is also nice to thin them from time to time.  There was a guy, who made a good living hauling garbage in Portland for many years and accumulated a collection of motorcycles, mostly Harleys, that he rode for around 500 miles each before stashing them in his collection in original unmolested condition.  As you can imagine, the auction when he died drew a lot of attention and brought many high prices for the bikes when they sold.  You could also imagine the costs associated with storage of that many bikes in a way to preserve them, and how that alone would force the heirs to dispose of the collection, let alone the buildings that housed them.  You can imagine what will happen to Jay Leno’s Garage when he passes on.
There’s a collection of cars down in Punta Gorda, Florida, on display in a museum euphemistically called the Muscle Car Museum, even though it’s mostly GM cars, few Fords or Mopars.  It’s one man’s collection that outlived him by becoming large enough to draw a crowd in its own right, like the LeMay Collection in South Tacoma.

But it’s probably safe to say that most of our collections are not going to wind up in a museum.  It’s also probably safe to say that most of our collections are too large, and could stand to be thinned a bit.  I tell my kids that, if they’re lucky, I’ll get the dump run done in advance.  The rest is up to them.  He who dies with the most toys wins, right?

The Thrill of The Score

It was one of those days in Monroe at the Fairgrounds when the sun would peek out behind the clouds just enough to give one hope, then dash it with a blast of rain.  The overflow crowd trudged through the sprinkles from the far parking lot through the underpass into the main lot, even then full of cars for sale.  It was the annual Automotive Swap meet on Saturday morning, and the underground economy was in full swing.  All the indoor spots were taken up, as usual, by the long-timers with the same old stuff, the trinkets and gubbins and gewgaws, so the action was out in the parking lots and the grassy areas along the fence where the newbies and the latecomers are sent.  That’s where you’ll find the guy who just wants to get rid of stuff, as opposed to the inside guy who’s trying to make a living.

The thing is, when you stumble across something worthwhile you have to recognize it and bite down hard and fast, because, if you look away, it will be gone.  So it was with the matching fender set off an early ‘90s Harley Davidson Heritage Softail that I spotted laying in the grass alongside some yard tools and other junk.  I could see they were in pretty good shape, even had the Heritage script intact on one side of the front fender, so I asked the guy who was on the spot, “How much you want for them fenders?”, pointing.  He got a big ol’ grin on his face and said, “Ten Dollars!”  “Each?” says I.  “Nah, that’s for both of them.” He says.  “I told that son-of-a-bitch they weren’t coming back this time, no way, nohow.  Ten dollars!”  ”Done!”, I said.

I peeled 10 dollars out of my wallet in record time and scooped up the fenders and beat feet out of there, in case the son-of-a-bitch was anywhere on the grounds.  Just for the record, I sold them later on EBay, quickly, for $285 with free shipping.  It turned out they were a matching pair, in Vivid Black, and all the trim was in place including the lights on both tips, along with the factory paint and hand pin striping, and it was all in excellent shape!  And that, my friends, is a score.  That’s why we play the swap meet game, and the Craigslist game, just searching for that oh-so-sweet moment when the adrenaline rush lets you know you’re on to something and your fingers start to twitch as you reach for your pocket.  It’s the payoff, for all the years of mistakes and lost money, and learning about the subtle differences between the various years and models, and what fits what.  It’s what Carl Sandburg was talking about when he said, “I seek to make my vocation my avocation.”  For most of us, we have to “retire” to do that, so, when you find yourself in that position, count your blessings.  Pity the one who doesn’t recognize the point of departure when it comes, and continues to slog away in harness until he drops to the earth, spent.

But for those of us who have freed ourselves to enjoy the pursuit of the score, be it on a gaming table, an ad in the Little Nickel, or on the ground at the swap meet in the rain, the undeniable thrill of the occasional unexpected single item score pales when compared with the one you get when you stumble across a pile.

And that’s the second thing.  Every pile has a story attached, for good or bad, and sometimes the story lingers long after the pile is gone.  One in particular remains fresh in my memory.

It was early Saturday morning, and I was cruising Craigslist’s motorcycle section as usual.  I have learned that you need to check in every day to catch the hot ones, the earlier the better.  This one read, “Harley shop going out of business, leftover stock for sale today.”, with an address in Tacoma.  I hemmed and hawed for a few minutes, then gathered up any loose cash I could find in the house and headed for Tacoma from Renton.  I even hit the cash machine for $300, just in case.  When I got there, at a strip mall on the road to McNeil Island, I found chaos.  The building was newly constructed, and consisted of bare concrete floors inside a steel and glass building that could be upfitted to be a Chinese restaurant, a massage parlor, or a Shucks Auto Parts, depending on your needs.  In this case, the space was occupied by a church.  They were raising funds to turn their space into a sanctuary by selling off a number of donated piles of stuff that one of their members, who ran a storage lot, it appeared, gave them.  I looked one way, past the two nice ladies at the picnic table with the cash box and receipt book, and saw a pile of flooring, another way a pile of household goods, over there a bunch of TVs, and there, on the floor surrounding the center post of the room, a large pile of Harley parts.

I saw a hardtail frame, a couple of front ends, I saw wheels and tires and boxes of new stuff.  I saw gas tanks and carburetor parts, lots of S&S stuff.  I saw bins full of odds and ends, the type that accumulates when you run a shop and you need an axle spacer, say, so you order a dozen of them in various widths, or those special bolts you need to mount a starter on an open belt drive on a Shovelhead, and then you need a system to keep track of all that stuff, plus takeoff parts and mistakes and spares, lots of spares.  It was all there.  I went looking for the person in charge.  I found him near the back, harried and hurried, with several people demanding attention at the same time, and maneuvered him over to the pile.  “How much would you like to get for all this stuff at once?” I asked.  He looked over at the pile, his face betraying the obvious fact that he had no idea what Harley stuff was worth in those days, and said, “I don’t know, you think it’s worth $500?”  I gave him the spiel I have used successfully in the past:  Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out all the cash I had on me at the time, which was around $385, held it out to him and said, “Easily.  It’s worth a lot more than that, I’m sure, but all I have on me right now is this, and I’ll give it all to you for this pile right now.”  He hesitated, and I added, “and if I do real good on this pile I’d be happy to make a donation to your church later.”  That turned out to be the magic words, and the deal was sealed.  I asked him, before I stuffed my Chevrolet Astro Van with the seats removed to the gills with all the plunder, what happened to the shop in question, and he didn’t know too much.  After I broke $1500 on that pile of parts I sent the church a $200 donation, upon which they hounded me for years afterward, just in case.  It was only later, after most of the pile had been sold, that I heard the rest of the story. 

I knew the name of the shop that had gone out of business from paperwork that was in with the pile of parts, and one day, a couple of years later, I saw an ad on Craigslist for one of the custom choppers that this particular shop had intended to build and sell as part of their business plan.  I sent an email asking if there was any connection to that shop, and it turned out the seller was the guy who had owned the shop!  As I learned, this guy was an Army Ranger, a Special Ops guy, and the shop was his own retirement avocation.  But in the heat of Iraq, the guy got called back for one more tour of duty, so off he went, even though he was supposed to be retired soon.  He told the landlord about the callup, and was promised that, no matter what, that shop would be there waiting for him when he got back from Iraq.

But then he got injured, bad, a roadside bomb or something, and wound up spending the next year or so in rehab and recovery.  And the dirty bastard of a landlord evicted the business from the shop and turned whatever survived over to the church for disposal while the soldier was in the hospital in Germany.  By the time he got back it was all gone, and I had made a pile off the last of it.  I felt kinda shitty about that, as you would imagine.  I gathered up most of what was left, bins and gubbins and paperwork and stuff, and took it back to him as a token recovery, and told him what happened, and how it went down.  I hope he sued the shit outta that landlord.  I can’t think of too many animals lower than a landlord who would screw over an injured Ranger who put his life on the line for the powers that be, and I hope he gets what’s coming to him.

And I hope there’s another pile out there with my name on it, with another good story attached.  The one is worth as much as the other. :-{)}

urban legends

We've all heard them:  stories of improbable deals, incredible finds, lucky strikes or big scores.  How often have we actually come close enough to one of them to actually be in a position to do something about it?  How about now?  Let me tell you the story…

I did a bad thing yesterday.  I went to a house in Newcastle and bought two Honda Shadows.  Yeah, I know, that’s ridiculous.  The very idea that a dyed-in-the-wool old Harley guy like me would actually go out and buy not one, but two Hondas at the same time is hard to fathom.  But it happened, and that’s another story for another time.  It’s what I found when I went to pick them up that is the stuff of legend.

See, there is this guy, we’ll call him Larry, because that’s his name.  Larry was renting a room from a friend of his named Hugh.  As things happen, Hugh died suddenly just last month.  I don’t know anything about the family situation, other than that Larry got a sudden eviction notice just last week that forced him to be gone by this weekend.  That’s what caused him to place the ad in Craigslist with the two Hondas at the improbably low price that resulted in me showing up at Hugh’s house yesterday morning.  After an intense dickering session that mostly consisted of me walking around in circles trying to convince myself I really wanted to do this, the deal was struck, and I began to load two motorcycles into the back of my pickup along with the usual pile of stuff that accumulates when you own a motorcycle.  As the project continued, I noticed more and more just what was in that double garage besides my two new bikes.

Hugh, it turns out, was a car guy.  When I looked up the address on Zillow and accessed the street view option from Google Earth, the street view of Hugh’s house, taken whenever, shows a top fuel dragster under a tarp in the driveway, so he was a real car guy.  By the time I showed up, the dragster was long gone, of course, but I saw why it had been relegated to storage in the driveway.

The first thing that leaped out at me was the two street rods.  Both appear to be fiberglass bodied ’32 Ford roadster types with the full fenders and running boards and an open hood showing the large V-8 engine and headers.  That was the red one, nearest the doorway.  The black one in the background was facing the other way, so I couldn't see if it had an engine under the hood.  The red rod was half covered in empty cardboard boxes, old blankets, and junk.  Sitting on the rear was a brand new fancy aluminum spacer for a large four barrel carb, along with a couple of gaskets, obviously brand new, just sittin’ there.  Down on the floor alongside was a brand new very large aluminum distributor for some big block engine, just sittin’ there.  A little ways from that was a new crankshaft wrapped in plastic, just sittin’ there on the floor.  Over on the bench I saw what appeared to be a complete rocker arm setup for a big block Ford, just kinda piled haphazardly on top of a bunch of stuff on the bench.

In between the back of the car and that workbench was a pile of what appeared to be brand new name brand hot rod components that was probably 12 feet long and about 8 feet wide and floor to ceiling high.  Most of it was in boxes, some with tantalizing hand-written labels like “Corvette fans”, others closed and packed.  On the wall opposite the pile was a typical car guy setup:  three rollaway toolboxes jammed full of every kind of mechanic’s tool you could imagine.  On the floor on the other side of the red rod was a new looking cherry picker engine hoist, just sittin’ there.  I saw at least one air compressor.  Everywhere I looked was more cool stuff, but I had to get out of there, so I left.

When I walk out into my own garage I see what happens when a man, over many years, has a hobby or an interest and spends time and money on that interest and accumulates the tools of the trade needed to work that hobby, and the spare parts that go along with it.  As an Ebay guy, I stand in a room like that one in Newcastle and look around, and all I see is inventory, bright flashing dollar signs popping out of boxes and dripping from the ceiling.  In the end, all of our toys become someone else’s inventory.  You go to the swap meet, and that’s what you’re looking at spread out all over those tables and on the floor:  a man’s life, reduced to inventory.  Hopefully, when we’re gone, and our inventory has been dissipated out into the community, we can only hope two things.  One is that some of those cool things that we thought highly enough of to collect and hold on to will wind up in the hands of someone who will actually put them to use as they were intended, if not just for the pleasure of owning them as well.  The other thing is that we will be remembered for more than just our possessions, for while our possessions do describe us, they take as much meaning from our ownership and use of them as we do from them, and when they are dispersed that meaning drops off and they become simple things again, a hammer, rather than my hammer or his hammer.  It is only in the memory of people that things become permanently connected to a person, like Eric Clapton’s guitar, or that very cool old National Steel banjo that is displayed behind glass at the first restaurant you come to on the way down into Naches on Highway 410 to Yakama.  That’s why tools I have inherited from my father are more valuable to me than tools I bought myself.

So here is the essence of this Urban Legend:  In a double car garage in a house in Newcastle at this very moment, a man’s life is about to become inventory for someone.  The difficulty lies in the fact that we don’t know who to ask.  The two tenants were on their way out the door, and did not have any contact information to whom could be placed an inquiry about all the stuff in the garage.  Hugh apparently lived alone, and they did not know of any immediate family in the area.

I’m not a car guy, so I wouldn’t know where to start on this pile, but I do get the strong feeling that this is indeed a legendary pile, that is about to change hands one way or the other, and I don’t have any way to find an opening, other than to park out front and wait for someone to show up.  Tomorrow would be a very good day to do just that, but I won’t be there.  I do, however, have one thing you will usually never hear as part of an Urban Legend.  I have the address of the house in Newcastle on my phone.  Obviously, I would not publish that kind of information, but if any of you car guys see this and get fired up by the idea, get in touch with me.  What would be really cool is to hear the rest of the story some day, about the guy who saw an opportunity dangling in front of him and went for it.  But mostly I just want to know what all was in that pile… :-{)}