It`s all stuff you`ve seen before. If you`re 30 or older, your grandmother or your parents probably had tons of it: ceramic figurine cookie jars, brightly colored dinnerware, amoeba-shaped furniture, maybe even some Philco appliances.
If you long ago dismissed such items as fodder for the next garage sale, it`s time to revise your thinking. Grandma`s house has turned hip. What once was thought tacky is now being hailed as the next wave of collectibles-that being the best word to describe items that aren`t rare and, as one antiques dealer said with distaste, ”aren`t even old.”
But they`re selling. Dealers and collectors are swelling flea markets, harvesting treasures at garage sales.
Grandma`s kitchen implements are now called ”kitchenalia,” and the right muffin tin can fetch $30 or more. A working Philco TV set-the `50s model that resembles a robot-can send a connoisseur into a swoon. And when the late Andy Warhol`s estate was auctioned, part of the profits came from a collection of 300 cookie jars. Andy paid $20 to $30 apiece for the pottery; at auction, some sold for as much as $10,000.
Not every cookie jar has the cachet of once having sat in Warhol`s New York townhouse-cum-warehouse. And if the boom in postwar artifacts were limited to the cream of `50s design-what`s known in the high end of the trade as ”midcentury modern”-it would be a little easier to explain.
But it`s not. People are buying artifacts from the `60s and even the early `70s. Old juice glasses festooned with cartoon characters are as au courant in some circles as crystal Victorian knife rests; the kidney-shaped coffee tables that used to glut Salvation Army thrift stores are going for unheard-of sums at East Coast auctions.
You can blame it, in part, on the ubiquitous Baby Boomers, who are credited with creating the market. The same people who have brought us a spectrum of behavior that ranges from recreational drug use to cocooning now have reached an age at which they remember their childhood with fondness; the sight of a Roy Rogers lunch box or a Doris Day paper-doll set is enough to touch off a flood of memories. It`s also enough to make them open their checkbooks. The product of a consumer culture, the Boomers are proving that if you can`t go home again, at least you can collect the knickknacks.
It`s nothing new
In fairness, though, they`re not reacting any differently from the generation before them. ”People buy what they remember,” said Larry Jaehnert, a St. Paul collectibles dealer. ”They have one item from their childhood, and they see another one. They pick it up, and pretty soon they`re picking more up.”
”Slow down, Wade,” Larry called out from the back seat of a rust-eaten red Oldsmobile. ”It`s garbage day. People are throwing out treasure.”
Wade Judd obediently slowed the pace of his `76 sedan and kept it winding through the alleys of residential St. Paul. Larry Jaehnert scanned the scenes of piled refuse that flicked by the window; his sister, Ann, sitting in the front seat, kept on the lookout for garage sales. When you`re a dealer, every crudely lettered sign tacked to a telephone pole is an invitation to come over and pick through the goods, or, to use dealer parlance, to go pickin`.
If you don`t stop, you`re forever haunted by the prospect of what those rickety card tables held, what valuables were spread out over uneven back-yard turf-maybe a metal toy from the 1950s or a piece of Red Wing pottery. In the world of collectibles, a moving violation is driving past a garage sale.
”You can`t go by a sale sign and not stop,” confirmed Jaehnert, who estimated that he hits about 1,500 garage and estate sales in a summer. ”It`s illegal.”
Jaehnert has been dealing collectibles since he was in 4th grade and his father got him started on a beer-can collection. He used to come home from garage sales on his bicycle, riding no-handed because he was clutching grocery bags of booty.
He`s 24 now, with a University of Minnesota degree in management and his own booth at the Payne Avenue Antique Mall. Though he specializes in brewery advertising and memorabilia, he has extended his holdings to all sorts of 20th Century artifacts-everything from swizzle sticks to kitchenware, from TV lamps to toys. It`s a regular job, with hours that begin early in the morning and end late at night; if you`re not pickin`, then you`re cleaning, sorting and wrapping up sales to collectors.
Ann Jaehnert, 22, deals in vintage jewelry; Wade Judd, 28, a good friend, has his own dealership in antiques and finer collectibles. Sometimes the two men like to chide each other about their respective specialties. Judd has an eye for Art Deco and fine porcelain and ceramics, while Jaehnert isn`t above buying old GI Joe dolls or early ”Star Wars” toys, socking them away in speculation on the future of such collectibles.
”He laughs at me when I buy this stuff, but I`ll have the last laugh on him,” Jaehnert said.
Probably so. After all, it was the profits from his junk-sale scavenging that paid for the bachelor`s degree. No wonder some people spell it junque.
No dealers, please
”People like myself don`t really like to see dealers at a sale,” Mike Ehlen said. ”They`re sharks.”
Ehlen, creative director of a graphics firm, and his wife, Julie Mortenson, an occupational-therapy student, have an eye for 20th Century design. Their 1908 Minneapolis home is outfitted almost completely with vintage 20th Century items, including a large collection of postwar artifacts. They already were collectors when they met at a thrift store in Fargo, N.D.; when they married, they merged their collections, too-her beaded sweaters and his cowboy shirts.
At one point, Ehlen owned five Volkswagen Bugs, those venerable automotive icons of the `60s. He`s down to one now, but along the way he picked up a `60s wooden sailboat.
”You buy one thing because it`s weird, and then it gets to the point where you can`t not buy it,” he said.
Maybe that explains Julie`s `50s ceramic-bird collection or the `60s juice glasses that are decorated with pictures of Archie, Betty and Veronica. Ehlen confessed, ”We have some with Fred Flintstone on them, but we keep them in the back so they won`t get broken.”
Ehlen and Mortenson, both 31, like to point out that they`re not collecting for the sake of acquisition alone; they use their collection daily. The Philco refrigerator works just fine, as does their Robert Shaw stove. They have breakfast every morning at their `50s enamel-topped red-and-white kitchen suite, eating from pieces of their vast collection of vibrantly colored Harlequinware, the `50s stoneware akin to the better-known Fiestaware.
In recent years the values of their collections have risen dramatically, but, for now at least, sentiment rules out any sales. ”I don`t think I could give away a single thing,” Mortenson said. ”They`re little extensions of yourself. They`re history.”
The move to postwar artifacts was prompted by more than nostalgia. At a recent New York auction, some Art Deco stools went for $70,000 each. And Barbra Streisand last year paid $363,000 for a Stickley sideboard.
A lot of the best designs from other periods of the 20th Century already are in collections, priced beyond the reach of an average buyer, said Richard Hickenbotham, the co-owner of Geometrie, a Minneapolis gallery of 20th Century furnishings and artifacts.
As he dryly noted: ”There`s not much left.”
But what remains-the immediate postwar years-can be strikingly elegant in its design and composition. The decade of 1947-57 was especially rich, when designers and manufacturers scrambled to meet the seemingly insatiable urge of new postwar families wanting to outfit their homes in the latest fashion. Innovative materials, such as fiberglass and stainless steel, were coupled with production techniques prompted by the needs of the war. The result was stylish, inexpensive furniture; it wasn`t all star-burst light fixtures and kitschy plastic chairs.
”That`s the most easily recognizable,” Hickenbotham said. ”But a lot of the best was very classical in its design. It`s at the point where it is very underappreciated and unrecognized.”
Midwestern mother lode
This is especially true in the Midwest, where it`s still possible to pick up good pieces for a relatively small amount of money because owners don`t recognize the value. On the East Coast, however, where postwar artifacts have been in vogue for some time now, they`re much more expensive.
This puts dealers such as Hickenbotham in a delicate position when pricing the objects. ”I try to keep the prices elevated to the point where we`re not going to have some New York or California dealer come in here and buy all of it,” he said. ”But a lot of people around here won`t pay the price.”
People who choose to decorate their entire home in artifacts from a certain year-say, 1951-used to strike Michael Marsden as being ”kind of aberrant.” But Marsden, a professor in the popular culture department at Bowling Green (Ohio) State University, whose studies have included the American automotive culture, now takes a different view.
”It really is just an extension of people`s impulse to collect,” he said. ”I can`t think of anybody I know who doesn`t collect something.”
Sage dealers know their market when they claim that people buy things that remind them of their childhoods. Academics such as Marsden take the analysis a bit further: ”They want to re-create that magic moment in their past, in effect, to establish a museum in their own home. Museums are a way of stopping time, of crystallizing a moment and saying, `Oh, it`s not going to change.` ”
Beyond trying to preserve personal memories or heritage, someone with a particularly fulsome collection also might be trying to stand out in a society made up of conspicuous consumers. And then there`s the taste question.
According to Marsden: ”There`s a special classification (of collector)
that says, `The rest of the world are yahoos, but we have enough sense to appreciate these things.` It`s kind of like the French, who rediscover America all the time.”
Regardless of why people collect, their passions offer an interesting argument against the popular notion of a disposable culture. –
”I don`t think we`re as much of a throwaway society as we`re accused of being,” Marsden said. ”That explains why you find Howdy Doody dolls and Shirley Temple dolls in someone`s attic.”
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington is often referred to as the nation`s attic. But Marsden would turn that phrase around.
”Every attic,” he said, ”is a Smithsonian.” –
