By Jim Hagarty
1986
I used to think there were no such things as antiques. The world was made up of only two kinds of household items – old furniture, bottles, machinery and paintings and – new ones.
I could never understand what it was people found intriguing enough about an old washstand or dresser to make them want to invest hours of backbreaking labour and lots of money in the refinishing of them. Why not just go out and buy yourself something new and shiny and unmarked?
Antique lovers, I thought, had too much money and not enough things to spend it on. Or they were wasting their time wandering around in a past that wasn’t really as good as they remembered it.
A few years ago, I bought a chrome-and-arborite table with an imitation barnboard top and vinyl swivel chairs to match. The whole affair was the most beautiful furniture I’d ever seen. How the manufacturers managed to sell it at so low a price was beyond me. And why everyone else wasn’t buying up the identical ensemble had me stumped.
About the same time, I gave away, free of charge, a white-paint-coated washstand to a furniture refinisher who expressed an interest in it. It was given to me, I reasoned and I wasn’t going to use it. Go ahead. Take it.
A short time later, I barely recognized the same piece of furniture in the refinisher’s showroom but by then, it looked remarkably good and bore a price tag of $225. I was vaguely aware that I had let some sort of treasure slip through my fingers.
Today, my chrome table’s gone and in its place sits an old elm harvest table, complete with scratches on the top and uneven finish on the legs. Around the table sit five old pressed-back kitchen chairs that wobble a lot and need repairing. The seat on one of them is split in two and the spindles on another don’t match but I wouldn’t trade the whole lot for a factory-full of chrome.
There must come a time in most people’s lives when the nostalgia bug bites them and I think it has some correlation with expanding waistlines, receding hairlines and rounding the halfway mark to the three-score-and-ten line. You don’t see very many teenagers in antique shops and flea markets. They’re in the record stores and burger joints.
I’ve always been sentimental but never was much attracted to old things until recently. Now I spend a lot of time browsing in flea markets and antique shops, in search of bargains. I look more often than I buy but if something really grabs me, and the price is not outrageous, I take it home.
It’s funny how tastes change. When I was a kid, our house on the farm had many old pieces of furniture ranging from washstands and dressers, beds and night tables to kitchen table and chairs. In their original state, they would all have been stained and varnished and had wooden or porcelain turns on their doors and drawers. By the time I was old enough to take notice of them, they had all been coated with several layers of white paint and their original turns had been replaced by glass knobs. I can’t remember ever thinking that any of that furniture was very appealing or valuable.
Now, in shops and markets, I look at the price tags on furniture that’s almost identical and just shake my head.
A few weeks ago, an antique dealer in a nearby town showed me through the room where all of his refinishing is done. As soon as I entered the shop, I spied a black and red, General Electric, table clock-radio hooked to the wall. I asked the man if he’d turn it on and he did.
The radio took half a minute or so to warm up before any sound came out of it. When it did, the music was accompanied by a humming sound – the identical buzz that emanated from the same radio that sat on my bedside table at home for years. Disc jockeys from WBZ in Boston and WLS in Chicago plus a New York station for which I can’t remember the call letters (was it WCFL or WKYC?) used to spin their records late into every night over that little radio while I lie there waiting for sleep.
I have no idea where the radio went and had forgotten about it completely until I saw its twin in the antique dealer’s shop.
In a turbulent world where, it seems, little stays the same from one day to the next, it’s comforting to know that that 50-year-old radio’s still spittin’ and cracklin’ its music and news out over the air.
It wasn’t for sale. Stuff like that never is.
