What was your most valuable flea market / garage sale find?
What was your most valuable or treasured ‘flea market / garage sale’ find?
I spent many a Sunday after I retired scouring garage sales, flea markets, estate sales, church sales looking for treasures. I would pick up antique cameras, vintage artworks, old musical instruments, and especially hallmarked china and silver, usually dirty and tarnished, which I would clean and polish and sell on eBay. On eBay I eventually earned the very highest trustworthiness rating from my purchasers because I never tried to fool anyone. I always provided a photograph and an accurate description, always pointing out any flaws.
My most valuable purchase was from an outdoor field flea market near Hyannis, Cape Cod, when my first wife and I were vacationing there in the mid-1970s. We saw a vendor pull two big Maxfield Parrish prints out of a big box and we immediately bought them both for a total of $25. They were in beautiful ornate frames, sealed at the back and we knew they surely had to be originals. They were about 30 inches wide and looked like this:
This one is probably Maxfield Parrish’s most famous print: “Daybreak”.
This one is, I believe, quite rare, called “Garden of Allah”.
As we walked out of the flea market carrying them past other dealers, two or three of them tried to buy the prints from us which assured us that we had lucked out in our purchase.
They hung on the wall of our dining room through the rest of our marriage, and have ended up in her hands, because when we divorced I gave her almost all of our mutually purchased belongings since I was then moving to China. I assume they are still in her possession.
I just checked their value, and the minimum price of such framed prints is presently about $350 each but that could be for smaller versions of them.
So my question to all of you is, what is the most valuable treasure you were able to purchase at such a marketplace? Tell the story of it, and provide a photo if you can. I know that some of you might have obtained some rare treasures through inheritance – for sure Dowser has.
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Valuable items I owned before I married, such as my vintage Martin and Gibson guitars, my old Appalachian dulcimer, other musical instruments and artworks and some antique furniture were given to my son and daughter before I moved. I came here with only two suitcases packed. There are many photographs, coloured slides, books and clothes including my silk QC robes that are in a storage locker in the apartment building where my daughter lives. I wish I still had those things but I've not returned to Canada for more than 8 years.
I wish could say something romantic like I met my wife at a garage sale, but nope. Still my best find was an old console radio with a record player and a record recorder built into it. The idea was that it has two turntables, one above the other. One of them you just played 78's on (that's all it would play) and the other had an extra heavy needle that, if you could find record blanks (I never could, but this was a long time before the internet) you could use a microphone (still had it) to record your own records or messages to mail or record from the other record player or from the AM radio. Radio and record player worked great and the recorder seemed to, but without a blank I could never be sure. Looked pretty cool. Wood was almost flawless and shined up nice. Gave it to my first wife in the divorce because I didn't have any place for it. I wonder whatever happened to it? It'd be worth some money I suspect. If I remember right I paid $25 for it and it weighed a ton! I should have donated it to the county museum or something. My dad donated his old TV set with the round 9 inch screen to them.
Interesting story, Randy. I never saw that kind of machine before. It could be the kind of recorder that was used in the movie "The King's Speech" when Lionel Logue recorded the Duke of York (soon to be King George VI) reading the "To be or not to be" excerpt from Hamlet. It produced what appeared to be a 78 rpm size record.
I had never seen one before myself, though my grandparents said they knew of them. People used them sort of like tape recorders to send voice mail messages to loved ones. The rich one, Winchester, on MASH used to get voice letters from his family on them. In fact they made it part of an episode because he jumped all over some GI's for teasing a member of their outfit for stuttering and in the closing scene he gets record from his sister and it turns out that she stutters also. Very touching. Apparently record stores used to have them too that were coin operated.