Antique Treasures

Many years ago the Maine Antiques Digest printed an obituary about a late Baltimore Antiques dealer, legendary in his field. One of the small things it mentioned was his shopping at the Goodwill Reject Store (a name I use, not them) in the early 60’s. I smiled, because he was not alone in his great “find”, I was there as well.

On Aliceanna Street in Baltimore, next to the stable where the A-rabbers (read “Home Delivery", Thursday, December 24) could rent carts and horses, sat the Goodwill’s Reject Store, the place where Goodwill products went if they could not be refurbished, retouched or refinished. The detritus of the donations landed there, as opposed to the trash. Bargains galore were there for collectors if they knew where to look.

I was the king of the cast iron sewing machine bottom! I bought as many as I could get for about 50 cents a piece and sold them to friends for $4. They were used as table bottoms by everyone. They charged you more if they were complete, and I had to remove and throw away the tops.

They had tons of pressed back oak chairs, all in singles. The sets must have been refinished and sold but the singles were throw aways. Generally they cost around $2, as I remember. I currently have a TV stand made of oak which is probably a chair bottom. I bought it there in 1963 for a dime! When I moved from our rented place to our first house in 1967, I put out 11 chairs for the garbage, as I had no need to move them and no one wanted them.

The strongest memory of that store was the heat system! In the dead of winter, a pot bellied stove was used as a furnace, and it was fed from a large table filled with scrap from the store. The most vivid memory I have is of employees feeding the stove with shovelfuls of broken baby dolls!

It was a highly stylized Dachau!