Tall Tales from the Antiques Trail

By Chris Osborne/City Lights

I guess it was because we already felt different that caused the specific group of us to congregate on the Boston Common in the early seventies, most of us from working class families, and blue-collar neighborhoods outside of Boston. Some of us, as was my case, grew up on welfare. Whatever our origin, we came to the wide asphalt path that ran along Beacon Street to skate board, although not one among us would have been mistaken for an athlete. Mostly, we hung out.

It was here I met my first wife Deborah Johns. Deb came from the rough Italian blue-collar neighborhood of East Boston, wore only black, and made up her eyes Twiggy-like with dark shadows and drawn in lashes she called her “sticks.” In her high school yearbook picture, Deb’s long dark hair falls around her face, and she holds her mouth cocked in the skeptical smirk that I would come to recognize as her near permanent expression. That smirk and her constant use of the phrase, “Yeh, right,” were how Deb let you know that she never accepted anything on faith. Soon we were living together, and now domestically situated I needed to find a steady job, once again, turning to my old friend Chaunce.

At the time, Chaunce was working in a used furniture store in Brookline and, as we already had the experience of moving antiques together, I went to work with him.

The store overflowed with couches, chairs, dining room sets, and sideboards. Pictures of cow littered fields and thatch roof cottages crowded the walls, but among them was one that attracted my attention for its depiction of a paradise without manure and the possibility of farm work. In it, two large columns framed a view of a lake, rocky cliffs beyond. An attractive young woman lays stretched out on a patio in the foreground, a nude sexually ambivalent figure bending over her. This person might have been waking her up but the picture gave no impression that they really had anything important to do. Finding myself drawn to the picture I wondered why: there was a great deal of small detail which I liked, and deep rich color something I also liked, or maybe I had just been looking for something to become passionate about and found it in Maxfield Parrish. I bought the picture for three dollars.

It is a romantic notion that most people like to think of their lives as pivoting on a single chance event. The reality is that most of the people I know prefer to think of their lives as carefully planned. My life, however, has always felt like the result of the sorts of events that lead to the “what-ifs.” What if I didn’t take that job with Chaunce and never saw a Maxfield Parrish?

Chaunce pointed out an article in the paper about the guy who painted my picture, it said he recently died and the Vose gallery in Boston was selling the family estate.

I went to the Vose gallery. Seeing the oil paintings in the rarefied setting of a Newbury Street art gallery was somewhat intimidating although they were very nice to me and showed me their entire collection of about twenty-five Parrish oil paintings as though they thought I might actually be able to afford one. I should mention that the paintings, which sell for tens of thousands today, were as low as five hundred dollars, but then, gas was thirty-five cents, a Mustang convertible twelve hundred, and I typically lived on less than fifty dollars a week.

The gallery had a list of collectors of Parrish illustrations and among them was Horace Tailor in Brookline. I called and, like all collectors, he was eager to show me his collection.

Over the phone, Mister Taylor proudly told me he was eighty-two and when I arrived at the rambling Victorian house, a slight, energetic elderly man wearing a brown suit and bow tie answered the door. Fortunately he didn’t seen at all put off by my ponytail, long side burns, and informal jeans.

Inside, the house had the thick soupy smell of over-cooked cabbage, and from the hall, I looked into the living room, which was dark and brimming with heavy furniture, tall Chinese vases, and curio cabinets.

“That’s my sister’s room,” Horace said, then added as though it was all I needed to know, “She’s ninety.” I would never meet her, but at times, thought I detected her presence in the house.

Horace steered me around towards the dining room and into an entirely different environment, this one crowded with hundreds of stuffed birds. Like the final scene of Hitchcock’s movie when the birds stop attacking as mysteriously as they began, these birds sat silent and watching as I entered the room. In dense congregations, small brown birds watched from glass cabinets, large speckled ones spread wings on top of the cabinets, and other birds huddled together beneath the cabinets, tables, and chairs. I gawked like a tourist in Times Square. Horace explained that he was an ornithologist and during the Depression when he gave talks, rather than money he accepted birds as payment.

I was considering saying something clever like, “Too bad, you couldn’t eat them,” as I reached out to touch one.

“Don’t touch them,” Horace gently warned with a wink. “Some of the older ones are filled with arsenic powder and we don’t want to stir that up now do we?”

Dust covered everything in the room. I tried not to inhale.

Occupying the rooms along with the birds, there were old toy trucks, stuffed animals on wheels, and on the dining room table sat a huge model of a manor house constructed of hundreds of individual clay bricks, lintels, and arches. I wondered if I was observing a second childhood although once I knew Horace better it felt as though he had never quite advanced beyond his first.

Horace showed me around the house where evidently the family never threw anything out. Tufted, tasseled, crenulated, and laced, the sumptuous detailing of the Victorians was evident on every surface. Curtains thick as blankets hung from fat wood rings around speared end rods and on the walls, the faded cabbage roses were so plump they seemed to bulge. This décor, so reminiscent of ancient grandmothers, may have been where I detected the presence of Horace’s sister, in the chairs with rounded backs, their fringe brushing the floor, and in the threadbare upholstery, which, like psoriatic elbows, exposed a matrix of tiny veins.

In what I assumed was simply more pride of personal history Horace showed me the nursery where, “I and all my brothers and sisters were born,” but I think he wanted me to have my first glimpse of Parrish since, around the top of the wall of the nursery, in what was one of the weirdest product placements I have ever seen, was a Maxfield Parrish Fisk Tire advertising border, depicting a witch-like Mother Goose in a black cone hat, astride a goose flying through a tire. This design repeated about fifty times around the room. I was eager to see the collection.

Horace’s collection was in a small adjacent bedroom. Haphazardly piled on the floor, on the bed or leaning against the wall, the collection was neither displayed nor protected. Only a couple of framed prints actually hung on the wall.

Parrish painted in minute detail and used dramatic effects of color and light. He painted with so much deep rich blue that in the twenties people called saturated blues, “Maxfield Parrish Blue.” In the movie Top Hat, Fred Astaire says of someone’s black eye, “It looks like Sunrise by Maxfield Parrish.”

Parrish did one particularly blue picture called “Stars,” a copy of which hung on the wall of the bedroom, and was the first thing I saw when entering. At over two feet tall, it was one of the largest of the framed prints, and the overall impression is of only one color, deep blue. In the center, a nude woman sits on a rock, the rock jutting out like a hand gently holding her aloft. She holds her knees up to her chest. A still ocean is in the background and a pale horizon almost cuts the picture in half. It is the moment when the sun passes below the horizon and as they say, “the stars come out.” At the top of the picture are tiny brilliant white stars against the darkest blue sky and the young woman looks dreamily up at them. I found it romantic and sensual. I wondered what the men and women of the prudish twenties thought of it. I supposed, to the intellectual crowd of the time who would have been declaring allegiance to Picasso and Braque, this was just commercial piffle. I knew this would be the judgment of my artier friends, such as Chaunce. I guess I was more easily impressed, and because of the simplicity of the emotional message and composition, I became absorbed in the picture in a way no work of art had ever affected me.

Horace perched on a chair while I went through everything. He did not seem to care what I picked up. While I foraged, he kept up a breezy monologue of what things were, how he obtained them, and what he knew about Parrish and the gossip about his relationship with his model.

In that room were all of Parrish’s characters, the knaves and jesters, portly jovial kings and fawning attendants, beautiful women in flowing gowns and young men in jaunty feathered caps along with Parrish’s signature nude and semi-nude women beside streams, below foliage and under starry skies. As though attending a language immersion class in a foreign country, it was both thrilling and intimidating to me.

Maxfield Parrish illustrated twelve books, over two hundred magazine covers, and did ads for Der-Kiss perfume, Swifts Ham, Fisk Tire, Hires Root Beer, and Mazda Light bulbs as well as others. He did oil paintings, such as “Stars,” for publishing houses that reproduced the paintings and sold them as “Art Prints.” Parrish was paid commissions from the sales of these prints and “Daybreak,” that first one I purchased, was the most popular, it alone ultimately making Parrish over a million dollars in commissions. Horace had almost everything, some things in multiples.

The most extensively illustrated book by Parrish is a children’s play called “The Knave of Hearts.” Horace had enough copies to launch a production.

One advertising commission Parrish undertook was a series of fourteen calendars for Edison Mazda light bulbs. The calendars had the store’s name printed on them and came in two sizes, a very large one to hang in the store, and small ones to be given away free. Horace started collecting Parrish in nineteen-fifteen when he could order the large calendars through the mail and pick up the small ones at stores for free. He had two complete sets of the large still in their mailing tubes and fist-full’s of the smaller.

His collection included an unused Hires Root Beer billboard five feet high and eight feet long. This was folded in a mailing envelope and he had two of them. I think it is very likely he had the only two of these in existence.

The hard part for me was that everything in the room was for sale and I didn’t have very much money.

Over the next two years I made three trips to Horace’s collection and purchased some very rare things such as a Hires Root Beer window card since I had no place to display the billboard nor the three hundred dollars to buy it.

Part of the point of collecting, however, is to find things on your own, not to mention cheaper, and the competitive spirit that drives all collectors took hold of me. I hit the bricks or in this case, the muddy fields of the Norton flea market.

  By Chris Osborne/City Lights      

         The first antiques I ever sold were stolen. It didn’t feel like stealing at the time but looking back I have to call it stealing regardless of the circumstances. The incident occurred in my junior year at Brookline High School in 1966.

         My mom moved us to Brookline in 1958 when I was nine.  We moved from a cramped basement apartment in Boston and the new one was accessed not through the front door but by a narrow path to the back running alongside the old brick apartment building.  Owing to the steep incline of Summit Hill where we now lived, my bedroom windows were fifteen feet above the ground so it felt as though we had moved up in the world even though we were still technically in the basement.  The path continued past our place down a steep weed covered hill to the top of a twenty foot retaining wall, the only thing preventing someone from stepping right off that wall to certain severe injury was a pot marked concrete balustrade.  To the left a set of wide crumbling concrete steps led down to the base of the wall and an alley where the anemic light from an antique streetlamp made it a place you’d expect to find a body.

          This neighborhood was also cool because right across the street from us was spooky abandoned house.

            Its paint grey and peeling, the windows shaded, supported in the front by a tall double stair of fat round field stones, flanked on one side by a steep driveway to a decrepit carriage house in the back, the house looked bent, blind, and broken. I snuck into the house for the first time when I was in the eighth grade. By then practically every kid in the neighborhood had been inside and seen all the old stuff there, including the bowling alley in the basement. It wasn’t until I was in high school that a plan to loot the house took shape.

My accomplice in this would be my best friend Chaunce Huntington Powers the Third although the name never seemed to do him any good. I took Chaunce into the house and when I did, he got very excited about this old desk.

“Look at the grain and the detail on the carvings,” he said running his finger over the tooth of a carved lion’s head drawer pull, looking the desk over with a lust usually reserved for cheerleaders, adding, “These people had money.” Intuitively Chaunce had sized up the situation.  The house was big and had servants rooms, and he assumed the people who lived there could afford good things.  We wondered around the house for a while, taking inventory of the other furniture: a wicker couch and chairs, a big colorful rug, and a bookcase with glass doors.  As we were leaving Chaunce said something that had never occurred to me, “I think I know someone who might buy this stuff.”

Chaunce lived in the South End and hung around an antique shop owned by a dealer named Will Chandler. Every day Will’s shop on Columbus Ave spewed its contents onto the wide sidewalk in front from the mountain of junk inside. Rich white retail from Beacon Hill and the Back Bay would not venture into this mostly blue-collar and black neighborhood to buy from Will but the antique dealers did, because many of the townhouses of the South End were unoccupied and abandoned and scavengers brought Will the things they found in these houses. Therefore, among the broken furniture, chipped glass, and sweaty couches in Will’s shop there were often things of unexpected quality or so Will told us.

Chaunce told Will about the house in Brookline and the things in it and Will offered to loan us a van so we could bring him the stuff, guaranteeing he would buy it all from us at fair price. We would have to take his word about the fair price part. We all agreed that no one cared about the place or its contents so it would not really be stealing. Nevertheless a black man taking furniture out of an abandoned house in Brookline would attract attention, where a couple of white teenagers would not, particularly if we didn’t look suspicious while doing it. One o’clock in the morning seemed like a good time.

One Saturday, when my mother was away, Chaunce parked at the foot of the stairs in the alley behind my place. I’d put on dark jeans and a black turtleneck but was reluctant to put shoe polish on my face thinking it would be difficult to wash off. Chaunce arrived in light pants and shirt so I didn’t bother to ask his opinion on the shoe polish. We took the path everyone used to get into the house up a tree, across the kitchen roof, and through the window to the stairs. The desk was our first objective.

With great stealth and cunning, we carried the desk to the front door, opened the door, and tilted the desk it on its side. The desk drawer hit the floor with a bang loud enough to be heard in Methuen. I froze. Before I realized it, Chaunce was half way down the steps, me scrambling over the desk after him, sprinting across the street, ducking into the shadow of my building backs against the wall, breathing hard, listening for sirens.

When we were certain that no one in the neighborhood had called out the National Guard, we returned to the desk abandoned in the doorway. Replacing the drawer, we hustled the desk down the steps, across the street, along the path past my entrance, down to the wall and down the wide steps to the Mustang convertible parked beneath the street lamp in the alley. Mustang convertible?

“Oh wow man, this is, like, not very cool,” I said.

“Will couldn’t get a van,” Chaunce explained. “It’s his girlfriends’ car. He said we better not fuck it up.”

I wondered if she knew we had it.

The top was down so we flipped the desk over, legs in the air, and rested it across the backs of the seats. Chaunce may or may not have had a licence but I didn’t know how to drive, so I held the desk while he drove to the shop where using the key Will gave us, we dumped the desk.

The wicker chairs and couch went next, got delivered, and we returned for the bookcase.

We had been looking at the bookcase all night wondering what the chances were we’d be able to move it. It was about six feet long, five and a half feet tall, and had three sets of hinged glass doors. We heaved, but lifting it was about as likely as two beauty queens lifting a tractor. I snuck back to the apartment and got two screwdrivers to remove the glass doors. Sure enough, with the doors off it was much lighter and, humming that tune about the little green ant, we muscled the bookcase as far as the hall where, for all I know, it still sits.

We used the screwdrivers to remove a set of hinged windows with clear leaded glass that were high on the wall between the dining room and kitchen, then rolled up the Oriental rug, and headed back in town for the last time.

The sun was coming up when we got to the shop. We waited until close to twelve for Will to show. He took the keys to the car and told us to bring the stuff outside, which we did while he inspected the car tisking and rubbing at smudges in the upholstery. She definitely did not know we had it.

Our haul on the sidewalk, we waited while Will looked it over, Chaunce and I glancing at each other silently speculating what sort of fortune he would give us.

“Well the desk is nice,” Will began letting the “but” hang for a moment. “But it would be worth a lot more if it was a partner.” We looked at him. “They’re wider and have a drawer on both sides,” he explained. In which case we would have dumped out a drawer no matter which direction we tilted it, I thought. What we didn’t realize was that with this comment Will was dialing our hopes down. Years later, I would do the same thing because people always hope for more than they are going to get, so you have to find a way to tell them that the item is less than it could be.

Will looked over the wicker. In the sun I could see the pads were dirty and torn, the wicker broken;  they didn’t look nearly as good as they had in the house where they seemed to belong.  Will pointed these things out.

“Not nearly as old as the desk,” he said, pulling open the broken seam of a pad and fingering a snapped bit of wicker. “Now what am I going to do with these?” He asked picking up one of the set of four glass windows taken from the dining room. “They don’t fit nothing.”

We rolled the rug out for him. “Machine made,” he said.

Will pulled out a stack of bills and started counting. There is a saying in the antiques business that when you are making an offer, “Let them see the money.”

“I’ll give you one-seventy-five for the lot,” Will said, shaking his head as though he was making the biggest mistake of his life, “that’s generous, the desk’s the only thing worth anything. I won’t make much on it. I wouldn’t have bothered with all that other stuff.”

“How about we keep the rug?” I asked. It was big and red with a fancy medallion in the middle. Letting it go cheap just didn’t seem right.

“One-fifty then,” Will responded shoving the cash towards Chaunce.

I looked at Chaunce, “You can use it, too,” I said.

“No problem,” he said handing me my half.

Seventy-five dollars each was a lot of money even though we were disappointed it wasn’t ten thousand. At the time, an ounce of pot cost fifteen dollars although it would be another year before I would buy my first one.

The rug covered the floors of various rooms rented over the next several years. These were years I took a lot of drugs and had a lot of jobs as I tried to find the job that stuck. It would be nine years before I would open my store and the rug was with me for all of them, a constant reminder of that night.

I never entered the house after that, now it really was just a big old house looted of its contents. I suppose I didn’t want to see the evidence of my participation in this. A year later, some budding anarchist or sociopath in the neighborhood tested his design for a Molotov cocktail on the back of the house. It only scorched a wall but the scar was depressing to look at.

After graduating high school and moving away, it was ten or more years before I happened by the house again. Someone had put stucco on the outside of it, torn down the porch, and added a front entry in a sort of Spanish style. By then I was in a profession that preserved the past and would have automatically protested a desecration such as this. This, however, was more personal as it was a piece of my own history they had so thoughtlessly altered beyond recognition.

By Chris Osborne/City Lights

It was nineteen-seventy and the love generation was in full bloom. My roommates John, Dave, and I smoked dope, balled chicks, dropped acid, took speed and downers, and lived on butter and sugar sandwiches and Hormel chili out of the can. Together we grooved on Hendrix, Cream, Lov, and Eden’s Children. At the club The Boston Tea Party, we saw Led Zeppelin and the Doors and on Sundays, on the lawn at the Cambridge Commons, local bands played free concerts, everyone there dancing as a mob to, “In Garden DaVita” and “Toad.” When it rained, we danced and slipped barefoot in the mud. If I thought about the future at all, it was formless, indistinct, and unchanged. Then I had an acid reoccurrence.

This might sound like a good thing; a tab of LSD that gives two trips for the price of one, however, the second trip is not like a second delirious round of sex in the morning, but more like waking up in a pool of puke. A reoccurrence has all the psychosis with none of the euphoria. Confused and distraught, I committed myself to Mass Mental where for three days they gave me Nembutal. Nembutal is a barbiturate with all the fun taken out of it. It keeps you docile and dull and gives you a wicked case of dry mouth. I was under observation for ten days but even after release, it was two months before I felt normal again. For all that time, I felt misaligned as though the normally seamless planes of my sanity had gone askew, allowing feelings of security and well-being to trickle out the cracks.

After that, I never did another illegal drug again. One month later, my sudden drug free condition saved my ass, and led to another incidence of selling.

When four cops in sports jackets arrived at the apartment, claiming to have a search warrant John let them in. They gathered John, Dave and I into the living room. It suddenly felt overcrowded. One of them took down our names on a flip pad while the others searched the rooms. He asked us leading question like “You guys got quite a little pot house going here, don’t you?” As we loaded on our denials, scrambling noises, like rats digging in the garbage, came from the other rooms.

The cops returned to the living room and one of them asked who had the room in front. Dave said it was his. They arrested him for drug possession, read him his rights, and slapped on handcuffs. They asked who had the room in the back. John answered and they paid him the same respect.

The one doing all the talking and arresting turned to me, “You must be the guru who lives in the middle room,” he said.

I nodded not sure what I was admitting to. “We didn’t find anything in there, you can go,” he said.

I suppose the honorable thing for me to have said would be, “No, I insist you take me with my friends, I am as guilty as they are,” but that would only have been possible had I not sprinted out the door the second they said I could. The next day I helped raise bail for John and Dave, and knowing that eviction was inevitable I found another place to live.

I rented a room in a townhouse near Boston University. Like many houses in the area, it had long ago been converted from what was once an elegant Victorian home into rooms for students. There were two rooms to a floor and we shared a bath but the room was large, ceilings high, and I had a bay window with a view of the alley.

I was out of work and my cash was running out. A few weeks earlier, Morgies had transferred me back down to the loading docks. Without my nightly scavenging, the job lost all its appeal so I stopped going to work.

In the old apartment when I was taking speed and experiencing sleepless nights filled with boundless energy, I decorated my room. Now all of that stuff just sat in the closet. A friend knew about the things I had liberated from Morgies and asked if I wanted to sell any of it. He came over, went through it all, made up a small pile, and offered me one hundred and seventy five dollars.

“Wow, man, sure sounds great,” I said with the sly cunning of a shrewd dealmaker.

I had no experience in the art of negotiation. I didn’t know that the first offer is never the best offer. I didn’t know then, as I do now after making hundreds of offers myself, that when I eagerly accepted his price he would be thinking, “I should have offered less.”

The following Sunday, filled with entrepreneurial zeal I packed two huge suitcases with the remaining stuff and took a subway out to the concert on the Cambridge Common.

A crowd was already gathering as I set up my display on the perimeter near where people watched the bands. People selling things did not typically turn up at these concerts so I attracted curious looks while draping the bedspreads, brocades, and embroideries over the back of a park bench. I displayed the scarves in the open suitcases on the ground holding them down with jewelry, beaded bags, and oddities like a set of “Thinker” bookends, a Victorian metal drinking cup that collapsed, carved figurines, and illustrated books.

I weighed about one-ten, had hair to my waist, and was often told I resembled Mick Jagger. Standing by my goods wearing a woman’s jacket made from a Victorian paisley shawl, I could not have been groovier if I took up the dulcimer. Although without the drugs to keep my weight down the jacket was beginning to get tight.

As always, the crowd that day watching and walking past, consisted of Harvard students and professors, high school kids and tourists, old rich Cambridge and the smart young newly rich. The young crowd taking style cues from the music scene appeared as British rockers and mods, American folkies and hippies. It was a costume party and to me even those not wearing a costume looked as though they were. The professor in the brown corduroy jacket with patch sleeves; the middle-aged jock in the letter jacket and jeans; the older woman still in her parochial school uniform, a white blouse and plaid skirt; I guess we all wear some kind of uniform I thought, feeling pleased with my philosophical turn of mind.

All those, however, drew little of my attention as it was the girls, young, buoyant, and willowy and brazenly wearing their new entitlements of equality and sexual freedom, I fell in lust with that day.

A scruffy Joni Mitchell type with dirty hands settled down cross-legged on the grass next to the bench and one by one scooped up my scarves gently placing them in her lap as if they were baby chicks. “Oh wow, are you, like, selling these?” she asked in a distant voice. I thought it was a bit early in the morning to be stoned and wondered if she needed a place to stay.

“Yeh, scarves are a buck, the other stuff’s ten and fifteen,” I pointed to a particularly nice Indian spread with psychedelic embroidery, “I want thirty five for that.” She had a long graceful face and wide mouth, I would have given it to her free if she came home with me but after watching her vacantly fondle the scarves for the next half- hour, I knew she would be melodramatic in bed and difficult to get rid of once we grew tired of each other.

A middle-aged woman in a Marlo Thomas flip and a blouse with a built in bow, dragged over a man in a crew cut and plaid sports jacket. “Do you import this yourself,” she asked, leaning in, as though I might be difficult to understand, her thin lips betraying her thrill of conversing with an honest to goodness hippy.

“No I collect it from thrift shops.” I said.

She leaned back, “You mean this is used?” She exclaimed tugging on Plaid Jacket’s arm.

He and I were checking out the full braless chest of the teenage flower child trying on one of my sashes over a gauzy floral print dress. Wrapping the sash twice around her tiny waist, she fluffed the fringe on her hip, and asked how much it was. I lifted my eyes from the game of peek-a-boo her nipples were playing behind the flowers of her top, greeted by a wholesome moon-face, a painted on daisy curving down one cheek, and cupid bow lips grinning as though pleased I’d noticed she wasn’t wearing the bra that was sure to be in her purse. The mom who bought and pressed the expensive looking Stevie Nicks outfit she wore would never have let her leave the house without one. I thought she might be underage and could get me in very serious trouble.

“Fifty cents,” I said as Flip and Plaid Jacket walked on.

The teen squealed and unfolded bills from a drawstring velvet purse, “Here keep the change,” she said handing me a buck.

Cute and patronizing, I thought.

More people stopped, looked, and began to buy. Many wanted to know where it all came from. I made up stories.

“I had a vintage clothing store in Greenwich Village. I just moved here.” I told a plump Janis Joplin lookalike. Unlike the teen whose crisp floral dress obviously came from a department store, the limp floral dress tucked in the belly folds of this “Janis” obviously came from Goodwill.

“Do you need a place to stay?” She asked her eyes wide and beseeching. “We have a group home not far from here. Everyone is welcome. We’d just love to have you.” Comforting and easy she was very appealing. Guaranteed she would have sex with me if only because she felt I needed it, then cook me a big breakfast. She rattled off the address and left swinging the mesh purse she bought, a little further on hooking up with a bushy haired Jerry Garcia lookalike. The fuzzy groupy-ness and gleeful sharing typical of communes had never been my thing so I did not attempt to remember the address.

It was a great warm day, in the background the bands hammered away on the Stones and the Who, and even though no chick followed me home, I got satisfaction in making bunches of money. I sold almost everything and grossed close to three hundred dollars.

Earlier in the day, someone asked me how I could bear to get rid of all this beautiful stuff. I did like it, I liked looking at it, and decorating my “Guru” tent with it but I also liked having the money. Hippy doctrine held that money only gives you a false sense of security, but I knew lots of hippies who grew up with money so I suspect they felt it would always be there when they needed it. I never had that expectation and, on that day, for the first time since being on my own, it felt as though I might be able to do better than minimum wage.

It, however, had not sunk in that this was a viable way to make a living, perhaps because I still was not paying for my stock. It would be another few years before I would start paying for things and five years before I made antiques my profession.