Gone Girl: Phase 2

col·lect·i·ble
noun
an item valued and sought by collectors.
“the auction attracted professional dealers trading in quality small collectibles”

As I discussed in Phase 1, in the weeks after my mother’s death in 2016, I worked on donating her belongings and streamlining the house for my father’s convenience and comfort. On the surface the house looked the same but I cleared and rearranged drawers, cupboards, and closets to make the house more functional for an elderly man on his own. In the years before my father’s passing in 2023 I helped him clear out some of his own large collections.

My father once claimed that he owned very little. What he meant by that I have no idea because I never asked him. Did he mean just the contents of his dresser and his few things hanging in the closet? Did he imagine himself moving monk-like through the world?

My parents shopped together for big-ticket items like appliances and furniture but decor and other household items were strictly my mother’s province. What had he to do with draperies or pots and pans? Maybe he mentally disowned anything he had no part in choosing and so thought of these things as belonging only to her. 

In spite of my father’s claim though, the house and garage were full of things, useful and otherwise, that he had brought into the household. 

2018: Phones

After decades of working at Bell Canada my dad had amassed a large number of telephones. He didn’t collect in the sense of passionately gathering and curating a group of objects and displaying them proudly. They just came home with him after they became obsolete. A few were genuine antiques but most were just common discontinued models with dials or keypads. 

In 2018 Dad decided he wanted to get rid of them so we found a dealer from Kingston, Ontario online. We set the phones out on the pool table in the basement and cleaned and photographed them. Photos and a detailed list of the collection were sent to the dealer. He bought many but not all of them. I packed his choices carefully into cardboard boxes and, in a two stage relay, my brother and I carted them from Chatham to Toronto to Kingston. The leftovers stayed in the basement.

The phones that went to the dealer

A real antique that stayed home

2021: The filing cabinet

After my mother’s death my father spent his remaining years sleeping on the living room sofa rather than the bed he had shared with my mother. He used the bed, instead, as a horizontal filing cabinet because “out of sight, out of mind.” Bills, bank statements, and other important papers were laid out in grid formation on the bedspread. 

The actual filing cabinet itself was a mystery to him. In 2021, I cleared it out, along with the desk. Mom had had secretarial and bookkeeping training and looked after my father’s books when he started his own business. She had a habit of over-saving and over-filing so, in addition to binders full of investment information that she had saved, the excess paperwork filled six bankers boxes. London Business Machines (no longer in business, sadly) charged $15 per box to use their large DIY shredding machine. I double checked everything as I fed it through the machine and the entire job took me three hours.

Shredding at home would have taken days

The results: stuffed bags and empty boxes

2022: Automobile brochures

When my dad was a teenager in the late forties and early fifties he had a collection of comic books and movie magazines. Stacks of Superman and Dick Tracy comics and magazines with movie stars like Clark Gable and Lana Turner on the cover filled a trunk. When he left the farm to work in the city he left that trunk behind and never saw it again.

Dad bemoaned the loss of those publications until the day he died. “Think what they’d be worth today!” I always imagined that his next collection was compensating for the loss of those “collectible” comics.

Starting in the 1950s and over the next five decades, Dad amassed (there’s that word again) a large collection of automobile brochures, “car books” we called them. The brochures were well-designed and beautifully photographed or illustrated, printed on glossy, coated paper, and no doubt were costly to produce. Dealerships gave them away free to potential customers. Do they even hand them out anymore in this age of the internet?

Blind embossing, gold foil stamping, and exquisite illustration

By the 2000s Dad had filled two dozen bankers boxes with these slick works of art. Mom organized them by manufacturer and created an inventory binder. 

In 2022 he decided he wanted to get rid of these too. He claimed that someone had offered him $500 for his collection back in the 1970s and was convinced that his current collection must be worth a small fortune.

Please understand that this was not a lovingly curated collection, kept in pristine sleeves and archival boxes in a clean, dry room. They were acquired for no money and little effort, stacked in secondhand bankers boxes discarded from an office, and stored on plywood shelves in a musty basement.

Not exactly archival-quality storage

I was not interested in selling them off piecemeal so I photographed a few, wrote up a description, and posted them as a single lot on FB Marketplace. There were no takers, of course. I credit my sister with finding a dealer who was interested in Dad’s brochures—but only the ones from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, which made up just a small portion of the entire collection. The dealer would be in town on such and such a date. 

I came back to Dad’s house the night before meeting him. Going through each box, I pulled out only those brochures from the early decades and arranged them on the pool table (what a useful table!). The sale made barely a dent in the whole collection. There were still almost two dozen boxes sitting on the basement shelves. How we finally got rid of them is for another post.

The Curse of The Antiques Roadshow

While Dad’s new vehicle sat out in the elements, he kept his 1971 Thunderbird in the garage, convinced that it would be a collector’s item in time. When the time came he sold it, not to the local vintage automobile refurbisher, but to a friend of a friend who left it in Dad’s garage for a year before he picked it up. After it was towed away Dad described that old car that he kept for 50 years as “the worst piece of junk I ever bought.”

So my Dad, certain it would only gain in value, saved that car for decades. He kept his auto brochures believing they would fetch a small fortune. He brought those phones home because he thought they might be worth something some day. The Curse of The Antiques Roadshow had struck.

He rescued used office furniture, like the filing cabinet, from the dumpster at his workplace. He salvaged old desks and television cabinets with a plan to turn them into something else. He saved every scrap of wood from every DIY project he ever did. Bits and bobs were squirrelled away in the garage, in the ceiling of the basement, and in odd places like the kitchen windowsill.

For a guy who once claimed he owned very little, he actually owned quite a lot.

Random Dad crap