Insights
By Barbara BeemAn October yard sale in Baltimore? Here in the suburbs, Saturday morning yard sale-ing has been elevated to a near-religion, but the regular season for picking through our neighbors’ cast-offs has been over for almost two months now. Except for the occasional indoor flea market (and the even more occasional church bazaar/rummage sale), that level of hunting and gathering in these parts is on winter hiatus until the days once again grow long. But this was to be no ordinary yard sale. This one was to be held by a consortium of Baltimore-based museums. And no offense intended, but I’m willing to wager that the stuff our neighbors haul out from their attics can’t hold a candle to the things curators consider not worth keeping. I told Ken about the upcoming sale, and, predictably, he went nuts, particularly when he found out which museums would be participating. Some of you might know that Ken’s collecting passion is the wares of the Edwin Bennett Pottery Co., which operated in the city for nearly a century, closing around the time of the Great Depression. Bennett was an active member of the Lovely Lane Methodist Church (never mind the fact that this teetotaler made a small fortune off the manufacture and sale of beer mugs and ale pitchers). Sure enough, Lovely Lane, which was once roofed with tiles made by the Bennett factory, was on the list. Also among the participants was the Maryland Historical Society, where Bennett’s output has been the subject of both permanent and special exhibits. Hmmm. The Baltimore City Historical Society - might be promising. And so on. This could be a very interesting sale, indeed. We were just short of camping out overnight to be the first in line for the sale when we found out that the museums would not be selling their holdings, but rather, items from their gift shops and otherwise discarded exhibit paraphernalia. Darn. And then we came to our senses. Reason prevailed over greed. Would we really want our city’s museums to sell off their treasures at a yard sale? We’ve heard tales of how museums hire curators with a personal interest in, say, glass, and how these curators proceed to de-accession the institution’s holdings in pottery so they can afford to acquire more glass. We have no proof of this, of course, and the stories might well be apocryphal, urban legends that collectors like to recant when they get together. Or are they? Even our local historical society has recently grappled with this issue: how to justify limited storage space, a shortage of operating funds, and donated items that just don’t fit into the grand scheme of things. Add to the mix the fact that many people give things to organizations such as this just to take advantage of a tax break, and it’s no wonder unwanted items in dubious condition wind up in collections for posterity. Of course, one could adopt the policy of the Smithsonian Institution, whereby everything donated is forever stashed in the Nation’s Attic. The federal government has a few advantages that make this stance possible, namely, funds. There is a large staff of trained curators whose job it is to make certain that the items accepted are of museum quality, or at least museum interest. And they can always find another building for storage. Still, we know of a man whose relative was the one entrusted with family heirlooms of considerable interest and value. Our friend was on hand to witness the donation of a number of items to the Smithsonian and to this day remembers thinking that most of the things donated would likely never resurface again. I suppose that what it comes down to is the inner struggle of the collector versus the historian. And I’m not really sure of the proper resolution of the problem. Which, come to think of it, is probably why I am not in the position to make these kinds of decisions, only to revel in a sale when one comes along. So we went to the outdoor event (shown above) on that Saturday morning, battling football game traffic in addition to the regular downtown obstacles. And although we weren’t exactly weighted down with our purchases when we decided it was time to head home (one size small hoodie from the B & O Museum, perfect for my teensy mother), I came away loaded with fond thoughts and nostalgic feelings for my hometown. If only we were miniature train buffs with a train room in the basement: we could have given a good home to a number of oversized vintage photographs, enlarged many times on display boards. Was my Grandfather in that photo of a trudging throng of workers at the Mt. Clare yards? I’ll never know. And the chair used during the filming of "Guarding Tess," which starred Shirley MacLaine and Nicholas Cage. Were we to buy it, how many degrees of separation from Elvis Presley would this put us, assuming his one-time son-in-law had taken a seat in this wooden chair, marked "$200 OBO"? There was something appealing about a taxicab-yellow set of lockers, but there is no room in our house for them. Nor could we fly the oversized banners, graphically appealing, but completely inappropriate for someone not living in a museum. A brick left over from a recent restoration of Ft. McHenry? A baseball signed by someone I’ve never heard of before? Sorry, we had to pass. With regrets.
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