Written by Michael Claxton
When I was in high school, I spent my Saturdays like any other red-blooded American teen: I went to garage sales with my dad. A printer by trade and a junker at heart, my father was the king of the Greater Atlanta yard-sale circuit. This man will seldom set foot in a shopping mall, and once, to avoid the Christmas crowds, he bought our presents at Texaco. But he will drive to the end of the earth in search of junk.
We had a routine. Every Friday night, when the rest of my friends would be hanging out at the five-and-dime drinking cherry sodas and listening to Johnny Mathis on the jukebox, Dad and I would scour the newspaper for garage sales. We circled the ads that looked promising, mapped out a plan of attack, filled a cooler with sweet iced tea and turned in early. Okay, so the part about the five-and-dime is not quite true, but somehow stories always sound better if they are set in the fifties.
Anyway, I have the greatest respect for my father’s yard-sale radar. He can smell a sale sign from a quarter mile away. In fact, he once spotted one that was written in pencil on a Post-it note and stapled to a telephone pole. My father not only has an unfaltering sense of direction, but also a fiendish sense of mischief. On these Saturday outings, his mission in life was to make it hard for me to get out of the van. Whenever we found a sale, Dad would keep driving until he found a ditch, a briar patch, a mud puddle, or any other tight spot where I would have to pull a Houdini to get out of the car unharmed. Had we lived near any canyons, I might not be here today.
We were primarily hunting antiques, since my Dad is a collector and was once a part-time dealer. On a good Saturday we might haul in some oak furniture, Depression-era dishes, a box of wooden fishing lures, some pieces of crockery and anything else that was too old to be useful but too hip to throw away.
Over the years we found some really odd stuff. Once we bought a plaster statue of the Marx Brothers that had been turned into a lamp. Another time we found a footstool, literally. Someone had made a stool with two legs, covered the legs with cut-off jeans and put boots on the end. As we rode around that day, I put the stool in my lap upside down with the feet sticking up and pointing toward my face. Then we would pull up next to other drivers so I could wave.
Once we bought a vintage projector and a box of old film reels. We took them later to sell at an antique show, and a very proper middle-aged man asked if he could plug in the projector and test it with one of the old reels. Thirty seconds later we heard him yell, “Don’t look!” to my mother. After that we quit buying boxes of unmarked film.
And yet, I learned a lot about integrity on those buying trips. My father never knowingly took advantage of anyone’s ignorance about antiques; he always offered a fair price, sometimes even more than the seller was asking. Once we were in Nashville for a family function, and Dad and I slipped away for a few morning sales. At one house, we bought a 1920s Louis Icart print, which turned out to be worth quite a bit more than we paid for it. We didn’t go back to Nashville until a year later, and my father drove around the city for an hour until he found the house where we had bought the print. He knocked on the door, explained who he was, and gave the astonished woman an extra $100. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen anyone pass out at a yard sale.
We had many grand adventures, like the time I nearly fell through the attic of a decaying thrift store because the owner thought there might be some old neckties up there. Another memorable time was when I got hay fever by spending all day at an estate sale with over 20,000 dusty books, some of which had not been moved from the owner’s shelves since 1929. Or the time I almost got whiplash when Dad did a sudden U-turn in hot pursuit of a sale sign.
But instead of all the drama and danger, what I remember most is just riding along in the van with my father. Sometimes we’d break into a chorus of his favorite song, “In the Pines.” Usually we’d stop for ice cream. Often we’d just hang out at the Chandler Road Flea Market and chat with the old-timers, who all smiled when they saw Dad coming. Once in a while we’d come home empty-handed but still happy.
Dad’s retired now, with his own garage full of treasures. In the seven years that I’ve been in Searcy, I haven’t stopped at a single yard sale. It just wouldn’t be the same.
