"Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without"

-- New England proverb

My love of Oak Furniture brings this article to you. Living in Upstate New York where Oak furniture was plentiful, I had the greatest opportunity to attend the best of antique auctions and long for the pieces being sold. As, a young auctioneer my knowledge grew and was applied to owning my own antique shoppe. As, a collector of Oak it was extremely difficult to sell oak furniture in the shoppe.

I am addicted to the cable channel Turner Classic Movies (TCM), much to the chagrin of my wife Linda who finds many of the movies dated and boring. Robert Osborne, TCM’s host, quotes Lauren Bacall as saying, “every movie is a new movie if you haven’t seen it before.” I agree. Further, once is not enough. Casablanca and Citizen Kane never age. I see something new each time.

During a recent visit from my sister, we had a chance to look back on our younger days and ponder the question, “Why are we so very afraid of not keeping every trivial item that passes through our lives?”. We found no easy answers, of course. It doesn’t work that way. What we did do was compare some of the areas in our lives we’d like to change.

Basically the only thing this blog has to do with antiques is Elvis Presley and the Norfolk and Western Railroad, both of which are no longer with us.

I was raised in a small Southern town by two wonderful and kind parents, Bob and Josie. They were quiet, conservative people whose idea of fun was sitting in the dark listening to the radio. Sometimes they would even hum and sing quietly with the old tunes. Now on Saturday nights things were different, Lawrence Welk came on TV. Lots of toe tapping good times there.

QUESTION: I own a large plaster of Paris sculpture of a bull that is painted dark brown. An impressed oval-stamp with “MARWAL / IND / INC” in its border is located near the right rear leg of the bull. When was this sculpture made? What is its value? – LR, Titusville, FL

QUESTION: I own a Coleman lantern that was presented to my grandfather in the late 1940s or early 1950s. He was the first person in the Dallas area to sell Coleman products. It is inscribed on the font: “FRANK WINDHAM / DALLAS, TEXAS” above a “Sheldon Coleman” script signature. The lantern is marked Model 202 and appears to be made of stainless steel. It has never been used. What is its value? – DB, Bridgeport, TX, E-mail Question

Over the years I've been wearing and selling vintage clothing and accessories, and I do believe I started out as a mangler. My definition of a mangler is someone who will take a perfectly good piece of vintage clothing that is perfectly wearable as is and either take it apart to re-use the fabric or shorten it here or take it in there to restyle it into something completely differently. I remember taking a perfectly good orange paisley print peasant top and making what I thought at the time was a wonderful halter top. I cringe now and wish I had that peasant top in my collection now.

Did you know that Sarah Coventry was the most popular home based business in the 1950s, 60s and into the 70's for women? At a time when women were having to raise children and manage a home, Sarah Coventry filled the gap for those women providing both an income and a way to spend time with other women. The predecessor to Sarah Coventry was the Emmons Jewelry Company started by Charles H. Stuart in 1949. The company was named for Stuart's wife, Caroline Emmons. Emmons was a home based business hosted by Emmons Fashion Directors, who were mostly men in the beginning.

Even as a child I loved magazines. Aunts and Uncles would bring me their old magazines and I would add them to my stash. Unfortunately my parents weren’t wild about my collection, so slowly while I was at school my piles got smaller. Didn’t matter to them that we had every issue of National Geographic on shelves in our basement....that belonged to them....Ladies Home Journal, McCalls, Seventeen, Vogue, and Glamour just wasn’t in the same league as National Geographic.