Article on Yard Sales previously mentioned. The link is dead, so I found it and copied it here:
Yard Sale!
What's the irresistible appeal of other people's junk? A sale hound gives his two cents.
by: Richard Rubin | from: AARP The Magazine | July 2009I direct your attention to my one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia, although I don't really need to. It's hard to miss: huge, heavy, and not particularly attractive. Almost 50 years old, but not a collector's item. Never will be. And utterly obsolete—much of the information found in its 2,300 pages of tiny type is no longer current or even true. Any truth it does still contain could be found much more quickly with a simple Internet search, which also has the advantage of sparing you a potential hernia or repetitive-stress injury. I should point out that this is not some kind of family heirloom we're talking about; actually, I just bought it recently, at a yard sale. I did so despite the fact that I have no fathomable use for it, and don't expect I ever will. I bought it because it was marked two dollars, I offered one, and my offer was accepted. Did I mention that this was at a yard sale? Need I say more?
Most Saturday mornings—and many Sundays, some Fridays, and even the occasional Thursday—someone somewhere near you, seeking simplicity and following the spirit of karma or cosmic oneness or casting one's bread upon the waters, will decide, for a mere pittance, to pass some of his or her most treasured possessions on to total strangers, one of whom may be you. At the same time, someone somewhere near you, looking to clean out their hovel and make some quick bucks, will sucker total strangers, one of whom may be you, into paying for the privilege of carting off their trash. These two disparate events may actually be happening at the same house, on the same lawn, or in the same garage. Which one you attended may become clear to you only the following morning, or week, or month, or perhaps only when you show someone else what you bought and tell them how much you paid for it. If it was the former, congratulations and welcome to the club; but if it was the latter, please accept my condolences. And welcome to the club.
For as long as people have owned things, they've also found cause, from time to time, to get rid of them. There are, traditionally, many ways to do this—you can give them away, or advertise them in the newspaper, or leave them in the care of a consignment shop or auction house, or drop them in the street and run away as fast as you can. But if you have a front lawn or a carport or a living room, chances are you've at least considered throwing a yard sale. And if you live in an area where other people have these things, chances are even better that you've been to quite a few of them. And if you have, no doubt you have your own variant of the Columbia Encyclopedia somewhere in your home—a hideous vase you bought as a joke but are too embarrassed to actually use, or a painting that doesn't look quite as good in your foyer as you thought it would, or some old LPs that you'd love to listen to again if you ever happen to come upon a working phonograph at another yard sale. Don't worry; you will.
So what is it about a yard sale that brings out the whimsical, the impractical, the desirous, in so many of us? I'll answer that in a bit; it's a complicated question. A yard sale itself, however, is a simple, straightforward proposition: to throw your own, all you have to do is drag unwanted items from your house, arrange them on your front lawn (or wherever), slap on some price stickers, and wait for other people—friends, neighbors, and mostly strangers—to come over and buy them. You can rely entirely on the kismet of drive-by traffic or help things along by posting signs on lampposts or telephone poles or by running an ad in your local newspaper. And if you're feeling adventurous and enjoy the art of haggling, you don't even have to employ price stickers. I would, though: after an hour or two, your sense of adventure and love of haggling tend to degenerate into a short temper and a deep animosity toward this rabble congregating on your front lawn and picking through your old stuff.
As you may have surmised, I love yard sales, have ever since I was a kid. In the past 30 years or so, I have attended probably thousands of them, everywhere from St. Petersburg, Florida, to St. Petersburg, Russia. So I feel comfortable offering up a few generalizations. To begin with, yard sales typically start early and end early. They're usually organized haphazardly and always feature at least a few items (those singing wall-mounted fish come to mind) that makeyou wonder what their original purchasers were thinking. The books tend to be segregated in boxes lined up on the ground so that you have to bend over to read their spines. The sellers often come across as either overly perky and friendly or bored and surly, depending upon what time you show up and how things are going. Buyers who arrive when the sale begins tend to be focused and methodical, and usually walk off with the best stuff; late comers (like me) are more relaxed and meandering, and usually walk off with some good deals. Most prices are flexible. Few sellers take checks. And no one likes so-called earlybirds, those people who show up well before the advertised start time. This is the safest yard sale generalization of all. If you see a listing in the paper that doesn't specify "No Early Birds," chances are it's a printing error. In all of my decades of yard saling, I have only once seen an ad that actually declared "Early Birds Welcome," and I'm pretty sure it was a trap.
Of course, in a sense, all yard sales are really traps; and those traps are baited with legends. Everyone knows at least one Yard Sale Legend, a story of an incredible find, an outrageous deal, that really, really did happen, usually to someone else. My mother likes to tell of a man who, at an estate sale in Arizona, paid a few hundred dollars for a painting that turned out to be worth a few million. A couple of years ago I read an article about a fellow who went to another estate sale, this one out on eastern Long Island, and found, in an old trunk, what is now believed to be the oldest existing Colonial American flag, carried by a unit of the Connecticut militia in the French and Indian War. The article didn't specify what price the man paid for it, but I'm sure it was a good bit less than the $500,000 or so for which it's since been appraised.
Perhaps the most legendary yard sale of all time took place in 1882, although it is almost entirely forgotten today. When President James Garfield was assassinated in 1881, his vice president, Chester Alan Arthur, moved up to the White House. But he refused to move into the White House, which was, it seems, showing its age, with rotting pipes and crumbling walls. After some dithering, Congress gave in to Arthur's demands and appropriated funds for what was, in essence, a gut renovation. As part of the process, the President went through every room in the house and tossed out things the previous occupants, and their families, had left behind. And there was a lot of it. Mixed in among items of dubious worth—spittoons, lamps, rat traps—were carpets and chandeliers, furniture once used by James Monroe and Andrew Jackson, a ratty old hat that had graced the head of John Quincy Adams, a pair of Abraham Lincoln's pants. One of the more unusual items was a sideboard presented to First Lady (and noted teetotaler) Lucy Hayes by the Women's Christian Temperance Union in gratitude for her refusal to serve liquor in the White House. Arthur had it carted away with the rest of the stuff, 24 wagons full, and sold off every last bit of it to the public. One of the most eager buyers was Lucy Hayes's husband, Rutherford B., who is said to have snapped up enough furniture to outfit his retirement home in Ohio. He didn't get the sideboard,though; that went to a local saloon keeper, who reportedly displayed it prominently in his establishment, well stocked with spirits, for years afterward. And you thought you were clever for converting that old wooden tool chest into a jewelry box.
No matter who you are, the most memorable yard sale you will ever attend is likely the one you host yourself. Here generalizations are useless. Some people decide to hold them on the spur of the moment, while others plan them years in advance. There are people who have them annually, or even semiannually, while most of us will do so only once or twice. No matter how you plan it and throw it, though, and no matter how poorly or well it goes, your yard sale will be a very strange event, at least for you.
I speak from experience, sort of. Some years ago my parents sold the house in which I grew up, and in doing so ended its utility as a free storage facility for the personal effects of my childhood. I went through and picked out some things I wanted to keep, but in a rare fit of pragmatism, fueled at least in part by a severe shortage of space, I decided they could just sell off the rest of it: baseball cards and comics, records and cassettes, snow globes and foreign soda bottles, Peanuts books and Matchbox cars, an Etch A Sketch and an Erector Set; things, in other words, that had once been very important to me but that I now regarded as nothing more than curious artifacts of a distant time.
At least, that is, until total strangers started to paw through them. How dare these people carelessly manhandle the treasures of my youth! Picking them up and putting them back down, scrutinizing every crack and crevice for fault, even—I can barely stand to write this—implying, with a counteroffer, that the price was too high! How on earth could any price be too high for these treasures? How could they even conceive of taking them home and giving them to their own children, or even using them themselves? What could they possibly have been thinking?
In fact, I knew quite well what they were thinking: This is neat. That's pretty nice. I haven't seen one of those in forever. You know, I think I could probably use this when I travel. And I'm fairly sure that thing is actually worth a few hundred dollars, at least. Better hang on to it. Who'd have thought I'd find one of those at a yard sale?
Well, they did, of course; that's why they came. And I'd thought so, too, every Saturday morning I'd awakened earlier than I would have otherwise, climbed onto my bike or into my car, and set off in search of homemade cardboard signs directing me to this house or that. I still do. It's not even, in the end, about the stuff; although we love good stuff, what we really love, what keeps us going to yard sales week after week after month after year, is the pure joy of finding it all so serendipitously. That's why, despite numerous predictions to the contrary, websites such as CraigsList and eBay have not killed yard sales, will never kill them. CraigsList and eBay are where you go to find something you want; yard sales are where you go to find something you didn't know you wanted. They're where you go when you want stuff to find you. In a world where so little is left to chance anymore, and where what is can be a source of great and terrible anxiety, yard sales remind us that, occasionally, something delightful can still just fall on you like the rain.
And sometimes that good thing you find, or that finds you, is nothing more than a brief glimpse into someone else's life, that person's world, a momentary unspoken connection with a total stranger, present or long gone. Those are my favorite Yard Sale Legends of all, and fortunately they're not so rare. I have quite a few myself—even one involving that massive one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia. When I got it home, I opened the front cover and saw that it had been inscribed in blue ink on the flyleaf:
Carolyn
I really don't believe you need this to add to your fund of knowledge but Merry Christmas 1960
Billie
I don't need it either, but I think I'll hang on to it for a while, anyway. At least until I have my own yard sale, at which point you're welcome to come by and make an offer. No early birds.
Richard Rubin wrote about genetic genealogy in the November-December 2008 issue of AARP The Magazine.
