Friday September 10

N. Superior, Decatur

This is a small sale in a driveway that I happened to see heading to an estate sale advertised in the paper. There is not a lot of stuff here and it’s really a bit boring. There is a collector’s boxed set of the Ted Turner movie “Gettysburg” on VHS, a tote bag from Cabo San Lucus, manuals for Photoshop 4 and for designing corporate web pages, old graphic design magazines, a box of teddy bears, a box of dreadful looking xmas figurines and a cookie jar shaped like a 1950’s car.

I buy nothing.

Princeton Way, Decatur- Estate Sale

This seems to be a real estate sale. It’s late in the afternoon and the ladies with the aprons are getting ready to close so I have to rush a bit to see everything. I first encounter a table of paper items with books pamphlets, postcards and other things. I find one entitled “ The Strange Case of Jacob Javits” another “ Moscow’s Master Plan for Sovietizing America” The latter is a 1948 publication of the Lutheran Research Society that links Langston Hughes and Eleanor Roosevelt to the Communist International in a plan to mongrelize America among other things. It is not every day that I encounter such things at a sale and I think it is quite bold that the estate sellers place this stuff right at the door so one can see at one that you are picking through the leftover goods of an old right wing bigot and anti semite. Last year I had the fortune to go through the former home, filled with all sorts of wonderful stuff, of George Bright one of the men indicted in the temple bombing. In that sale there was no bold presentation as you entered telling you what you for in for. There you discovered it bit by bit as you searched through the the reamins of one man's life. When I finally asked questions to the new owners of that property they told me the story behind the home and its contents. They did sadly admit that some of Mr. Bright’s old cronies had broken into the house after he died and made off with who knows what.
But at today’s sale we have what is left of a radical right wing Lutheran’s life. Some of the other publications include “The Cross and the Flag” a German language newsletter entitled “ Klutter Blatter”(does this translate to blathering about clutter?) There are also a few postcards of Glacier National Park.
Past the literature I find a number of unusual items, a plastic device that resembles a shoe horn that says “ Chiropractic Back Problems” a desk top statue of the See, hear, speak no evil monkeys and a mug with a confederate flag on it.
In the basement I find a few dozen old VHS tapes among them are episodes of Brides Head Revisited, Treasure Island, David Duke and a Brinks Home Security Guide. There are also three commemorative plates with Presbyterian churches on them (why not Lutheran?) an empty container of Lincoln Logs, about a half dozen ribbons awarded from a men’s gardening society, a poster for Herman Cain, a black man who lost a Republican bid to the senate, this year, and a black velvet painting of a puppy. In a glass case (I presume these are considered rare and valuable items by the sellers) are a old matchbook cover advertising an Elvis Presley belt buckle, some Wallace for President buttons and a credential badge for the 1969 Republican convention as well as a button that says “I milked Rosebud”
This Rosebud was not Citizen Kane’s sled but a famous cow in a local dairy that school children could milk.

I buy “Moscow’s Master Plan” for $3.00