The Family Chronicle and The Family Business of Buying and Selling Old Stuff - It's That Hometown Thing We Thrive On

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

     It wasn't until my parents had passed on, that I really started to develop an interest in ancestry, primarily because Suzanne, my business partner and significant other, was deeply, and I mean this sincerely, imbedded in family research. Being passionate about history and antiquities, particularly our own modest Currie heirlooms (two small paintings was pretty much it), I felt there were some missing paragraphs in the Currie / Jackson family chronicle. Although there had been a family tree initiated by a cousin of mine, it was full of inaccuracies and missing information. It was a template however, for Suzanne to use as a step-up to a broader and more intense protocol of research using of course, our subscription to Ancestry.ca.

     I don't know why, or at what age that I developed the opinion I must have been adopted, but it was a nagging feeling I couldn't shake. But an issue I could also never address. I was an only child, because my mother had suffered a miscarriage. I was the second attempt child, you might say, yet there was always some strange doubt aroused, maybe because of their evasiveness at times, that seemed to fit an adoption scenario that I just couldn't prove. A lot of kids go through this stage of doubt, only to find out the proof they need later in life. Even though I had a lot of family traits, physically and otherwise, my parents always seemed to leave doubt in my mind, that of course, was the seeding in my psyche suggesting I was from another family.

     Consider this point of view. My parents were hard core minimalists to the day they died. They hated collectables, and memorabilia, and even family photographs were modest compared to images kept by average Canadian families. I began my life as a hoarder in training, and it used to drive my mother nuts. Every day, on the way home from school, I would have filled my pockets full of found objects, from chestnuts off the Torrance hillside, in Burlington, to car parts left after an accident on the Lakeshore. When I spent most of a Saturday at the Burlington arena, I would arrive at our Harris Crescent apartment possessing one or more "sliver" hockey sticks thrown over the boards during a game, and at least three hockey pucks deflected into bleachers. I was a high ranking Rink Rat in my youth, which I carried over to the Bracebridge arena when we moved north in the late winter of 1966. When I wasn't picking up what I believed was useful debris on my walks, to and from school, I'd find in the weekly garbage set out at curbside, much to the chagrin of our neighbors and of course my mother Merle, who used to apologize to one and all for my strange garbage day behaviour.

     I've thought about this along, seeing as they both watched me entrench myself wholeheartedly in the antique trade, which obviously nurtures a hoarding mentality, although it's not always to the exponent of ten. I've always been about a seven point five on the hoarder scale. Merle used to question me constantly about what made me want to collect so much stuff, and invest so much money in these old and musty antique things. I remember once coming home to our apartment in Bracebridge, and finding that where my favorite china cupboard had been in our tiny and modest kitchen, was no longer in place. She told me she had to get rid of the clutter and as she referred to the 1900's cabinet as a "rat's nest of useless items." I used to stare at the neat relics inside every morning, lunch and dinner that I sat eating my meals at that wonderfully nostalgic kitchen table, which by the way faced the same fate a few years later. I kind of thought these items would one day be mine as a modest inheritance. Just like the two press back chairs that used to be in my bedroom. One day I found them outside by the garbage bins, for someone to adopt, and when I was the adoptee, my mother refused to let them back in the house. When I returned home after my first year at university, I found my room basically emptied. Merle had thought it was a nice gesture to give my childhood possession (which I wasn't finished with yet) to some neighborhood families a little down on their luck. I was starting to feel pretty unlucky myself in those days.

     I inherited two nice little paintings that had been in our family forever, and she did give these to me when I finally moved out. I still have them in our living room here at Birch Hollow, and I still gaze upon them as I did when I was a kid, home sick from school, and really needing a diversion from a bad cold or the flu. They gave me reason to exercise my imagination, by immersion in each, and they have never let me down through a lifetime. I'm just glad they survived to this new century, without have been chucked in the garbage because they were deemed objects and adornments of a cluttered lifestyle.

    As far as my relationship to the Currie and Jackson family, well, the good news is that I'm the real deal as far as bloodline, thanks to the relentless searching by Suzanne, through all online records she had found and exploited for my benefit and our family generally. Take for instance my great grandmother. It was said, by my mother, that her grandmother was of the Pennsylvania Dutch, and she used to sit on the porch of their farmhouse in Trenton, Ontario, smoking a clay pipe, wearing traditional garb. Her married name was Sandercock, of English background. Yet all the meat of the family chronicle, dealt with the Jackson, British side. The Sandercock wing was pretty much a non-starter as far as any discussion about worthy family ties and connectedness. When Suzanne dug a little deeper into this pipe smoking great grandmother of mine, by golly, it opened up the gates of ancestral wonderment. This diminutive elder of our family, was of a much broader, and truthfully, a more exciting chronology than either the Curries, Jacksons, or Sandercocks. She was of the Dutch Vandervoort family and that included connections with the Meyers of German ancestry, with family notches going back many centuries in Europe, and then belonging to the class of early settlers in America, in the New York area. I stopped worrying that I had been adopted, and began enthusiastically following Suzanne's lead. Every week she would find something more exciting, and a new path to follow deeper into our clan's history, all of it adding so much more depth than I could have ever imagined; and I do believe it would have been a great period for my mother, if she had lived to learn more about her pipe smoking grandmother, who was definitely well appointed in American and Canadian history, as a United Empire Loyalist.

     I wasn't adopted. That was good news. And going back with Suzanne on these family history junkets, each week here at Birch Hollow, I can honestly claim to belong to many interesting and colorful antiquarians, who had amazing adventures of their own, including participation in the American Revolution, the War of 1812. I think my own adventures as a antique and heirloom collector, and dealer, makes a lot more sense to me now than it ever did as I was growing up ever questioning my mysterious past. I would like to, in future posts, give you a few more examples of how Suzanne's mission to uncover our family's past, has manifested, without our really intending as much, into the character of our antique enterprise; especially when it comes to respect for all the family heirlooms from others, we come to possess as temporary stewards. It has all strengthened our interest in traditions, and heritage as far as families are involved. It has made this antique-thing so much more personal and intimate, and it is in this vein of maturity in this business, that does, in fact, make us more astutely aware of the sensitivity required to work with kinfolk to settle estates, and handle heirloom items respectfully. 

     More on ancestry and its immense value in the contemporary sense, coming up in future posts.

 

When The Serious Side Gets Too Cumbersome, and the Pent-Up Good Humor Gets Ready to Pop - Antique Dealers Have Some Humorous Tales to Share

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

 

     I came back to our Bracebridge antique shop one morning, after doing some minor business down the street, and as I approached our parking lot, (at the former W.W. Kinsey Funeral Home on Manitoba Street), I couldn't help but notice there were a couple of hairy legs hanging out of the back hatch of our Festiva. It was all we could afford but it was a nice shade of blue. As I got closer the large fellow in short-shorts, was deeply imbedded in the boxes of books I had brought to the store earlier that morning. Now, let me footnote this by stating that in our line of work this is not as unusual as it may read initially. The chubby legs turned out to belong to my book collecting friend and mentor, Dave Brown, of Hamilton, and yes, this was our first actual meeting although Suzanne had told me all about him the night before. And she had told me, but should have warned me, that the book-guy she had met the day before while tending the shop, wanted to see some books she had said we were bringing in the next morning. All she had to do was say "estate" and Dave, a life-long bibliophile, would conjure in his mind how old they would be, and probably heavy on natural histories and both Canadiana and American. I don't know how he could predict the books from a very general conversation, but he was good at his recreation. And before I had even got in the shop, Dave was coming behind me with a significant arm load of unpriced books. Oh, how dreadful it was with Dave to horse trade, because this was as much a sport as finding good old books.

     This isn't a story about Dave Brown, and the fact he was my number one tutor for quite a few years, but rather a little inside scoop about what goes on with us antique folks in both the heat of battle and the calm before the storm, that allows us to move forward with each new day. Now in the case of Mr. Brown, that strange meeting in the parking lot of Birch Hollow Antiques led to a wonderful relationship with both an accomplished historian, educator, Outdoor Ed. being his specialty, and a truly insightful bookman, who scoured hundreds of old books shops in Ontario and in the United States, where he frequently travelled with friends. His mates went to baseball games in New York and Chicago, and Dave, who hated sports, went to his favorite book haunts and they met up again after the game. Meeting Dave for the first time, hanging out the back of my car, which looked pretty funny to passersby on upper Manitoba Street, was life altering, because I would be the one selected to write his biography by the subject himself. I agreed to write the text but it was on the understanding he would be contributing with many soon to come interviews. I had a lot of questions. Dave didn't tell me he only had a few months to live. Gosh, I still would have taken on the writing mission, but it did bother me that Dave in the spirit sense, would be with me twenty-four seven to advise and inspire. And Dave did this and more, but that's best saved for another post later in this series. The point I want to make, is that we are not nearly as serious and conservative as I might have alluded from the early entries of this biographical journal. There are so many humorous anecdotes, I could fill a separate text. Here are a few gems from past experiences, in keeping with this opening courtesy Dave Brown's hairy legs.

     A good friend of mine, John Black, one of the regions finest news photographers, who worked with me at Muskoka Publications, was always willing to assist a work-mate with whatever project needed a little of his expertise. John could fix just about anything and he was a whiz at electronics. He was also a practical joker, and I was often his target, especially on a busy press day, when we had fallen behind and might have missed our print-shop deadline. John could pull some stunt, or provide some comic relief, that would help us all get through the rest of the tension-filled afternoon, and still get to the press on schedule. On the day after the paper was successfully published for yet another week, and we had a few moments to abandon the news office, John offered to help Suzanne and I move some furniture into our newly acquired home, on the bottom of what is known to the oldtimers as "Tanbark Hill". The name comes from the fact that in the years of the booming tannery business in Bracebridge, harvested bark used in the leather manufacturing industry, came from uptown to downtown along Ontario Street into what is known even now as "The Hollow." The problem of course, was that the hill before being realigned was terribly steep, and many of the horse drawn wagons would flip going down the slope and dump their load of what was obviously called "Tanbark." I pretty sure it was the bark off hemlock trees.

     The hill is still pretty substantial even today. The distance between our old place and new home, was less than a full urban block, but the hill was a bit of a challenge. John and I packed on a heavy and somewhat awkward load, but as God is my witness, the magnificent pine cupboard and the entire load was adequately tied down. I got to our new abode first, to meet John at the front door. I waited for awhile, wondering if John had been called back to the newspaper office. I was admittedly getting a little worried about the fact he was missing in action. I got a call on our new phone, and was, I believe, talking to the nice bank manager about our newly signed mortgage, when there was a knock on the door. I ran around the corner into the hall, to see John standing there, on the newly installed porch mat, with an armful of boards. All with original paint by the way. That's important to us antique dealers, you know. "Where did you get those boards, John?" I asked, thinking that he had found some boards on the way down, he thought an antique dealer like me would be pleased to have for furniture repairs. "Uh, well, this used to be your pine cupboard Ted," he said, with a most serious look on his face. I thought, son of a gun, he's pranking me again. What a guy. "Okay John, that's pretty funny. So really, where did you get the boards?" "I'm sorry buddy, but somehow the rope broke halfway down the hill, and the cupboard hit the pavement and nearly the car that was coming behind." I cradled the boards he was handing me, and I said what was on my mind. "Well, John, old boy, as long as no one got hurt, and I'm not going to get sued, we can glue this sucker back together." The John showed me the cardboard box of splinters and when the serious moment passed, we broke out laughing. "Well, this is perfect. This is known as 'distressing' and antique, and you know, it might look older now than it did before. I'll call it a primitive piece of pioneer Canadiana."

     We made a major purchase of a giant brass National Cash Register mounted on a pedestal of cash and invoice drawers, that would open when the right keys were struck. It had been a fixture at the former Muskoka Garage, and it was known to even my father-in-law Norm Stripp, a regular at the station in years past, and he couldn't help laugh about us buying this monster of old technology, that weighed "way" to much for the average antique dealer to hustle about should it ever sell. Norm even played around with the keys and the drawers, just as he had been fascinated with, back in his youth when the unit was relatively new. And it was by all means a monster in terms of awkwardness and weight, and that it was top heavy was pretty obvious to most of us. Except one fellow who wouldn't listen to our advice on its eventual removal from our shop. Here's what happened.

     We had the National Register for about a year, when a young lady came in one afternoon, and told us that her boyfriend had been in our shop earlier in the week, and had been trying to figure out how to afford the unit, which was about fifteen hundred bucks. She put a downpayment on it as a birthday present for him, and it took about four months to pay it off. As it turned out, right about this time of year, at our former Manitoba Street location. We were, by the way, in the basement of the building, which also housed Martin Framing above. The staircase was not what one would describe as being steep, but it had about twenty or so stairs and a sharp turn at the top toward the front door. We had a lot of fun getting big items in and out of the basement, but nothing, to that point, had ever been stuck mid-hike upwards.

     On a busy Saturday morning, the chap who now owned the National Register came with an elderly friend, who was going to, apparently, dead lift the pedestal unit up the stairs. Meaning, he didn't have a freight cart or another ten helpers to get this six hundred pound antique up those menacing twenty stairs. A few of my mates were in the shop at the time, and we tried to convince the two lads, that there was no way that massive piece was going up the stairs without a mechanical device on wheels. They were a tad on the bull headed side, and blew us off as being rookies in the moving game. Just for the record. We, in that room at the time, were used to moving large antique pieces for our respective businesses. We knew that all the hubris in the world wasn't going to levitate that cash register out of that basement room and up those twenty stairs. But what could we do? Here were two professional bakers who thought they knew all there was to know about the shipping and handling of honking big antiques.

     The unit was wiggled and tickled to the base of the stairs. There were no alternative stairs in the basement, meaning that there was no exist, if they got the piece stuck on the stairs. Before I could warn our customers that there was going to be a slight and momentary compromise to the staircase in and out of the store, the "bakers delicious" had already started to tip the pedestal forward, with the younger fellow on the bottom, challenged to dead lift about six hundred pounds up one stair at a time. We had no room to assist as the walls and the width of the pedestal prohibited us getting our hands on the side or base. It was up to two bakers. And then, as you might have expected, of a top heavy item like this, the register came down on the baker at the front, standing on about the fourth of fifty stair of twenty. Well sir, the full weight of that beautiful brass cash register knocked the top baker down, sprawling on the upper stairs, with the full weight of the machine wedged into his crotch. I was in a position to interpret the look on his face, and the words he was silently mouth, being, "Jesus Christ, get this thing off of my.......... (genitals)". So here we have a trapped baker who thought he was a mover, and a store with about ten or so customers trapped below. And the conundrum being, how to free the fellow from this terribly compromising position, when we couldn't get even one hand between the pedestal and the wall.

     So what the heck do you do in a case like this. We asked the baker with a cash register in his groin, if he could withstand the weight of one of us climbing over the cabinet, and up and over his head, to be able to mount a top rescue; meaning it would be easier to right the fallen unit by raising the heaviest part versus from the bottom which was impossible. The look on his face said it all. "Over my dead body," which was very nearly the case. Then one kid says to me, "I've got to pee sir." Ah geez. The bathroom is upstairs kid. Can't you hold it?" To cut to the chase, a burly customer came in at the precise moment we were going to call for fire department assistance, and with another customers at the top of the stairs, managed to raise up the fallen register, releasing the poor nearly flattened baker.

     Moral of the story? The two baker lads returned the very next Saturday with a two wheeled trolly and managed without too much assistance to get the National Cash Register up those twenty stairs to freedom. We could have saved them a little agony but what do we know? We're just antique dealers after all.

The Treasure Chest That is an Old Book - You Might be Surprised at the Kinds of Keepsakes "of the Flat Kind" Stowed Away Safely in Books

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

     If I haven't made it clear, previous to now, in this biographical series, I must make it crystal clear, as a venerable antiquarian (or at least that is how I think of myself in my mid sixties), that the antique profession in most parts of the world, is often a cut-throat, viciously competitive profession. It is both "storied," and "historic" and the profession itself has made its way into many of the world's classic literature, by the pen of Charles Dickens, and "antiquity" generally by Washington Irving. Even on the regional scene, it is now full to overflowing the market place, with a new breed of what us oldtimers used to call "Attic Dealers." This means those who enter the profession gently, and who don't have shops to tend, or even booths to maintain at local antique co-operatives. Today these lower level dealers work online sales through auction sites such as eBay, plus many other market sites perfectly suited to the lighter volume collectors and sellers. Along with those folks who rent space in antique malls, are dealers like the Curries, who have to hustle in order to keep up their respective inventories. The increased competition these days, with all levels of antique buying and selling, has thinned out the market place, where we get our inventory. The high level of dealer competition back in the late 1980's and for most of the 1990's was huge and expanding, as more retirees seemed to be turning on to antiques as an interesting sideline, and it really juiced the creation of malls and co-operatives, indoors and outdoors. Point is, filling a shop with what customers wanted in antiques and collectables, had become wickedly difficult and amazingly expensive. Since then, there has been a noticeable shift to online auctions and other cyberspace marketing sights of which we also belong to several of these electronic venues.

    The reason I offer up this explanation, is to explain why, as small dealers back in the 1980's, we simply couldn't afford to play the game the way other dealers were dropping large amounts of money at the weekly summer auctions, where we previously had a reasonable opportunity to acquire interesting pieces, furniture and paintings, quilts and wool blankets, which was our specialty at one time, and huge job-lots of what dealers call "smalls" that are in essence, small and affordable collectables that appeal to those shoppers with lesser budgets. What Suzanne and I came up with, as a way of maintaining inventory, but opting out of the larger and more expensive antique furnishings, and opting instead, to pay more attention to the "smalls" and to increase our exposure in old books and ephemera. I can tell you with sincerity, that if we had not shifted back in the late 1980's, the Birch Hollow Antique component of our family business would now be a footnote of local business history. Here's why!

     Every generalist antique shopkeeper has to have a little bit of everything to keep customers interested. So much so, that they will keep on coming back. So even though we shifted gears, and put less emphasis on the larger pieces in the antique forum, we always insisted of ourselves, to keep a reasonable amount of old and nostalgic furniture in the shop, plus the typical bits and bobs you expect of such a shop dealing in generalities of the past. Yet most dealers of any consequence know the importance of having at least one specialty; one particular interest that has developed out of a deeper interest in collecting, that over time and experience, creates a realm of expertise. For us it became books of all ages, and the old paper that was often found stashed within. When a large quantity of old books would come for sale at auctions, or made available at flea markets, or charity sales, (even at private yard and estate sales), we could blow out our competitors fairly easy, simply because we knew how to grade them, make repairs to the bindings and damaged pages, and we understood clearly that books were part of our own antique culture; and we just hadn't known until push came to shove, that becoming known book dealers was also extremely cost efficient and full of fringe benefits. What do I mean by this?

     How many times have you, for safe keeping, folded some paper item other than a book mark, inside a text you happened to be either reading at the time, or found convenient nearby the phone for example. A lot of phone related messages are temporarily lodged in books. We've found thousands of notes folks have made during phone calls, who have then decided that for posterity, they were best stored in the safest place in the house. A book. What happened when we began buying old books by the cartons, and thousands of books at one time, is the windfall of what had been stored within for sometimes a full century.

     After one of these large purchases, at an estate auction at the former Ewing Farm near Bracebridge, Suzanne and I sat for several hours just emptying the old books of their stashed paper treasures. It was an ephemera collector's dream, as we filled one fairly large box with this paper harvest, which included hundreds of beautifully inscribed, handwritten recipes kept in the antiquated family cookbooks; hundreds of old letters and for the collectors, some well conserved postal covers dating back to before the turn of the century. There were equal numbers of in-memoriam and death notices also going back to before the turn of the 1900's, and a huge volume of old dog-eared photographs of the farm and its inmates. There was a small amount of pressed dollar bills, and a variety of interesting cancelled cheques, invoices from area businesses, and similarly significant receipts, plus cancelled steamboat and bus tickets, and event stubs, that had been kept for nostalgia's sake in these wonderful old treasure chests, that were, for all intents and purposes, meant to read. Over about thirty years now, we have amassed a nice collection of handwritten recipes, some of which we have framed and mounted in the shop for visitors to see. We could put together a significant book of these found recipes, which by the way, were written on just about anything, including doctor's appointment cards, on invoices, cut-out portions of cereal and pudding boxes, and on so many other open surfaces that would afford the writer a little bit of space for a hastily dictated recipe given by someone in casual passing.  Some of the older recipes are quite literally works of cultural art, with the quality penmanship and of course, the grease and icing stains that add provenance to the respective recipes.

     After being in this business since the 1970's, a lot of the so called "locals" know our collecting specialties, and will make a point of offering us book purchasing opportunities before they host charity sales and private events to unload some of their possessions. There was a local situation that perfectly illustrates what a tutored dealer can do, when confronted by a persistent seller at such a Saturday morning yard sale. A fellow we knew in the buy and sell business, of mostly old stuff, was having an outdoor sale of general odds and sods, mostly as a clear-out of a storage space, more so than an actual business event. The chap would not leave me alone, as he tried every horse-trading trick to convince me that I should by the twenty or so boxes of books he was trying to get rid of that morning. I knew every book in his collection and there wasn't any reason for me to buy the lot, seeing as I couldn't justify being fifty cents for even one. All the time I was wandering around the sale, he kept coming up with incentives, and a better price if I took all the books, and by time I was getting ready to leave, Suzanne tugged my arm and said, "Buy the damn books or I will, just to shut him up." By that point I think the full boxes were two dollars each, and seeing as Suzanne had pointed out a few that would sell for more at our own book sales, I decided to end on a positive note and make the deal. The boys loaded the boxes in the van, and when I turned back to see how the vendor viewed the bulk purchase, he was killing himself laughing at, I suppose, our expense. Oh well. But it's true that what goes around comes around. Suzanne had been right, you see, about making the purchase. When we started going through the mountain of books, we began finding a substantial number of "Tall Boy" hockey cards from the 1960's that at the time, were worth at least twenty dollars each. We sold them off to one collector for a nice profit, and a third of the books were easy to sell in our discount bin for two dollars each.

     In one other case, I was attending a large yard sale of another dealer in town, who would use these extra events in the summer, at his house, to bolster proceeds from his shop. It's what a lot of dealers choose to do in order to keep funds rolling in at peak times, expecting the winter could be not only cold but business deficient. I was looking through the piles of old books and happened to find one late 1800's biography that was loaded with ephemera that was a hundred times more valuable than the book; and seeing as most of the books in the boxes were a buck each, I felt it incumbent as an experienced dealer of ephemera and books, to take the materials out and present them to the dealer for reconsideration. He looked at me as if I had offered him the greatest insult one dealer could offer another. He thought I was making fun of him for mistakenly leaving the good stuff in the book when it should have been removed and sold separately. He told me that he meant to leave these paper heirlooms in the book, and would I please put them back inside. I did so, and then I asked him, thusly, if the book was still priced at one dollar as the sign on the box indicated. He said no, it was now fifty dollars. I asked why and he explained that there was at least a hundred dollars worth of ephemera inside the text. I put the book down and never visited the vendor's shop or sales ever after.

     But, that's business and, for some, pleasure. Just not mine.

On Becoming an Intimate Player in Someone Else's Life - as a Dutiful Antique Dealer and Collector

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

 A few years back, on a late winter gad-about, we were browsing through a regional antique mall, as was typical fare as a family outing, on our one day off a week, (we never open the shop on Sundays), and in one of the vendor stalls, I found a plain, no frills whatsoever, cardboard box wedged under a wood table. As a career scrounger and someone who makes many stellar finds in the most unlikely places and, yes, boxes, I couldn't resist pawing through the odd collection of ephemera that had been wedged into the cardboard container. In a few minutes, and with a really sore back from being hunched over the collection of handwritten notes and art sketches, I realized it was a biographical treasure trove of a regional artist who obviously had passed away and left these for the executors to either donate to a museum, destroy as being irrelevant to anybody, or offered for sale at either an estate clear-out or auction sale. This information wasn't as important as the immediate rescue operation. I was not going to allow this significant material, including some fascinating art sketches of children, and architecture, to wind up in someone else's possession, who would cull the folios for framable art and get rid of everything else.

     I paid the hundred plus dollars for the small but amazing personal collection, and at the precise moment the transaction was completed, our family became immersed in art and writing legacy of Canadian artist, Katherine Day of Oro-Medonte. I did wind up composing a hefty biographical manuscript based on the contents of that box, and following completion the originals were donated to an Orillia gallery collection that already possessed a goodly number of Day's art work and written material. The finished manuscript was published on our business Facebook Page, given to the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery Archives and a video released as well, highlighting her art work and the beautiful place in Oro-Medonte where she had two enchanted little cottages built in the late 1940's and early 1950's. The point I wanted to emphasize here, is that for a full year, Suzanne and I lived and breathed the Katherine Day story through her handwritten journals and her sketch books, and of course having researched all the biographical information we could find in local histories and on-line. Her father had been a well known school inspector who had even worked here in Muskoka, visiting public schools as an overseer to make sure teachers and administrators were doing their duties for the benefit of students. The Day family was prominent in Orillia and Katherine, for many years, was a well known personality visiting the restaurants and shops, and Church, in the city's downtown core. We got so deeply involved in her biography, that we began visiting her gravesite in Orillia and bringing some tiny interesting rocks from our home here at Birch Hollow, to adorn the top of her granite family tombstone. We felt spiritually connected to Katherine, and still do, because we came to know and appreciate so much personal, intimate information. So much so, that through a journal she kept for her perpetually tight budget, we knew exactly what she would eat for dinner at a main street department store that also had a lunch counter. We knew what she was buying for groceries and pet food because she entered those expenses in this accounting book. We also learned from the same booklet, what medication she required for a serious stomach disorder, that we believe eventually contributed to her death. We could see the drastic changes in her handwriting as her ailment became more serious, until the time when she was forced to seek hospital care. She died a short time after being admitted.

     We also stumbled onto the reality, she had formerly, in her training years as an artist, in Europe, prior to the Second World War, had a significant relationship with an artist-mentor, who was well known on the international art scene at the time. He was connected to many of the finest artists and writers of the pre-Second World period, and it was a relationship that included at least one major shared art show in New York, that received mixed reviews for her tutor, and poor reviews for her work. Her love interest in her artist teacher never fully matured, before the rumblings of war sent both into exile; as the instructor was sought by the Nazis for reasons undetermined. Katherine immediate withdrew from Europe, and specifically Paris, and returned home to Canada, where she set up home and studio near her original family home in Orillia. It was where she would spend the balance of her life, never marrying, or having a family to share her unique little cottages in that Oro-Medonte region that, at the same time, in the late 1940's, Kenneth Wells and his wife Lucille, had established their "back to nature" homestead, known popularly at "The Owl's Pen," only a short distance from where Katherine was doing pretty much the same pioneering-thing just a little closer to the city limits of Orillia.

     Prior to this, Suzanne and I had taken on a massive estate collection of "old paper," for a Gravenhurst women, Miss Mary Reid, the daughter of Reverend Ewing Reid and his wife Maud, formerly of the Alhambra Church, in Toronto, and a cottager on Lake Muskoka's Browning Island. When Suzanne and I, and our assistants, sons Andrew and Robert, set eyes on the huge volume of paper heritage, and biographical journals and correspondence well back into the 1800's, we were panic stricken to start with, and that mode of operation didn't really end until the estate was fully resolved, and the executors satisfied with the results. For three months the work was so intensive, that we couldn't really do much else in terms of business operation. The majority of the material was sold in online auctions, because we had a serious time limit to clear everything up, to coincide with the house sale before the start of the summer season that year. We read through many hundreds of letters and studied thousands of photo images, as all the Reid family loved taking pictures, plus what Miss Reid's family had inherited themselves, in terms of family photo albums, specifically from Merton and Bronte Ontario. On top of this, there were hundreds of letters to Reverend Reid and his wife, from her brother who was a missionary in China in the early part of the 1900's. We found a buyer for this part of the collection very easily online, and honestly, there were very few pieces of the entire collection left at the end of our three month adventure. But it did take a toll on us, and even today, we are still as intimate with the Reid family as we were then. As I've written about many times before, Suzanne and I sleep each night on what family called "the death bed." Which is a beautiful 1850's circa spindle bed that was once used in the church manse, where the Reids lived in Toronto, that was used to display the recently deceased, when family could not afford an undertakers full service. The deceased was placed on the bed with appropriate attire and adornments, including floral displays, and family and friends were invited into the manse and the subject room, for purposes of a viewing and possibly a small and intimate ceremony before the funeral procession was to begin. And you know what, it's true, we do sleep like the dead.

     We have experienced this intimacy many times in the past, and as it is part of the antique profession we have chosen in which to specialize, we except the good with the bad. But we do become imbedded in the materials we acquire in this regard, and I think you can probably appreciate the kind of detailed information we are exposed to, that might make some folks a little unsettled. We get lots of those moments but the real prize is working in a field of the antique profession, that best suits our interests as historians. We also enjoy the right of ownership, that does allow us considerable freedom to develop this hand written record into heritage features we like to publish. We do of course practice due diligence, in what we do publish, and fully appreciate the sensitivities of what we have access to as personal confessionals, and what we must protect for the sake of still surviving family.

     In my next post, I'd like to explain the treasure trove that exists with old books, that goes well beyond the value of the printed and bound text; revealing to the intrepid old paper hunter, many interesting and often valuable finds within.

A Matter of Intimacy in the Antique Profession That Goes Beyond The Same Old, Same Old Buy and Sell of Old Stuff

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

 

     While I headed-up the writing staff of the former Herald-Gazette, in Bracebridge, in the 1980's, I was also working on weekends to rebuild my antique business that hadn't survived a full two and a half years before the partnership with my parents folded into itself. I had picked the wrong partners to start with, but I was determined to re-open a second business, and by mid decade, with a new partner in more ways than one, Birch Hollow Antiques was launched. Suzanne and I had a reasonable foundation on which to build a more durable small business, and it had helped that I spent a lot of my free time, several years earlier, trying to rebuild what I had been pretty much forced to sell-off in order to balance the books for that inaugural bid to operate a worthy antique shop. Point is, we put together a much more efficient and money making business, which we began in our first home on Ontario Street, below the high school in Bracebridge. I had a short walk to my newspaper office on Dominion Street, and Suzanne had an even shorter hike to the school where she worked as a family studies teacher.

     What happened during my newspaper tenure did in fact, influence my interests in the antique business and for good reason. While at the paper, I was very heavily involved in feature news writing, especially for our sister publication, The Muskoka Sun, under the direction of Robert Boyer, a well known regional historian and former M.P.P. It wasn't long before I was living and breathing archives work, and very gradually I shifted from news editorship to feature writing for Mr. Boyer to fill his huge weekly paper available from the 24th of May until just after Thanksgiving. In this new venture, I was buried almost daily in the newspaper's substantial collection of old issues dating back well more than a century, plus having access to thousands of bits and pieces of correspondence stored down in the basement archives. I became obsessed very quickly, and in a very few years, and having moved on from the publication to work as a freelance writer, as well as a re-booted antique dealer, I found that my interest in general antiques had diminished significantly. From the near constant pursuit of antique furnishings, oil lamps, old Canadian and American glass, vintage quilts, antiquated clothing, and sporting collectables, I was veering into ephemera which included just about anything printed, inscribed or written otherwise, from letters to journals; and including vintage invoices, old land deeds, wills, and just about anything else of a considerable vintage that was of the constitution of paper and ink. I shocked myself, by paying more for a box of old paper, letters, and assorted correspondence, than the pine boxes and hoosier cupboards I had been trained to hunt and gather by my mentors.

     I couldn't really get too intimately connected to a flat-to-the-wall cupboard, or a dry sink, but gosh, I could become deeply involved reading through hundreds of old letters, some war time correspondence, such that Suzanne and I as a research team, would find ourselves gradually immersing in the life and times of the writers of days past. It wasn't a transition we were worrying about, but it did become more emotion consuming as we acquired more and larger collections of this old paper; often a profoundly compelling paper trail going as far back as the 1850's, involving so much personal record of births, marriages, illnesses, and death, and this included large amounts of memorial cards and actual death notices, including government notices of military deaths from the period of the First World War. We were finding substantial volumes of letters so intimate and revealing, that we had to secure them separately, because of serious concerns about content and its security from the public domain. That was the truly delicate issue, because it was the case, that a majority of the old paper finds came to us from other dealers, and auctions, that had not been vetted for content. This is an important consideration, and here's why.

     I was in a local second hand shop a few years back, and while looking through the old books for sale, I happened to find a handwritten journal of about a hundred or so pages, entered over a number of months and years in the early 1970's. I paid a whopping fifty cents for the journal, in part, because I had found some sensitive entries that I felt should not be in the hands of someone inexperienced with such personal confessions. The journal was used by a student at a post secondary school in Toronto, during a period he was enrolled in an art program. It was obvious to me, the student was unhappy with his life and times, and there wasn't much in the text that was of a positive nature. As I read through the material, as was my right as the new owner of the material, I realized that I had definitely known of the young man, and his art work, some of it in fact, I had purchased from the same shop a few weeks earlier. I liked the content of his art panels. The artist, by the way, had only recently passed away, and before his death, he had actually donated the journal and the panels to the shop. The problem wasn't the art work which was most interesting, but rather the journal which contained an angry statement that the then Prime Minister should be assassinated. That would, of course, have been Prime Minister Trudeau (1970's). I was stunned about this entry because it was not only timely, when it was written, and an event that could have been undertaken, thankfully not, but its relevance to the artist's name, and family, was huge and a heavily weighing responsibility to me, the journal's new owner.

     As Suzanne and I have for many years, worked on a number of intimate biographies of artists and significant others, for small publications and to be donated to national and provincial art archives, and others used in an assortment of regional publications, we know what we're doing with such sensitive editorial bits and bobs. We protect the families who may be implicated by such honest but uncensored letter content, and this includes photographic collections, where there is particularly sensitive images, especially from the war years, as well as other subjects that we refuse to use in our ongoing feature story development, and biographies, and certainly do not offer these materials for sale in our shop or anywhere else. Everyone in our family is aware of the responsibilities of handling sensitive archive materials, which is part and parcel of the ephemera collecting enterprise. And the intimacy it requires at times, puts you in a strange mind-space, because you can easily find yourself imbedded in a family history that seems to welcome this latent intervention. Here is another example.

     In a box of correspondence we received a few years ago, I spent several days reading through ever letter in the collection we purchased. We purchase this large box lots because we are not only interested in getting intimate with the subject matter, but for the social intercourse with other times, and other places, in the history of the region, the province, the country and the world. We have possessed old letters and documents from around the world, and as curious researchers, we have received a most amazing education in social / cultural history we wouldn't have otherwise. In this collection of letters from a daughter to her mother, it is explained in minute detail, how her and her husband were handling the heart problems of their young child. It was a most compelling story as you might imagine, and I found myself looking forward to reading updates from the early 1960's, up to the time of the lad's open heart surgery about five years later in time. The child survived. That was the good news. The bad news. There was not family to take over stewardship of this material. It was not the kind of correspondence that we could sell, and there was content that we were forced to destroy just in case, one day, it was the case our own collection of archives material was left similarly without stewardship.

     The reason we are eager to acquire old paper collections, from wherever we can find such print nostalgia, is the fact we can profit generally from the old documents and invoices of former businesses, that are often thrown together in estate clean-outs. For example, we benefitted quite a few years back from a large box of invoices from a family that travelled extensively on the steamships plying the Muskoka Lakes. The tickets and assorted invoices for freight shipments, are extremely desired by local collectors, and we made a substantial profit from a box of paper that most estate handlers would have simply dumped into the trash as mistakenly judged worthless. We have found, like the theme of the movie "Howard's End," old handwritten wills that were possibly never uncovered prior to the settling of long ago estates, and many letters buried in the old books we also collect, that may have been from a secret love relationship that had not been previously known by respective families. We know this because of the content, which often suggests an "affair" either beginning, ending, or soon to inspire the break-up of one or two marriages. It is our own pledge of honor, to be fair to one and all, and not allow this information, which may never have been known otherwise, to hurt the legacies of parents and grandparents, in the eyes of present tense families; who thought their kin folk weren't the kind to fool around on their husbands and wives.

     Suzanne and I, and even our sons, Andrew and Robert, are sworn to secrecy when it comes to handling sensitive editorial material that comes into our possession. We never put profit ahead of decency, when it comes to what we are willing to sell just to make a profit. We are always interested in acquiring old paper and there are many incredible insights to be gathered in the pursuit of old records, and especially pioneer journals and war correspondence. And we do very much consider ourselves rescuers of such paper heritage, getting much of the highly sensitive material out of circulation, and we think, in some small way, we are protecting folks we never knew, who were just writing honestly about subjects and situations they felt angered or overjoyed to relate.

Getting Intimate With the Subject Matter - and the Object of Affection as Both a Writer and Antiquarian - But Always With A Heartfelt Sense of Providence

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

      For someone who has long confided in the public, without shame, seeking readers' validation of my wild array of intimate stories, you'd think I'd have also included a little note here and there, explaining why I believe this has been important to me.  In regards, of course, to my bold willingness to share so many personal and family stories of past exploits, (some that are pretty crazy) via thousands of published newspaper and magazine columns over the decades, and through the electronic media, particularly blogs like this one. In person, you see, I'm rather standoffish as I have always been, due to a lifelong relationship with shyness. I was born this way and I've always found ways around addressing a group discussion, and avoiding at all costs, public speaking of which I am terrified and it always shows if and when I can't avoid the main stage and a glistening "live" microphone. So I have instead, for these many years, preferred to use the print media and then electronic, including a former radio spot I used to have on CHAY FM in Barrie. But what is not known of me, either as a present antique collector and dealer, a journeyman writer, and regional historian, is what I find most difficult to even write about, is what I once contended with as a reporter which did put my psyche in harm's way. It's still difficult to discuss even with family, so you can imagine that it is much harder to address in this public forum. But the importance to my biography, which, after all, was why I commenced this blog in the first place, is that the intimacy issue of my involvement in antiques and all that it represents, (ghosts included) and my interests in local history, are woven tightly into how I matured in all aspects of what I decided upon as chosen professions. It began simple enough.

     After a year of struggle trying to keep our first-effort antique shop in operation, in the former home and office of Dr. Peter McGibbon, on upper Manitoba Street, across from the stately Norway Maples bordering Memorial Park, in Bracebridge, I needed to take a job to bulk up resources. Sales were terrible that first two years, and yes, it was the reason we had to close it fifty years prematurely. I had planned it as my own eventual retirement business, which it has become, but not with the name Old Mill Antiques. To infuse some extra cash, and seeing as my mother Merle took over the day to day operation of the shop, I was afforded the opportunity to work with the local print media. I had just recently graduated a university level creative writing course, and graduated with a degree in Canadian history, but I wasn't in any way up to speed on news reporting and copy writing. And I certainly wasn't a photographer. But that had to change and I had no choice but to adapt to my new assignment in life, because the shop was bleeding money and I couldn't afford to replenish our inventory. So when it came to the responsibilities of being basically the only reporter on the local beat, for a tiny newspaper, I really didn't have much choice. I certainly couldn't turn down an assignment, of for example, chasing the municipal fire trucks and ambulances on a call down the highway.

     On my first accident call, on Highway 69 at what is known as the "S" curve, I had no idea, and I mean this, what I was going to find at the scene, and just how close this cub reporter was going to get to ground zero of human carnage. I can remember the first responders who saw my identification as belonging to the "Press" allowing me to pass along the metal and gas strewn roadway to within feet of the totally collapsed and smoking sedan that had collided with a fully loaded tractor trailer that was straddling the centre line. I was there taking a huge whack of photographs while the fire fighters were deploying the jaws of life, in an attempt to free the driver. He was the sole occupant of the vehicle. There was a surreal atmosphere to the scene, with a grey and yellow chemical haze, and as I was trying to breathe and focus the camera, there came such a blood curdling scream, that I nearly dropped the camera to the ground, and very nearly fainted in a succession of events that snapped me back to reality. This was going to be a death scene, because the man they were trying to rescue did not survive the trip to the hospital once rescued from the wreckage. The truck driver fared better as you might expect. I was wobble-kneed for the rest of that work day, and I very much disliked the editor for sending me on this assignment to get a front page photo and story based, unfortunately, on my own actuality at the scene.

     Where have you heard this before. I needed the money. I wanted to be good at the job, and I wanted to be as tough, resilient and courageous as the first responders, and be able to handle these tragic news events with rigid efficiency and responsible coverage based on that old media norm of "the public's right to know." So what it meant for most of a decade in the news business, locally, is that I attended far too many tragic situations on the roads and at house and building fires, and indeed, I notched quite a significant number of front page credits, and seeing as the pay was poor, the bylines were part of the salary package. They would help news staffers build their personal portfolios, should the daily publications come calling.

     The reason I want to explain this period of my work chronology, is to allow readers of this post, to appreciate that when I write about sensory perception, and use the words "spirit" and "ghosts" like they're toothpicks after a fine meal, there is a relevance of intimacy here, where I do find that I have developed, quite without intending so, an elevated sense of insight about many aspects of both writing, and living and working with possessions that once belong to someone who has crossed over to their heavenly reward. The fact that I had a reporter's access to death and its aftermath, in the professional sense of covering the local news, the trauma I never truly dealt with, on an emotional level, turns up routinely in the present tense of dealing with heirloom and personal pieces from estates we acquire through a wide variety of sources and opportunities. I look at my role in this profession much differently now, than when, for example, I began collecting antiques and then opened my first shop. I confess that at this point I was pretty much in it for the money, and hustled like a man obsessed, to be the first at sales, the biggest spender at auctions, and the sharpest when it came to what we call "horse trading" amongst associate dealers trying to out perform the competition. When Suzanne and I opened Birch Hollow Antiques in 1986, in the living room of our Ontario Street home, in Bracebridge, I was clearly not in the same mind-set as when I began buying and selling old furnishings. I soon began delving into print antiquities, from books to ephemera, being of course "old paper."

     It was a gradual shift into a more intimate relationship with antiquity on one hand, and a more profound relationship with the family biographies that came along with acquiring what amounted to personal letters, diaries, journals, and documents that I wasn't really supposed to see, let alone sell off in our shop. It's difficult to explain but handling profoundly intimate and personal correspondence, like attending accident scenes as a cub reporter, gave me access to information that often seemed a fundamental breach of privacy for remaining family members. But often, and I should make this clear, Suzanne and I were often the only remaining mortals interested in these personal declarations, love letters, confessionals, diaries that were seriously revealing, backed up by photographs that we probably should have destroyed before even examining them closely. But our archivist bent disallows us to be this casual about the information contained within, that can be very relevant to historical record on a wider scale than the family circle. Which by the way, often has ceased to be an issue, as kin have all passed away.

     In the coming few posts, I would like to explain a little bit more, how Suzanne and I both have handled some of these sensitive matters in the past, and even in current affairs, and how deeply we can become imbedded in very personal family chronicles, painstakingly handling the paper trail of often more than a century; and coming to know the chroniclers very intimately at the end of our research effort. For how ever long we work on cataloguing a collection of ephemera, and old photographs, we become part of that family as a confidant; and we are the deciders as to what can be revealed and what must never be released to the general public, because of the damage some revelations could cause the community or neighborhood.

     Please join me for a close look at what our role in the antique enterprise has become in this retiring period of Birch Hollow Antiques, and what we have come to appreciate of its broader intimacies.

The Sounds and Sensations Around Us Daily That We Pay Less Attention to Than Once, When it was Important to Survival

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

   It was said that Tom Thomson, legendary Canadian landscape artist, would profoundly change his demeanor, even in the company of others, when the atmosphere itself began to change, to herald the imminent arrival of a summer storm.

   Some witnesses to his dramatic withdrawal from whatever social or work circumstance prevailed at that moment, to commune intimately with the evolving weather. He seemed strangely comforted by a thunder storm, as it seemed to inspire his art work. This is visible in many of his panels, where there is an obvious storm environs sweeping down over the Algonquin hillsides, onto the lake boiling with undertow pushing the dark currents, twisting and rising up to engage the wind, into the lake's cascading, wildly erratic whitecaps, clashing in the rock and pine cauldron. The Thomsonesque treescape with its wind blown heritage, clinging to the craggy and moss covered rocks, high above the demon lake, being turned black and silver, and that ominous gray, as influenced by the ominous cloud cover booming in thunder, and engulfing it all with the intense flashes of lightning. It was, to his observers, an environmental gift to the artist he aspired to be, and it was as if he believed it to be the manifestation of the long held lore of the lakeland. It was similarly reported by those who knew the artist well, that he was similarly entranced by the sight of the Northern Lights, and a comment was once heard by the artist, when displaying some of his depictions of the mysterious show in the sky, that the scene looked cold and lonely, and with that, Thomson felt he had captured something more than the scene as witnessed. He felt that it was important to create a mood with his work; such that the viewer would find some sensory stimulation beyond the actual content and artistic merit of the panel.

     When I began a decade long research project on Tom Thomson, this was the one characteristic of the famed artist, who by the way inspired the eventual creation of the Canadian Group of Seven Artists, that truly appealed to my own respect for artists, their work, and their plethora of inspirations. As a small time art collector myself, it's the kind of aura of a particular creation, that appeals to me most of all; such that as an art work, I can enjoy the artist's point of view, their interpretation of a subject, whether a landscape, seascape, or a profile of some relic of architecture. I want their creative enterprise, in the latent sense, to inspire me, the voyeur, in the comfort of my domicile, who wants to know what it was like painting that particular scene, whether it is a panorama of a lakeland, as Thomson might have captured on his paint boards, or a single wildflower amongst ferns in a curious and intriguing illumination. I want a work of art to, I suppose, fulfill my own unfulfilled adventures, as an intrepid creator looking for sources of inspiration. And it is my shortfall as a painter myself, that amplifies my interests in the work of others, who, in my mind's eye, have an intimacy with the subject, or the object, such that I can also be the beneficiary of protracted sensory stimulation. As a long suffering writer, I have always surrounded myself by intriguing works of art, sculpture, and of course Mozart, and I will not apologize for using the work of others to motivate myself to work more prolifically and intently.

     My old book collecting friend Dave Brown, of Hamilton, and a near legend in his own time for his work in outdoor education, invited me one afternoon, to join some of the art classes from the city, that had booked time at Camp Kwasind on Muskoka's Skeleton Lake. The city kids were part of an intense art and nature study program jammed into a school week at the summer camp. Dave's component, of course, was outdoor education, as it related to art and its cultivation. I went along as a reporter for the local press, and I have to tell you, it was one of my most memorable experiences, that didn't involve the quest for hard news and a front page byline. After we had a lunch in the large dining hall, the teenage students were organized into groups for their afternoon classes; which involved painting, sculpting, natural art creations, and even music study. Dave's group got ready to wander along the lakeshore paths of this sparkling lake, said to have been created by the impact of a meteor thousands of years ago. I wandered behind listening to my old mate talk about the natural surroundings of the lakeside topography, and the flora and fauna we brushed through and by, as we navigated the relatively flat terrain at water's edge.

     After half the planned hike, Dave asked his group to sit down on some fallen logs that had been positioned by the camp to act as natural benches. He asked of his students to listen to the sounds around them. The wash and lapping of the waves agains the rock and sand along the shore; the noises they could detect of the entire environs in which they were situated as witnesses, to what this lovely solitude actually sounded like when isolated into a place of study for those few moments of concentration. It was made clear to me, before we went on the short hike, that most of the participants, the students, were from the inner city of Hamilton, where the sounds of jets flying overhead, jack hammers ripping up roadways, sirens bellowing through the open spaces between sky-imposing architecture, and the din of the human contingency that makes up the texture of a city built for human; but not necessarily for the kind of sensory stimulation these budding artists needed to enhance their creative potentials. Dave told me that, on parallel outings, with other city kids, it could take most of a week of this kind of exposure to the natural environs before the campers could readily see and clearly hear, and feel, the myriad of life forms thriving in this part forest, part lakeside setting. At first, it would have been unlikely that they would have been able to hear the very slight brushing of leaves nearby, from where a chipmunk or field mouse was scampering back and forth; or the sound of a fish jumping out of the water in quest of a low flying insect for dinner; or appreciating what a bee or hornet sounds like as it is hovering overhead, or just beyond the sight line. Might a bear or moose have ambled out of the surrounding woods, they most likely would have registered this with a dangerous situation. But on the smaller scale, they were missing much of what nature possesses, that is critically important to conserve. Dave's opinion on this was simple. How would these teenagers, soon to make a mark in their choice of professions, and recreations, help conserve these precious resources, if, as at that point in his tutorial, they couldn't connect with all that was surrounding them in this semi-wilderness, that had made for such an inspiring classroom.

     I do believe very much, that sensory perception, especially with our most amazing natural resources in Muskoka, is a profound danger to the district's environmental well being. Apathy is a killer in disguise. What Thomson captured of nature on his birch art panels, from his forays into the Algonquin woodlands, was as much a mission to demonstrate by impression, and an effervescent passion, just how spiritually powerful nature can be, when afforded the keen attention of the silent witness. The voyeur who feels compelled to see, and experience the deep and profound spiritual vibration, at the very place, where these legendary scenes were first painted by the artist devoted to the viewer's most intimate immersion, whether to feel the cold wind of an autumn windstorm, or feel the tremor of rolling thunder bouncing off the Algonquin hills.

     Feeling art beyond the visual; sensing the perfumed air of a wildflower spray on a windswept hillside, and hearing the creatures of the forest in their art of living; and feeling the gentleness caress of the final rays of afternoon sun, as the artist applies a final brush stroke to the paint board, feeling the essence of the vista has been captured; although, never really captured.

Who Can Honestly Admit to Never Having Had a Moment of Unexplained Magic, the Experience of Fantasy, or an Enchanting Encounter?

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

     When author C.S. Lewis wrote his Narnia stories for the benefit of millions of children, how did he find all that inspiration in the looks and capacities of an antique wardrobe stored in his attic? What was it that American Author, Washington Irving witnessed, from the window of his study, at Sunnyside, his residence in New York, when he wrote his folk tales of the Haunted Hudson River, and its phantom ships; what occupied his moments of quiet contemplation, as he crafted the story of Rip Van Winkle, and what gave him the inspiration to compose a tale of "Sleepy Hollow," and its imposing ghost rider, the Headless Horseman? What was Charles Dickens studying in his quiet moments before putting ink to paper, when he imagined three ghosts visiting an old Christmas-hating curmudgeon named Ebenezer Scrooge? What natural resource, in Ontario, Canada, specifically the lakeland of Muskoka, motivated revered horror writer Algernon Blackwood, to slip a little of the good life here, into one or more of his stories yet to be written? That would be a late 1800's stay at an island cottage on Lake Rosseau! 
      When I was a lot younger, and much more resilient to the physical demands of long woodland hikes, through this beautiful district, I frequently came upon situations, and imposing circumstances, where it was clear I was lost and forced to sit for awhile on some small elevation of land, to figure out if I was going north or south, maybe east or west. I was pretty good figuring it out, after a little respite in these most enchanting woodland settings. It was not uncommon for me then, once I determined which way would take me back to my ride, parked on a dirt side road, usually a couple of miles winding through old pioneer trails still visible more than a century after being cleared to serve some homesteader need. I would frequently follow these old and heavily grown over trails, often winding up at a long abandoned farm house, or even a lowly log cabin, still giving the voyeur the immediate opinion, it had served its inhabitants well for many years. The toughest years in this heavily forested, rock bound terrain, where nothing was easy, and so much was unrelenting hardship. These were all, in their own way, haunted by my own familiarity with such remote places, succumbing ever so slowly back into the land from which it was derived. I never denied these storied places, that had faithfully protected their occupying families, for long and long from the harsh environs, their right to exist in the hauntingly low light of day, entombed by the towering pines and venerable cedars; the huge maples and leaning birches, that backdropped a history the passerby could only imagine. It was never surprising to me to feel the presence of those former occupants of this place, who walked daily along the laneway just then taken, and probably resided as well, on this little knob of landscape above the pasture below.

     I can remember one particular afternoon, while lodging temporarily on a recently fallen pine tree, looking out over such a remarkable and historic scene, when from the distance, somewhere beyond the remnants of the half fallen-in farmhouse, I could hear the unmistakable revelry of children. There was no mistaking that din of happy voices in the mix of laugh and screeching of youngsters unfettered in the late afternoon; then on the final days before the school summer break. I listened to the cheerfulness of the sentimental scene, as I did the washing of the late spring breeze, wavering the tall field grasses, and stirring the broken off shutters that hung awkwardly, and unkindly from the old homestead wreathed in the debris of neglect. I was sure my sojourn was about to be interrupted by these marauding youngsters, that seemed to be getting closer and closer, to where I was comfortably seated enjoying the ambience of old Muskoka as it had been, on this land, in the early 1900's presumably. I wondered if I should get up and step back a ways, in case the parade of merry-makers was to take the same trail around the farm house that I did, to get access to the pasture and this knoll of rock and shrub. There was a moment, when I could have sworn that a hand had slipped into mine, as my arm rested on my knee, while I steadied myself in a sitting position, with my right hand bracing against a moss covered outcropping of stone. I looked down immediately, and the sensation did not end because my focus changed, or my attention was directed to my left hand, which I assumed had fallen asleep as they say, balanced on my raised knee. There was a most definite squeeze of my hand, as if it had been seized by someone or some entity, but in a most fascinating, calming way; as if one of these children I had heard, was in ethereal form, the entity acknowledging my existence on the farmstead, and at the same time, its right in the paranormal sense, to let me know it was perfectly alright to be in this place as a "watcher in the woods." After a few seconds, the pressure on my hand decreased, and as if to validate the experience, I watched a strange spiral of warm spring atmosphere, drift down the grass covered slope, and pass gently, slowly into the same foot path that I had trodden down while arriving at this particular portal onto what seemed a very vibrant past, still being re-lived in that curious retrospect that shouldn't be explained; but respectfully enjoyed in the peace and tranquility of such a human memorial to lives "lived", once.

     I do not have a view from Birch Hollow over such a remarkably storied river as Irving studied New York's Hudson, and I haven't a piece of antique furniture the equivalent of that Narnia gateway, the enchanted wardrobe, in possession of the good Mr. Lewis, and I don't have much here that would ever have inspired me to write about three Christmas spirits, who made it their business to save the soul of a covetous old sinner, Scrooge. But I do have the privilege of looking out over a rather fascinating lowland, we call "The Bog," yet in its own prominence and natural character over the four seasons, and its fascinating stature in the most enchanting play of light and shadow, morning to night, sunlight to moonlight, in the midst of a summer storm, to its engagement of a sentimental autumn afternoon, the sunlight engaging the dance of fallen leaves in that colorful cascade that concludes the calmer season, heralding the first snowfall of late October. It is the mist festooned moor, with its wreathing of pine and hardwood, cedars and the leaning birches, the kind made famous by American Poet, Robert Frost.

     Are we to deny our senses, when at times we hear our names being whispered somewhere beside us, or from some source on a trail at our back? Should we dismiss as a play of wind on obstructions, the sound of revelry from somewhere beyond our position, looking out over such peaceful places as overgrown meadows and pasture of once upon a time? Is it possible that an old piece of furniture, with stories untold, and provenance not fully known, could be a portal for the imaginative "you" to escape the burden of reality, to a more inviting fiction, where nothing is entirely as it seems, but then, that would be the allure.

Someone Who Died -Once Upon A Time - Cherished the Antiques You Have Now in Your Possession - So Think About Both Providence and Provenance

Birch Hollow photo by Suzanne Currie

 

    I have never been disrespectful to the deceased. I am entirely reverent of their respective lives, if I've known them or simply known of them, and I suppose becoming a funeral director might have made sense with my interest in those who have departed this mortal coil. I've always been fascinated by the funerary profession, but mostly in the historical identity, and character, such as the undertaker profiled by author Charles Dickens in his book, "A Christmas Carol." That was fiction of course, and there are obviously not many parallels to the actuality of the present role of funeral directors and their clientele. But as it relates to the deceased, and their possessions, well, antique dealers are often by profession the soon-to-be stewards and curators of some pretty interesting heirloom pieces. And yes, for some of the older antiques, dating back centuries, it can inspire some unspecified awe, knowing that these protected articles and artifacts had been protected and conserved by a wide variety of family characters and others, who assumed ownership at some point of each bit of history passed down by numerous estates through wills, public auction, and through an assortment of antique dealers as far back as Dickens own time. As Scrooge inherited the meagre possessions of his former business partner Jacob Marley, including Marley's ghost who visited the old curmudgeon on the cusp of Christmas Day.

     It is a situation I experienced as a wide-eyed twenty year old, having a reasonable understanding of history, and antiquity, when I first began visiting estate clear-out and estate auctions, where the possessions of the newly deceased were being dispersed by family. Family, by the way, that had already taken the items of personal interest, leaving the rest to raise funds for the estate of which they probably would benefit when it was settled. I can remember being left in areas of the subject house, where the deceased had spent much of their respective life, and possibly having inherited the house themselves from parents or grandparents, giving most definitely an "occupied" feeling about the place. Why would anyone feel that was strange or extraordinary. There was always a "haunted" feeling to these places and an aura of unhappiness with the mission of cleaning out a lifetime's clutter, including the really nice antique pieces, that were often obscured by more contemporary inclusions of minor value.

     It is not as if the former owner's ghost hovers about the remnants of his or her life, going from room to room, while antique dealers and collectors paw through the myriad of former possessions, some more dearly appreciated by the departed. But for those of us who don't dismiss the paranormal casually, and are admittedly sensitive to any strange intervention, or curious vibe, understand that whether ghosts are real or not, it is better to ere on the side of caution, and tread carefully on the leftover emotions that may still be bouncing off the walls in the residence. I've had many ghostly experiences, or what I would better reference as paranormal intrusions, where a room has become almost instantly oppressive and sad, with a companion perfume scent, that had no known source. Even though I might not have scene a mysterious glow or witness a white vapor floating across the room, the feeling that someone was watching your every move was characteristic of these visits, which, by the way, I didn't really enjoy as a antique dealer trying to stock up on inventory for our shop. I know if my family was getting rid of my stuff after I had departed the living, and I had the opportunity to haunt the old digs as a heavenly option, I can guarantee I would try just about anything to kick my competitors in life, right back out the door, ghostly foot imprint on their backsides. No kidding. I would be pissed, if a ghost can get that mad. I'm not sure about that, but time will tell. I've got a lot things to get rid of, and my family knows there is a right way, and wrong way to disperse my earthly possessions.

     Not every settlement of physical properties carries a paranormal quality of quantity. I think you have to at least half believe in the possibility those who have crossed-over can communicate with the living, before it becomes an on-the-job issue. Having to deal with an alleged ghost, of an estate being settled, is really pretty easy if you are at all respectful of what it might mean to have your own cherished pieces sold-off to folks you may not approve of, and a method of dispersal you find disrespectful to your own in-life values. When we are in such a position as dealers, who are tuned to the psychic scenario, we trust our instincts and sensory perception always, and talk back in a silent, thoughtful way, to let the former ownership of these antiques, etc., know that we intend to act as immediate conservators, and stewards of each acquisition, and that we will pass on the subject articles, whether furniture, or vintage dolls, to new owners who as much, will adopt them with considerable affection. Now, it's true, that we are not always able to do this, as you might have guessed, because when we do offer items for sale in our shop, we can't put restraints on the buyer to abide by what we promised an earthbound spirit, that didn't want to let go of their once prized possessions. It seems a little whacky, but you know, most senior antique dealers appreciate that some of the estates and estate items they acquire, carry a little unexplained enchantment with them, and while not making a big deal about it, have in some way, known similar circumstances as described above. There are pleasing and happy estates where there are no encumbrances, and then there are others that are overwhelmingly unpleasant and possess an aura that represents different realities to different people. Whether it is the feeling of being watched, and discouraged from carrying on with purchases. A lot of dealers I've known over the decades have admitted to feeling quite happy to be on the outside of a particular sale, having experienced that sense of dread inside that couldn't be rationally explained.

     We treat antiques with respect to the succession of owners they've had through the centuries. It doesn't mean they're haunted, or enchanted, or that we feel any sense of obligation in owning them, however temporary that is in the antique scheme of things. But we mostly respect the history they represent, and we do question the heritage they have witnessed and ponder that if they could relate their stories, just how compelling would they be to voyeurs like us.

Buying What You Like is Perfect for the Customer But Not Always for the Antique Dealer

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

     I was fortunate as a rookie antique dealer, and cub reporter for the local press, that many of the auctioneers and antique dealers, back in my own halcyon days of the seventies and eighties, were willing to share inside tips with the tenderfoot. I'd often visit in those days as a writer first, because I was most likely broke and couldn't afford to buy anything. The vendors and auctioneers didn't mind having "Scoop" around their businesses and auction sales, because it was generally free advertising. I'd just find something interesting in their shops, or up for auction, and with the thousands of articles they sold off every month, it wasn't hard to get new and interesting feature stories on a regular basis. And now and again I'd have a few dollars to invest, and they often gave me some good advice on what would appreciate in value, and what might turn out to be a "dog" (as they call inventory that won't sell), in my own shop in Bracebridge. I was always pleased when they took the time to give me what amounted to inside knowledge of a very complex and changeable enterprise. The antique profession is both storied, and ancient, and well known to be an enterprise with a goodly share of scoundrels. Not all of us, but there are a few rogues out there, and I was given the characteristics to look for, just in case I found myself negotiating on ill gotten articles or worse.

     The problem I experienced early in my years hustling antiques and collectables, was that I was too much of an individualist for my own good. I didn't think about the market place desirability factor, and spent too much money on antiques that pleased my interest. I remember a creative writing professor once commenting on a piece I had written, suggesting that while I most certainly could explain what my story was about, would I thusly be on hand to interpret my words for each person who picked it up to read for themselves. In other words I was writing so personally and intimately, in order to please an audience of one, that I had given no thought to actually having my work read by others. How would they know what was in my psyche, that led to the creation of such an impossible to decipher text. The same in the antique profession, as with other retailers looking to capitalize on the local or international market. Getting too intimate with you buying for resale, means you may be taking the subject pieces home eventually, so that you can get close and personal with what wouldn't sell.

     The other area that I was advised to be careful of,  was paying too much for inventory, per item, without knowing full well what your particular market can support. I see this happen all the time with some dealers we have gotten to know over the years. In many cases, we have had no choice but to limit our purchases from these dealers, (which is common place in our industry), simply because there is no room to add for an acceptable, sensible asking price thusly at our shop. We have always tried to support other antique dealers, as they have supported us over the years. But this is a point where antique prices have escalated beyond the budgets of many formerly active buyers, who can't justify paying to much higher prices, despite dealer discounts which are an industry standard. We like marquis pieces, or show-off items, and will do back flips to get one that suits ours business themes, of which there are a half dozen. Still, following the good advice of my mentors way back in the 1970's, you can't afford to be all show at the expense of a depleted inventory. That advice was right on the mark, and it's the reason we have for long and long, made every attempt to acquire a wide variety of inventory suited to a diversified market place, with particular attention on our pricing. We set it up this way! When we go out antique hunting, we like to know we can buy a good selection of antiques at fair market values, and low enough, in outlay, that we can keep our own mark-ups at a reasonable level. Such that we could afford to buy antiques and collectables in our own shop. That's the criteria plain and simple. We have to turn down a lot of good items that would certainly look good in our shop, but the accountant and the marketing guru of our company, Suzanne, keeps us from breaking the bank. As a rabid antique hunter, I could break the bank in about fifteen minutes of reckless abandon. I used to do it all the time, until Suzanne insisted I stop going to auctions. Yup, I was an auction junkie and a buying maniac.

     I used to write a regular newspaper column for Muskoka Publications known as "The Auction Roll," and it both pissed off auctioneers, because I told too many inside stories about their enterprise, and occasionally encouraged them to the point they would actually give me breaks when I was bidding on particular articles of vintage. So what's wrong with that, you ask? Well, I was writing a column that did occasionally discuss the ethics and protocols of the antique trade and auctions. Gosh, so here's the guy waxing legal about auctions and auctioneering, and fair play to bidders, and I was winning bids as a sort of payola. They weren't supposed to do that, and I found out just how well read my columns were, when back bidders reminded me of my previous editorial viewpoints about shady deals, and quick counts to certain auction-goers apparently deserving a deal. This kind of thing by the way, isn't rampant or anything, but it is wrong, and the client or estate that the auction is being held for, loses money this way. I can remember getting yelled at via mega-phone, by an irate auctioneer who didn't like the fact I was late coming to the sale, considering I had blasted auctioneers in my column for being routinely behind their times starting the bidding. The crowd at large agreed, and honestly it felt pretty good in a bad way, that I had so many readers checking out my columns, but they were getting a little forensic with my critiques.

     The problem for me at auctions generally, is that I didn't have the good sense to stop bidding when I got angry; or otherwise, ridiculously competitive. My blood pressure and heart rate would pound away in my chest, and Suzanne and the boys, Andrew and Robert, would point to the veins bulging in my forehead, when the bidding got way out of control. I was sensible when the bidding started, but when I sensed any snide attitude coming from competing dealers and collectors, I would bet the bank to win that item on the block. It was especially crazy if it was a piece that Suzanne or the boys asked me to bid on, for some reason or other. and it became a matter of high honor to be able to win it for them. Then I felt I could blow the wad and they wouldn't get mad at me. Boy was I wrong about that part.

     For the past twenty or more years I've stayed away from auctions, and we have only very few outings these days to antique venues, simply because we can't afford to buy much of anything, and well, why waste the gas. Now this is a professional thing, and it is not to suggest that collectors and hobby dealers won't find things to their liking and suited to their individual budgets. In our own attempt to keep our business much simpler and much less expensive, to meet what we believe is our own market place here in South Muskoka, we buy most of our collection over the counter. It saves us gas, time, and it is far more economical this way for a small business run by family only. We do sell to a lot of dealers because we have kept our prices purposely low, because, well, we're not operating a museum here, and part of the fun is being able to refill the shelves that go empty; and it makes us feel pretty good about the kinds of antique and collectable pieces were putting in the shop; taken from the long ago advice from those kindly dealers who tutored me on how not only to thrive at business but to survive for the long haul. We are proof this works.

     We are always interested in hearing from folks who wish to sell off some of their vintage possessions, and other collectables, so feel free to contact us at any time.