This was a "big" weekend for garage sales throughout most of northeastern Nebraska, in nearly all the cities and towns and villages and lone farmsteads. I have no idea how the tradition started, having these things en masse the first weekend of June, but suspect it's a new "tradition," surely no older than 20 years.
I had two items on my shopping-list, and expected to find neither, but it's a good excuse for social intercourse.
The first item was a potato masher, as I'm getting tired of mashing eggs with a fork.
Of course, there are potato mashers all over the place, but I never really paid attention. Having spent all that time in the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants with free medical care for all, personally seeing, "hearing," touching, smelling the depths of abysmal poverty that has to be seen before it can even be imagined, when I came back home a little more than ten years ago, I was a changed man, dedicated to the barebones spartan austere life.
Again, the usual caveat; I am single with no dependents, no debts other than the monthly electric and natural gas bills, and so I can afford to be this way, living the life the primitives wish us all doomed to live--that is, excepting the primitives themselves. If I was married and had children, or had greater responsibilities, I'd be an asshole to live like this, and so there's no "virtue" in it.
Much to my surprise, I found a potato masher at the second place I went, and it was exactly like the one from my childhood. A handle on the top, and a circular metal bottom with square holes, manufactured by Ekco Stainless, perhaps in the early 1960s. Fifty cents, and it was mine.
I sort of worried about creeping decadence, getting a potato masher, but got it any way.
The second item, suggested by BadCat, was somewhat more difficult to find; a coffee grinder.
People around here generally don't grind coffee; it's just easier to get a can of it at the grocery store.
It wasn't until mid-afternoon that I encountered an authentic coffee grinder, and not one of these electrical plastic things. It was a coffee grinder all right; a wooden box with metal parts on the top. The brand is "Arcade," and apparently manufactured in Illinois about a hundred years ago.
And well used; the box was chipped of nearly all of its paint (or varnish or whatever they used to daub on), and there were traces of rust on the metal parts. But those are problems easily remedied.
The asking price was five bucks, and so I paid five bucks.
When I was done, I commented to the seller, "You know, if you were selling this up over there in Vermont or New Hampshire, you could probably get a lot more than five bucks. They go apeshit over old junk there."
The seller agreed, pointing out the composition of the population there; that "rich old hippies don't know the value of anything," sentiments with which I readily agreed.
The biggest garage sale was that being done by a prominent cyclist, three whole yards of bicycles and bicycle parts and other stuff. I'm not into cycling, given that Nebraska (other than Lincoln and alongside the Platte River) is an excruciatingly difficult place to bicycle, but there were some people there I knew, and so I went to this sale for the social benefits of it.
Someone pointed out they had seen "old magazines" in boxes up on the front porch.
Visions of Harper's, the Atlantic, the New Republic, Time, Life, Newsweek, the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies' Home Journal, Collier's, the American Mercury, &c., &c., &c., from, say, circa 1900-1940, danced in my head.
Alas, they proved to be boxes and boxes of magazines from the 1970s and 1980s, more than half of them cycling publications, the rest of them being swimming, jogging, tennis, golfing, hiking, and somesuch interests.
But something caught my eye; a surfing magazine.
I quickly thumbed through the box, there were Surf, Surfer, and Surfing, most of them from the 1970s and 1980s; a few from before and after.
I asked the person sitting on the porch if he happened to know if there were any articles about Dorian Paskowitz in any of the issues. The guy had no idea, commenting he wasn't into surfing, and that the magazines had just been left at his place by a long-ago roommate.
"They're all a buck a box" he added.
"And who is Dorian Paskowitz?" he asked.
I told him the truth; I didn't know, other than that his son had been on a left-wing television show recently.
At a buck a box, and with circa 60-70-80 magazines per box, I bought all three boxes of the old surfing magazines. If I find an article in one of them written by Pedro "Beach Boy" Picasso, I'll send the copy to him, asking him to autograph it.
