Why Antiques are important in everyday life | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Aside from the obvious investment value of certain antiques, there is a valid reason for everyone to have a few scattered around the house or property.

    At one time, I was an antique dealer. There was an antique fair held at Lakewood Fair Grounds every month called the Elco Antique show. My roommate and I attended it once and realized that it may be a potential income producing second job. It had the added benefit of attracting girls. This was in 1976; the idea of Silver Spoon rings had taken hold, and many people had jewelry made from old silverware.

    The reason this recently popped into my head is that one of the magazines that I get from time to time had an article about the father of Georgia Movies in that era. Ed Spivia apparently was the guy who started the Antique Fair at Lakewood and was also very instrumental in bringing the movie industry to Georgia. I do not think I ever met Ed but we had a booth there every month. Ed Spiva, Georgia's movie mogul.

    Lakewood fairgrounds

    "Lakewood Fairground's most distinctive feature is its four distinctive Spanish colonial-style livestock exhibition halls. For over twenty years, the Lakewood Fairgrounds Antique Mall was held in the exhibition halls every second weekend of the month. Over 15,000 antique dealers were on hand for the monthly event, until the weekend of October 13-15, 2006, when the Lakewood Antique Market closed its doors for good. . The Fairground halls were leased for the Antiques market on as a 50-year lease from the City of Atlanta by Ed Spivia, who promoted it until it was established as an Atlanta icon." Lakewood Antique Market

    After we graduated from spoon rings and other novelities we began to specialize in certain collectables. Below is a list of items we featured:

    Heisey Glass

Here is Reg and I at the booth with our glass for sale.

    "Heisey glassware is readily identifiable by its high clarity and brilliance. It is highly finished through the process of firepolishing, with polished bottoms. Many of the pressed pieces appear to be cut crystal on casual inspection, due to the high quality of the glass and the crispness of the molding. The majority of the pieces are impressed with the company logo, a raised capital letter "H" inscribed in a diamond of approximately 1/4 inch (6 mm) in length. This mark is found on the bottom of most large pieces and on the base or stem of drinking glasses and compote."     Heisey Glass history.

    Avon Bottles

    "In 1965 Avon began promoting the sale of figural bottles (i.e. bottles made after the form of some type of object), these being produced in a very wide variety of shapes. One of the first types was made in the shape of a boot." Avon History.

    Old Wood Ice boxes converted to Bars

We kept adding to the inventory and included display cases.

    We moved up to Antique Wooden Ice boxes that could be converted into a modern day liquor bar. This necessitated the rental of U-Haul trailers to haul the inventory to and from the monthly show.

    Antique Fire Places

Atlanta is notorious for tearing down old houses for the new and improved urban trends.

    Somewhere along the line, we gravitated to old fireplace mantels. You could drive to north Georgia and pick these up fairly cheaply from farm houses and abandoned homesteads (With permission of course). Thee were many old houses being torn down in Atlanta as well. There were two ways to sell them. On was in "as is" condition where the buyer would make it a do it yourself project. The other more intricate method was to have them stripped and refinished for sale as a completed item. Naturally, the money was in the second method, which we chose. There was a shop in Avondale, Georgia called the "Mad Stripper" that had a big dip tank and he would dip the wood pieces in the tank, which would remove all traces of paint and varnish. This was a highly labor intensive project which we did from our apartment.

    Old Wagons

    Anyone who has ever been in business knows that one of the secrets to success is through growth. If you are standing-still, you are going backwards. Competition will force you to innovate and move with the trends. That is how we began selling old wagons. We may have missed to point about growing the business by growing the size of our product. It started when we saw an old barn with a farmer's wagon sitting next to it. I guess neither my roommate nor I realized that we could not do this out of our two-bedroom apartment on Buford Highway. Fortunately, my dad had five acres where we could store the wagons.

    We were fortunate that one of the plant nurseries bought one of the wagons to display their plants outside their store. The idea caught on and other plant nurseries followed suit. That did not require us to do anything but acquire the wagons, transport them to Atlanta and then deliver them to the stores in the area.

    Since I was a college dropout business major with an accounting basis, it did not take long to realize that our expenses were growing faster than our gross income. I must have dropped out before the course on diminishing returns. We used a simple formula to gauge our success. If we cleared enough money after expenses to have a good steak dinner for us and dates as well as seed money for the next purchase we were in high cotton.

    It was never really a moneymaking goal but a scheme to pay for the incidentals of Wine, Women and Song. It did that very well but there was no goldmine to be found in our approach to this sideline/hobby.

    We eventually got out of the antique business when my company transferred me to Tampa, Florida. Today, I can report in all honesty that I do not have one piece of Sterling Silver Ring, Heisey glass,Avon Bottle, Wooden Bar, Wagon or anything else we had in our inventory. Neither does my partner.

    It was an interesting experience but never really a business. We had fun, met a few great people and generally enjoyed life without taking any of it too seriously.

    Today antiques are a big business and the north Georgia area is no longer an opportunity for buying cheap and selling in Atlanta for outrageous profits. The old farmers and mountain people have caught on to the city ways and you will not get a deal trying to buy their memories. Most of them do have a great story to tell about how Sherman once sat at the table or Burt Reynolds stayed at their place during the filming of "Deliverance "in 1972. Return to Deliverance post.

    In an effort to bring closure to this overly long and tedious article, I offer my reasoning behind why there is a valid reason for everyone to have a few Antiques scattered around their house or property. If the particular item is from your family history or holds some personal memory for you, then there is more than a dollar value to its place in your life.


1958 and 2015

    I was never too much interested in memories as a young man; I guess I was too busy making them. As I grow older and more reflective, I am glad that I have family artifacts to remind me of a wonderful childhood and family, that will hopefully eventually end up in my heirs homes.