The Rural Voice, 2019-07, Page 40One rainy day last week, we
spent the afternoon touring
through some consignment
stores. That seems to be
the new term for antique shops. The
first thing that I noticed was that a
great deal of the stuff could have
originated from our farmhouse where
I grew up. As a young lad growing
up in Huron County in the 1940s and
’50s, I never realized that our lamps
and knickknacks and furniture were
all so valuable. They were simply the
soup-du-jour, handed down from my
grandparents or purchased at an
auction sale.
The one new piece of furniture
that we had was a dining room table
and chairs set purchased from the
Eaton’s catalogue. The chairs fell
apart one by one and were constantly
being reglued and rescrewed, and the
table marked every time something
hot or damp was set on it. When we
had just enough money to buy an
arborite kitchen table with plastic
covered chairs, Mother tossed out our
old wooden kitchen table and chairs
that would be worth a small fortune
today. Out with the old and in with
the new! However, the new stuff has
long since been relegated to the
dump; it had no hope of becoming
more valuable with age.
What is an antique depends very
much on when and where you were
born. The old adage that “one
person’s junk is another person’s
treasure” holds true for antiques. I
was shocked at the prices in the
consignment store. One fancy sleigh
bedroom suite cost almost to the
penny the amount we paid for our
new Pontiac in 1954. I expect that
bedroom suite is selling today for
more than the original price. When
we got married, we bought a new
bedroom suite for our Toronto
apartment. I was so glad to get away
from my old three-quarter-sized
spool bed. And where did my old
spool bed end up? In the guest room
of our farm house where guests
oohed and aahed over the
opportunity to sleep in a real antique
bed. Who would have guessed?
Today, most of our friends sleep
in not double, but queen-sized, beds
and some of our friends and family
sleep in king-sized beds. It’s just not
the same as snuggling in the old
spool bed. Quite often when we
check into a motel, we are asked
whether we want two queens or a
king bed. Wow, that’s a tough choice
that we never had to make half a
century ago.
In my lifetime there have been
many changes. The things that I saw
in the Dick Tracy comic books are
commonplace to the preteens of
today. Watches that can be used as a
telephone, starters that can start your
car from inside the house and
computers that correct my spelling
and grammar are all taken for granted
by my grandchildren.
When I was about 12 years old we
got our first TV. It was a 17-inch
black and white that got three
channels off an aerial mounted on a
pole; we couldn’t afford a fancy
tower. Then along came the miracle
of colour and the 24-inch screen.
Later, we graduated to a 36-inch TV
that weighed about 300 pounds and
took up a good chunk of the living
room. Today, our TV is a 55-inch
flat-screen that weighs about 20
pounds and gets over 300 channels. I
can still only watch one at a time, but
recently I saw a TV that has a
picture-in-picture screen and you can
watch up to four shows at a time. I
can barely stay awake to watch one
show. We went to Sam’s last week –
that’s a store not a friend’s place –
and they had a special on 70-inch
TVs. I’m out of date again. Will old
17-inch black and white TVs become
valuable antiques some day?
Everything is changing so fast.
The microwave is a radiowave
phenomenon that can heat up
leftovers in a minute or two. Now
they have timers and turntables and
so may settings that you need a
manual to heat soup. The latest ones
36 The Rural Voice
Our old things were just “soup-du-jour”
As technology increases obsolescence, things from
yesteryear that last increase in nostalgic and monetary value
Old stuff the Mathers family couldn’t wait to get rid of has now become so
valuable in terms of memories and dollars.
Arnold Mathers