They were spread out on a table at the auction house, and since there were so many of them I wondered if they were someone’s collection. Had they hung on a wall or sat on a countertop to make the owner’s day or make her laugh when she needed to relax? They were so amusing that they had that effect on me.

These were not the lovely trivets that are collectible (like Griswold’s), and could fetch good prices on eBay and other retail sites. These were meant to be light-hearted and kitschy. Neither were they like the early three-foot trivets that were used to hold hot pots and skillets. Nor were they the iron trivets used to hold irons (called sad irons) for pressing clothes.

These were decorative wall plaques; placing anything on top of them would have scraped off the paint on the messages. They won’t likely sell for much, although I did find a lot of 12 that sold for $40 on eBay. However, there was only one bidder.

Here’s a look at some of the trivets at auction:

Messages on kissing and cooking, a messy house, smart women and home sweet home:

A message espousing over-indulgence in food and drink:

A message on hyperbole and kindness:

Messages of love on tile and the Serenity Prayer:

A message on the greatest love:

And all together:

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In a 1930 magazine ad, Generel Electric had actually described the top piece as “scarely bigger than a hatbox” in a promotional move, no doubt, to appeal to women. It was nothing like the refrigerators we’re used to seeing today. It had four curved feet and aluminum ice trays like the ones I remember in our icebox (that’s what we were still calling our electric refrigerator when I was growing up).

An inside view of the 1935 General Electric Monitor Top refrigerator.

Someone had taped the original receipt on the door. It had two dates plus information about both sale and rental, so it was a bit confusing. The receipt was from the Philadelphia Electric Co. with a delivery date of 9/30/35. The date of the receipt was 10/11/35. The terms were listed as $4.90 rental for 36 months, yet there was also an amount listed as $176.40. In fine writing at the bottom of the receipt was “Present this bill when making payments. Use reverse side to record payments.”

I assumed that the refrigerator was sold to the person whose name and address were on the receipt, but that it could also be rented.

I loved this vintage refrigerator as soon as I saw it. It was stylish in its oldness, impressive, and very clean. It did not have that stale hot smell of a refrigerator left sitting around for a long time with its door closed. On the catalog sheet, the auction house noted that it had a few areas of paint loss – which I didn’t see – but that it still worked.

The Monitor Top was an impressive-looking appliance.

The refrigerator was a Monitor Top, and it was said to be one of GE’s most successful products. It was first sold in 1925 for $525 or 1927 for $300, depending on what you read. According to the 2002 book “The 1930s” by William H. Young and Nancy K. Young, GE had sold 50,000 of the refrigerators by 1929 and continued at that clip right through the Depression. Sales had reached 1 million in 1931. By then, the company had dropped the price to $290, according to the book.

The 1930 magazine ad describing the compressor as a hatbox had the appliance selling for $205.

The Monitor Top was toppled from its perch by the Sears Coldspot Super Six designed by Raymond Loewy in 1935. The Coldspot, according to the 1930s book, is considered a design classic. Other refrigerator makers like Kelvinator and Frigidaire were also getting into the competitive fray and selling their own products. By the late 1930s, refrigerators were starting to lose their four feet and made flat to the floor, as in this Westinghouse ad.

The compressor atop the GE refrigerator was said to be fashioned after the gun turret on the Civil War ship the USS Monitor.

One website noted that utility companies sold the Monitor Top to customers in monthly installments added to their bills. A 1935 GE ad offered a dozen models, including the Monitor Top and Flat Top (with the compressor underneath), for as low as $77.50.

The new Monitor Top had its drawbacks, according to the 1930s book. The freezer and meat tray weren’t big enough, but the ice trays were more efficient that chipping ice – the way it had to be done with its predecessor, the ice box. Wooden ice boxes with hollow sides and tin or zinc linings kept their cool with blocks of ice delivered by the ice man in his wagon. Inside was a drip pan, holding tank or other device for collecting water.

At an event recently, a woman told me about a refrigerator her mother still owned. As soon as she mentioned it, I thought about the Monitor Top I had seen at auction. No, she corrected me. This one actually needed ice to cool the insides. It was an old icebox. I’d love to see one in person, but I did find several examples on the web.

I wasn’t around when the Monitor Top sold at auction, but I learned later that it went for $250 – not much more than it sold for in 1935.

These old ice trays brought back memories.

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That was then, this is now. As we celebrate Women’s History Month – you can read my other blog posts about women here - I’ve selected blog posts about some tools of “women’s work.” Since women’s lives were once so strictly defined, a lot of those items tend to show up often at auction.

Here are some of them:

Big mama’s old black wash pot

I watched as two hefty men hauled the big black pot between them and sat it squat on the muddy ground in back of the auction house. As soon as I saw it, a very familiar childhood vision sprang into my head. It looked just like the old round-bellied cast iron pot that my grandmother heated up to clean her white clothes dizzyingly white.

The wringer machine was a lovely yellow color.

Wringer washing machine leads to black female inventor

The man made the statement in jest, but it was oh-so-true. “This was when women had it tough,” he said to the two other people with him. He was walking towards a lovely yellow vintage wringer washing machine that from a distance looked like it had not been used often. He touched the wringer, seemingly amazed and enamored with this wash-day anachronism. “Can you believe that,” he said. “I’ll be darned.” I learned that an African American woman named Ellen F. Eglin invented a successful clothes wringer in the 1880s.

The General bread-making machine ready for auction.

Antique bread maker leads to black inventor

The metal pot with the army green patina looked like a thicker version of an Asian wok there on the auction table. I slid off the lid and saw a jumble of heavy metal parts inside.On the lid were some deeply embossed words that led off with this inscription: “The ‘General’ Seamless Bread Maker.” It was the strangest-looking bread maker I had seen. I found out that an African American man named Joseph Lee revolutionized bread-making in the 1890s by inventing a machine that made bread crumbs.

Recalling mom’s egg beater & flour sifter

“Carmen, remember these,” a woman called out to her friend as she stopped at a flea-market table this weekend. She picked up a red-handle egg beater and started twirling the little knob, setting the wheel and whisks a-turning. The memories just poured from her face – a smile, a gleam in her eyes. She was remembering her mother or grandmother – or herself as a helper – beating eggs and other ingredients using a tool just like this.

Licking and gluing S&H Green Stamps

I came across some books of S&H Green Stamps recently while combing through a box lot from an auction. They were inside an old Eckerd’s drugstore paper bag, the word “Stamps” neatly written across the bottom. The book instantly brought back memories of licking and gluing, licking and gluing, licking and gluing. I don’t remember what my family bought with the stamps, but I do remember that part of it.

Did you ever meet a Fuller Brush Man?

The Fuller Brush Man never came knocking at our door. I’m very familiar with the image of this ubiquitous salesman with his briefcase full of brushes. But I never met one. He apparently walked door to door in suburban neighborhoods – so, that’s why we never saw him – in his neat suit and warm smile. Selling utilitarian brushes to help housewives make their work easier. I grew up in a rural area and he would’ve worn out his shoes trying to visit our houses.

Royal Crown Hair Dressing was used in the straightening process.

Ritual of the straightening comb

The image is amazingly clear: A little girl sits on the floor or a stool between her mother’s legs, her head a mass of unruly hair. Her mother sits behind her in a chair, close enough to the stove to reach the tool that will tame her child’s natural hair but not too close to burn either of them. Lying on an open gas flame on the stove was a tool of mass destruction – the straightening comb, or hot comb.

When being a wife was far from funny

The paper sign stood out like the proverbial sore thumb there on a middle rack at the auction house. Once, I’m sure, it was a hoot, but it felt like an anachronism now. Its calculations showed the worth of a woman way back when – there was no date on the sign but its appearance looked vintage and its notations dated. The calculations were presented in a “hee-hee-it’s-all-a-joke” kind of way, but its undercurrent sentiments were all too obvious.

Mason fruit jars and canning

Several summers ago at the World’s Longest Yard Sale, I came across a Ball Mason fruit jar with what looked like blackberries that had been canned years ago and forgotten. A man was selling them on the side of the road. That’s the neat thing about this yard sale: People set up in any clear spot they can find and sell just about anything. The fruit jars were like many that show up at auction all the time, because once – and still now – women canned much of their food.

Kitchen appliances in plastic

Years ago, when I parked appliances on my countertop – and very seldom used them – I’d buy those colorful fabric covers to keep them cozy. Since appliances don’t get cold and shiver, I suppose I also used them to add color to my kitchen. I have no appliances on my counter these days, and so the cozies are gone. Because they were covered, I had a hard time figuring out what was under them. That apparently was not an issue for the woman who used the clear plastic covers I came across recently among some 1950s-era kitchen items at auction.

Privy to slop jars, chamber pots and the past

“Maybe they cleaned it,” I said to the buyer slightly to the front of me as she hugged the slop jar/chamber pot she’d just gotten at auction. “They” were the previous owners who had once used this slop jar, hidden it under the bed for that midnight rush to the toilet. It was a lovely pot, ceramic or maybe porcelain, with what resembled a Staffordshire pattern but without a lid. “I doubt it,” she replied in good humor. The slop jar was one of about a half-dozen in an auction of items by a couple who had engaged in 50 years of collecting.

Page from the North American newspaper in Philadelphia, Sunday, Feb. 23, 1919.

Where were black women?

I was separating out some knitting, crocheting and embroidery items I had picked up at a local auction a couple weeks ago. The person who owned these items also left two newspaper pages with articles about women’s clothing, embroidery patterns for a scarf and lamp-shade design, along with an article on tatting lace. Whenever I see women in these early newspapers, it makes me wonder about black women like my grandmother who was in her early 20s at the time and raising a family. They were completely left out.

Vintage sewing machines at auction

I never took home economics or sewing classes in high school. I took typing classes. I jokingly told my friends that I’d hire someone to come in and do my housework and sewing. I was in college before I developed an interest in sewing. Well, not exactly developed. I was forced to learn after a friend messed around and failed to make an outfit for me that I desperately wanted. So, I taught myself on a Singer and made some of my own clothes for years afterward.

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On the lid were some deeply embossed words that led off with this inscription: ”The ‘General’ Seamless Bread Maker.” It was the strangest-looking bread maker I had seen.

The General bread-making machine ready for auction.

I had toyed once with the idea of buying a nice electric bread maker so I could start making my own wheat bread. I scuttled the idea because I knew that it would go the way of the automatic rice cooker and the cute little ice cream maker I had bought – both now sitting on a shelf somewhere in my pantry.

This bread maker before me, though, was a lot more interesting than the modern ones I’d seen. On the top were instructions on how to make bread: “Put in all liquid first. One quart of liquid to three of flour. No seams to fill with dough.” It sounded simple enough, but there certainly had to be more to it than that.

It was surprisingly clean for its age, as if it has been used little or not at all. On what looked like a crank were two patent dates, the latest was Jan. 29, 1907. This was a No. 10 model.

The parts for the General bread-making machine at auction.

Looking at the crank I was reminded of the other antique home and kitchen items I’d come across at auction that required a crank to operate, including a White Mountain ice cream maker.

As usual, I was curious about this machine, which surely eased the chore of making fresh bread a century ago. I could find nothing about the General No. 10 on the web, but was bombarded with plenty of machines bearing the name Universal. It apparently was a pretty popular bread-making machine manufactured by a Connecticut company near the turn of the 20th century.

What I found even more interesting was the inventor who revolutionized bread making – an African American man named Joseph Lee. Born around 1849 in Boston, he worked in a bakery as a boy, and went on to become a successful restaurateur and caterer in the city. In the 1890s, he invented and patented a machine that ground bread into crumbs. In the past, day-old bread was discarded, but his machine opened up a whole new way to recycle it. He used the machine to make bread crumbs for such dishes as croquettes, fried chops and fish, and for cake batter in his enterprises.

Photo of Joseph Lee from the cover of a book about his life, along with the patent design for his bread-kneading machine.

Lee sold the invention to the Royal Worcester Crumb Co. of Boston. A 1902 American Kitchen magazine extolled the convenience of the company’s prepared bread crumbs – something grandma didn’t have – which offered “escalloped oysters at the moment’s notice … or croquettes that melt in one’s mouth, besides all the other toothsome fried things that everybody delights in.”

His invention apparently made frying a delectable undertaking.

Lee then sought to find a better way to make fresh bread simply and with less labor. That led to the invention and patenting of a bread-making machine. I could find nothing about whatever happened to it. Lee died in 1905, and school teacher Jerome T. Peoples last year chronicled his life, inventions and more in the book “Lee’s Bread Machines: The father of automated bread making.”

Bread-making machines appeared to be a hit around the 1890s and into the 20th century. That was around the time Landers-Frary & Clark of New Britain, CT, came out with its Universal machine – the “mainstay” of its business – along with its food chopper and percolator. The Universal had embossed instructions on the cover, and an inscription on the side noting that it had won a gold medal at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.

Homemade, but not made with an antique bread maker. Photo by Kongur.

In a 1905 newspaper ad, the company promised that its bread maker could mix and knead dough in 3 minutes. and it came in two sizes. One sold for $2 and the other $2.50. This new bread-making machine, a company official said in 1955, allowed dough to be ”prepared in the evening, left in the machine overnight, ready for baking in the morning.”

Universal No. 4 machines I found on eBay were selling well, most for less than $100.

Another turn-of-the-century bread making machine was the Manning-Bowman Eclipse, manufactured in Meriden, CT, by Manning Bowman and Co. It seemed to have worked the same way as the Universal.

The instructions for making bread were embossed on the top cover.

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Vintage mixed in with the contemporary in any décor adds a certain flair and flavor. This juxtaposition has a way of connecting you to the past but keeping you grounded in the here-and-now.

Vintage vegetable seed packets that have been framed.

I purchased most of those labels long before I began attending auctions, and by the time I started, I was off and on to another area of interest. But I’m still drawn to the vintage, especially the old kitchen tools – love the ones with the Bakelite handles – that people seem to toss at random and end up on the auction tables. Some are still in good condition and usable, but I see them more as decorative additions to a kitchen.

You don’t have to smother your kitchen in any one item from a particular period; that would be much too much. But incorporating them  – and not just dropping them anywhere there’s a blank space – can enliven it and offer a fresh feel. And there are so many to select, from cookie jars to molds to trivets.

On the very top of my kitchen cabinets, I have displayed old license plates from two of the states I have lived in: Florida and North Carolina, along with a metal Georgia sign I purchased at an antiques show. I’ve always loved old mason jars, and if I had a windowsill wide enough, I’d line a group of the aqua pint jars in a row with plants or flowers or herbs.

Here are some of the kitchen tools and other items I’ve come across at auction. None of them were expensive; in fact, they cost very little money because they were in box lots.

A decorative tin mold.

A folk art rolling pin (top), a German Springerle style rolling pin (bottom)

Red-handle egg beaters and other tools with wood and plastic handles. Bakelite handles are more desirable.

An advertising flour sifter.

Wooden utensils, including butter pats or paddles (left), and scoop.

Kitchen towel calendars.

White Mountain Ice Cream Freezer, circa 1923.

Hoosier kitchen cabinet jars.

Wear-ever juicer.

A masher and strainer (left), and heavy metal tongs.

Figurative cookie jars.

Here are two tools below that I just love but have no idea what they are. They resemble whisks, but the wooden mound in the center and the pop-up lever on the side indicate that an attachment is missing. Do you recognize it?

I’d love to hear your ideas or see photos of what you’ve decorated with vintage items in your kitchen. Drop me a line and send photos here.

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It always reminds me of my trip to Italy some years ago when we wound our way through the dark cavernous Catacombs of Rome. The auction houses are not as bleak or foreboding, but maneuvering through the furniture can be an experience. It’s worth the obstacle course, though, just to see furniture with inlaid designs or marvelously carved woodwork. At one particular auction house, the stuff is also stacked to the ceiling on an outside ramp that seems to stretch almost the length of a basketball court.

This butcher block table at auction was as big as it was charming.

That’s where I found myself looking one day recently when I rounded the corner and was instantly face to face with the toughest looking butcher block table I had ever seen. Sitting there, it looked like it weighed a ton. I have a small quaint table at home with a wooden butcher block top, and yellow legs and shelves (which I painted). It was no match, though, for this huge baby.

The top had blackened from use and age – and would require a tremendous scrub-down (one website noted that they are more sanitary than plastic cutting boards) – but it still had its charm. Its four legs were still intact, too. It was about three feet tall, three feet deep and twice as wide.

Where the heck had it lived its life, I wondered. In a restaurant? An old butcher shop? Idling in someone’s garage?

I couldn’t imagine it in my home because my narrow galley kitchen and 1920s-built house would groan from the weight of it. It could easily become an island in a large open and airy kitchen with a few choice auction-house stools to accentuate it. Or it could be pushed up against a kitchen wall to display a collection of vintage red-handled kitchen utensils or blue and/or gray tin coffeepots and basins. Or it could be the canvas for a beautiful still-life bouquet of flowers or fruit in a lovely vase. 

The butcher block table sold for $525 at auction.

You could use it just about any way you wanted, but first, you’d have to get it home. On the day of the auction, I was curious about how popular it would be with the bidders, most of whom were dealers who come here specifically for the furniture sale. It had wowed me. Would it wow others?

I watched as five auction-house workers moved the table to the front of the ramp where the bidders had congregated. “It’s one of the nicest I’ve had in here,” the auctioneer said to get the bidding started and keep it going high and higher.

He didn’t have to wait long for it to take off – first past $100, then $200, then $300 and not stopping until it ended at $525. What a buy! I found some other lovely old butcher block tables on the web, many selling for twice that price and more. One site was selling vintage tops for more than that.

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An over-sized box of Kleenex tissues. Mennen baby powder. Little Miss Pixie bath crystals. Deoderant cream. Dills cough syrup. Ben Gay. Alka Seltzer in the glass tube. Maxwell House Coffee. Over-sized bars of Ivory soap. McCormick spices. Morton salt. Lydia Pinkham Vegetable Compound in its original sealed package. Lilacs and Roses talc powder.

There was also a pharmacist’s bottle of pink liquid labeled “Hydrochloric acid.” Scary.

This tray of household items included some to help us feel better.

I was struck by the sheer number of items and their apparent age. I’m used to seeing a box here and there of vintage tins and other household items, but I couldn’t remember seeing so many in one auction. I had been to estate auctions of people who vended for a living, but these did not have the feel of products for sale. An auctioneer told me that they came from the same house and, no, the owner was not an antiques dealer, shop owner or flea-market seller. These products were purchased from a store to be used by the owner who apparently forgot about them.

Products come and go, and I’m sure these were replaced with newer and better stuff. So why weren’t these old ones tossed when their effectiveness evaporated years ago. Seeing the five or so trays got me to wondering why someone would just keep them and where.

The products do tell us a lot of about who we were, our ailments and the medicines we took for them, the ways we tried to keep clean, the foods we ate and the drinks we consumed. They are a treasure trove of information about how we lived. I always find the look back fascinating.

An over-sized box of Kleenex tissues was among the items on one tray.

I was probably the only one at the auction who was being nostalgic. Most of these folks sell for a living, and they saw the dollars they could get from selling separately each of the 20 or so items per tray. I found the Mennen baby powder tin selling for $59 on one site and sold on eBay for $10. The Lilacs talc powder tin sold for up to $15 on eBay.

I was especially curious about the Lydia Pinkham bottle because of the background of its namesake. Pinkham was a marketer of medicinal women’s products in the 19th century, and her empty bottles were being offered on eBay (but they weren’t selling). A sealed unopened bottle of her vegetable compound would fare better, I’m sure. I also found on the web a woman who collects Pinkham bottles.

These vintage products were pretty popular at auction. Bidding on the trays was a competitive back-and-forth, with one buyer getting most of them for about $30 each.

A tray of vintage household items sold at auction.

With all of this, I got to wondering about the stuff I buy. I could not imagine my family finding products in my pantry that I bought 20 or so years ago. But would they? I decided to check for forgotten products. This is what I found:

A bottle of red Italian wine that was left behind by the previous owner of my house – 10 years ago.

Old jars of cooking spices that have likely lost their fervor. Some folks say you should discard them after six months, others say you can keep whole spices for three years and ground for a year. You can check the freshness at the McCormick website.

A product called egg-replacer that I got from Whole Foods because I don’t do whole eggs for dishes requiring them. That was before I discovered Egg Beaters.

A bottle of honey that I bought before I discovered agave to sweeten food.

A small cute jar of honey that I got at a travel show as an advertisement for the Trapp Family Lodge in Vermont.

A box of Swanson chicken broth that I’ll never use because it has 24% sodium. It’s good ‘til 2012.

A box of oatmeal I bought one day when I was thinking healthy. I could still use it to make oatmeal cookies.

A bag of artisan decaffeinated hazel nut coffee that I’ll never brew.

The worst: an almost-empty box of 4C bread crumbs with an expiration date of May 27, 2006.

Some of the household items from my pantry.

What do you have that could turn up in an archaeological dig of your kitchen cabinets or pantry?

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The day finally came last week, and I went hunting for the shakers as soon as I arrived at the auction house. There were several trays of them – many of them in pairs, clean and neat - in a glass case and on a shelf against the wall. There were animals, souvenirs, Black Americana, mini kitchen and household wares and more, made of porcelain, plastic and ceramic.

An array of salt and pepper shakers sold at auction.

There were about 24 trays in all with at least 10 pairs per tray. These were not the highly prized shakers with such names as Limoges, Royal Nippon, Royal Bayreuth and RS Prussia. These appeared to be the low-ends – flea-market buys or the kitschy types you pick up at souvenir shops on vacation that were made overseas.

In fact, Japan was one of the major mass producers of salt and pepper shakers by the 1940s, stamping them with the label “Occupied Japan.”

Over the years, shakers varied in both the materials they were made of and the designs on their exterior. From the clean and sanitary look of white milk glass to the bold colors of Fiestaware. Some bore the images of familiar characters or the advertising logos of companies. 

These Black Americana salt and pepper shakers were snapped up pretty quickly at auction.

Among the sweetest I saw on the web were two sets of shakers that were works of art: curvy and colorful shakers called Schmoo (or Shmoo, depending on what you read) by Eva Zeisel and the Holt Howard pixieware, which featured the head of an elf on the top.

Zeisel is an industrial designer from Hungary whom I had not heard of before but is quite famous in the industry. She is considered one of the premier ceramic designers of the last century, and her pieces are in the Museum of Modern Art. Her works, which include dinner ware, shakers, vases and more, are just beautiful, and all have her characteristic trademark curves. “I do curves because I’m curvy — meaning I am a little bit fat,” she said in an NPR interview in 2005.

Van Tellingen Hugging Bears shakers sold at auction.

Like any other collectibles, salt and pepper shakers have their own museum and clubs. The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum in Gatlinburg, TN, boasts of having 20,000 sets of shakers from around the world and the largest pepper mill collection. The museum was opened in 2001 by a woman who has been collecting them for 25 years.

The shakers at auction sold for what turned out to be great prices (which I learned after doing my research). The auctioneer sold them by the tray and the first bid won was for $37.50 a tray, then $30 a tray and then $25 a tray.

The biggest win may have gone to the auction-house regular who got about 15 trays for $12 each. Not a bad haul.

Salt shakers sold at auction included Miss America, Schenley whiskey and tiny vacuum cleaners.

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I had been out running errands in the midst of the windstorm one Saturday when I came home to find that my clocks had stopped dead at around 3:20 p.m. It was now about 4 o’clock. The wind had knocked out the electricity in my house and my neighborhood. Before I had left that morning, my lights had flickered on and off, so I knew the wind was testing itself.

 
I figured I’d wait a little while to see if the blackout would end soon. As the time passed with still no electricity, I decided that I should get ready for a night without lights, just in case. So I went looking for the candles and flashlights I had placed in every room on every floor of my house for emergencies like this.

I found the candles and flashlight together in one room, and only candles in the others. Had I been interrupted and never completed the task, I wondered. Fortunately, the batteries in the flashlight worked, but I kept others nearby in case they gave out.

My next duty was to find candle holders for the candles. That’s when I realized that I don’t buy candle holders often and probably did not have a single one in the house.

With my flashlight, I went to my basement hoping that I was mistaken. As I shone the light around, I came across two candle holders made of thick glass – one clear and the other a deep cobalt blue. These thick glass candle holders, which I had bought at auction more than a year ago, were beautiful there in the faint light.

I had completely forgotten about them, and now they would be my night-saver. But I needed more than two if I wanted to walk around my house without stumbling into anything and breaking my neck in a fall.

So, I also brought some other auction items upstairs: a small green bowl in the shape of a flower, a small white vase with flowers on the side and a small dish with flowers in the center. With a little aluminum foil, I could improvise some candle holders.

Which I did. I covered each container with foil (especially the glass ones that I really didn’t want to mar with dripping wax). Then I wrapped the bottoms of the candles with foil and stuck them securely in the containers. I then placed a broad sheet of foil under each of them to protect my furniture.

I had five candle holders, four of which I set up in my bedroom. The warm glow of the candles made the room feel very peaceful, and they gave off enough light for me to feel safe and comfortable.

By nightfall, my entire street was dark. A family in the house diagonally to my left had set up candles in a window. The other houses near me looked totally dark; either the families were not at home or were in back rooms in their houses.

The street was ripe for night-crawlers looking for a place to score a robbery. It wouldn’t be my place: I put my fifth candle in a front room as a warning that this house was occupied and someone was at home. I kept a check on that candle, too, to make sure it didn’t accidentally cause a fire and burn the house down.

Around 8 p.m., we had lights again. The blackout was over.

Later, I realized that I had a vintage candle-warmer and candle holders in my basement, and could have used them. One was a Silex coffee warmer (at right in photo) for use at the table to keep your coffee or tea warm with the aid of a candle inside a glass container. The other was a Delft Holland candle holder (in center), and the other, which had a wire mesh top, looked also to be a candle holder. With a little ingenuity and some aluminum foil, they could’ve all been converted to hold my 12″ candles.

You never know when – or how – those auction finds will come in handy.

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Then I came upon this old white refrigerator. Not the two-door models we see so often today at our local Home Depot or Lowes. This one practically dated itself with its single door. As I approached it, I noticed a handwritten note on white paper taped to the door just above the handle:

“Aunt Myrtle, Don’t Take Anything Out of Freezer We Have Enough in Freezer Upstairs. Thanx Love Shell”

Shell had drawn a cute smiley face on the sheet.

I realized that this was an upright freezer rather than a refrigerator, and it was not an anachronism. I’m sure there are plenty of people who still keep a freezer in the basement or some other place near the kitchen for their overflow meats and frozen foods.

What had been in this freezer that Aunt Myrtle would’ve taken upstairs? I opened the door and it, obviously, was empty – and very clean. Someone had taken the time to wipe it down before handing it off to the auction house to sell.

The freezer, though, was not as interesting to me as the story of Shell and Aunt Myrtle. Who were they? What was their story? Was Aunt Myrtle always bringing food up from the freezer when there was always plenty upstairs? Did her actions precipitate the need to put a note on the freezer to remind her?

I’d love to know.

My refrigerator (the two-door model) is cluttered with magnets from the trips and vacations I have taken over the years. From the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco to Monet’s Paris to Shakespeare’s London to the Stax Museum in Memphis to Gettysbury’s battlefields – with some Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence art exhibits.

What do they say about who I am? What does your refrigerator mementoes say about you?

At the auction, I was just as intrigued that the note had been left on the freezer at all. I have never quite understood why people would leave such personal items on things they want sold at auction. I would’ve torn it off and thrown it in the trash – I hope my relatives would at least give my magnets to someone worthy.

It seems the auction house folks don’t just summarily throw your stuff away. I was at an auction recently when one of the assistants placed a box of trash – literally trash – on the table for bids. I asked incredulously why they didn’t just toss it. He indicated that they couldn’t; it was given to them as part of an estate. Nobody bid on it, and they likely threw the trash into the garbage anyway.

I’m always filled with questions about the items I find at auction because they are stand-ins for their owners. Sometimes, they can take on a life of their own, and the mystery surrounding them compels me to dig up their stories. 

At one auction, I found a hankie and a card with a note from a soldier to his sister. Another time I found a soldier’s letter to his family buried under a camera lens in a leather pouch. I’m sure it had been there so long that they had forgotten about it.

I’m not sure how much the freezer sold for. Probably no more than $25, and I’m sure not over $100. I wonder what the buyer did with that note from Shell. My guess? Tossed it in the trash.

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