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It all started organically with only a little passion and curiousity to drive it. This microbusiness began with only… passion!
Chapter 3
"Garage Sale Saturdays"
Laying on the couch one Saturday morning, coffee brewing and Giant Nickel want ads in hand, it seemed like a beautiful day for the usual yard sale adventure and good things do come to those who wait. Here is an interlude with visual imagery for effect: The sun was out as usual that desert morning, and the leaves of the large locust trees growing in the front yard were gently swaying in the summer breeze. Black and white magpies were squawking and swooping low and rising again to the next tree, their long tails wagging up and down as they flew. The sun was up and it was already 86F at 9 am, the grass was long but covered with a little morning dew in the shade, but the mowing could wait.
The Giant Nickel had yard and garage sales sporadically placed throughout, and I wrote down the address of houses in the north part of town where we usually go, laying out a fairly well planned route. Keeping keen eye out for the estate sales was the key, as one good estate sale could be worht 10 garage sales sometimes. In town there is a feeding frenzy of people, known as early birds, who are not welcomed for early sales, but still pushed their way in anyway. Antique dealers, cheapskates, Mexicans, Bosnians, and Russians, and me, all looking for good deals, buying cheaply the things no one else wanted anymore.
I knew the “morning bite” for the good stuff was over by this time, but there was always something good still. The straight black coffee was good but it was time to go. As I scanned the last section of the Giant Nickel, it jumped out of the page at me: “Apple Boxes, $3, with Labels $7, call Gerry 544-9597. My heart rate rose, and I jumped up off the couch and ran to the telephone, my heart racing as I dialed the number. Pretty strange eh? “Get a life” ran through my head but only temporarily as the ringing gave way to a voice: “Hello friends! This is Gerry Henley, the Apple Box King! Your call is important to me so please leave a message and I’ll call you back as soon as I can! Good bye and have a great day!” He wasn’t in! I was a bit frustrated, telling Marcia all about it, but still, this was as close I’d come to apple boxes in many months and it wouldn’t be long, hopefully before I got some.
We took off and checked out the garage sales that day. Marcia had asked me to look for a bug zapper because she thought it would keep the bug levels down in our back yard. At an old house in the center of town, with brown dead grass and old junk in the yard I saw two very old boxes, and could it be? There was a faded picture of a bug zapper on it with a small lime green original sticker price of $119 on it. I opened the water damaged wrinkled cardboard box and inside was a very large, brand new black bug zapper, and next to it was a second one just like the first. I asked the lady what she wanted for them and she said $5 so I bought them both and went home, glad to be of service to my wife, and of course demonstrate that garage sales were a good thing, like antique stores, and pawn shops, and other places where good deals could be found. She plugged the bug zapper in and hung it in the back yard patio. We could hear the poor critters telling each other “don’t look at the light” and the response “but it’s so beautiful” and then “Zzzappp!.”
By the end of the day there was a pile of dead bug bodies an inch deep under the black bug holocaust machine. She was truly nauseated by all the dead bodies, smell of burnt things, etc, that she never used it again. I put an ad in the newspaper for the other and sold it to a harry biker with a big belly who answered the ad and paid $40 for it to use at their tavern by the river. I could only imagine what sort of pile of ‘wings and things’ would form down by the river at that biker tavern. A mass bug grave would surely be visible from the highway. Whenever I drive by at night now, I can see the back porch light of the tavern, cluttered with aluminum wine and beer kegs, empty boxes and plastic crates, now doubt a putrid smelly mess up close. I can see massive bug action as swarms of insects speed around the light as if in orbit around it, just like electrons spinning about the atom. Sometimes they’d make a few orbits then wind in and actually hit the light, bouncing off only to make a few more orbits and hit it again. The smaller gnats and river bugs would yield to the larger ones, probably grasshoppers or beetles.
The garage sale adventure did continue, as I found two Rainbow vacuum cleaners, which were old and had all the attachments, and they were from two different yard sales a block apart. I purchased them for $25 and $35 respectively thinking that Marcia would love to have another, since we had a similar Rainbow. They work so sell, pickup up dirt and using water filter to knock out all the dust. She didn’t need it, or the $1 deep fat fryer which I promptly threw away.
She would say “Its not a good deal unless you actually can use it, and if you already have one you wasted your money.” So I sold on for $175 in the Giant Nickel and gave the other away as a gift to our dear friends, now very happy friends, Edwin and Cristy. I supposed that the $175 was a good thing, better than the vacuum, and the lack of jokes seemed to confirm that.
This was all training for some future use that God had for me, maybe? I wasn’t going to arrogantly declare that all of my oddball and lowball purchases were highly spiritual events, of course. But, I was getting pretty good at spotting a good deal and things of relatively higher value. For example, plastic toys from McDonalds are a dime a dozen, and oil lamps from the 1930s at $10 could be sold for $50 in an antique shop. But the plastic junk was just that, junk. However, to hedge my bet, and demonstrate the perspective of ages, I did fill a large box ,for $10, with these fast food toys, Buzz Light-Year, Big Bird and Ernie, Luke Skywalker, and other “nonsense plastic junk” and put it in the attic as a time-capsule of sorts. I joked with my daughter Kelsi that some day this would be worth a lot of money, and when I’m gone you can sell the house, and take this time capsule and sell it for a million dollars. Knowing of course that by then the purchasing power of the dollar would predictably fall until we were all paper millionaires like in Weimar Germany, only rescued from wheelbarrows of paper by the ease of moving decimals over to the left as needed to keep the money looking good.