CULTURE
The Joy of Junkin'
By Scott Jacobs
Every summer, along with about half the population of northern Illinois, I
find an occasion to go up north to sit by a lake in Wisconsin pestering the
natives with my presence.
For at least part of the journey, we all travel up on the Interstate highway past squad cars posted like tollbooths reminding us that only Wisconsin residents can drive 80 mph in a 65-mile zone. But at some point, we break off onto two-lane blacktops en route to our own secret no place.
The road I follow begins just after Green Bay. It takes me through towns like Oconto and Wausaukee, the twin cities of Lena (pop. 368) and Pound (pop. 424), and, on those trips where I’m inclined to stray, Pembine, Algoma and Ashwaubenon. (Sometimes, I think the only reason I go to Wisconsin is to collect odd names.)
What leads me astray is not the scenery -- as Mike Royko famously said, “all of Wisconsin looks alike” – but the certainty that somewhere in these little towns there’s a junk store with that little, perfect something you can’t get anywhere else: like, for instance, the three-masted schooner made out of peeled Budweiser cans I found just last week in Stiles Junction.
My wife is an inveterate junker, has been since she grew up in Dixon, Illinois, only a few miles away from Auction City. As a result, we eat dinner off of Fiesta ware, grow plants in minnow buckets and collect pennies in jars held by men made of bottle caps, all of which, she is sure, will one day get us a big spread in Real Simple magazine. My wife has an eye for antiques, as they say, and a map in the glove compartment marked with the location of every junk store we have visited over the last decade.
Junk in Wisconsin is not actually sold in stores. It is sold in “Antique Malls” – usually barn-like structures divided into cubicles where 20 or 30 “collectors” bring their estate sale finds to be re-cycled to tourists under the supervision of a single sales person. When we enter one of these malls, the owner usually greets us with “welcome back” and inquires how those little planters with the Siamese cats are working out in our new decorating scheme.
Every antique mall is unique, although a large proportion seem to combine “Antiques” and “Ice Cream” in their signage. My favorite is Ironwood Antiques, just off Hwy D south of Oconto, which combines an antique mall with a golf driving range. If you don’t have clubs, you can buy a used set there cheap -- if you like to play with niblets, mashies and spoons.
I once found a family Bible at Ironwood Antiques, bound in white leather with the seam hardly cracked. On the front plate, it said it was a gift to the Hickey Family from the Oconto Electric Co-operative, IGA Foodliner and Sawhill Feed Store. Now normally, I confine my bible collecting to Gideon versions borrowed from motel rooms. But this one included a chapter synopsis, a dictionary of Biblical names and terms, chronological timelines, Sunday school lesson plans and two dozen full color plates of famous Bible scenes – an even better steal at only $5.
While I was in the buying mood, I also picked up an historical guide to gold mining in northern Wisconsin, invaluable should the price of gold on the open market go any higher.
My wife and I approach antique shopping with different strategies. She goes into a store with certain goals in mind: filling out her collection of paint-by-numbers paintings, getting another green planter to match the ones she bought down the road, or maybe buying a cast iron skillet for the cottage. I’m more of a wanderer, ogling the Green Bay Packer nesting dolls, (and shocked at the $70 price), intrigued by the idea of owning Teddy Roosevelt’s White House Cookbook from 1908, and always searching for Life magazines from the year I was born.
I suppose I could find all this stuff sitting home at my computer working ebay. For half the stores along our route, ebay has been a godsend. It’s a great way to off-load the selected good stuff and, since foot traffic is light, there’s plenty of time to manage the accounts. For the other antique sellers, ebay’s a virtual Walmart. “It takes all the fun out of junking,” one owner told me -- not to mention half the people out of the stores. The problem I have with ebay is that you have to know what you are looking, but I usually don’t know what I need until I see it.
On this last trip north, I purchased a plastic doll of Woody from Toy Store for $4 (because I somehow forgot to pick up mine when McDonald’s was giving them away free) and found a collection of matchbook covers from Chicago cab companies in the 1940’s. At $3, who can live without that?
For under $20, I can hit three or four stores on my way to the cottage and usually pick up at least a couple essential items. For my wife, junking our way north comes down to the thrill of the hunt. For me, it’s the joy of discovery. For both of us, it’s the satisfaction of exercising our shopping gene for less than the cost of parking at Nieman Marcus or Bloomingdale’s or any of the other Michigan Avenue stores where the Wisconsinites are flocking to this year on summer vacation.
To each his own.
