Collecting Picket Fences & Stickball Games
05.04.06 By Derek DahlsadMy collector/dealer inlaws travel quite a bit, shopping far-flung antique shops for rare and unique items, and often find branded items stamped with the name of a bank, restaurant, or feed mill from some far-off town. They like to talk about these items, how they sell: my wife and I often get reports on which 
item went, because they’re so unpredictable. The inlaws will be on the road in Ohio, find an ashtray commemorating the 50th anniversary of a rural power cooperative in Kansas, and an eBayer from Florida will end up buying it. These items rarely go home; they always end up someplace far away.
Collecting one’s lost childhood manifests itself a lot of ways: the collectors of toys and books are the most obvious, if not always accurate, labelled ‘buying back your childhood.’ Others, however, remember their grandmother’s china pattern and would like to have it on their own shelves, or their grandpa’s affinity for John Deere tractors, and most of all, they remember that town where grandma & grandpa lived, where dad grew up — wait, what was it called? A few searches later, and they can find a dozen postcards on eBay from Brainerd, Minnesota.
James Lileks, a writer for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, has long collected postcards from his hometown, Fargo ND. In a recent blog post, he wrote about visiting an ephemera collection in the Twin Cities. There, from a Fargo dealer, Lileks learned of his “nemesis,” a Fargo memorabilia 
collector with bottomless pockets, who could — and did — buy everything he could find on his hometown. James Lileks still owns his collection, holding on to his own ties to his hometown, but the other collector went a different direction. The nemesis’ hometown collection became part of the NDSU library archive, and now his collection is open to everyone.
Buying hometown collectibles can give a context to a person’s own history, even if they never lived in that town. My grandparents tell stories about the places they worked in their youth, the places they went and the things they saw, but nothing solidifies the story about Grandma’s job packing ice-cream at Knerr’s Dairy better than a photo of the building. These items hold a nostalgic air, harkening back to a simpler time, the time that parents and grandparents grew up in. If there is nobody left to tell the stories of “the good old days,” a person far-flung from the family homestead can still own a chunk of the Good Old Days by collecting pictures and memorabilia of their hometown’s history. The history needn’t be of genuinely antique nature; a person could fall in love with the town they left in the 1970s, regardless of what has happened since then. The pleasure of collecting these items is in building around the memories of long ago.
The market for hometown 
collectibles can be very customer-friendly. Unless the item was made by a desirable maker or is a photo of a nationally historic place, there is often little demand for it. Many times, small town tchotchkes were mass-produced by no-name manufacturers, and every town produced photo postcards of their Carnegie Library, so the only value is in the town name. That town-name value is easy to find online, too: because it’s often prominently and clearly displayed, unlike china or silver markings, there is little question that the name has to be included in the eBay title or listing. Also, such a wide variety of items have been produced for towns over the decades, from postcards, to matchbooks, to posters, to kitchen utensils, t-shirts, bumper stickers, pens, that finding a variety of items not only adds to the roundness of the collection, but can add more fun to the discovery of something new to add. The relatively cheap and mass-produced nature of these historical items can develop into a large collection for not too much money, and will no doubt hold more emotional meaning than a lot of other collectibles.
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Article Tags: childhood, collectibles, collecting, hometown, James Lileks, NDSU, nostalgia, postcards================
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