Antiques

Did my mom and dad ever collect antiques! The photos above give you a bird’s eye view.

Now can you imagine these same antiques that were collected some 50 some odd years ago may be 5x+ more valuable on today’s market?

As you might note these are not spectacular antiques or collectables but instead antiques that were very much in demand at that time. Such as disc figurines, English and French china, clocks, bronze, things you would find at most antique shows at the time and what I’m trying to relate to you now is hotel memorabilia and antiques have appreciated to the same extent and are becoming a real collectable item.

My house was so cluttered with French furniture ticwood chairs lamps and the only player grand piano I could remember seeing at that time. Notice the baby discs that were called piano babies because anyone with a grand piano would be sure to have a baby piano disc on it.

There was just a path through our living room, dining room and solarium, but not a place to entertain. Today we would call these people compulsive collectors; it’s kind of a disease.

My dad being in the auction business had plenty of opportunity to collect antiques from the auction house he ran and all the different auction sales he attended. It seemed there was never a week that would go by that he wouldn’t bring a most unusual piece home.

I was about 14 and I invited my friend to stay over the night and gave him the plush down cushion French sateen for his bed. I remember the next morning I asked him how he slept, he said "not so good”, but I sure knew what time it was. That was one of my dad’s weekly chores to wind up all the cookoo clocks china and grandfather clocks, marble and wood mantle clocks and he assigned different chores to each one of us six kids. My chore was to polish all the ticwood furniture every week.

Rummaging through hotels, we uncovered antiques, for example a dozen or more prints in large gold leaf frames that were under a stairwell that had been enclosed for 50 years. In another case we appraised a hotel by the room piecemeal and inadvertently figured all the pictures at $5 each. We later found that the pictures were crayon oil and chalk. The artist traveled all over the world and painted famous sights landmarks, and landscapes of different parts of the country while on cruises she would do these paintings and sell them to cover her travel expenses. What she didn't sell she hung in the rooms of her hotel homes. We ended up making a separate art gallery of over 200 of her pieces and they went for 15 to 200 dollars each, a lot more than we expected. We decided the value mostly by size and landmarks.

We found a news release from a dealer whom always brought from us, who we called tiny. He was a big heavy man and bought a lot of furniture from us over the years and found a valuable diamond in one of the dust proof dresser draws in a guest room.

You can imagine all of our help setting up the sales always pulled out the dresser draws from then on hoping to find the catch but mostly what they found was playboy magazines and the like.

Any time we would get into a historical hotel we would make it a point after the day was done to do a scavenger hunt. This means we would go through all the catacombs with martini in hand from top to bottom looking for castaway items to incorporate in our sale.

There was an instance at the Traymore in Atlantic City where all the house keepers and servants slept in 100 rooms under the first floor. This was during a seasonal event and the hotel would close and all the migrant workers would go home.

We didn't bother looking into these rooms until after we took possession and certainly were surprised to find that when they redecorated the upper guest rooms they would put the furniture down into the servant’s quarters. Would you believe the servant’s quarter’s furniture value was worth more than the new renovated furniture? They consisted of marble top tables, brass beds, handkerchief chests, GWTW lamps which all meant plenty of profit.

The book we're writing tells a lot of good stories and I need your input to tell me if they're as good as I think they are. We made it easier for you to answer these blogs, all you have to do is click the green "click here to comment" button feel free to use it.

Clem D. Long

Auctioneer and Hotel Liquidator

Founder and former C.O.B. of National Content Liquidators

Third generation of Auctioneers