Blown opportunity

By David Dahle; posted February 9, 2020

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This would fit right in with James Mulvey's Hunts & Fails... Way back in 1985, I was still very much a greenhorn in collecting - I had only met another (recently former) collector the previous fall, and while I was aware of Crown Jewels and the Milholland book, I had neither. One summer day, when my family was taking the boat and camper down to the river for the weekend, I saw a sign advertising an antique shop in the town near where we would be camping and asked if we could check it out. My dad reluctantly obliged, only after we dropped off the rest of the family at the campground and got the boat in. We come around to this house, and were told the shop was out back (the blue / white building in the far back). We went inside, and for someone as new to collecting as I was, I was in heaven. Even today, I find myself wondering what treasures I passed up just because of my very limited pool of knowledge. There were boxes and pop-can flats full of insulators EVERYWHERE in the shop among the usual assortment of antique shop wares. I do remember seeing a drawer full of CD 102s in blackglass and being told they were $1.50 apiece (I still have the one I picked out, and this is also where I got my 162 with the 'corkscrew' straw mark). Years passed, and I would think of this place from time to time, and even when I got a car, it wasn't until sometime in the 2000s that I decided to hop in the car and go back down to this shop. The fail? I learned that the woman who owned the shop had passed away a couple years earlier and the daughter had come up from Texas and cleaned out the whole place.

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