WHY ANTIQUES?

Rex Burress

How many things do you have around the house that are antiques? Several things in my house, mostly family hand-me-downs, are antiques, although more like junk than jewels...I think.

Local Facebook followers undoubtedly have seen pictures of T.J. Stone [formally Whetstone] and the treasures he has gleaned from downtown Oroville antique stores. Maybe that's where he makes his millions! [pictures, that is].

To see people flock to the antique roadshows featured on TV, towing their million-dollar aspirations—chests, chairs, and pictures dug out of the attic, is an indication of the lurking thought that there is treasure in the junky old trivial! A stashed original Van Gogh IS worth a million! I've been painting a good deal of my life, but I don't think my works have hit any high plateau...yet. I'm not complaining although I could use that million now! But that original John Muir portrait now in Pennsylvania?? Or that original “What is a Mother's Love?” painting hiding in my house? They say love is worth more than a million, and in that aspect, I rate high!

My cousins Al and Pat Tolle haunted those antique stores all the way between Trenton, Missouri and Gassville, Arkansas, and made some nice finds. You have to know the potential. I had an old folding desk as a boy, and in later times Al took it for restoring, revealing the walnut beauty that had been hidden by varnish for untold years! “American Pickers” glean piles of dusty junk to find those antiques, an addiction quite evident in the number of garage sales attended countrywide! I'm not knocking it because I bought a large chunk of dinosaur bone for 50 cents, three jars of petrified shark's teeth for a pittance, and an untold number of old picture frames, saving a pile of money.

Check out the unique antique stores in downtown Oroville! You may find IT!

It was amusing when my rockhound friends, Bob and Lou, would stop at any garage sale/antique shop on rock trips. They were quite the experts in evaluating antiques—even kid toys, and their acquisitions filled their garages and most of the house with aisles running through the stacks!

Before me I have a glass ball paper weight said to be a 148 year old family relic, and beside it there is a 100 million year old quartz crystal I found in a Feather River vein. They are both of a similar silica substance, one an antique, the other a natural phenomena, and though they could melt in a fire, they have retained their tangible form. Some call it fate, and others call it God.

Many of those natural curios I have are well over the accepted antique age of 100 years. Petrified stuff is timeless. Old wooden things tend to give out sooner than stony things, especially around active households, so it's rare to find a major antique unscathed by time-etched blemishes. Some choice furniture can actually have wood-boring larvae of pine beetles inside! Driftwood antiques from the sea often have burrows of piddock clams and toredo ship worms, that either add or subtract from the value.

The word 'antique' generally refers to furniture made at least 100 years ago, or other objects existing since ancient times. We can refer to groves of Old Growth forest as 'trees of antiquity,' and though some oaks and many redwoods far exceed the 100-year level, we don't actually call them antiques, but rather 'ancients,' or primitive.

What is a 32-feet-in-diameter redwood worth? A grove of those giants once stood in the Oakland,CA hills, but the demand for wood to build San Francisco in the 1800's put a price on their heads, and by 1860, most of them had been logged out. Can you imagine their value today as a living prized relic in Joaquin Miller Park?

“Fossils can be beautiful and amazing. Anyone who has stood beneath the skeleton of a dinosaur, or who has cracked open a rock to reveal the bright mother-of-pearl colors of a seashell that died over 100 million years ago, will know the sense of wonder prevailing from primordial times. That the dinosaur skeleton was once covered with muscles and skin, and that the shellfish once lived on the seafloor, filtering food particles from the water, shows how fossils allow us access to a different time.”

--Michael J. Benton “Prehistoric Life.”