Who will speak for the knees?

This is the root of a cypress tree—what's known as a cypress "knee"—and it's something I see occasionally on my estate sale rounds in San Antonio. Cypress trees are native to this area and they figure mightily into the city's second-most-famous tourist attraction, the Riverwalk. The roots poke up out of the earth like stalagmites, or like prehistoric fingers—don't you think this one looks like it's giving us the finger? It would not surprise me to know that trees were collectively flipping the bird at San Antonio, given how they're razed willy-nilly here to make room for big-box shopping centers and condos.

Turns out that cypress knee art was once quite the thing in the Southeastern United States, especially Florida where the rampant kneecapping of cypresses resulted in laws prohibiting the practice (the knee obtains oxygen for the tree—cut it off and the tree is very sad). Some artists would just varnish the wood and let the biomorphic shapes speak for themselves, perhaps topping it with a lampshade. Others were a tad more literal, carving and/or painting the knees to resemble wizards, witches and gnomes (google images for cypress knee art and you'll see what I mean).

At this website, I learned about Tom Gaskins, the preeminent cypress knee artist, who died in 1998. Check out the completely awesome vintage brochures for his Florida roadside attraction Cypress Kneeland, "a 3 in 1 attraction," comprising a cypress knee museum, the world's first cypress knee factory, and a 2,000-foot catwalk in a cypress swamp. The museum featured knees resembling FDR, Stalin and "a lady hippo wearing a Carmen Miranda hat." The brochure makes some pretty grandiose statements, which I've no reason to doubt:

The collection is fantastic, artistic, humorous. One with a well-oiled imagination can see in the knees nearly everything that was and is yet to be. Animals, birds, and people you will recognize, good and bad.

Gaskin's son had taken over the family business after his father died, and in an article in Roadside America, he gave one of the best quotes I've read in a good long while: "This place is real Florida. It's not a plastic mouse show. I'm a Florida Cracker, a piney woods rooter. I know how to survive on acorns. It'll be a long time before anyone ever shuts us down."

Unfortunately, he had to shut the place down in 2000 after someone broke in and stole many of the best knees. Total drag, right? The only places I've been in Florida are the aforementioned "plastic mouse show" and the place in Miami where the big cruise ships depart. I'm bummed that I'll never bear witness to the treasures Gaskin amassed.

The REAL story of how I missed the O'Neil Ford estate sale

I am a big fan of children's nonfiction books that purport to be REAL or TRUE or ALL ABOUT—to be the last word on the subject at hand. The REAL book about easy music-making! The REAL book about farms! As opposed to all those unreal farm books, stuffed with their falsehoods and fictions. Like Charlotte's Web—E.B. White clearly had no idea what he was talking about. "Some pig"? Get real, ’50s kids!

I got The Real Book about Easy Music-Making, The Real Book about Journalism and The Real Book about Farms at a library sale that I wasn't optimistic about because it was at a new library, way out in the exurban sprawl. I was misguided. Even out in cookie-cutter subdivisions only just sprung from the scraped earth, there are old people donating their old books to new libraries. But the biggest surprise about these "real" books was the inscription on the inside cover: "The O'Neil Ford Family, Willow Way."

I don't know if people outside South Texas know from O'Neil Ford, but he was a renowned midcentury modernist architect who spent most of his professional life in San Antonio, where he designed or redesigned various public buildings and spaces, as well as a number of private homes (to live in an O'Neil Ford is definitely something to brag about). I was familiar with Ford's work, but I didn't know anything about Willow Way, so of course, I googled it and discovered that was the name of his homestead—a ramshackle ten-acre former farm on the South Side, which had been in his wife's family since the 1920s. Ford died in 1982, his wife in 2002. And the estate sale—which sounds like it must have been the mother of all estate sales—took place in late 2005, a year after I moved to San Antonio. How do I know this? Because my google search also turned up a link to a story about the sale in the San Antonio Current, written by my pal Elaine.



If you are a habitué of estate sales, you're familiar with the One that Got Away, the One You Missed, or most dreadful—the One You Arrived at Only In Time to See Someone Else Leaving With All the Stuff You Totally Would Have Bought If Only You Had Known That This Sale Should Have Been Your Top Priority. You can really get bogged down in the what-ifs and what-might-have-beens, so it's best not to dwell. You have to accept your limitations; it's simply not possible to hit every estate sale on a weekend, or to know which ones are really worth the bother. Classified ads must be parsed closely. Location must be considered. The pricing practices of the estate-sale companies must also be factored in. Based on that rough calculus, choices must be made. Don't get me started on what I could be missing at all the run-of-the-mill yard sales that make up the bulk of the classified section of the newspaper. The vast majority surely suck, but amid that sea of smeary black ink there are probably a couple of doozies every week. I'll never know.

Unfortunately, thanks to Elaine's article—in which she dodges wild poultry while previewing the eclectic offerings for the paper—I have a pretty good sense of what I missed at the O'Neil Ford sale, and seven years later I'm grinding my teeth just thinking about it. She interviews David Dillon, an architecture critic and old friend of Ford's, who describes him as an omnivorous collector:

I think what's visible at Willow Way is, on the one hand, the incredible range of interets, the kind of magpie quality of the collecting that [Ford] did, and to some extent the messiness of his life—it was not exactly clean in the traditonal sense—there were all kinds of ghosts, all kinds of loose ends, and they're all out there at Willow Way, too.

Arrgh! She should have told me! Why didn't she tell me? Sigh. Back then, I wasn't pursuing this interest with quite the same intensity. I certainly wasn't blogging about it; I was too busy on my other blog devoted to new motherhood and the culture shock of moving to Texas and blah blah blah. One detail in the article does more or less confirm that my books somehow wended their way from this fabulous estate sale to this pretty decent library sale to my overstuffed bookcases and this blog: "A small woodframe house with a hearth that could hold a Mini Cooper," she writes, "is given over entirely to silver-fish infested books inscribed 'Willow Way Library' in graceful penmanship."

Well, there you go. I didn't find any silverfish but a torn note, written in graceful penmanship, did fall out of the journalism book:

Dita-get book at library (if you want it) Cell & Psyche—Business & Science. Muir Library. Hairdo & manicure 10:00 Isabella. Take Neil's desk top to Mr. Schulz. Buy dish-washing soap and hairspray (ask Dita).

Who wrote the note? Who was out of hairspray? Who is this Dita and did she really want to check out Edmund Sinott's meditation on the mind-body question when she clearly had so many errands to run? (My best guess is that the book in the note is actually titled Cell and Psyche: The Biology of Purpose.) Will we ever know the REAL story of O'Neil Ford and his messy life? Who knows—who cares—I'll take the enigmatic detail, the tantalizing slice of life over the potted history anytime.

But I still wish I'd made it to that sale. Somehow I think I would have left with more than just a few books.

Hometown heroine #2: Heloise

One of the immutable laws of used-book foraging: Every thrift shop in America will have at least one Hints from Heloise; if not Heloise, then it shall be Erma Bombeck's If Life's a Bowl of Cherries, Why Am I in the Pits? Or else: Helter-Skelter.

In San Antonio, the likelihood of running across a Heloise book increases exponentially—have I ever been to a Goodwill or garage sale without spying a volume or three of her handy hausfrau hints? Don't think so. The proto-Martha Stewart, who's written a ton of books and whose columns are still syndicated in some 500 newspapers—who knew there were so many newspapers left?—is one of San Antonio's few local celebrities (I already addressed the city's meager supply of those here). Owning one of her books is pretty much a given, like having a big metal star on your garage, a windmill on your lawn and a copy of Lonesome Dove in the guest room.

The brief history of Heloise is that her mom was a very resourceful military wife, who started writing a column for the Honolulu Star in 1959. She groomed her daughter, whose name was not Heloise at the time, as her successor, and by the time Mom died, the daughter had given up her dream to become a math teacher and was ready to dispense hints about eradicating body odors, wine stains and ring around the collar to an eager populace. Now an attractive 60something woman with silver shoulder-length hair, Heloise seems pretty cool. According to her website, she tools around her neighborhood—which I think is rather near mine—on an old-school Russian motorcycle. Her schnauzer rides shotgun in the sidecar (I recently saw a similar photo of Brad Pitt in Us Weekly, but son Pax was riding shotgun, not a schnauzer. Stars: so like us!). My husband swears he saw her driving a black Lexus with tinted windows over by our supermarket—the HINTS vanity plate was the tip-off. As far as I know, Heloise doesn't have a daughter who plans to change her name to Heloise upon her mother's death and assume the mantle of homekeeping maven, so you have to wonder—like the employees of Oprah's Harpo media, or Martha Stewart Omnimedia's stockholders—what will happen when Heloise passes on.

So, her books are pretty ubiquitous in these parts but the series I've collected here, plucked from three different sales over the past seven years, seems to be fairly rare. Published by Pocket Books in the early ’70s, they feature a sex kittenish fantasy of a housewife on their covers. From her pantyhose to her sexy orthopedic shoes and deer-in-the-headlights expression, this chick is a ’70s wet dream. She reminds me of the women in the Playboy magazines my friend's father used to hide in the back of his bedroom closet (he didn't hide them well enough, obviously). The laundry-themed cover is so "Oopsie, I pulled a Bobby Brady!" And the one where she's pulling a little red wagon full of Coke bottles—WTF? Where is she going?? And the career gal cover with the totally random St. Bernard is just baffling.

These covers are a tad misleading, however. I regret to report that the tips inside these books aren't even a teeny bit racy. Just the usual collection of chestnuts culled from readers' letters about how to eliminate shower curtain mildew and how to throw a "stew party"—alas, no tips about how to throw a key party.

Postcards from the edge

I live in what I consider to be a prime estate sale neighborhood: mostly ranch houses built in the 1950s and ’60s, lots of retired military folks (military = well-traveled = interesting estate sale fodder) and doctors (already discussed what makes their sales generally worth hitting). If I didn't live here already, I would totally stalk my own hood. So when a sale crops up, I tend to get irrationally territorial—like, who do you people think you are coming to my turf, trying to buy my neighbors' stuff? I haven't called the cops on the estate salers who park in the street (you are so busted! no one is allowed to park in the street here!) but I've been sorely tempted.

Like at this sale, at a ranch house set way back from the road, tantalizingly obscured by a grove of oaks—how many times have I jogged past it, biked past it, walked the dog past it and wondered what treasure lies within?

Well, I got a pretty good haul, including a box of San Antonio postcards. Oversized and rounded at the edges, with saturated colors and brightly colored borders, they were printed in McAllen, TX, by James Hanshaw Postcards. Not sure when but I'm going to guess the ’70s. (I might just be saying that because this image of La Villita is reminding me of the famous chase scene in The French Connection.) James would have benefited from the services of a proofreader but doesn't that just make the idea of San Antonio—7th largest city in the U.S., number one tourist destination in TX, simultaneously disrespected and embraced for its core lameness—as the city that "spans the centurys [sic]" all the more endearing?

I don't know what I'm going to do with all these cards exactly (a feeling I often experience post-sale); if you'd like me to mail you one while we still have a postal service, lemme know.