scooterplace

Monday, February 21, 2005

Old house exploration

I guess I'll go dang near anywhere looking for old scooters and stuff, so when I got a chance to explorer an old house and several farm buildings, I took off. I'm not saying where this place is but it was a 101-year-old farm house that has not been inhabited for about 25 years. It was still furnished. There were a couple of sheds, two barns and an attic.

The first place I looked was in the kitchen where I saw an old Hoosier style kitchen cabinet and a wood butter churn. The churn was a square box mounted at a crazy angle. You just turned the crank and the buttermilk sloshed around until it made butter. It must have been 60 or 70 years old, but looked like it had not seen much use. In one corner there was a red ice chest. It was galvanized inside and had a metal tray. It probably said Coca Cola on it at one time, but it had been repainted.

There was a wooden soft drink cooler in another room. It was like the ones you saw in grocery stores before WWII. There was a round wringer type washing machine, a waterfall dresser, a chest of drawers and some tables and chairs. In a small room off the back porch there were about 50 mail order catalogs. Most were from Penney's and Sears. The one on top was from 1978, but deeper in the stack they looked older.

Antique stuff was in every room. The house had marble doorknobs, and there were old bottles and jars everywhere. I saw hand cranked gadgets that I couldn't even identify.

But I knew that any vintage motor scooters would be in the out buildings so I literally headed for the barn. Make that "barns," plural. The first one contained large bales of hay, and I wondered what might be hidden behind it. Over on the back wall I saw a Chevy hubcap, circa 1955, and a tractor light. There were old tools and horse tac hanging on the walls. The other barn contained more hay, but one room had two old horse-drawn mowing machines, and a disassembled farm wagon.
There was a horse drawn disk in another room. Bottles and jars were everywhere in the barns.
I saw shell-back lawn chairs, wash tubs, and iron stoves. There was another wringer washer in a shed behind the house. I saw a couple of old license plates.

But there were no scooters. I guess you can't win them all. So why didn't I bring home all that other stuff? Well, the property is for sale and I guess I'd have to buy the whole farm to get any of the antiques. But if I had found a scooter, I might have made them an attractive offer on that.
Howard

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