Vintage Picking and Road Tripping with Dinerman

[tropicalbob]

Hi, Dinerman,
I just noticed a long list of your offerings in my emails. How come it's all stuff that's already sold? They look like articles that were posted back in February. Que pasa? Am I missing something?

 

[Dinerman]

I finally got around to updating some blog archive stuff, but I've never used that for posting anything current, just as a place to warehouse old sales as reference material. Generally update it every month or two as time and school allow. The facebook and the eBay pages are where current sales and information live.

 

[Dinerman]

By the time we had reached West Yellowstone, the sun had set, temperatures plummeted and it started to snow heavily. We spent two hours white knuckled, through Yellowstone National Park and Targhee National Forest, crawling along in near whiteout conditions with only the tail-lights of a semi to guide us. We pulled in late at the first motel we could find, on the outskirts of Idaho Falls. The motel was the kind we strive to avoid, with crippling stains on the bed and towels. The mattress, pillows and carpet were steeped in decades of nicotine and the heater had given up on life. We spent the night in every piece of clothing we had packed, shivering, and woke up stiff, bloodshot and exhausted.

Snowcovered fields gave way to green and eventually to the stunning red rocks of Arizona. The cold of our previous night was replaced by baking heat and an equally broken air conditioner in our car. Windows down is fine in town, but at 85mph on the highway, the wind is almost as unbearable as the sweat.



But, after 850 miles of solid driving, we made it. Our hotel doesn't have free wi-fi (go downstairs, smoke! gamble! drink!) and the pool outside our window is in the process of being jackhammered out. So out into the city! While Alex is at a photography conference, seeing her photographic heroes- I venture out! To the shops!

On paper, there are some 75+ antique, vintage and thrift stores in town. Before leaving, I had plotted them all out with one of those route-planning algorithms developed based on the flight patterns of bees. But with no internet, no printer, and my PDF having converted all my addresses to GPS coordinates, so far I've had to wing it. Las Vegas's antique stores are nearly all clustered in roughly four blocks of the old section of downtown. Left to my own devices, I go into picker mode. Vintage clothes? Vintage clothes? Vintage clothes? No- none here- on to the next store. 5 minutes and done, sticking out like a sore thumb. Dealer. Not from here.

There are a surprising number of vintage clothing boots here in Las Vegas, but dealing mostly in 1970s cheese. Polyester used car dealer jacket? Leisure suit? Three mile thick paisley necktie? You got it, buddy. The older clothes are thin on the ground, but either there's no market, or they're out of the dealer's comfort zone, so I was able to pick up a couple of gems at otherwise outrageously priced places. Along the way, I ran into the star of the reality TV show, "Thrift Hunters", and unsurprisingly in this strange vintage world we inhabit, we had friends in common. We'll be meeting up for drinks at one of the local tiki bars- more on that later. Tomorrow should be my big thrift day, but after the couple I hit yesterday and the day before, I don't have high hopes. They're around in abundance, and are the enormous Goodwill-type shops, so no shortage of things to go through. But so far what I've been seeing is mostly very low-end suits from the 1990s, stained rental tuxes and novelty print neckties. It could be a numbers game- dig through a few thousand and maybe something will have fallen through the cracks.



Stay tuned, more to come over the course of the next week as we finish up in Nevada and work our way through a few more states.

 

[mikespens]

Cheese in Vegas? No way! Hope the trip gets better from here but sounds like your enjoying the strange and shock of one of the wonders of the modern world. Where's the tongue in cheek emoji?

 

[Dinerman]

Saturday was a new record for me. 20 thrift shops in a day. In Las Vegas, they're mostly grocery store sized, so where I'm used to a half dozen racks of men's stuff, these came through with aisle after aisle. Hundreds of suits and jackets all in one place, shirts as far as the eye can see, and decent prices for the large part. I realize Las Vegas is a relatively new town with a transient population, but I hoped it would be a numbers game- 20 shops, thousands of things at each of them, bound to be some vintage in there somewhere. It turned out I was half right. There was no shortage of early '60s overcoats, tweeds, plaid cotton, largely small collared, fly fronted and raglan sleeved. One or two in nearly every store. Unfortunately, many were stained or moth damaged, and most of the stores were asking $20-$30 for them. This may not seem like much, but the current overcoat market is bad. I could put one of those in the eBay store at $10 and it would probably go unsold for a year. The local vintage shops won't touch them at any price. Usually it stands that where there is one piece of vintage, more are lurking, waiting to be found. Unfortunately that wasn't the case, and my entire sellable haul from the day's thrifting was a single necktie, which goodwill had priced at $4, about eight times what I'm used to paying for thrift shop ties.


After picking Alex up from the photo conference, we met up with Jason T. Smith, star of Spike TV's "Thrift Hunters", "Thrifty Business with Jay and Nay", "Thrifting With the Boys", etc. at Frankie's Tiki Room. I compared my experience with my aborted vintage-picking TV show with his two seasons in reality TV, we talked the state of thrifting, eBay sales and how people like us have ruined thrifting for everyone by divulging its mysterious ways. You couldn't hope to meet nicer people than he and his wife.


So far, the haul stands at a '40s English summer suit, a turn of the century sack suit, Hollyvogue tie, vintage Notre Dame Athletics shirt, pair of vintage eyeglasses and a vintage patch.
We made it into Salt Lake City last night only to find we're due to catch the edge of a potentially 3 foot snowfall. We'll try to keep it brief here and head west before things hit.

 

[Dinerman]

We reached Salt Lake City late but with enough time to hit IKEA to pick up a few things for the interior of the bus. With dire predictions of 1-3 feet of snow around Salt Lake City and sleet and snow already falling when we woke up, we skipped many of our thrift shop stops and prioritized the larger of the antique malls. Back on more familiar, older ground, my luck started to change, with a couple of fedora finds. The vintage shops in the area focused more on women's vintage (with huge selections) and 1970s menswear, but there were a few pieces of vintage kicking around there and the antique malls. There was the usual frustration of 6-3/4 hats (unsellable) and equally unsellable late 1950s-early '60s suit jackets and overcoats tempting me in lots of the shops. Dodging the forecasted snow in the SLC area and north in Pocatello, we cut west to Twin Falls for the night. Waing early, we drove the last two hours to Boise, where we stumbled upon Ward Hooper Gallery and Vintage Swank, which specializes in the type of vintage clothes that largely make up my own closet. It's always fun to walk into a place filled with 50-80 year old clothing and be able to recognize exactly who made what without even take it off the hanger. Alex made a major score there, picking up an early 1900s wooden 8x10 bellows camera, a real monster. We hit up a few more antique stores and a couple of thrift shops before reaching the point of critical thrift saturation. Usually we do more sightseeing, more walking through back alleys looking at changes in brickwork and battered neon. This trip we've done much too much driving and going from one chain thrift shop to one chain thrift shop, with identical interiors, the same lousy clothes on every rack from one store to the next and seeing the same sprawl. No matter where you go, driving by an Applebees still looks the same.

So on to Pocatello, to recharge at our favorite hotel, the Black Swan Inn Theme Suites. This time we got the Caveman room and what a kitchy roadside treat it was. Back within our 300 mile zone of comfort, we re-traced the footsteps we've taken on several other trips through Pocatello and Idaho Falls. We were last in the area in October, and places haven't had time to fully re-stock, so we saw a lot of the same antiques we've passed over before. Still, a tie here, a jacket there, it adds up.







When it's all laid out, it's quite a haul, coats, hats, ties, suits, jackets, and the big score, over a hundred deadstock WWII zippers, mostly Talons and Crowns. I've been working on shooting and editing for the past 10 hours, I should have the rest of it ready to show you all by tomorrow. I'm also working on editing some of the video we shot along the way. There's a definite learning curve, and this probably wasn't the trip to start with, but I think you'll enjoy it.

 

[BobHufford]

Nice finds Dinerman! Thanks for sharing once again.

 

[Dinerman]

Here are all the finds (except for the neckties) from this past trip

 

[Joao Encarnado]

7 1/8...

 

[willyto]

The zippers find is just amazing...100 zippers.

 

[dudewuttheheck]

So cool! I am quite excited for any video on this.

 

[mikespens]

Excellent adventure!

 

[stetsonofagun]

Man, I wish hats would show themselves around these parts.

- Andrew

 

[stetsonofagun]

PM sent, Dinerman

- Andrew

 

[Two Types]

I'm looking forward to seeing more of that British summer suit. Lightweight British suits are rather rare and should be an easy sale.

 

[Rabbit]

I'm looking forward to seeing more of that British summer suit. Lightweight British suits are rather rare and should be an easy sale.

That one sold already:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-194...D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557

 

[Dinerman]

Not a good sale either. One bidder, lost money.

 

[Rabbit]

And what a nice suit it was! If it hadn't been too large for me, I'd have tried my luck. Tan seems to be such a rare color in surviving vintage suits, much more so than cream/white suits.

 

[Papperskatt]

Whoa, I was expecting that one to go for much more!

 

[Dinerman]

Some more progress on the bus (apologies for some of the weird distortion/errors in the photos, my camera's lens just isn't quite wide enough to get the whole thing in there and the photo stitch program did some odd things). We have the frames for our cabinets roughed in and the counter top cut for the sink and range. They're not lined up in the photos quite right, the two middle cabinets need to go back to the shop so that I can notch out their backs to fit around the gas filler surround. Seeing all the cabinets in person, we're surprised how much more storage we have than we thought we would. We scrounged up an old kitchen table that we'll bolt down. The next step is to build fronts for the cabinets, and stain and paint them. The water will be foot pump operated, still struggling to find a spigot that will work that doesn't have any knobs or valves. The back heater will come out soon to make way for the bed frame and some more storage- they're radiant, running on a loop off the same coolant as the engine's radiator. We've discovered that the hydraulic wheelchair lift in here weighs around 450 pounds, but it has to come out, so we're trying to figure out a strategic way to remove it and dispose of it. The carpet is on order and will go in as soon as the cabinets are finished. I figured out a way to run the solar panel cables through one of the roof vents so that we don't have to drill any more holes than necessary. We've tested out our battery system and the LED lighting we'll be bolting in, and both are even better than we'd expected. Slowly getting there!