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SIERRA VISTA — Antique dealers have an instinct to seek out old things.
They find, buy and appreciate artifacts from the past. Then they sell them.
“It’s a job but it’s not. It’s a hobby,” said Irma Alejandro, a dealer at Antiques and Collectibles Mall, 112 N. Second St.
It’s a natural interest and love of antiques that keeps many of the sellers in the business, said Maggie Switalski, owner of Antiques and Collectibles Mall. For her, collecting antiques also fulfilled a need for things with staying-power.
 Irma Alejandro, a vendor at Sierra Vista's Antiques & Collectibles Mall, tries on another of the stores vendors' hats while customer Marty Jackson looks on. The store has grown since opening over a year ago and has several vendors selling goods. Mark Levy•Herald/Review |
“I think it was the nostalgia and how well made things were back then and how thought out they were. Now we live in disposable, fast society,” Switalski said.
Rather than drive-through for some fast food, families would set a dinner table with a soup bowl, salad dish and dinner plate. A yearning for those old things got Switalski started in collecting and selling at antique shows.
One year after opening the store with six dealers, their selling space has doubled and about 50 antique sellers have filled every room, case, wall, nook and cranny at Antiques and Collectibles.
What they fill the space with and how they find it is unique to each.
“That’s the fun part,” said Dorothy Maas, an antique dealer at the mall who gets her wares at garage sales, estate sales and friends who are cleaning out their closets.
But acquiring items isn’t the fun part, it’s hearing their “life stories,” Maas said.
Like the story of the china with a cobalt blue edge and colorful flowers she recently bought.
According to the woman she got them from, her grandmother migrated to the United States from England in 1901 and the china was her wedding dishes.
“Unfortunately dishes are not worth much. It’s more of a sentiment,” Maas said. “I wonder how she could part with them, but then, that’s me.”
An unusual tin with feathers also intrigued her recently.
“They used to be used in barbershops. They put talcum powder in them,” she said.
The turn-of-the-century tin belonged to the great-grandfather of the seller, and although it probably isn’t worth much, Maas likes letting it go to someone else. Maybe a barber or beautician would take an interest in it, she said.
She likes keeping some of her finds for herself, such as things made of yellow celluloid that she loves. But she doesn’t want to become a pack rat.
“I have a rule: There’s nothing that can’t be sold, so long as I’ve enjoyed it as long as I want,” Maas said.
Norma Glisch, a dealer and antiques adviser at the Antiques and Collectibles Mall, has come to know the trends of the business by conducting estate sales in Sierra Vista for more than 27 years.
She prefers estate sales, where the possessions are a collection of lifelong wealth, over garage sales, where things are being thrown away, she said.
Her own interest in antiques stems from a love of her great aunt’s Victorian home in Texas where she spent her summers as a child.
“All my life I wanted a home like it,” Glisch said.
It’s also fostered an appreciation for “primitives,” hand-crafted furniture.
“But they’re not quick sellers,” she said. She sees a lot younger buyers taking an interest in “antiques” from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.
“In my mind I think ‘What are they doing?’ They’re buying what I think of as new but it’s not unlike when I started out,” Glisch said. “People are looking for their roots.”
Pricing items can be as tricky as finding what will sell.
“You can’t price by the book,” Glisch said.
The area and how many items are in circulation have to be taken into consideration, she said. Her Fostoria stemware, for example, would be priced at $22 a piece by-the-book, but she hopes to sell them at $8 each.
The right price also depends on what’s “hot,” said Leila Blair, owner of Cachet, 25 Main St., in Bisbee.
“You just have to pay attention to what’s selling,” Blair said.
She also sees price being affected by region. Antiques dealers from the east coast visit her shop and buy what they can sell for more in their shops.
Blair has been in the business for more than 40 years and remembered becoming interested in antiques as a girl when she visited New Orleans with her family during Hurricane Betsy.
“There wasn’t anything to do so I just walked along the antique shops,” she said.
She also remembered her first antique purchase — a Tetley Tea tin for 15 cents.
She got her start selling some wedding gifts she and her husband didn’t need at a swap meet.
“I started noticing that things I sold for $1 were $15 in other people’s booths,” Blair said. “I thought ‘I can do that.’ ”
Although the store seems to have everything, she specializes in cowboy clothing, books and estate jewelry.
“People look in and say ‘Oh, it’s just a junk shop,’ and I go ‘No, we have diamonds and emeralds and rubies,’ ” she said.
When stocking the store she looks for colorful, unique and odd things.
“Just whatever catches my eye,” she said.
Recently that was a gold art deco broach with genuine stones.
“I’ve never seen anything like this. It was really exciting when I got it,” she said.
She remembered paying a man for a skull and ballet slippers once.
“He said, ‘You have really weird taste,’ ” Blair said. “That’s why I’m successful.”
But where she finds those items to add to her collection is something she’s keeping secret.
“That we never tell,” she said.
herald/review reporter Laura Ory can be reached at 515-4683 or by e-mail at laura.ory@svherald.com.
A happy customer! wrote on Dec 7, 2007 12:19 PM: