Ebay and Me

WELLSVILLE: For years ebay has been my online classified ad/auction/shopping website. Now it seems more like The Story Corp.

                Rick and I must undergo a serious possession reduction. We have too much stuff. We have a clay studio, a cabinet maker workshop and a metals construction area. All three areas are filled with “needed” tools, machines and materials, recognizing that “needed” is a flexible word ranging from that-is-so-cool to required-for-production but just yesterday Rick really did need the welder to fabricate a part for the lawn tractor.

                Rick is finishing the thorough rebuild of our 1939 Chevy and is still designing and building furniture for our family. After that, he can start divesting. I am emptying closets, chests and drawers. Ebay has functioned well, finding buyers for our singular items but it has also been giving us stories.

                This started flurry of sales started 3 weeks ago with a shawl. I listed it for $10 and described it haltingly since I didn’t know how I got it, had no idea what the fabric was and couldn’t tell how old it was but could say that the work was wonderful, the fabric was soft and fine and I thought it was my mother’s. Someone bid on it right away deeming the listing a success.

                After a couple of days the bid was up to $40. Fantastic. I found a shipping box for it and waited. Well, my eyes popped when someone bid $203. How old is that shawl? What’s it made of? Why is it so valuable? Answers unknown and story untold, the shawl went to Germany.

                Shortly after that, there came an interesting story from Patricia in Texas. She had a photo of her mother as a bride and a granddaughter who liked and wanted Grandma’s wedding dress. The problem was that all Patricia had was the photograph of the dress so she started searching images of antique wedding gowns on ebay and chanced upon a picture of my mother in the same dress.

                While I, at times, optimistically search ebay for a lid to that candy dish or another one of those bamboo Exoffico travel shirts, my optimism was less than that required to try to find an 80 year old wedding gown. Lucky for me and her granddaughter, Patricia’s found the dress and purchased it. She only paid $34 for the dress and will likely spend much more to clean and alter it but she is on her way to the desired wedding dress, 12 foot train and all. Nice for all of us.

                A piece that we mused about now and again over the years as it has hung in the closet a pair of stars and stripes jeans. Rick lived in Ubon, Thailand during the Vietnam War and decided that some Easy Rider style jeans would be great motorcycle pants. A tailor made the button fly jeans in dark blue corduroy with applied red stripes and white stars on the pockets.

                Each belt loop was  a work of art made of 2 stripes each of red and blue corduroy, woven together and stitched in place. The craftsmanship of the jeans is admirable. Rick likely paid $20 for them and wore them often. One pant leg still has 1970s chain grease firmly embedded.

            Would anyone what such a pair of jeans? Snappygal wanted them as did Retrolover but a gentleman named Richard, living in New Hampshire, wanted them more. He needed them for his collection of 1960 and 1970 era clothing. He is creating a museum featuring clothing from those decades so he searches for such objects on ebay regularly. Richard’s interest had a value, $177. While that seems a lot to me, people pay more for cookie-cutter denim jeans with designer labels.

                Richard also purchased the jean jacket that my sister embroidered for me. The center of the back has a rose drawn in ball point pen and embroidered only on one petal when she put the project aside something near 40 years ago. The red thread was in the pocket so I sent it all along so that anyone so inclined might finish the stitching.

                Joy, in Michigan, now owns my mother’s circa 1940 nursing cape. She didn’t pay a lot for it but she gave us a story full of pride.  

                As a child in the 1970s, Joy read the Cherry Ames, Student Nurse Series.  The series included 27 books written by Helen Wells or Julie Tatham between 1943 and 1968. The successful goal of the series was to steer thousands of girls into nursing. At the time, nurses wore white caps, dresses and shoes and Joy wanted to “be Cherry Ames” or at least to be a sister nurse in white.

                Joy said that her childhood was difficult and when she graduated from high school in the 1980s, she wasn’t able to go to nursing school but chose to become a nurse’s aide to work with others dressed in nursing “whites,” a uniform she saw as a badge of honor, now replaced practical scrubs.

                Joy is now in school to earn a Nurse Aide license, a step toward her dream of a nursing degree.  She knows that her school had, in the past, recognized graduates with a capping ceremony so she researched the ceremony and used ebay to find a WWII era Nurse Aide uniform. She found one complete with a photo of the person who graduated in it and even has that woman’s textbook with handwritten study notes. Now she also has my mother’s cape and a photograph of my mother wearing it.

                In October, Joy will host a traditional nurse capping ceremony in which both she and her daughter will be capped. She will wear the full outfit and carry the mementos of the women who originally wore both uniform and cape.

                Going further, she plans to volunteer in a small museum in her town. School children meet museum members who dress in period attire to bring history to life for them. Joy will be among the volunteers, wearing her uniform and telling children about what she calls “the proud and noble profession” of nursing. I suspect that some children might even hear about Cherry Ames, Student Nurse.

Detail of the back of that shawl.