Folks forced to sell cherished collections, heirlooms, keepsakes put up for sale to pay bills!

KoKo

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sat Jan-03-09 08:23 PM
Original message

Folks forced to sell cherished collections, heirlooms, keepsakes put up for sale to pay bills!

Edited on Sat Jan-03-09 08:24 PM by KoKo01

By Gabrielle Dunn, Globe Correspondent | January 3, 2009

A collector since she was 4, Janice Dumas, 49, of Revere, is selling her 300 Barbie dolls on eBay to pay medical bills.

As a child in foster care bouncing from home to home, from one caretaker parent to the next, David Mendes had one thing that he prized above all, one thing that he took with him when his life inevitably uprooted - a suitcase containing 5,000 meticulously kept sports cards, each in its own protective plastic sleeve.

"They're the only things I kept and all I had," he said. "It was just me and my cards."

Decades later, when Mendes had made a home in Lowell and had his own children, the cards became his legacy, of what he had lived through and of the life he had finally achieved. He pledged to his 4-year-old son, Adam, that one day they would be his.

But now he is breaking that promise. Laid off by a roofing company that is struggling in the flagging economy, 32-year-old Mendes has put the cards up for sale to pay rent and put food on the table. He hopes a collector will offer him several thousand dollars for the collection. He hasn't found the courage to tell his son.

"He'll say, 'Dada, let's look at the cards,' " Mendes said. "That's another thing that kills me. He knows about them. He knows they're his."

Mendes is but one of thousands across the country who, hit by the recession and with no savings to absorb the blow, are making torturous decisions to sell some of the only items they have that are both valuable and not essential for surviving day to day: collections, cherished mementos, or small inheritances handed from one generation to the next.

Pawn shops, dealers, and online markets say they have been deluged with goods, and with the heartrending stories of those forced to sell. Craigslist said the number of posts on its Boston collectibles section increased by 46 percent to 11,590 in the year since November 2007. In just two months last fall, listings on eBay's collectibles section rose an astounding 56 percent nationwide, officials for that site said.

The Boston Area Toy Collectors Club has noticed a sudden increase in calls from people looking for buyers of vintage toys, said Stephen Lanzilla, the club's founder. "These people call because they're panicked and don't know who to turn to, who to talk to," he said.

Some who are now selling are collectors, Lanzilla said, people drawn by nostalgia and "the victory of finding something you've been looking for," to sink what little money they have into esoterica that, over years, comes to represent emotional landmarks.

But now, he said, "they've hit a brick wall, and it can be awful painful to think, 'What have I been doing this past 20 years buying all these Barbies?' "

Janice Dumas's one-bedroom, white bungalow in Revere is cluttered with more than 300 of the iconic dolls. The self-described ultimate pack rat's home is also filled with random keepsakes, like her grandmother's 90-year-old electric organ and a library of old books and magazines.

But for Dumas, the plunging economy has caused a collection of another sort - her unpaid medical bills. The recession suffocated her ability to handle financial burdens imposed by the lupus she has struggled with since high school, her 2003 cervical cancer diagnosis, and an acrimonious divorce shortly thereafter. Things are so bad that for three days in November she went without running water because she could not afford a plumber.

So she is putting her dolls up for sale, trying to collect hundreds each for some from the 1960s and rarities, like a pregnant Barbie.

"I never thought it would come to this, but it's hard to make the bills now," Dumas said. "I'd like not to be living paycheck to paycheck and have that fear of not being able to pay the gas bill this month."

Once an occupational safety engineer making $60,000 a year, her $28,000 yearly income now consists of an alimony settlement and a monthly disability check. With insurance, her medical expenses total about $8,000 annually.

On the list of items to go are her books about Abraham Lincoln, who fascinated her as a girl.

"If I could just be ahead of the game on my bills for once," Dumas said, opening one of the books and reverently palming a page.

At Empire Loan, a pawnshop in downtown Boston, owner Michael Goldstein said his customer base has expanded to suburbanites looking to pawn family heirlooms.

"There's no question that they'd rather not part with what they're borrowing on," he said. "They're borrowing on things they find sentimental, but in a bad economy, they have to pawn or sell things they'd rather not."

Sue Jennson of Franklin posts three times a day on Craigslist to sell, among other treasures that have been in her family since the 1800s, a figurine of the baby Jesus that belonged to her grandmother and which she hopes will fetch more than $100.

"They're heirlooms that got passed down from my grandmother to my mother and then to me," she said. "It's so hard for me to even put this stuff on the computer."

Some who have felt forced to sell, like 79-year-old Charles Sullivan of Randolph, have ultimately balked, saying even the need for cash was not enough to overcome the emotional price. Sullivan got an appraisal on 200 toy trucks, some of which belonged to a son who died of cancer six years ago, but then he couldn't go through with a sale.

"They've been with me for 40 years, and I've thought about it and no matter what, I just can't part with them."

For many, though, there is no choice. Or the choice is between one kind of meaning and another. Mendes last month posted on Craigslist a second treasured memento, a drum set that was a gift from a foster mother who, Mendes said, was the only assigned caretaker to ever really take an interest in him.

"It cost $125, and I had a paper route, and she said if I saved up I could get the drums on layaway. But I was impatient and I wanted them now," he said. "The next morning she woke me and told me to go out to the car and help unload groceries, and in the car, there was the drum set. She bought it for me. After all that time, I'll never forget that."

The drum set sold almost immediately on Craigslist for $80, which Mendes used to pay for a Christmas tree for his children.

"No one did this for me so I have to do it for them."

----
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/01/03/cash_for_the_memories?mode=PF