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Discover Mid-America — December 2005

Fashionable filth

Here we go again. The battle is still going on — to clean or not to clean.

I am not talking household, but talking antique furniture. I recall years ago when we began to deal in antiques the first thing we did was get the Murphy’s Oil out and go to work. In some cases, the grunge was really grunge! In some others, it was merely a good cleaning.

It was a joy to clean up a piece that had been in a barn or garage for a generation to find that there was good wood, good construction and actually a fine piece of furniture under all that accumulation of mud-dauber nests, rain spatters or bird droppings.

But in the high-dollar circles nowadays, there is a turn of the worm. Those people who really know their American antiques, who have a provenance (we are not talking a chiffon robe from Sears and Roebuck) want their antiques to show that they have been around a long time. Proof of this is in watching the Antiques Roadshow.

How many times have we heard the Keno brothers tell a crest-fallen owner that if they had not cleaned it, not removed the paint or whatever, it would be worth almost ten times as much? Articles in the trade magazines showing less than glossy pieces in fine homes make one wonder if they have a maid to do the dusting. We are wrong. They are left grungy ON PURPOSE. The reason being that years of dirt, oils and cobwebs cannot be faked (not yet, anyway). The grunge that these years have added to the piece proves that the piece is truly an antique.

Previous columns have been written about the artificial dirtying of old looking pieces in order to label them “antique.” This column has cautioned buyers to look, learn and listen if they are paying a top price for a piece that has been labeled antique. Readers might recall the column that told of the furniture maker that decided to fool Winterthur Museum. It took him years to develop his plan to make a copy of a very antique chair, but he did it and it was accepted as old until this now honest man told them just what he had done.

For the less knowledgeable antiquer, there are still many lessons to be learned about the age of a favored piece of antique furniture. These high-dollar folks are being extremely cautious about what they have told their maids NOT TO DO. The appraisers also have become very cautions about discussing the cleaning of true antiques.

There are owners that go to great pains to keep these pieces in the public eye. Articles in the magazines make note of the age but also show that the hole in the couch cover is covered with a pillow. The damaged parts are camouflaged so the presentation is still classy. On the other hand, there those of us that do not like body oils untouched. We prefer to clean up and to be able to use freely the old pieces that we have acquired or inherited. To each his own.

* * *

Recently, I wrote of my eldest son’s situation in the New Orleans area. When they came to Missouri later, they read the article I had written on when to save quickly in certain situations. My daughter-in-law stressed again that if we treasure something that is not replaceable, whether it be income tax papers or Lincoln’s signature or your baby’s pictures, plan NOW and have a plan of action. When the bad thing happens, it is too late to decide what you need to save.

Norma Crews is a native Texan, graduate of Texas Tech, former teacher and rancher, mother of three grown sons and six grandchildren, and raised in South Texas on a ranch as a member of two pioneer families.

Upon retiring from teaching and ranching, she and her husband James became pickers for large Texas shops, before branching into doing shows for a number of years in Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas. She currently resides in Neosho, MO.

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