The Liner Notes

http://youtu.be/EgkJjyNVG7w

The museum of American Victorian walnut furniture opened around 1992.  There was no grand opening, it just evolved.  It contained what was possibly the largest collection of American Victorian walnut furniture in America.  It was a project of the Collins-Binkley Foundation, a foundation my parents started in 1982.

By 1992 my parent’s antique collection had appreciated quit a bit.  My parents had it appraised by a professional appraiser, donated the collection to their foundation, and moved everything into an old 1924 three story Masonic Temple they had bought in 1985.  The appreciated antiques and donation proved to be such a good tax savings, that my parents saved more in taxes than they paid for the antiques originally! Hopefully, now the antiques would be a good investment for their foundation, as well as providing an educational look at how people used to live 100 years ago.

This video I took in 1995 shows briefly the 4 large rooms and lobby areas where the antiques called home for around 15 years.  Rows and rows of massive antique beds, dressers, wash stands, tables, and other items filled the large building in Sherman. My parents would open the museum most Sundays from 2-5 P.M. and give visitors a tour, educating them on what they were seeing.  Antique lovers came to see the collection, although nothing was for sale.  It was all about having an investment for the foundation.

A year before my father died, we had begun to work on having the top floor be a jazz museum, and the lower floors be the antique museum.  My dad had worked his way through college playing in dance bands, and had a love for jazz.  He was also the first full time band director of Sherman High School in 1939, so a music museum in Sherman made sense.  Our plan was to sell off some of the antiques and have fewer, but more expensive antiques that wouldn’t take up so much space.

My dad died in 2008, and that was the end of the antique museum.  My sister had no desire to keep the museum going, which I understood since none of us lived in Sherman, so we split the assets in half, with me keeping the building and jazz artifacts we had acquired up to that time.  The jazz section all of a sudden had the whole building to itself.

The antique museum had served its purpose and it was time to move on.  Someday the jazz museum will cease to exist, but in the meantime it will preserve some of our American musical history and educate the public about our American art form we gave to the world. It is a music museum, but it is also an American history museum.  Our history can be found in our music, and our American musical history is still very young.

http://youtu.be/_3rs0FQQ24c

My parents actively collected antiques from 1973-1978.  This video shows the section of their warehouse in Sherman where they were stored and refinished before their antique museum opened in 1992.  My dad loved to restore and repair the antiques as needed.

My parents had two purposes for buying antiques. First, they appreciated the craftsmanship in the antiques and thought they were made better than what you could buy new.  They would go to antique auctions almost every weekend, making trips home with their purchases in their El Camino. They could buy the antiques for what the dealers were paying, so it was a good way to buy.  Plus, my dad could repair things that needed repairing.  Basically, it was a great hobby for my parents after my dad retired.  My mom would say what she liked at an auction, and my dad would buy it.

The second reason they bought antiques was to have another inflation hedge.  In the 70’s inflation was starting to run anywhere from 6-13% per year, so people were worried about having too much in cash.  My dad had majored and taught economics and he was aware of the dangers of inflation, even at those levels over time.

Some of the antiques they bought were used in their house, also.  They thought it was smart to live with your investments, as well as have them as furniture for the house.  Over the following two decades, they did very well with their antiques as they went up in value, or rather, the dollar’s purchasing power went down.  They also had a great time together in the process.

One more thought on the subject of what they bought. They decided to only buy walnut antiques because the wood was not as fragile as oak and other types.  Because of its quality, walnut antiques could have more ornate carvings, such as what you see in Victorian furniture.  It’s when the availability of walnut became scarce that the furniture makers turned to other types of wood, and the ornate carvings disappeared.  My parents thought walnut would always bring a premium because of its quality, however, this has not been the case so far.  People have tended to like oak, even though it’s not as strong as walnut. Quality doesn’t always win out in our society.

http://youtu.be/INySm4lcDss

There was a time thirty years ago that my father found himself storing collectible cars in his warehouse in Sherman for a car collector.  If he had decided to buy the cars from the collector, we would have had an instant car museum.  It might have also been a good investment, but my dad was thinking more about antique furniture than he was about cars, so it never happened. My parents had been buying antique American Victorian walnut furniture at auctions since 1973, which was stored in another section of the warehouse.

Sorry about the poor video quality…it never transferred properly, but at least I have something on tape.  We were in the early days of home color video cameras and DVD recorders.  I’m still working on the best way to transfer things the best way to YouTube, also.

It would have been great to have a car museum, but my parent’s antique museum leading to our jazz museum was our path. Neither one was even an idea, yet, but they would both happen in their own time.  This tape was from the mid to early 80’s.  In settling my parent’s estate my sister got this warehouse, so it doesn’t look like I will ever have a car museum because I won’t have a warehouse to store them.  But you never know how things work out, do you?