THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020 63
M
ost kids lose or break their
toys. I curated mine.
In 1976, the University of
Iowa renamed an existing history-and-
literature program America Studies. It
drafted me and some other merry hip-
pie Ivy graduates to blanket the state
and gather “existing folk manifestations.”
We plundered far-flung Salvation Army
thrift stores and rural junk shops. We
hunted the simple tools and dolls that
our essays overinterpreted. Those startup
treasures helped found my folk collec-
tion, one that’s not unknown today.
Handwrought nineteenth-century
artifacts were criminally cheap then.
“Midwesterners don’t know what they
have, or had,” we Easterners gloated after
country raids.
Prior to radio, before television,
savage winters spent indoors turned
many German-Americans into excel-
lent wood-carvers. Unable to afford child
whimsies (even from the Sears cata-
logue), a farmer just whittled his brood’s
amusements. Those things sure lasted!
Here we have a horse-drawn-farm-cart
toy, scaled for one specific kid. You can
still feel the father’s February yearning
for a warm harvest, his love for the mis-
matched horses hand-portrayed and for
his boy, born to inherit Dobbin, Paint,
and the family acreage.
These days, I’m sometimes interviewed
about my collection. Lazier reporters ask
me to name my most valuable find. It
was actually a gift. I divide my career into
two rough phases: “Toys” and “Post-Child-
ish Things.” And this—hung right over
my rolltop desk—still marks the turning
point between the two.
W
e cheerful avid youngsters, lured
to Iowa City, were given five
twenties a month to spend on outsider
art. Our professor, born in Rome, jok-
ingly called this “ethnographic colonial-
ism within one’s native land.” His lec-
tures were persuasive and dynamic; he
was callous in the pan-gender bedding
of his students, yet sensitive to how all
empires fall. He’d grown up amid artis-
tic beauty that was broken to pieces but
left in place.
We set off every Friday full of caffeine
and an acquisitive sleekness that some-
times passed for sexy. Wearing thrift-
shop moose-motif sweaters, driving
borrowed jalopies, we were cerebral
hucksters out to pillage the second-flight
antique shops of eastern Iowa, western
Illinois. The odder our finds, the brain-
ier we felt. Uncover some handwrought
gimcrack, write an article about it, read
it aloud in class, then seek publication
in some journal suitably obscure. Our
Roman professor stressed the long view,
advising us, “Sapete sempre che voi siete
stranieri... in un Paese molto più strano. ”
And, this being a state school, he im-
mediately translated, “Always know you
are strangers... in a land far stranger.”
We clocked many country miles dur-
ing a long Friday’s “picking.” Toward the
end of such a trek, my classmates were
heading back from the western edge of
Illinois, bound for Iowa City, in a bor-
rowed Ford wagon; I followed in my
overloaded Jeep. We stopped for gas and
bathrooms. Then the others waved good-
bye. I’d spent eighty of my allotted hun-
dred. My haul? A rural mailbox, made
in a 1946 shop class and shaped like not
one or two but three Scottish terriers, two
white, the middle one black, whose con-
joined mouths accepted letters, parcels. A
pink chintz hostess smock edged with so
much nineteen-forties rickrack it looked
all but Aztec. And my hands-down most
ironic iconic Find of the Week: a hand-
somely lettered five-foot-long sign ex-
plaining, “You’ve Got to Be a Football
Hero to Get Along with the Beautiful
Girls. THEREFORE, GO TECH!”
This kind of joke was then thought
“smart.” And no one was more enslaved
to fashionable smartness than a hy-
per-educated boy of twenty-six with a
twenty-nine-inch waist and, so Mother
always hinted, a colossal I.Q. I look back
on him with a curatorial mixture of pride,
amusement, and pity. I think he conde-
scended to the very loot he intended to
save then praise. (But surely that prob-
lem’s built into the notion of taking a
graduate degree in “self-taught artists”!)
Though tired and hungry, I felt greedy
for one more twenty-dollar prize. Proud
as I was of my football pep-squad board,
I knew I’d not yet found this outing’s
“it.” I imagined discovering, in every
dairy barn I passed, some primitive oil
portrait of Lincoln, painted when he
was yet a beardless state legislator here.
My friends swore they’d save me a
stool at Hamburg Inn No. 1. The blue-
plate special, this being Friday, was
surely fried fish. Sunset offered a limit-less salmon-orange. In one farmyard, a
tractor tire on its side—painted white—
had been filled with soil, then white ge-
raniums. Dusk now turned these all the
colors of a campfire. Tidied fields shad-
owed toward something sinister. And
should that huge rooster be crowing
right at sundown? I sped through a pretty
little town called La Verne. And, just as
its propane gasworks and beauty parlor
(itchily called LuAnn’s House o’ Hair)
gave way to corn-green countryside, I
spied a dangling Colonial sign whose
girlish freehand promised:Theodosia’s Antiques
(real and imagined)
Only Thing Reasonable Here?
Our Prices“Well, hell. Somebody’s thinking,” I
said aloud.
I aimed my Jeep toward the unlit
store, which, up close, looked out of
business. I’d already popped my clutch
to find reverse when I flicked on my
headlights, then my high beams, then
braked. That cigar-store-Indian thing
bent in the window? With jewelry all
over it? It appeared to be either some
dressmaker’s dummy or perhaps a human
being. Oosh, it’d definitely moved.
“Evening,” I said, smiling through the
door chimes’ sweet-and-sour tinkling.
“You must be the eponymous The-o...”
“Herself.” I warranted one courtly,
bitter nod.
Caught hovering at her window, wor-
ried this might seem invitational, the
owner must’ve made a fast crablike re-
treat to a high stool. The climb still had
her panting. She presided behind an
outmoded silver cash register that itself
looked like a costly toy, circa 1923.
What had bent her so? Fever? Birth
defect? Her spine showed the exact angle
of an opened safety pin; its clasp, her
hooded face. Theodosia, weighing less
than ninety pounds, seemed to wear her
best stuff. A county’s worth of timepieces
were pinned to her otherwise concave
chest. Ladies’ watches, some with clock
faces visible, others locketed away, a few
on pulleys that allowed easy consulting,
quick return. Their metals glinted across
her front like military decorations.
It was the day’s last stop, so I quickly
scanned, nose wrinkling. I sometimes
imagined I could smell the hidden trea-
sure. Where was “it”? Maybe lurking