What Do I have/ Story Telling Time Thread

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Long winded story time:

I should start off by saying, I dont really care what this mag goes to, but I'm cleaning/sorting stuff and rediscovered this after not seeing it for a few years. Also, I know the other item is a funnel. No one needs to tell me that. Lol.

A little over 3 years ago, I went to my first real estate sale. I always enjoyed flea markets and yard sales, but felt it was kind of weird going thru someone else's house and seeing everything from their entire life for sale. I saw an ad for this estate sale on Craigslist by chance because a friend was looking for a boat motor and I was looking for him. I decided to go with him because the ad said there were a ton of machinist tools as well.

When I got to the house, I was a bit overwhelmed. There was cool shit everywhere. This was a Sat/Sun deal and the place was loaded with people on Sat morning. I'm a machinist/ hobby woodworker and this guy had it all. So I start picking and in one corner of the basement, I noticed some reloading equipment. I got more excited, but with the amount of people there, you don't want to tip anyone else off of a good score.

I ended up talking to the estate people, she gave me a fair price on a huge amount of this man's life and set a bunch aside for me to pick stuff up when it wasn't so crowded.

The next day, while taking possession of this estate, I learned that the previous owner had passed away from a tragic car accident.
You can read about it here.

Mr Oby's obituary said he was a member at Uxbridge Rod and Gun. Although I never knew the man, I think about him often. Which is weird to me. But because of this man, I grew an interest in case forming and wildcat cartridges because of books he had and also some of the tools. I often wonder if he had a NES screen name. Wherever he is today, I hope he has enjoyment knowing he passed a ton of knowledge to a younger generation without even knowing it and I put his custom made funnels to use often.

Now to the mag, it was found on a pile of his things, and I have always assumed it was a bastardized mag made to accept more rounds. I can get 10 rounds of 380 in it. Does the shape look familiar to anyone?

Here's to you Mr Oby.

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Hey - cool story.

Somewhere in my travels I've seen it said that if you're in people's memories - then a part of you continues to live on.

So by that measure - Mr. Oby continues to live on.

Over the years I've helped clear out a few houses and apartments when people have passed. It seems to me that most people just approach doing that by getting a dumpster and tossing everything into it. I've seen a few cases where all sorts of valuable things were just tossed away - in my opinion due to sheer laziness.

I've wondered how some items have survived over many many years - even centuries - when so much just disappeared. I think it's because it's because people find the stuff valuable - and then pass it on. Or at the very least they consider themselves as caretakers of those objects. You can see this with antique cars. The ones that survive are cared for by people who stash them away - while so many others just end up in the junkyard.
 
My grandmother passed in 1981. My grandfather had been a long shore man. I remember my mother throwing out unopened boxes of figurines. She just didn’t like them. I remember them saying Hummel on the boxes and some German writing maybe. The only thing I still have left from that time is a Hummel lamp. I assume they fell off the boat and my grandfather brought them home.
 
My grandmother passed in 1981. My grandfather had been a long shore man. I remember my mother throwing out unopened boxes of figurines. She just didn’t like them. I remember them saying Hummel on the boxes and some German writing maybe. The only thing I still have left from that time is a Hummel lamp. I assume they fell off the boat and my grandfather brought them home.

That's exactly the kind of thing I was thinking about.

Why not at least find somebody who wants the things - instead of just chucking them in the trash?

Many years ago, I think it was when I was college - my father gave away a bunch of my kid toys to one of the neighbor's kids. GI Joes , Matchbox cars - stuff like that. I remember being a bit pissed at the time. I was like "it's my stuff" - and I had actually paid for a lot of it from gift money and $$ I made here and there as a kid.

Recently I was reading an article about the most valuable Matchbox cars that collectors pay big $$ for. I had like 4 out of 10 on that list. The listed sale prices added up to enough to buy a REAL car.
 
That's exactly the kind of thing I was thinking about.

Why not at least find somebody who wants the things - instead of just chucking them in the trash?

Many years ago, I think it was when I was college - my father gave away a bunch of my kid toys to one of the neighbor's kids. GI Joes , Matchbox cars - stuff like that. I remember being a bit pissed at the time. I was like "it's my stuff" - and I had actually paid for a lot of it from gift money and $$ I made here and there as a kid.

Recently I was reading an article about the most valuable Matchbox cars that collectors pay big $$ for. I had like 4 out of 10 on that list. The listed sale prices added up to enough to buy a REAL car.
I know it was just to get it done. She passed and maybe 4 weeks later my grandfather had a stroke. They were trying to sell the house and move on. I understand why, but I’ve tried to learn from it.
 
I know it was just to get it done. She passed and maybe 4 weeks later my grandfather had a stroke. They were trying to sell the house and move on. I understand why, but I’ve tried to learn from it.


That's always the pressure - when something like that happens it's a unscheduled interruption - and most people just take the tack of trying to get it done and over with as quickly as possible.

About 20 years ago my grandmother (father's side) passed away. We were up here - and she lived on Staten Island. At first my father was sort of overwhelmed about how to deal with the whole thing - he was just going to toss everything. I told him to break it up into chunks, don't waste time down there going thru stuff - just chuck out all the stuff that is obviously trash ( the house was full of newspapers and magazines - I suppose they would have value to somebody but at that level it just wasn't worth the time to sort thru), then pack up the stuff that you think you might want to keep or go thru - and get it out of the house. We traveled down there every weekend over the course of like 2 or 3 months - and cleared that house out. Every trip back was cars full of boxes of stuff all packed up. It took him probably a couple of years to fully go thru everything - but he DID find all sorts of cool or valuable stuff in there - that likely would have been tossed if he had given into the time pressure to go thru it all at the house.

A lot of things were given away - clothes to Goodwill, tools to the neighbors, the car got sold locally, some furniture got sold locally - stuff like that.

I did the same thing when my other grandfather passed. He was a big woodwork, I took some of his tools, gave away some of his stock to friends of his, donated some of his tools to the local woodworking guild he belonged to - stuff like that. Everything went somewhere to somebody who wanted it or could use it. Very little got tossed in the trash.
 
Why not at least find somebody who wants the things - instead of just chucking them in the trash?
my grandmother threw the contents of her home away when she moved on to the final chapter of her life. everything. my dads wwII marine uniforms and memorabilia, stuff he painstakingly preserved over the years and maintained there in his moms house at her invitation, from several early pacific campaigns. and my grandfathers possessions. i never met him, died before i was born. he had one thing he loved to do in life...fly fish...and brought that love with him from the old country. there were several rods and a few favored reels i would have loved to be the caretaker of for the rest of my life in that house. and books on fly fishing as well as notebooks he kept as he traveled new england to fish. and his small pocket watch collection. not having a lot of money he made the best of quality, not quantity.

yeah, the house was a treasure chest of family history and mementos. i hope the guys hired to toss it all recognized this and even if for profit, held out and sold some of the "good" stuff to people who'll appreciate and preserve it a bit longer. some, like grandma, don't care.
 
One man's trash....

For stuff to be preserved, you have to have stuff that's worth preserving, and people that have the right mindset to preserve it.

If you've lived with something for decades, but it was someone else's passion/collection/hobby, then it likely does not have the same meaning. When I was a kid, I collected pennants wherever I went - I can still remember buying my first one at Edaville RR. (I can remember how cold it was in the huge barn of a gift shop (ok, huge to a little kid)) and they're currently boxed up. I'll not sell them.

Back when I was on the estate/yard sale -> ebay sales circuit, I looked for pennants. One day, one of my kids asked why I bought pennants for resale, but would not part with the ones I already had. "I'll sell other people's memories, but not my own."
 
Makarov maybe? Kind of looks like this one:


That’s what I was gonna say. The export “hi cap mak”, not the regular single stack milsurp.

Not a real sentimental guy, myself. After the last move, I went through a huge box I had labeled “memories”. What a bunch of junk! Must have been 50 pounds of pictures, patches and medals and plaques. To the dump it went. I never looked at it for 20 years, I’m not gonna miss it. Wife couldn’t understand how I could do that, but I said that life is over, I’m not gonna live in the past, our best days are ahead.
 
I found some old photos from my late teens/early 20s.....I decided to mail the ones of old friends that I still send Christmas cards too. They were very appreciative. I couldn’t just putting them back in a box for my kids to trash when I croak.
 
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