You Can Pick Your Friends, You Can Pick Your Nose…

I have a confession to make. The thing I love most about collecting is the pick, spotting the gold in the scrap pile. That is why I spend every minute I can on the floor at the National, from opening to close, relentlessly going through boxes of cards and memorabilia. Whether I call it intuition, my “Spidey sense”, or something else, the fact is that I get off on finding something that no one else sees, especially when I can make it into something financially rewarding. Seeing a bet like that pay off is better than drawing to an inside straight in a poker game, better than getting a raise, even better than sex (never thought I’d write that).

I’ve always been like this. I suppose much of it is the unintentional byproduct of the way my father would always break my balls about work when I was a teenager. Great guy, my old man, always trying to impress on me the value of hard work, regardless of how hard I was working at the time. Our biggest disagreement of my teen years was over his incessant demand that I get a part-time job AND push to the top of the class at an elite private prep school. I know, boo-friggedy-hoo for the rich kid. Well, try working a 60-hour week at one job (school + homework + extracurriculars needed to build a college application resume = 40-60 hours spread over 6 days) then being told to go flip burgers for $3.35 an hour on the weekends.

It all started when I turned 16. Living in suburban Los Angeles, my father told me I was getting a car AND a job to “make some dough” to pay for the car. Seemed like too much trouble to me, so I said: “then I don’t want a car. I’ll keep taking the bus.” He said I was getting a car regardless of what I wanted (my parents needed me to drive my little sister around to her various appointments) and I would have to support the car, so I had to go get a job. I had some real shit jobs. I worked food service, drove delivery, even did telemarketing (that was the worst one of all; try having strangers tell you to go fuck yourself 300 times a shift and not want to slit your wrists by the end).

OK, he was clear, I had to make some money to pay for the car I didn’t want. I did the math and realized that working at $3.35 an hour even in the 1980s was a really shitty deal. As a minor I could only work four-hour shifts. Work a four-hour shift for $13.40 in gross pay, then pay FICA and Medicare from it? And I gotta pay for gas to get to and from work? Yeah, sign me up for a slice of that on Friday and Saturday nights.

The worst was the summer after my freshman year in college, I got the most coveted of teenage jobs, working in a movie theater. It was clean, indoors and union, so it paid a lot better, relatively speaking, then all the food service jobs I’d had, and I got to see movies for free. I worked eight-hour shifts on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, then had four days off, and made more “dough” than working 5-6 shifts at other teen jobs. On three, off four was not good enough for my father. No four-day weekending for me. He told me that I had to quit the union job and get one that I had to go to every day, even if the net pay was less each week, because getting a job wasn’t about the money. Not about money? Then WTF was it about, Dad? I didn’t know the phrase “gaslighting” but I sure knew what it was before I was 20.

Needless to say, I did not learn the lesson about working that my father intended to teach me. Instead, my teenage years gave me a real attitude about work. I always identified with a line from The Pope of Greenwich Village:

“Let me tell ya somethin' about 'honest work'. When somebody says they got 'honest work', you know what they got? They got a shit job, that's what they got.”

Which is where picking comes in. One good pick could earn me the same money as working for months at a cruddy job, and I was always looking for another way to “make the dough” besides a job. If money was the goal, I just could not see working hard the way my father demanded instead of being smart and doing whatever made me money. Picking was a much more fun and efficient way to get paid. My father saw it as lazy; I saw it as entrepreneurial. We clashed. A lot.

The greatest collecting “pick” of my life was the unintended by-product of my father trying to force-feed me yet another lesson about hard work. One year a few weeks before spring break my father told me that I would be working at his office for spring break cleaning, moving furniture and doing other mind-numbing, back-breaking grunt work, for minimum wage. Never mind that I was an honors student and well on the way down the elite educational track he selected for me—which I thought showed that I had amply learned the importance of hard work when it counted—by his account, I still needed a lesson on the value of hard work, and that meant no lollygagging around for five days with my friends.

Let me set the stage for you. My father was the head of the Los Angeles office of an international public relations firm. His firm had recently merged with another one and they consolidated Los Angeles operations into the other firm’s full-floor offices on Wilshire Boulevard. Those offices were about a third vacant and had accumulated rubbish and storage of decades of operations in about fifty file cabinets in a file room and several offices. My father wanted it all cleared out and the cabinets emptied cleaned, and moved to storage so they could sublet the offices. It was just the sort of dirty, hard, poorly paid work that he always wanted for me. I guess he thought it would build my character.

I showed up bright and early the first day of spring break, resigned to earning my shit-ass $3.35 an hour. I started on the file cabinets that had to be emptied, cleaned, and moved. That is when my Spidey sense went off. The company my father’s firm took over had been the outside public relations counsel for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: the Oscars people. For years, its job had been to coordinate the massive press coverage that the Oscars got every year. The file cabinets I was emptying were the records of decades of Hollywood history: photos, slides, transparencies, passes, badges, programs, posters, tickets. I even found two envelopes used onstage at the actual friggin’ Oscars. All destined to be thrown out.

I immediately asked my father if I could keep any of the stuff. He said sure. I did. Boy, did I. The drudgery of that week turned into the thrill of the greatest pick I had ever seen. I just could not wait to see what was in the next file cabinet. By the end of the week, I had loaded up my car with thousands of items. My room at home became an Oscars memorabilia storage locker.

After spending a bit of time organizing it all, I made up a sample album with one of each of the thousands of photos I’d gotten; there were usually a dozen or more of each photo. I then went to the movie memorabilia stores on Hollywood Boulevard and offered to wholesale them photos at $0.75 each. They jumped at the offer, and I had a steady gig. I could head over there and make a month’s wages in an hour or two, whenever I wanted. My father was bemused. He said he never thought all that crap would be worth anything. But I still had to get a job.

That pick paid off for years. After I graduated and returned to Los Angeles I took tables at Hollywood memorabilia shows and sold Oscars stuff. Leads there brought me to other movie memorabilia picks. I even traded some Oscars programs for an early admission with a dealer the second day and a stack of T202s at the infamous 1991 Anaheim National. Eventually, the remainder went to auction. I’d say that over the years I made a hundred times the money I made in wages that week just by selling the trash I’d been hired to throw out.

I am still looking for that next pick. I comb flea markets and paper fairs, garage sales and estate sales, buying whatever makes my Spidey sense tingle. Last weekend I bought out a giant collection of prewar Asian postcards, ephemera, and photos at an estate sale. I had no idea what they were worth, and still have little to go on (the language barrier is significant) but at the per-unit cost I paid for it, the lot was well worth the gamble. Worst case scenario, I may lose a few bucks; best case, I earn a multiple of what I paid. Either way, working at picking sure beats the snot out of working.

I suspect all of us collectors have some picker in us, or we wouldn’t be collectors. I know a few guys who are professional pickers. They don’t make a lot of money, but they have a great time doing something they love.

I am off next week for the holiday, back the week after that with more philosophical musings and scatological prose.