Hidden Treasures

by Leigh Keno

  Barn hardware was not the only thing we ferreted out of those wooded sites, however. The decaying foundations of old houses, for example, stood as signposts to old refuse pits—literally, nineteenth-century garbage pits—which were another source of potential treasures. After hunting the surface of a site for all that we could find, we turned our attentions farther away, to the area that immediately surrounded it, and asked ourselves, If we had lived in this place, where would we have thrown our trash? The answer usually lay over the nearest hillock, just out of view of the surviving structure, because the low rise acted as a natural buffer to what originally must have been an unsightly pile. We discovered that lilac bushes often sprouted over these waste sites, perhaps attracted to the moist, dark soil, so if we spotted that fragrant bush, we made sure to dig near the roots.

  Leslie and I would often work silently together for hours, clad only in our work boots and jeans, sifting through the ground as the shifting shade of the trees above sheltered us from an otherwise-relentless summer sun. There was suspense in each shovelful of moist, gritty soil, which was further sweetened by the aroma of the earth itself. For us, these were times filled with the kind of unadulterated intensity—a purity of focus—that I think is reserved for children, try as we might to recapture it throughout our lives.

  Sometimes our excavations yielded nothing more than broken bits of oatmeal-colored stoneware—that practical, daily-use ceramic that might be best described as the Tupperware of the nineteenth century—but occasionally we uncovered an old inkwell or pieces of fancier tableware, such as English soft-paste pearl ware (a form of cream-colored earthenware) or blue-and-white Chinese export porcelain (made in China specifically for export to Europe and the United States). More often, though, we found fractured bottles of colored glass—ones that had probably been used for alcoholic beverages or for medicinal purposes—and occasionally came up with a perfect, unbroken specimen.

  Just as with the wrought-iron hardware, there were levels of rarity to the shapes and colors of the glass bottles. We sometimes carried a price guide to antique glass bottles with us when we worked, so we could immediately determine the value of our discovery. The most desirable colors were amber and sapphire blue, followed by assorted shades of yellow-green. Next were the aquamarine examples, followed by colorless or clear bottles, which were the most common.

  For weeks in the summer, we could spend every day combing the same site, over and over, deeper and deeper. It was addictive, because the lower we dug, the earlier the vintage and more rare the samples we might uncover. One memorable bottle that we discovered was an aqua-toned pocket flask that resembled a pumpkin seed in shape. It had a flat oval body leading to a short, narrow neck, and we called it the “Christmas flask” because it carried a raised imprint of what looked to be a fir wreath on one side. By the early nineteenth century, glassmakers began hand-blowing the glass directly into a mold that could yield any pattern they fashioned. Politically inspired portraits of men like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Andrew Jackson proved incredibly popular, as were images of the American eagle and ships flying the American flag. Our small flask not only displayed a less mainstream (and therefore rarer) image and a sumptuous color; it was also in absolutely mint condition: not a chip or scratch, despite the small colony of black beetles and other residue that we shook from its clogged interior. When we first spotted that piece peeking out from the soil like a gem, our whoops of joy bounced off the rocky ravine where we worked and rose high into the valley around us.

  Circa 1969, about the time we started our diaries.

  Teenaged lecturers. A prized early-nineteenth-century water cooler.

  2

  “We Are Antique Dealers”

  WHEN LEIGH AND I WERE TWELVE, we decided to start a joint diary. Like many children that age, we had begun to develop a sense of our own personal history. Finally, we had lived enough actually to have a past significant enough to recall—and, of course, we were beginning to dream about our future. Unlike most other children, however, our dreams revolved around antiques, and not just the kind that we were finding in the woods. Flea markets, tag sales, and antique shops also loomed large in our early childhood, and with a diary, Leigh and I decided, we could chart the progress of our expanding interests. We resolved to record and research in the greatest detail the many objects we admired and sought.

  When my brother and I first decided to write this book, we revisited those diaries, which had somehow come to be stored in a large brown cardboard box in the back room of Leigh’s Madison Avenue gallery. On a cold winter’s night not too long ago, we hauled the box out into the wide arena of the gallery’s main show space and set it down on top of a rare Philadelphia piecrust tea table. We then pulled up a pair of walnut side chairs made in Boston around 1740, lifted the long rectangular top off the box (inhaling the musty scent of aging paper), and began to weed through its jumbled contents.

  We were immediately sent back in time by the well-worn pages of each battered notebook filled with our alternating immature hand—replete with misspellings, food stains, and doodles. I am still amazed by our first and rather prophetic entry, dated July 15, 1969, in which we unabashedly declared, “We are antique dealers. Leigh & Leslie 12 years old (at this time).”

  I think we saw those words as our mission statement. We felt we were making official our entry into the world of antiques. Our mutual love and appreciation for old things, stems, of course, from our parents, who were, and still are, avid collectors and dealers. As we wrote in our diary that first year, “We actually owe part of the intelligence that we have in antiques to…our Mother and Father. They got us interested in this fabulous hobby. We think that they diserve a good hand. We want at least 1/2 the credit to go to our fantasticly wonderful parents.”

  Misspellings notwithstanding, Leigh and I got a good laugh from the line that directly followed that statement, which reveals just how focused we were; “By the way, we are writing on an early Hepplewhite table (tiger maple) that we estimate is worth $150.00. It is a very fine piece of furniture.” What we were referring to was a trim little drop-leaf table (often termed a Pembroke table) that sat in our parents’ living room. It had a rectangular top with two hinged leaves on either side that could be pulled up and supported by a pair of wings, or braces, that extended like fingers on the underside (open, it probably measured close to thirty-five inches in width). The table’s triptych top featured a wonderfully charged tiger-maple wood, so called because its distinctive rippled pattern (caused by an aberration in the grain) resembles a tiger’s stripe. It was an elegant, well-proportioned piece that probably dated to the 1820s. That is why in our diary we made reference to the English cabinetmaker George Hepplewhite, whose influential book The Cabinet-maker and Upholsterer’s Guide (first published in 1788) forever linked his name with Neoclassical style, in both England and America. Until our parents sold the table a few years back, it was the oldest piece of furniture in the house.

  It may seem unusual that Leigh and I were so consumed with the search for and study of antique artifacts, but I don’t think we ever had a choice in the matter. It was simply in our blood. What Dad has always called the “antiquing thing” began with our paternal grandmother, Anna Keno, who, around the time our parents married, developed an interest in trivets, the small short-footed stands, usually made of cast iron, that were used to protect tabletops from oven-hot pots and dishes. After rooting around in her attic one day, Grandma found one that had belonged to her mother. The trivet’s base formed a scripted letter W, which likely stood for Westermann, her mother’s family name. Grandma decided to hang the piece in her stairway hall, and within a short time, that single trivet was joined by another and another, just as Grandma herself would be joined by one collecting Keno after another.

  Our parents married quite young. Mom was eighteen and had just graduated from the Herkimer County High School, while Dad, aged twenty-one, was a junior at Syracuse University. After their marriage, our f
olks moved into a small two-bedroom apartment that Dad built over the garage of his parents’ place. That’s when they began accompanying our grandparents on visits to small antique shops in the area. Our grandparents were still on the lookout for trivets, but it wasn’t long before Mom and Dad began pursuing objects that caught their own fancy.

  Their first purchase was a late-nineteenth-century dry sink made in New York. It still carried its original buttermilk red paint (so called, according to Dad, because the deep brickred color could be formulated at home by mixing a powder pigment with any convenient liquid medium, such as buttermilk). Nowadays, many people use these freestanding wooden washbasins as planters, but originally they were used for cleaning dishes in kitchens that lacked running water.

  Soon after our parents took the dry sink home, Dad did what many others did at that time: He scraped the old red paint right off. This was, of course, the worst thing he could have done, but back in the early 1950s, people didn’t respect old finishes the way we do today. Regardless, a few weeks later, our parents spotted a chest of drawers that they thought would prove more useful in their newlyweds’ home, so they sold the sink (actually managing to double their investment) to buy the chest of drawers. Antiquing was not only fun, they quickly discovered, but it could be profitable, as well.

  By the time Mitchell was born in December 1952, Dad had also begun to pursue another passion of his, collecting classic cars. Some people find it surprising that Mom indulged Dad as much as she did. At one point in the early 1970s, Dad was storing eight cars on our property, including a silver 1938 3.5 liter SS100 Jaguar and a white 1954 XK120 Jaguar coupe, two of the world’s sexiest sports cars. At times, our property may have resembled a parking lot, but, then as now, if Dad was happy, Mom was happy, too. So, while other young couples bought sensible Dodges, Fords, Chevys, or Plymouths, the growing Keno clan piled into an old Jaguar, Cord, or Auburn, none of which qualified as a typical “family car.”

  The family.

  With Dad on the fender of a rare 1931 L-29 Cord.

  Despite our parents’ growing interest in antiques and automobiles, they were by no means wealthy people. As Leigh mentioned before, Dad was a trained painter; for a living, he taught art at Mom’s alma mater, the Herkimer High School. But he also supplemented the family’s income as a structural ironworker, working on bridges and buildings around Utica during school vacations. Leigh and I remember taking him lunch with our mother while he was working on the South Washington Street Bridge, which now spans the Mohawk River and the Erie Canal (in parts of Herkimer County, the two run side by side) from north to south. There, we gazed up in complete awe at Dad, our hero, skirting the exposed network of metal support beams rising eight stories into the sky.

  Right after our parents moved to the farm, Mom took a more serious stab at the antiques business and set up a small shop in our home. As it turned out, Mom was a born seller. Her success as a saleswoman came from her direct and low-key approach to her customers. She would tell visitors just what she knew about a piece and leave the rest up to them. And when clients came to the house, Mom placed Leigh and me—then about five or six—in charge of minding the shop, which of course pleased us no end. We loved cautioning browsers to handle the merchandise with care, although, in hindsight, I suspect it was Mom’s tender way of ensuring that we were the ones who were careful.

  “The Homestead”—where we first learned about original condition.

  A few years later, Mom moved the shop across Creek Road to an early-nineteenth-century homestead that was part of our property. (Sadly, that house—which had probably been built by the people who originally settled our land—has since been torn down to make way for a state highway.) Despite its run-down condition, the house was a magical place, with the original bean-shaped wrought-iron handle on the front door, wide pine floor boards, plaster walls, low-beamed ceilings, and a neatly built green-painted pine corner cupboard in the large parlor room that Mom converted into her shop. Walking in there, you were immediately enveloped by the spicy smell of old wood and warm fires extinguished long ago. It is an unforgettable scent, one that I regularly catch inside the many high chests and corner cupboards that I examine at Sotheby’s. As teenagers, Leigh and I used to spend time down in the homestead, hanging out with our buddies, sneaking cigarettes, and listening to the Grateful Dead and Tranquillity. But that was only after Mom had moved her shop off the premises, to a storefront in Fly Creek, a town about thirty miles south, toward Cooperstown.

  The shop may have been Mom’s domain, but our parents were a team when it came to acquiring antiques. Dad has a wonderful eye for objects, probably because of his training as an artist. One of the questions he always asks when evaluating a new object reverberates with Leigh and me to this day when we look at American furniture: “Does it speak to you?”

  A piece may be authentic and unaltered and possess the right color and finish, but if it lacks an inner light, Dad believes, there is nothing even the best salesman can do to convince you of its greatness. Great objects should trigger reactions that are visceral. And this criterion applies as much to high art or masterpieces as it does to work done by blacksmiths, carpenters, or nonacademic painters—folk art, or innocent art, can also be breathtakingly beautiful in its natural expression.

  The first purchase that Leigh and I recorded in our joint diary was a small Canton ginger jar, about six inches high, which we bought from a woman named Myrtle Dicker for fifteen dollars. In retrospect, acquiring that porcelain jar (probably made around 1840 and shipped from China’s port of Canton to the United States) was not a particularly significant event in our early collecting history, but meeting Myrtle Dicker certainly was. Myrtle was a retired schoolteacher who had taught in the Poland Central School just outside of Cold Brook, the small village where she lived, a few miles north of Utica. During the early 1940s and 1950s, Myrtle had run an antiques business as a sideline from her home. But by the time we met her in 1969, she was all but retired from antiques as well, and whatever signage she had posted outside the large yellow Victorian house had long since fallen down and never been replaced.

  As with so many folks in this business, Myrtle was a character. Quite simply, she was the most stubborn, ornery, unpredictable woman we had ever come across in our young lives, but she had her reasons. By the time we met her, she was well into her seventies and so crippled by arthritis that she needed a walker to get around. A large woman with shoulder-length gray hair, she spoke with a German accent that seemed forever colored with pain and frustration. I think we first met Myrtle through a friend of our parents named Roger Johnson, who was also an antiques dealer (and also quite a character). In the thirty-five years or so that we have known Roger, he has always driven a battered van stocked with the tools of his trade: old receipt books scattered across his windshield, quilted packing blankets stacked high in the trunk, and a few boxed items that are always for sale.

  By contrast, Myrtle’s house, and all its glorious contents, sat virtually undisturbed and forgotten in that sleepy little village nestled deep in the foothills of the Adirondacks. In all the years that we visited Myrtle, the phone never rang and no one ever came to call. After our first visit, though, Leigh and I were captivated by the beautiful things that we saw there and insisted that our parents take us back as often as they could (usually about twice a month). Every cabinet, dresser drawer, and visible surface above or beneath her chairs, tables, and even the beds held a gem.

  Myrtle’s taste in objects was exceptional. She had a great eye. She owned a number of large country pieces. In particular, I recall a tall eighteenth-century pine corner cupboard in the living room. It had three open shelves on the upper half and inset paneled doors below. There was also a wonderful tiger-maple kettle stand with a circular top and three cabriole legs, which was kept in an upstairs bedroom. But the strength of her collection was in early “smalls,” items that could be easily handheld or carried. The reason for this was that back when she was actively acqui
ring antiques, in the 1940s and 1950s, she bought most of her stock out of the homes of her neighbors. Usually, that meant eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century ceramics, pewter, glassware, woodenware, and iron—all items that could have been easily transported to the area by the earliest settlers. This was also the reason why Leigh and I chose to focus on those same categories when we first entered the field. We liked the early things—and still do today—and the oldest pieces that had survived in our rural pocket of New York State tended to be smalls.

  In some ways, Myrtle was a mentor to us—albeit, an unorthodox one—for she insisted that we understand the merits of the objects that we enjoyed and studied in her home. “Has anything been done to this cupboard?” “Is this the original surface?” “Do you think this painting has been altered?” “Why is this burl bowl better than the others?” she’d query us firmly.

  But even if we made it through the rigors of her questioning, it was still never clear that we would be allowed to buy anything. In fact, nothing in Myrtle’s house ever displayed a price tag or sticker, so we might jump through her hoops for hours on end, only to discover that the object we coveted was not for sale. Or she might agree to sell something and then abruptly change her mind and ask us to leave. On Mom’s advice, we always came bearing a quart of vanilla ice milk to soothe our way into Myrtle’s good graces, but she still pushed the limits of our twelve-year-old patience.