You Can Buy Anything Somewhere

Our neighbor, Buddy Hewitt, had a need for a washboard. So he went to all the big box stores to find one. Strike out. In desperation, he went to Hymie’s tiny, crowded hardware store in the middle of our village. “Do you have a washboard?” Buddy asked. “What size?” Hymie replied. “I have two or three in here somewhere.”

I use rubber cement, gallons of it over the course of a couple years. All the stores stock only 4-ounce bottles. So I searched the Internet and found Bill Smith’s company. Chatting with Bill I learned he also sells spirit duplicator fluid, the nice smelly blue “ink” kind, that some poor school districts still use. He may be the only person to do so.

Wand a caboose for a summer cabin? Look in the back of Trains magazine. They also have ads for private railroad cars and homes right near the main lines.

Did a plane crash in relatively good shape? There is a place which rents out the pieces for tv shows and movies. You look at a shot of some busted plane and it’s theirs. People inside all tossed around: it’s a piece of some unfortunate airliner that ain’t gonna fly no mo’, no mo’; it ain’t gonna fly no mo’.

Want this or that piece of housing, outside trip, gee-gaws for your garden? Some outfit in Southern Connecticut gathers them up from properties being torn down and they are yours for the going price. It looks like an orderly junkyard, which it is, but a very profitable one indeed.