Big Buying in Nashville

The parking lots are huge at Gaylord’s Opryland Resort in Nashville, like everything else about the facility. Tour buses, pickup trucks pulling large cargo trailers and thousands of cars co-exist happily on acres and acres of white-lined litter-free asphalt. Once our van and trailer have come to rest in this vast shiny pond of road warriors, we are very reluctant to move them again, ever. After the icy ordeal of the day before, I hate even looking at our frozen, mud-encrusted rig.

We unload our personal gear and for almost a full day do little more than clean off road grime and fast food grease. We rest. We read the paper. We nap. We swim. We walk around and through and over the gardens and fountains and river that fill the huge atriums of the 4 separate “neighborhoods” of our hotel. Our road nerves subside with a good night’s sleep.

The prospect of some serious inventory acquisition finds me at 8 a.m. with an early buyers pass at the Fiddler’s Inn Motel. The Fiddler’s Inn is just across the highway from where we are staying and is the site of what is known in the trade as the “Tailgate” show. It’s one of a number of lesser satellite shows that spring up around the mega “Heart of Country” show in the Opryland complex. The “Tailgate” show is not pretty. It’s a street bazaar for professional level antique buyers - nothing more. There is no glitz, scant creature comforts (in the form of a half dozen Porta-Johns) and most assuredly no mercy for the faint at heart or uninformed.

There is a dealer or dealers for every single room in the motel. They use their quarters as their selling space. Many - if not most - actually stay in another motel further down the road. Beds are pushed into the back and bathrooms fill up with packing material and additional inventory. In addition to the rooms, the parking lot and balconies fill to overflowing with antiques for sale.

To prevent chaos everybody has to wait for permission to set up shop. No jumping the gun allowed. Prior to the appointed time, the dealers are only allowed to get their trucks and vans positioned near their rooms. Precisely at 8 a.m. the word goes out from the show’s organizers that it is now OK to unload. Until that time they stand around and gossip like schoolchildren waiting for the bell to ring.

As I enter the motel grounds, permission to set up has just been given. Nothing is really on view yet but even at this very early hour I can see sharp-eyed buyers standing near the tailgates of certain favorite dealers looking intently at each piece as it gets unloaded.

“What’s that, Sam?”
“Federal…Clean as a whistle…Even got original brasses…Out of an estate auction in northern Indiana…Wish I had a dozen.”

A small man in red sneakers wearing a ski cap with earflaps peers intently at the small bureau. He’s a dealer from just around the corner. While his inventory, what I could see of it, suggests he deals primarily in porcelain and paintings, he gets on his knees and tips the bureau high enough to look closely at its legs. He opens the drawers quickly and peers inside each one. He runs his hands all over its dusty surface.

“What you want for it?”
“Thirty eight hundred.”
“For me?”
“For you thirty-three.”
“Will you hold it?”
“Joe, it’s not even unloaded. Ask me again at noon.”
“It won’t be here then.”
“I hope not.”
“I’ll take it you big bully.”

Total elapsed time? Maybe two minutes.

I can’t buy antiques like that. It takes me more time to think about things I see. Generally, if the time is available, I also like to check my impressions with Sarah, my wife and partner. So it’s about 11:30 and the unloading is well along before I make my first choices, a big heavy iron eagle that was once sat on top of a Chicago bank, a wonderful, big, carved wooden squirrel painted an improbable shade of green and a group of little carved song birds sitting on a rustic log.

I want Sarah to see a great country piece that, because it is expensive, I feel needs the two of us to agree on. It is a big pewter cupboard in a warm, worn red that looks like a New England piece because of the curves on the bonnet. There is also a very fine sailing ship model in perfect condition and I covet a group of 9 cast iron right hands that once to decorated an Ohio fence. (I know what you’re thinking but they are great.) It is with a hungry stomach and sore feet that I finally head up an alley and meet Sarah at the local Country Kitchen around noon for a quick bite.

The original plan was to give over my early buyers badge to her so she could do the afternoon shift. The badge was very expensive and we thought we could tag team the buying process and save money. As it turned out, even though we had heard from dealer friends that the security would be tight, we were able to walk around together in the afternoon.

I am happy to say that my partner loved the pewter cupboard, the model and the iron hands. That afternoon we also buy a child’s Windsor chair in great old, blue paint, a funky duck sewing box, a striking, red industrial wheel and an old, blue blanket chest in an unusually small size.

So it is that around 5:00 pm, after more than 7 hours on my feet, we stagger across the highway to the parking lot of the Opryland Hotel. We slowly drive back to the Tailgate Show and gingerly maneuver our van and trailer through the still busy, constricted merchandise aisles to retrieve our purchases. We had traveled over a thousand miles to do what we have just done. We are exhausted…and satisfied.