Manvel, North Dakota is a town of about 400 people located roughly 10 miles north of Grand Forks and this weekend they are celebrating the 125th anniversary of the town.

Part of the celebration is a city-wide garage sale that consisted of four sales. All four were located within a three block stretch of the same street. Working my way down the street, the first three offered nothing of any interest, but the fourth one was like a flashback to twenty-five years ago.

Amid the baby cloths, furniture, Harlequin romances, and used small appliances was a six-foot table filled with things “that came from my Grandmother’s when we moved her into a rest home a month ago.” Nearly all of Grandma’s stuff was priced at 5 cents, 10 cents, a quarter or 50 cents.

Here’s a picture of what I bought.

Included were:

• Two carnival glass bowls
• A set of four carnival glass wine glasses
• A Royal Bayreuth bowl
• A RS Prussia plate
• A RS Bavaria bowl
• An RS Bavaria creamer
• A hand-painted German serving tray
• Another German hand-painted bowl
• An old German roly-poly toy
• A pressed glass toothpick holder
• Three sets of Rosemeade salt & pepper shakers
• A hand-painted Japanese condiment set
• A Fenton wedding basket

When I was done and asked the young woman having the sale how much I owed her, she replied - $2.70.

That’s what sale used to be like around here twenty to twenty five years ago. You could walk out a garage sale with two or three cardboard boxes filled with things and be only two or three dollars poorer. That doesn’t happen very often any more.

As a side note, there were only sixteen garage sales that started on Friday in Grand Forks. At every sale, the thirty or forty people who look for inventory for eBay, flea markets, mall booths, etc. were complaining to each other about how tough it was to find anything the last few weeks due to the small number of fresh sales each day.

The sales in Manvel were advertised in Friday’s paper with a start time of 6:00 pm. If these four sales had been in Grand Forks there would have already been fifty or sixty people rummaging through things at 5:20 when I showed up. In Manvel, there was one older gentleman who lived in one of the nearby houses. I basically had all four sales all to myself. None of the thirty to forty complainers from earlier in the day were willing to invest the time and gas to drive 10 miles for a city-wide garage sale.

Saturday morning, I made it a point to ask people if they had gone to Manvel the night before. No one I talked to had driven out there.

I was able to buy the things pictured above for $2.70 because I put myself in places where things like this can find me. No one else was willing to go the extra 10 miles to do that.

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