Memories Live at Estate Sales : Leisure World: It’s become a bittersweet ritual in the retirement community. Some residents buy cherished belongings of their late friends to remember them by. Others are just looking for bargains.
Virginia Perkins used to marvel at the busy schedule kept by her neighbor, Harriette Sackett, and would wave to her across the garden courtyard in their Leisure World neighborhood. She admired the cleverly decorated sweat shirts Sackett wore to the clubhouse gym where she worked as a nurse.
But Perkins had never set foot inside her neighbor’s townhouse until after she died. On Thursday she returned for the second time, one of about 200 people who came to sift through Sackett’s lifetime of belongings at an estate sale.
“She was a marvelous person,” Perkins said of the woman whom she now has learned was a talented seamstress, evidenced in the hand-sewn sequined and beaded jackets and evening gowns and the afghans and tablecloths that Sackett had knitted and embroidered during her lifetime.
For Leisure World, it was another in a regular series of estate sales that often follow a resident’s death. Antique dealers and other store owners come searching for bargains, but for many who live here, it provides a rare window into the life of someone they knew, and a chance to come home with a memento from the life of an old friend.
Gladys Angle, 87, who came to the Sackett sale, said that when one of her friends died recently, she picked up an item at the deceased’s estate sale that will always remind her of their friendship.
Angle said she had always admired a seascape painted by her friend and told her that if an estate sale was held upon the friend’s death, she would buy it. Angle said she kept her promise, and the seascape now hangs in her home.
Some estate sales are conducted by the relatives of the deceased or by Leisure World residents who are moving to smaller quarters in residential facilities that provide more personal care.
But many of the larger estates are handled by professionals.
“Most people don’t realize what they have. You have to price and tag everything down to the last knife, fork and spoon,” said Karen Vicker, who with her identical twin, Sharon Hawkins, has been conducting estate sales in Leisure World for 19 years.
Depending on the content of the estates, she said, the sales can gross between $2,000 and $150,000. For their services, which may include weeks of preparation, the sisters get 25% of the proceeds.
While estate sales are their business, the sisters say they enjoy learning about the lives of the people whose treasures they are selling--and sometimes they are emotionally touched.
Hawkins keeps the picture of 4-year-old James Stuart Britton and the announcement of his birth, dated March 19, 1925, among the family photos displayed in her own home. The boy is no relation, however.
His picture was part of the estate of a woman who had kept it, along with booties, letters and other items, to remind her of her only child. They boy had left college to join the Air Force in World War II and was killed on his first mission over Japan.
“There was no family to pass it on to and I couldn’t throw it out,” Hawkins said. “Any mother with a son would take it home. I feel that his mother says, ‘Thank you.’ ”
“What is great about our job is that we get to know the people without ever having met them,” she said.
Some people contend that there is a ghoulish aspect to estate sales, as strangers coldly assess the deceased’s most valued possessions and cart them away.
“I have written orders that I don’t want an estate sale,” said Dianne Pitts of Leisure World.
William Lucky, 85, disdains the process. “If you look at this too closely there is a connotation of sadness,” he said. “How would you like people thumbing through your stuff?”
For others, the Thursday and Friday estate sales are more like weekly outings to an antique mall or flea market.
“It’s an addiction,” acknowledged Pitts, who bought a sweat shirt with the likeness of two cows on front that reminded her of a herd that grazes the hillside beside her Leisure World home.
Elizabeth Dubin, 70, had targeted a Bissel carpet sweeper that her granddaughter, a student at UC Berkeley, can use in her apartment.
“Last week I got her an electric wok and a tea kettle,” she said. Buying appliances at estate sales, she said, “is low cost. Better than even going to K mart.”
Other Leisure World residents were looking for furnishings for their own homes. George Lasso, 76, a widower, bought a double bed with mattress for $75. He joked that he had decided to replace his single bed “just in case I find a girlfriend.”
Elizabeth Penney of San Diego, Sackett’s niece and closest living relative, said her aunt, who died in March at 73, had no children, brothers or sisters. She said Sackett, a widow, had done a lot of traveling and taken many cruises, on which she wore her sparkly, handmade clothing. She also had been active as an officer in the Eastern Star, a fraternal organization.
Penney said that when her aunt realized that she was dying of cancer, she told her: “When I’m gone, sell this place as soon as you can and have an estate sale.” Unless she had received those instructions, Penney said, she probably wouldn’t have had the heart to hold the sale.
She said she did go through her aunt’s things and selected special items for herself, including pictures her aunt had taken on her travels.
“I’m a pack rat and my first intention was to keep everything,” she said. “But as my house started to burst at the seams, I realized I couldn’t do that.”
