Hoarders Have To Go.

[Stanley Doble]

No matter where you are I guarantee there are old cars and other old thing going to wrack and ruin out of neglect, or that are up for sale near you.

Why don't you go "save" those things, since you feel so strongly about it?

Because if you did save them YOU would turn into a hoarder.

So, If I save old things I should be damned as a hoarder. If I can't or won't preserve them I should be damned as a hoarder anyway.

It seems like the only way I can avoid being damned in your book, is to just scrap everything I can't use as soon as I get my hands on it.

Now about the guy who owns the cars in the picture. Maybe I have some insight on what is going on there because I am a collector, or hoarder, as well.

The story says he is a collector known for saving some very rare old cars. I bet he has a garage, or garages full of nice old cars carefully preserved.

So far, so good.

If he is like me and every other collector I know at some point his acquisitions outpace is storage capacity. At that point you have to leave your least valuable cars outside, or sell them, or do something.

Evidently he had a lot of old cars that were no better than parts car, or too far gone to restore. He was storing them outside.

Rather than leave them laying around at random like a common junkyard he arranged them into an "art exhibit".

This was very clever on his part because it dodges one of the hazards of storing old cars, which is having your property condemned by the local zoning authority, and having your cars towed away and scrapped.

A friend of mine left a nice, original, but not plated 57 Rambler sedan parked in his driveway for 2 weeks while he went away on vacation. By the time he got back it had been towed and scrapped by the town. It does happen.

So, I don't like seeing those cars rotting into the ground either. But there are other angles that you are not considering.

 

[Vintage lover]

My problem with a democratic governing body is this: popularity contests only measure the sways too and fro of the majority, while caring very little about the disagreeing minority. Milton Freedman once said something to the effect that in a democracy, if 51% of the population votes for the other 49% to be shot it is done. Government always comes down to force. Whether its the rule of the few, or the majority, governments always rely on force to enact policy. What would we do if the voters simply didn't care about these treasures? Even worse: what if there was a wave spreading among the people that everything old is bad and should be forgotten or destroyed? As much as I want to clobber this scoundrel, I have no right to command him.

As to auctioning off the cars, what would happen if this man wasn't alone? What would stop somebody with the same idea as him from buying the cars and letting them rot some more? Would people be sent to check on the welfare of the vehicles?

As to animals being property, I simply cannot see them in that manner. I grew up considering pets as family and treated them as such.

 

[Fastuni]

@Stanley Doble
The guy is not a collector who is simply overwhelmed by his collection, but doing this on purpose as an "artwork". So it is not just neglect, but malice.

So what exactly was your point again?

If it is just a storage problem - sell them.

Why don't you go "save" those things, since you feel so strongly about it?

If I had the money to save everything I can, I'd do.
I do it on a scale I can afford by collecting and taking good care of historical clothing and household goods.
So I put the money where my mouth is to the best I can.

@Vintage lover

Animals are in my personal view also not just "things", but in most legislation they are considered property, although by now animal protection laws are being included. I mentioned them only as an example of regulated use of "property".

Milton Freedman once said something to the effect that in a democracy, if 51% of the population votes for the other 49% to be shot it is done.

Which is Friedmans peculiar interpretation of "democracy". This is unregulated, lawless mob-rule.
A democratic political system as commonly understood (and many other goverments - not all democratic) has laws protecting the minority and preventing this kind of "dictatorship of the majority". It was used by Friedman as a theoretical construct of "unrestricted rule of the majority". Otherwise it would be a strawman.

I think we can come to an end with the clearly political aspects- as this is not welcomed by the FL.

 

[sheeplady]

I'm not sure if this guy is a hoarder or not. At face value, if I take him at his word, he is an "artist." However, most hoarders have excuses for their behavior, and I can see "art" being one of them.

I grew up with hoarders, my parents. It is an illness. At one point they were using my husband and I's home to further their hoarding. My mother, who is always complaining that she "makes a space and he fills it" about my father enables my father's hoarding. They honestly believe that they are taking better care of an object than you ever will. Case in point was my "wedding present"- a Model A. It is on a dirt floor in a shed surrounded by wire and garbage. It is only under shelter because when my parents bought another car they needed space and were going to put it outside, I took the initiative at age 14 and cleaned out a space for it. My parents pushed the car where it sits while I steered because I couldn't get the thing to start (and I was the only one who tried to start it). I was told that they were giving it to me when I got married. As in, "Your wedding gift is the model A."

I got married 9 years ago this June. Note I do not have said car.

I have cleaned out my garage. I have lined up a flatbed to bring said car here. I have offered money (far more money than it is worth) for it. I have asked for the title numerous times. My parents proudly brag that they gave me this fabulous car for my wedding to anyone who will listen. (In their stories the car runs and is fully restored. Well, it both ran and was restored when they got it.)

Note I do not have said car.

When I press it, I am told that I will not care for the car like they do. My mother starts screaming at me about how I throw out yogurt containers and plywood that has nails in it because I am wasteful and disrespectful. The last time the tires were inflated was 6 years ago when my husband and I crawled back there to try and access the damage. Sigh.

Add to this they have a 66 Mustang, a 72 Buick, a 37 Chevy Dumptruck, and a 37 Caddy Coup. I will not tell you how these are stored.

 

[Vintage lover]

Fastuni, you are a gentleman. I disagree with you, but I simply have to commend you on your civility and intellectual approach in what turned into a political debate. I will simply say that I see where you are coming from, digitally shake your hand, and shake my fist at the man who is letting these poor cars rot.

Its so nice to see that The Lounge is still as classy as it was years ago :eusa_clap

 

[Fastuni]

I appreciate your comment and virtually doff my hat. :yo:

 

[HudsonHawk]

... causes were mentioned. As you don't accept historical and cultural heritage of any kind to be a legitimate cause I think we can leave it at that.

That is unequivocally false. But we can still leave it at that.

A historical car is in terms of value and scarcity not comparable to a hat or razor. Also I did not say that I am against the intended use of historical cars - to the contrary. The intended use of clothes is to be worn and razors to be used to shave. So please put away this strawman.

But what if you don't use those razors to shave? What if you simply keep them in a box, away from the rest of the world? Should they be confiscated? It's far from a strawman.

You don't seem to understand the line of legimation in a representative system.

And you don't seem to understand the concept of personal liberty.

By this logic no act of government would ever be acceptable.

I'm not sure how you make that leap in logic. I've argued that the government should not have the authority to limit personal liberty unless it interferes with someone else's. In no way, shape or form have I argued for anarchy.

I never claimed it is.
You made the comparison of "German sense of dictation" vs. "American sense of liberty".

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.

If he ever hears you would accept wrecking Monticello...

I think he would accept it too. Not that either of us would advocate it.

Why even bother trying to patch back together a strawman?

You keep using that word. I'm not sure you understand what it means. Tobacco as an example of a waste of money is not a strawman. It's an extreme example used to make a point, not unlike your example of buildings and livestock. In this case, that what one person considers a complete waste of time, money and resources is a perfectly legitimate pursuit to another. If anything, it's more of a reduction ad absurdum argument.

 

[Fastuni]

And you don't seem to understand the concept of personal liberty.

Your concept of personal ¨liberty¨as can be glanced from your posts:

There is no cultural, historical or societal value for you that could possibly come before the unbridled right to property.
Mind you this is not about cars - by your own writing you also reject the existing practice of historical heritage preservation by democratic countries, because this is to you "dictatorship".
Destroying unique historical heritage, buildings or works of art is to be accepted for the sake of "private rights".

One might call it narrow-minded individualist fundamentalism... [huh]
I'd be tempted to describe this view also as cultural nihilism.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.

Obviously.^^

If anything, it's more of a reduction ad absurdum argument.

Absurd indeed.

You keep using that word [strawman]. I'm not sure you understand what it means.

Many regular posters are sufficiently familiar with your typical modus operandi (strawmen and sophistry) on this forum. :yawn:

-

Feel free to have the last word - this exchange has gone to a level where continuation would be either too political or too personal to be appropriate (if it isn't already there).

 

[HudsonHawk]

Your concept of personal ¨liberty¨as can be glanced from your posts:

There is no cultural, historical or societal value for you that could possibly come before the unbridled right to property.
Mind you this is not about cars - by your own writing you also reject the existing practice of historical heritage preservation by democratic countries, because this is to you "dictatorship".
Destroying unique historical heritage, buildings or works of art is to be accepted for the sake of "private rights".

One might call it narrow-minded individualist fundamentalism... [huh]
I'd be tempted to describe this view also as cultural nihilism.

If that's you take away from this, so be it. I can't understand it for you.

Many regular posters are sufficiently familiar with your typical modus operandi (strawmen and sophistry) on this forum. :yawn:

Again, I don't think you understand what a strawman argument is.

Feel free to have the last word - this exchange has gone to a level where continuation would be either too political or too personal to be appropriate (if it isn't already there).

It isn't personal on my end. But ok.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm not sure if this guy is a hoarder or not. At face value, if I take him at his word, he is an "artist." However, most hoarders have excuses for their behavior, and I can see "art" being one of them.

I grew up with hoarders, my parents. It is an illness. At one point they were using my husband and I's home to further their hoarding. My mother, who is always complaining that she "makes a space and he fills it" about my father enables my father's hoarding. They honestly believe that they are taking better care of an object than you ever will.

There's the difference between just having a lot of stuff around and actual *hoarding* -- when it takes on an emotional aspect as opposed to a practical one. My grandmother had a tendency in that direction, but just for certain items -- specifically, brown paper bags. She would carefully fold and store every grocery bag that came into the house -- not because she had a practical purpose for them but because she was convinced she would have a need for them someday, and didn't want to be caught short. I always figured this had something to do with her experiences as a young married woman during the Depression, followed by the years she spent dealing with wartime shortages. I think a lot of people of her generation were marked similarly.

I have always had a tendency in that direction myself, and for similar reasons --after an eviction scare when I was six, I spent the rest of my childhood convinced we could lose our home at any moment, and figured I'd better be prepared. As I've gotten older, I've had to make a conscious effort to avoid anything that could lead to "hoarding" -- I have a firm rule that I don't buy anything that I don't immediately intend to use, and I try to avoid having "collections." I do tend to bring home things I see at the side of the road or at the dump -- especially typewriters, for some reason -- but if I don't immediately have a use for such items I clean them up and give them away. I've given away several typewriters over the years to people who expressed an interest in having one, and the only ones I've kept for myself are the one in my office and the portable I had in high school.

I do feel guilty over throwing away cottage cheese containers, because we used them as cereal bowls when I was little. But I force myself to do it.

I hope you get your car while it's still salvageable. If it's any consolation, Model A's have perhaps the best availability of parts and service of any prewar car.

 

[HudsonHawk]

There's the difference between just having a lot of stuff around and actual *hoarding* -- when it takes on an emotional aspect as opposed to a practical one. My grandmother had a tendency in that direction, but just for certain items -- specifically, brown paper bags. She would carefully fold and store every grocery bag that came into the house -- not because she had a practical purpose for them but because she was convinced she would have a need for them someday, and didn't want to be caught short....

I have a firm rule that I don't buy anything that I don't immediately intend to use...

Mrs. Hawk has a friend (which is my friend too), about your age, who has a terrifying fear of being caught without toilet paper. While I certainly understand that's a place no one wants to be, it's a major psychological issue for her. She buys large amounts every time she goes to the market, meaning she has a whole room full of it now. Well over 10,000 rolls.

 

[Stanley Doble]

My mother saved brown paper bags too but we used them up as fast as we got them. For lunch bags, for making book covers for school books, cut into sheets for scratch paper and to do our homework on before recopying it into our expensive (10 cent) scribblers. For lining garbage pails. For mending things around the house, making patterns, wrapping things and of course, to use as bags to carry things in.

Now there are no paper bags and I save plastic grocery bags because, what are you supposed to do with the dam things? I stuff mine in a drawer like everyone else. When the drawer is full I donate them to the library or thrift store or put them out in the recycling. I don't know what else to do with them.

The old folks of my grandparents generation lived comfortably and never went without because they never wasted anything. They lived well on less money than we give welfare cases today.

It is a completely different way of looking at things. The way we live today would seem hopelessly extravagant, even crazy to them. And, habits we form when we are young stick with us. It could be some people learned to save paper bags, newspapers, and bits of string when these were useful household items you used every day. In later years the habit stayed around even though the reason had evaporated.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Does anyone else remember saving bread bags to wear on your feet? Put them on over your socks and your feet slide easily into your winter boots and if you get a soaker your feet stay dry. They seem to help keep the cold out too.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We always did that as kids -- walking to school in Maine could be very chilly with wet feet. You'd put on a pair of heavy woolen socks, then the bread bag, then a rubber band to hold the bread bag in place, and your boots over that. You'd carry your shoes in your lunch box, and change into them once you got to school.

The middle-class kids, of course, all had snowmobile boots, but I'm willing to bet we had drier feet.

Plastic grocery bags are good for holding the scooped-out materials from the cat box. Scoop out the stuff, throw it in a plastic bag, tie the bag off, and throw it in the garbage can. Or across the fence into the junkyard if the garbage can is full.

I still have a ball of white twine about the size of a bowling ball I accumulated when I worked at the t-shirt factory. I don't use white twine all that much, but it's nice to know it's there if I need it.

 

[Papperskatt]

Now there are no paper bags and I save plastic grocery bags because, what are you supposed to do with the dam things? I stuff mine in a drawer like everyone else. When the drawer is full I donate them to the library or thrift store or put them out in the recycling. I don't know what else to do with them.

I (and I guess most people in Sweden?) mainly use them as garbage bags. Or to carry things in.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Does anyone else remember saving bread bags to wear on your feet? Put them on over your socks and your feet slide easily into your winter boots and if you get a soaker your feet stay dry. They seem to help keep the cold out too.

It's very common around here for folks to use plastic bags to put their boots on. Slip the bag over you feet, you foot slides into the boot, then pull the plastic bag out.

 

[sheeplady]

There's the difference between just having a lot of stuff around and actual *hoarding* -- when it takes on an emotional aspect as opposed to a practical one. My grandmother had a tendency in that direction, but just for certain items -- specifically, brown paper bags. She would carefully fold and store every grocery bag that came into the house -- not because she had a practical purpose for them but because she was convinced she would have a need for them someday, and didn't want to be caught short. I always figured this had something to do with her experiences as a young married woman during the Depression, followed by the years she spent dealing with wartime shortages. I think a lot of people of her generation were marked similarly.

I have always had a tendency in that direction myself, and for similar reasons --after an eviction scare when I was six, I spent the rest of my childhood convinced we could lose our home at any moment, and figured I'd better be prepared. As I've gotten older, I've had to make a conscious effort to avoid anything that could lead to "hoarding" -- I have a firm rule that I don't buy anything that I don't immediately intend to use, and I try to avoid having "collections." I do tend to bring home things I see at the side of the road or at the dump -- especially typewriters, for some reason -- but if I don't immediately have a use for such items I clean them up and give them away. I've given away several typewriters over the years to people who expressed an interest in having one, and the only ones I've kept for myself are the one in my office and the portable I had in high school.

I do feel guilty over throwing away cottage cheese containers, because we used them as cereal bowls when I was little. But I force myself to do it.

I hope you get your car while it's still salvageable. If it's any consolation, Model A's have perhaps the best availability of parts and service of any prewar car.

It took me years to realize how sick my parents were. There were two turning points for me.

One was when at an auction I bought 5 boxes of cook books for $1. Since it was the end of the auction, the auctioneer threw in several boxes of junk. One box was a box of stuffed animals. Used stuffed animals that looked the worse for the wear. A man came up to me and offered to pay me $1 for the stuffed animals because they matched the ones he had bought for his daughters. I told him, "Here, have them, I was just going to donate them anyways. I wanted the cookbooks." They were obviously poor. I was going to donate the stuffed animals. He had kids. I didn't want them. I really didn't want to take them home then to the thrift shop.

My mother saw me give them to him and she fumed at me, "Those could have been worth money!" And right in the middle of the auction dressed me down for being so stupid as to give away stuffed animals that could be worth millions. My husband and I had to leave because she was getting in my face and screaming at me. I'm pretty sure the cops were being called.

The second event happened years later. By then I knew they were sick, but how sick I really didn't know until this happened. My mother lost a bracelet she and my father had purchased for me. First, she accused her best friend of stealing it. Second, she remembered two weeks later she had made a compartment in the guest bed's box spring to hide it (under the mattress, and under the table and boxes she had piled on top of the mattress), because she was afraid it would get stolen. This was a $20 bracelet. My parents have never been robbed. They know no one personally who has ever been robbed. They do not live in a high crime area. I'm pretty sure if someone broke into their house they wouldn't steal the bracelet first thing. (They'd probably break in and immediately leave once they saw everything a mess.)

So, of all of the things they have done, the car sounds the most sane, sadly.

 

[tonyb]

On a few acres not far from where I sit at present was a large collection of old cars and trucks and school buses and the like, left to rot away in the perpetual damp of what had been, until recently, a temperate rain forest. (We still get the rain, but the trees have been cut down and shipped off to China.) After years of citations and various court actions a fleet of tow vehicles hauled the collection away. This was four or five years ago. I drove by as the clearing was taking place and talked to the young man operating the roll truck with the old Porsche 356 on its back. "You're scrapping THAT?," I asked. He said there was really nothing there worth salvaging anymore, that it was so rusted you could poke through the sheet metal with a screwdriver like a hot knife through butter. Swiss cheese floors, nothing left of the interior, etc.

The fellow who owned the property (and the vehicles, presumably) was in violation of a list of ordinances. As it turns out, you can't operate a junk yard just anywhere (thank the God of your choice for that limitation on personal liberty). My understanding was that he inherited the property, that it had been in his family going back generations and that he was more than a bit of a crank, always tussling with neighbors and the local authorities.

It's understandable how a person might get to feeling a bit put upon by encroaching civilization. I certainly do my share of sneering at the gentrifiers who came to "save" my old neighborhood up in the city. Listening to them talk, you'd think the place was unfit for human habitation before they came along and priced out the natives. (I don't object to the escalating value of our humble little house up there, though. Nope, not one bit. Gentrify away, y'all.)

The fellow cited by the OP isn't a hoarder in the sense of any hoarder I've ever known. The poor deluded folks I've known acquired stuff that had real value at one time, and in many cases it still does, but they rarely if ever part with any of it, so they never realize anything that might honestly be called a profit. And whatever beauty or utility the items may have is lost on them, as their stuff is buried under piles of their stuff.

 

[tonyb]

Plastic grocery bags? Great for picking up after the dog.

 

[MikeBravo]

Maybe someone should back a truck up at his place