He Flew 3,000 Miles for the Last Rummage Sale

In September 2009 the school announced the sale would end after 65 years. Foster Huntington, a Catlin Gabel alumnus who had attended from sixth grade on, was then a senior at college in Maine. He later wrote on his blog that as the Maine nights got crisp, he started building a case for flying 3,000 miles home to Portland for a long weekend. He had not been home in eleven months. He called his parents and announced he was coming.

I want to be very clear about this. Eleven months away, and what brought him home was a rummage sale. I would take it. I would meet the plane.

For two weeks in late October, he wrote, the school more or less stopped while students, teachers and parents collected and sorted donations and moved them to the Portland Expo Center. There was a presale for parents, alumni and volunteers at 3 p.m. on the Thursday. He was there at 2:45.

He brought the traditional equipment, which the post shows in a photograph: an old cardboard box with a length of binding twine. You drag the box behind you. Your hands stay free.

For two hours he dragged it among the tables, taking pictures as he went, through piles of shirts, old license plates, tools and boots, filling the box. Then the doors opened to everyone else. It was, he wrote, everything he hoped it would be.

A newspaper story at the time, as the student paper recalled, profiled a volunteer who had worked the sale for 45 years, and another who had persuaded her sister to fly in from New York to help.

So he was not the only one who flew.

We had a garage sale in May. The youngest, who had read about this with me, found a box, punched two holes in one end with a pencil, and tied on a jump rope. She dragged it up and down the driveway all morning, collecting things we were trying to sell. By noon she had repurchased, for nothing, most of the inventory.