Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for October 19, 2022

It’s a shame too!

Maybe you should talk to his wife. She might be interested.

Maybe this trip down memory lane is giving JJ time to create the next chapter with Gene, Mary Lou, Meg and Gus?

We bought the obligatory Noritake when we married. Bought a new set on close out. Inherited two more. Just an average Boomer.

This is what I meant by “a lot of heirlooms are junk”. In many cases grandma couldn’t afford Wedgewood or Lennox. The good stuff is timeless. And we use use it often.

But yeah, for a lot of people this isn’t important. And it’s interesting. I had a coworker who with her husband were high income (300K+). They have a million dollar dollar house, with the huge gleaming designer kitchen. But at Christmas she doesn’t cook (in fact, she doesn’t really cook at all). She buys precooked prime rib dinners and serves them on paper plates.

I will say this, when my wife sets the table for a fancy dinner, our guests notice. They will ooh and ahh and say things like “it looks like something out of a magazine!” My wife enjoys doing it, and I enjoy sitting at a table she has set.

Same thing happened to me in 2006 when cleaning out my parents’ home of 51 years. Dad had bought lots of LP records at cheap prices. I tried a store that sold vinyl records, they didn’t want them. I tried a store that handled selling your stuff on eBay. Lady pulled up vinyl records on eBay to show me the going prices and said that they were not worth anything. Sadly I put them in the dumpster that I had rented.

If the dishes are Flo-Blue, they are worth a fortune. They might wantto check with antique dealers.

Funnily enough, I just sold a set of Fiesta Ware to someone.

Call “Replacements Limited” and see if they will give you anything for them. My spouse was into depression glass and I still remember what she paid for a plate that came as a premium in a Dose box.

so the kids are still running a restaurant? Or again? I thought they went broke or something?

Must be one reason they are in the 300K+ range?

Worked in a restaurant that had china plates. They switched to nice plastic ones that looked like china. The nice thing is they were way lighter and easy to bus. The problem was they were way lighter and the dishwasher was turning them into frisbees, LOL!!! They had to readjust the water pressure.

You can’t give away $6000. worth of pinwheel crystal either. Much to the chagrin of my sister who acquired that much over the years.

We have china we bought before our wedding. And we have a set of silverware that belonged to my wife’s grandmother. You can buy both on ebay, etc. It’s not hard to find a setting for eight WmRogers silverware that some girl bought for her “hope chest” and has never used, often for less than a set of stainless from Walmart. And yes, we use it at Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc. And yes, we have to polish it before we use it.

is this a re-run ?

Oh, yeah? Put them out by the dumpster with a sign on them that says “Do not take!” They’ll be gone before you get back to the house… ☺

I think many of us have heirloom china that has been passed down to us from our parents, grandparents, and even great grandparents. I have a porcelain platter that, according family lore came over from Germany with a boatload of immigrants sometime during the 1800s. My favorite set is my Christmas Lennox china that my dad bought for my mom. I also have family china dinnerware and and silver sets about 100+ years old. They don’t see much daylight.

Salvation Army and other 2nd hand stores are inundated with “heirloom” dishes and glasses and won’t take them.

Oh well Janis you can donate them to some charity?

Yep. We had a 60-piece set of vintage Limoges china that no one wanted, though we tried several places. Eventually sold the lot for $50 to a collector through neighborhood listserv.

Oh the amount of Royal Albert “Old Country Roses” china we’ve got around the house. Had the base set and would add items as we came across them (thrift stores and the like). Amazing all the things that got the pattern. The gold gilt makes them unusable in the microwave though. We really never pull ‘em out and use them. I’d never do it to mine, but what seems to be a popular use is making teacup and saucer ‘garden stakes’. https://www.plowhearth.com/en/Ceramic-Teacup-Garden-Stakes-Set-of-2/p/53371

Get a booth at the antique mall. I’ve never seen so many dish sets and glassware.

There was a fight over my Mother’s china. She jokingly said one time at a family dinner that the china should go to her granddaughter since her name and the name of the china was Ramona. However, it was given to me by my Mom before she died so there wouldn’t be a fight over it. Didn’t work. My sister and her daughter hounded me until I gave up and sent it off to them. I didn’t use it anyway – too afraid of breaking it, so I guess it worked out, but it sure tore a hole in my relationship with my sister.

And really pretty much anything else to the kids except money…..

My wife’s great grandfather bought out a china shop that was going out of business, so we have a few of those sets, plus some her father brought home from Japan after the Korean War. I’ve wondered about the feasibility of renting it out through friends who do catering.

Despite part of a rerun week – no year copyright with this strip?

I’ve been to restaurants that serve meals on collected, mis-matched old china. If it chips or breaks, it is easily replaced— just another staff run to the local thrift stores. But a far larger problem with old china is the high lead content lurking in and leeching from the glazes used ‘back then’ (even on the ‘good’ stuff.) Same thing applies to all that lovely old crystal.

Older folks see their junk as heirlooms while younger people see heirlooms as junk.

Old plates, anything that goes on a table, the old table, the chairs, the bureau, the chest of drawers, the coffee table — vintage or antique, doesn’t matter, nobody wants any of that stuff now.