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My grandparents were survivors of the Great Depression. Their stories are beacons to me in these turbulent times. The tale of my mother’s parents holds special significance for The Gold of Kings. My grandfather was a sharecropper’s son in eastern North Carolina. His own father died when he was fifteen, leaving him as the eldest son responsible for a family of five. These sharecroppers defined poverty in early twentieth century America. My grandfather only had a third grade education, but he studied math and writing on his own, and when he was seventeen he turned the profit of two good growing seasons into his first business deal. One deal led to another, until when he married my grandmother in nineteen-eighteen, he owned the first Ford dealership in eastern North Carolina. He sold one used car that first year, and one the next. My grandmother says they almost starved.



But times grew better, and my grandmother started two habits that she held close until her final days. The first was, she grew the family’s food. There were always chickens, a couple of pigs, an acre or so of ‘trucked’ vegetables, a cow for milk. The Depression hit my family very hard, like it did a lot of others, but my grandmother always kept the family well fed, and the extra food became a vital bartering tool during the roughest patch.



The other early habit which she maintained throughout her life was to invest what extra money she had in antiques. She started with what she knew, which is an early southern speciality called ‘pressed glass’. Wealthier families looked down on pressed glass. They collected lead crystal, much of which came from the Austro-Hungarian empire. But for those people who could not afford crystal which had been carved with diamond-like precision, pressed glass ran a pretty close second. The practice of melting and molding glass to look like carved crystal had pretty much died out by the beginning of the twentieth century. My grandmother built up one of the largest collections in the south.



My mother caught the collecting bug early and well. By the time I reached college, she was running a couple of antique stores and had built up a reputation as one of the wisest heads around on the American Jacobean movement. In our nation’s earliest days, the wealthier colonials migrated with any number of servants in tow. They brought their own bricklayers, masons, metalsmiths, and carpenters. The English colonists often mimicked the style of life they left behind in Britain, and had their carpenters build Georgian-style houses, and fashion furniture similar to what they had known at home. This created a remarkable phenomenon, because what most of the carpenters copied were actually antiques. So the American Jacobean movement runs about a hundred and fifty years behind that of the original British Jacobeans. The result, however, is a style of furniture that is uniquely American.



I myself am no collector. If you were to ask my wife, she would tell you the only way to describe my taste in home furnishes is, monastic. As far as I am concerned, the less clutter, the better. Chintz is almost a dirty word in my book. But my mother still loves me, despite these very large flaws.



Writing this story, and learning the arts and treasures trade from the inside, has been a great way to get back inside my mother’s good books.