Vintage Picking and Road Tripping with Dinerman

I would definitely watch this as a reality show! I think it would probably do fairly well!

Yeah, but... You'd go all Hollywood on us and the world would lose a GREAT architect, Spencer!

Last week, we headed off to Big Timber, about an hour west of here. It's always been a quick stop on the way to other places, and I've never had it as a destination; never really spent a lot of time there. We found a large antique store on the outskirts of town we'd never been to before- "Country Crossroads", with a sign saying "gifts and crafts" and a front parking lot full of wrought iron patio furniture. It looked like the kind of place we generally pass up, the type of place which deals in scented candles, reproductions and those tack-welded metal letters you see everywhere now. But we were determined to really do Big Timber this time around, so we stopped. Not a craft or gift-shop tchotchke in sight. All good vintage and antiques, all organized by type, size and color. It killed me to pass on a set of large Halliburton aluminum cases, but with the big trip coming up, the less large things like that I buy, the less I have to put into storage.
We swung through Livingston on the way back home, hitting and striking out at my favorite thrift shops. While Alex was out getting some more shots for an upcoming photo series. I popped into Mountain West Mercantile, discussed earlier in the thread, here: Vintage Picking and Road Tripping with Dinerman to visit with its owner and my friend, Tamara Mason. After some shop talk, she showed me a couple of western suits that had just come into her shop. Oddly, the market for that style is much stronger in Europe than it is in the US. It's easier for me to sell them online to someone in the UK or Germany than it is for her to sell that particular shade of vintage westernwear at a shop specializing in vintage westernwear in the American west. The vintage market is bizarre sometimes. I somehow left a pair of pants from one of the suits behind in the shuffle and in a typically Montana act, she drove over the mountain the next day to hand deliver them. Again, I can't recommend her store enough- if you're here, you have to stop.



Yesterday's trip was to Red Lodge, MT. Red Lodge boomed in the early part of the century following a coal strike in the 1890s. The mines largely closed during the depression. Tourism bolstered the town's economy in the 1930s following the construction of the Beartooth Highway and it now straddles the fine line between upscale ski-town and down on its luck Montana mining town. The "antique mall" in town turned out to be a relatively small storefront shop dealing in old-west reproductions and rifles, and the thrift shop inside a senior center, while clean and organized, didn't have much stock older than the 1990s. The antique shop and thrift shop on the way back, in Columbus, Montana were both closed in that typically small town way that makes you wonder if it means closed for the day or closed for good. So 300-some miles on the car and a tank and a half of gas and nothing for the shop to show for it.



But, as you can see, an interesting town. We were struck by the herds of deer and especially by the dozens of wild turkeys roaming the downtown. Deer on the steps of the courthouse. Turkeys at city hall!

Dinerman said:

Last week, we headed off to Big Timber, about an hour west of here. It's always been a quick stop on the way to other places, and I've never had it as a destination; never really spent a lot of time there. We found a large antique store on the outskirts of town we'd never been to before- "Country Crossroads", with a sign saying "gifts and crafts" and a front parking lot full of wrought iron patio furniture. It looked like the kind of place we generally pass up, the type of place which deals in scented candles, reproductions and those tack-welded metal letters you see everywhere now. But we were determined to really do Big Timber this time around, so we stopped. Not a craft or gift-shop tchotchke in sight. All good vintage and antiques, all organized by type, size and color. It killed me to pass on a set of large Halliburton aluminum cases, but with the big trip coming up, the less large things like that I buy, the less I have to put into storage.
We swung through Livingston on the way back home, hitting and striking out at my favorite thrift shops. While Alex was out getting some more shots for an upcoming photo series. I popped into Mountain West Mercantile, discussed earlier in the thread, here: Vintage Picking and Road Tripping with Dinerman to visit with its owner and my friend, Tamara Mason. After some shop talk, she showed me a couple of western suits that had just come into her shop. Oddly, the market for that style is much stronger in Europe than it is in the US. It's easier for me to sell them online to someone in the UK or Germany than it is for her to sell that particular shade of vintage westernwear at a shop specializing in vintage westernwear in the American west. The vintage market is bizarre sometimes. I somehow left a pair of pants from one of the suits behind in the shuffle and in a typically Montana act, she drove over the mountain the next day to hand deliver them. Again, I can't recommend her store enough- if you're here, you have to stop.



Yesterday's trip was to Red Lodge, MT. Red Lodge boomed in the early part of the century following a coal strike in the 1890s. The mines largely closed during the depression. Tourism bolstered the town's economy in the 1930s following the construction of the Beartooth Highway and it now straddles the fine line between upscale ski-town and down on its luck Montana mining town. The "antique mall" in town turned out to be a relatively small storefront shop dealing in old-west reproductions and rifles, and the thrift shop inside a senior center, while clean and organized, didn't have much stock older than the 1990s. The antique shop and thrift shop on the way back, in Columbus, Montana were both closed in that typically small town way that makes you wonder if it means closed for the day or closed for good. So 300-some miles on the car and a tank and a half of gas and nothing for the shop to show for it.



But, as you can see, an interesting town. We were struck by the herds of deer and especially by the dozens of wild turkeys roaming the downtown. Deer on the steps of the courthouse. Turkeys at city hall!

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Great pics,thanks.

Always enjoy the posts and that your living your passion

Keep up your travels. Helps the rest of us feel like we are almost right along for the ride!

Turkeys at city hall? In this country?

tropicalbob said:

Turkeys at city hall? In this country?

Click to expand...

Hey, everybody keeps voting them into office!

It's nice that a lot of Dinerman's great finds end up on the worldwide market. And so well described and documented too.

The plan was to make a run yesterday down to Dillon, in Southwest Montana. We stopped in Butte for lunch at the reopened M&M cigar store (founded 1890) and at a few antique shops. After a stop at Rediscoveries Vintage Clothing and a lot of shop talk with owner Brian Mogren, who's owned it since 1980 and really knows his vintage, it started to snow. With deteriorating road conditions in the direction we were planning on traveling, we were forced to turn back to Bozeman, making a brief stop on the way back in Whitehall for some photos.

This weekend, Alex had a commission to do some photography back in Anaconda and some thesis photography work that took us to Deer Lodge and Philipsburg.
With snow in the forecast for Saturday, we drove out Friday night, after a stop at an antique fair in Bozeman. I got my shop talk and dealer gossip in with Tamara of Mountain West Mercantile (Livingston, MT) and Brian of Rediscoveries Vintage Clothing (Butte) and found a couple interesting bits of vintage.
Then off to Deer Lodge, a little over 120 miles away. Deer Lodge was founded in 1864, around the Grant-Kohrs Ranch. The Montana State Prison was built in Deer Lodge in 1871 and operated through to 1979, when it was replaced with a new facility outside town, currently the major employer of the area. Deer Lodge was a major railroad town in Montana before being bypassed in 1980. Railroad hotels built in the early decades of the 20th century sit abandoned, The Montana's ground floor businesses having survived into the early 1980s, while The Deer Lodge was abandoned after a boiler failure in the 1960s. The historic prison is now a museum, comparable to Alcatraz, only without any other people to spoil the creepiness of the experience. An annex to the prison houses a car museum, and buildings across the street are used as an old west museum, toy museum, pen museum, and a local history museum. This is well into the off season. Downtown is more dominated by pawn shops, casinos and bars this time of year.
We woke up to whiteout conditions out our window at the Western Big Sky Inn. Lucky for us, it was more wind than snow and the roads were more or less clear by 10. It hasn't been that long since we were in Deer Lodge, but two of my "go-to" stops have disappeared, an antique shop in an A-Frame on the edge of town and a thrift/junk/antique store right downtown. The antique store by the prison didn't seem to have any new stock since my last pass through over the summer and the thrift shop had almost no men's section. We drove around town taking pictures, through the residential areas, with their one bedroom company houses, through the industrial areas (there is still one large lumber mill just outside town) and through the back alleys of the main drag. It's always fascinating to see how these towns have changed. How the ground floor of a building was redone in the '60s, and now bears a sign from the '80s, but the upper floors are untouched. How the facade of a building may stand, but the building behind is a pre-fab metal shed, erected after a fire claimed the original structure. While taking pictures of one of the abandoned railroad hotels, the owner of a secondhand shop down the street poked her head out and started watching us. In typical Montana fashion, instead of "hey what are you doing, get out of here!", we were met with the full history of the place, which she now owns and has been working on fixing up when time and money allow, and of the town, with some recommendations on hidden spots for us to shoot.

Then on to Philipsburg (founded 1867), a former mining town which went bust following the closure of mines and sawmills in the 1890s. Starting in the 1990s, the town began to be restored and geared to tourists. It's a beautiful town, very much in-tact, but with a fakeness stemming from the restoration. The most compelling buildings were the ones on the fringes, still abandoned, still bearing faded signage from the 1920s in the windows. The 1990s does 1890s signage hanging from all the businesses (candy stores, gift shops, breweries, jewelry stores) and the restorations deny the century in between, the rise and slow decay which makes all these western towns so interesting. It's nice to see a town in this area having found a way to drag itself out of the ashes, but it's strange to walk down a main street filled with things which are so real yet feel so fake. We had a great lunch at the local soda fountain, a drug store from the late 1800s with a beautifully preserved 1930s Liquid Carbonic Corporation soda fountain and 1990s-does 1950s retrofication. The thrift shop was a gold mine, and we found a cache of vintage hardware at the antique shop for the bus interior. We drove Alex's '96 4 Runner on this trip and kept getting stuck in snow or sliding backward down hills while exploring the neighborhoods. Scary, but no harm done.

Finally, we ended up in Anaconda. We've done Anaconda so many times now for Alex's photo projects that it's started to feel like home. Like a small town that you're trying to escape. We were set to meet up with a photo client for a commission of some photos of downtown around noon. It later turned out that his short ski trip scheduled that morning had turned into a 20 mile backcountry trip. So we waited. And we waited. It being Anaconda, there aren't a lot of businesses. It being Sunday, there weren't a lot open. It being Super Bowl sunday in a sports town, there was nothing open. We've so thoroughly done the town on a half dozen other fine-toothed-comb photo trips that even driving around for hours, we couldn't find much new to shoot. So we sat in the car downtown waiting for the phone to ring for hours, until the sun started to dip behind the mountains which ring downtown. We eventually got the call, halfway back to Bozeman, and all was resolved. Alex had guessed and taken the shots that were needed in the time we were sitting. I made a good enough haul Friday and Saturday to pull the rest of the trip into the black.

Great report and photos (as always). Nice finds too! Love the black cowboy boots, but they don't look to be my size.

They're dwarfed by those size 14 Whites, which belonged to a driller for the Anaconda Mining Company back in the 1960s. Must have been a big fella.

Nice haul!! Looks like such a fun gig.

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We were off to Helena today. Not a lot of sightseeing this time around, strictly business. I made some pretty good finds, a Pendleton half-belt gabardine jacket, '40s 3 piece suit, a few other jackets, shirts and odds and ends. The only real setback was the vintage/consignment section of one of my favorite thrift shops being closed off for the day. Smooth sailing otherwise.

Brilliant (as usual).

Some of the finds- I kept the shirt for myself and my roommate snagged the m1950 field jacket.
I found a nice WWII issue peacoat at the last thrift shop we hit, but wasn't able to buy it- it had been set aside as a free coat for the homeless as part of a drive and they wouldn't pull it on a paying basis.

Been working on the bus- seats are all out, interior's painted. We recently got our solar panels, inverter and battery array in, as well as a vintage dresser, set of plates and cups and spice containers. I'll be posting more in the next couple of days.


Off to Las Vegas and Salt Lake City on Tuesday, have close to 100 thrift and antique shop stops planned out, and will be shooting video. Watch this space.

What a teaser Spencer! Road ccommodations sound like they'll be dee-luxe too

Here's to hoping! We're trying to keep things as simple and off-grid as possible. The solar panels should be enough to charge camera batteries, run computers for editing and power a few LED lights. We've opted for a heavy duty cooler over a fridge to minimize electric usage or having to plumb it for propane. Water's run by a foot pump and we have a composting toilet. Other than the propane stove, there's very little with the build-out that can go very wrong on the road. We'll be using the bus's existing wheelchair tie-down rails (which you can see four of in the picture above) to bolt down every piece of furniture and bit of storage, so no worries of cargo shifting or things flying about. There's a lot more space in the bus than we would have ever expected, and we've managed to keep everything low with all the windows clear, so it should be nice and bright.