Few of this collection’s holdings are more powerful than the Union Army battle flag framed above the landing of the central stairwell (Fig. 16). The flag, whose thirty-four stars date it to 1863 (West Virginia and Kansas had just become states), is unusual because of its relatively small size. “Most battle flags are huge, because they were used by the cavalry,” the collector says. “But this one was carried by a Pennsylvania infantry company.” The silk fabric is fraying at the edges, lending the red, white, and blue threads a fragile luminosity. For me, the flag is the most stirring item in the collection, both a work of art and a piece of history.
This is a house that encourages daily intimacy with its objects. The owners use their antiques, and visitors are urged to play with the toys. “Everything in the house is in use,” Ogle says as he drops down into a eighteenth-century windsor chair in the dining room. Wandering into the laundry room, the owner runs his hands through a wire basket of early twentieth-century wooden clothespins that he and his wife use for the laundry. He then glances at a nineteenth-century wooden blackboard on which the two leave each other chalked notes. The eraser is a vintage Milton Bradley.
The passion for collecting runs deep in this couple. Early in their married life they filled a 1760 house outside New York with antiques. But it was not until they moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s that they began acquiring objects in earnest. On a visit to Santa Fe they became enamored of American Indian artifacts and began collecting them. The husband liked beadwork. The wife loved baskets and nineteenth-century Navajo jewelry. In the 1990s they sold most of that collection. They had discovered Americana.
In an upstairs guestroom an optometrist’s sign featuring cast-iron spectacles with the original blue glass lenses stares down. In the master bedroom, an 1852 Pennsylvania Soap Hollow dresser painted with gold horses and stars and signed by its maker, John Sala, is in daily use (Fig. 10). In the master bath, a nineteenth-century placard (Fig. 18) conjures up the snake oil salesmanship of a lost age: “Hair Restorative Restores Falling Hair. Prevents Hair from Turning Gray. Price: $1.00.”
Often accompanied by Ogle and Douglas, the collectors enjoy traveling to the major antiques shows in New York, Nashville, and New England. “The sick part of it,” says the husband as he waits for Ogle to mix a bourbon and water in the bar just off the kitchen, “is that we’re always on the hunt. We’ll never stop looking.”
Steve Oney is a Los Angeles-based writer and is the author of And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank.
Pickle Dish, American China Manufactory (Bonnin and Morris), Philadelphia, 1771-72. Soft-paste porcelain with lead glaze; height 4 3/16, width 4 1/2
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