When an old lawyer in Franklin died and his office furnishings were being sold, Mother said to my father: "Cliff, if you can get those office chairs of his at fifty cents apiece, I want them." My father thought Mother was daft to want the homely old things, but she persisted, until all eight chairs were in our dining room. Recently a man who's a decorator came to my apartment in New York, with some friends. He saw two of the same chairs, which mother had sent me years ago in a generous truckload of furniture from home. "Where did you get those?" he asked, in the tone one would normally use to inquire after the crown jewels. I told him what I remembered of the original transaction, while he scrambled around the floor on his hands and knees, examining the chairs' bottoms.

"Hand-doweled," he muttered, lying with his chin hooked on a chair rung. "Too marvelous." He used a lot of other adjectives I've deliberately forgotten, due to the fact that decorators' phrases, if taken internally, have a tendency to make my stomach rumble. However, I do remember that he offered to buy the chairs at forty dollars apiece, whenever I felt like selling. "Early Pennsylvania Dutch," he said. "Practically museum pieces." Since then, I've viewed the chairs with proper respect, as a nest egg in case of emergency. Every free-lance writer needs a couple of early Pennsylvania Dutch chairs to fall back on.

-- from We Shook the Family Tree (1946)