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How did you get started collecting whistles?
I started looking in antique stores, flea markets, junk yards and garage sales. After six months of looking I had not a lead or clue as to where to locate a steam whistle. Then, while on a ski vacation to Colorado it happened. On the way to Breckenridge from Denver we stopped in Georgetown, Colorado for a rest stop and decided to kill some time. I popped into an antique store called the Powder Cache and, after having been in the store for less that a minute I spotted what was to be my first steam whistle.
It was a 4” Buckeye chime whistle in excellent condition. And without any hesitation I paid the asking price of $275 and went away ecstatic with my purchase. My next stop was the hardware store where I bought a can of brass polish and with an old tee shirt from my suitcase I polished the whistle all the way to Breckenridge relegating the job of driving to my wife. The polishing continued for the next several days, I would ski all day and come home to the condo at night and polish. After three days of skiing we decided to take a break and drive up to Leadville, Colorado which is another old mining town a bit off of the beaten path. Leadville had a few antique shops where I found two more small whistles… a 1.5” Buckeye and a 2” Crane. The prices were modest and after my 6 months of intense searching I decided to purchase them also.
And that was the beginning of my whistle collecting career. One whistle is just a whistle, two of them is a pair and three is a collection. I came home to Texas a whistle collector and that was many whistles ago.
Where do you find them?
This is perhaps the most difficult question to answer because there is no one place that I find them. I find them everywhere I look but over the years I have learned to look in the right places.
Understand at this point that I started looking for whistles long before ebay became the guiding force in whistle collecting. Today one can go to ebay and type in steam whistle and come up with 25-50 whistles for auction on any given day. This modern electronic phenomena has removed the search from whistle collecting…for anyone with a fat checkbook and a computer can buy a whistle and have it delivered to his front door. Now this is not necessarily bad as it does put rare and unusual whistles at everyone’s fingertips, whistles that the average collector would never see in a lifetime of searching.
My focus in whistle collecting is not necessarily the acquisition of lots of whistles but the search for the undiscovered whistle – whistles still up in the air on old factories or saw mills and refineries, whistles in someone’s barn or shed, or whistles on the old abandoned cotton gin.
I have been very successful in the hunt for old whistles having taken down some 65 whistles from their natural habitat on old boiler houses, cotton compresses etc.
After I find a whistle I have to “do the deal.” This consists of finding the owner of the building or someone else with authority that can either let me have or sell me the whistle. Then you have to establish a price. That is usually somewhere between free and an arm and a leg and my first-born child.
Over the years many have been free.
One Buckeye from an old steel mill in Alabama cost me dinner for the security guard and his wife, which came in at a pricey $25. A 3" Lunkenheimer off a foundry in Houston cost me $50 and a bottle of Jack Daniels and my biggest whistle, a 12” Lonergan chime cost me $1000 and a pair of Cowboy Boots – after a year of negotiating.
To me the epitome of whistle hunting is to get permission to climb up on an old boilerhouse and take down a whistle. I have untold number of photos taken by my wife of me balancing on old tin roofs with my tool bag over my shoulder, trying to reach the object of my obsession, another old whistle...
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