I stopped at an estate sale in an affluent area of Baltimore some time back. The lady of the house was throwing the leftovers in a dumpster and I asked if there was any outdoor equipment left (outdoor equipment, as in guns, ammo, or decoys). She told me everything was sold, but I could look in an outbuilding. I looked in the building and found wooden boxes full of antique decoy weights. Some of them were cut from 2 1/2" stainless steel stock, into open water weights. There were a bunch of them and way more than a bunch of lead weights. It turned out that the weights had belonged to Glenn L. Martin, aircraft tycoon, and also a serious waterfowler. There must have been hundreds of dollars worth of stainless steel in those boxes. She told me to pay her twenty dollars if I wanted those "boxes". That day, I became a decoy weight collector. Only Glenn L. Martin would use stainless steel from his factory to avoid going to a sporting good store to buy weights. Some years ago, I married a woman, The Lovely Linda, who I was to find out, had a father who carved decoys. After he passed away, I found out that he had never sold a decoy. I became a decoy collector, but only decoys carved by one person. Those are only two examples of how we get into collecting hunting related "stuff". It only gets worse with the books and the guns.
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