When my three sons were children, we’d think nothing of driving 8 hours to stay with friends or family or go camping in state and national parks. Audio books helped the boys be patient travelers, but now and again we all needed to stop and shake a leg. We frequently did so at antique malls because they are heated in winters, cooled in summers and often cavernously large.

Once inside, I would remind the boys of their mission before turning them loose. Some might ask, Wait, what? You would let three young children freely roam among vast arrays of fragile antiques? Indeed I did. They all knew how to mindfully navigate around delicate items. Over the years, a few things were chipped, crushed or shattered at our home, but never at an antique mall.

As for their mission, it was to find miniature glass nesting hens once used as salt holders at each table setting. Two original manufacturers, Boyd and Mosser, produced hens in both clear and slag glass in a wide variety of colors. If my children found a nesting hen and I bought it, I gave them a dollar. They became excellent not only at finding them, but discriminating originals from reproductions.

My collection grew rapidly in the early aughts as we found at least one hen at every antique mall we visited. And then they seemed to vanish. The expansion of online shopping made many collectibles harder to find in shops and substantially more expensive if you did. Hunting online is easy, but it’s not as fun as culling through booths of antiques. It’s also harder to gauge the quality of the glass hens online and after a few disappointing purchases, I stopped looking.

Instead, I began collecting other things, including rolling pins, small glass bottles, miniature pitchers, Maida Heatter jewelry, Spanish and English porcelain flowers and, more recently as regular readers know, Capodimonte porcelain. Mr. Tressler, the father of my longtime friend, Jen Marvelous, left me his ice cream scoop collection, which I keep in a crockery bowl found at the Bomb Shelter on Akron’s south side.

Grouped together, these collections make visually appealing displays that are inexpensive to acquire. I started my rolling pin collection when purchasing several at an old theater-turned-store in Toledo near where I had lived in the second grade. I wasn’t allowed to walk to past that theater on my way to school because in the early ’70s all its films were X-rated. It was delightful to walk inside decades later and find something as wholesome as rolling pins. 

Determining how to display the rolling pins — each exhibiting signs of repeated use by the hands of former owners — took years. Then, when I hosted wine tastings at World Market before COVID, I found wall-mounted wine racks. The rolling pins slot perfectly into two metal circles, a small one meant for the neck of a wine bottle and a larger one for the base. I foolishly bought only two racks, enough for the number of rolling pins I had at the time, as if I’d never be tempted to buy yet another.

McKinney, Texas, where I spent a week last month, has a charming downtown much like Medina’s with a courthouse surrounded on four sides by blocks of restaurants and shops, including the Antique Company Mall. I darted into ACM to get out of the heat for a spell and am glad I did. Unlike every antique mall I’ve visited in the Midwest and Northeast for the past decade, ACM has incredible prices (check out their Facebook page). I spent well over an hour on my first visit, with helpful employees repeatedly taking items from my hands to a holding area. One helped me search for miniature nesting hens, to no avail. Another employee took my number and said she’d call various dealers to see if they had any they could bring in. 

Sweet success! I returned the next day and bought a jadeite hen and another that is ceramic, something I’ve not seen before. I also found several small bottles in a variety of shapes and colors and two rolling pins. I rarely check baggage when I travel, but because Southwest Airlines didn’t charge me, I had with me a largely empty suitcase. 

Everything made it home without damage and has been threaded into my collections. Now if only someone would loan me a pickup truck or large van for a week I’d roadtrip to McKinney straightaway to purchase one of ACM’s pristine $300 Hoosiers.

This column was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, July 13, 2025.