A sad end game of poor estate planning

[bgadow]

Last week I read the obituary of a guy I knew, not well, but at least on a first name basis. He lived alone; he spent most of his free time playing with a model T in his garage. Well, within a day of reading of his death (maybe even the same day) I drove past his house and there was a full-size roll-off dumpster in the driveway. Yep, that's one way to do it. Who knows what will get tossed in?

A story I've told too many times: about 15 years ago I responded to an ad in the paper, "Old TVs for Sale". Turned out that a gentleman in his 90s had passed away, leaving everything to a niece and nephew. He had been a TV repairman, among other things. He owned an old farmstead. The house and all the buildings were stuffed with antique furniture and other vintage stuff. There was so much stuff that it took 3 Saturdays to auction it all off at the firehall up town. The TV sets (ranging from a '50 RCA to a single BPC set, probably a couple dozen in all) were left because they weren't worth the effort to move. Anyway, I bought the whole lot for $50 and while loading up what I could I was talking to the nephew. He asked if I collected radios as well. Turns out, there had been oodles of them. One large building had them stacked like cordwood, who knows how many. The kicker: they had carried a few to the first auction but they didn't bring anything so it was decided not to bother with them. From his description, most were wood-cased. They were all, every last one of them, thrown on a burn pile and destroyed.

I really need to sit down and write plans for my collection. Consider: I own radios that belonged to my great-grandfather. Does anyone else know which ones they are, among my collection of 300-400 radios? Would that person clearing things out know the difference in value between, say, a CTC-5 and a CTC-53?