Snake America Forty Three
Snake is a bi-weekly email covering collectible salable items. This week, Sean McEvoy, the vintage dealer, talks about the West Point jacket that he's selling and which belongs to deceased Packers coach Vince Lombardi. If you're reading online, subscribe.
Heritage Auction: Vince Lombardi game-worn West Point coaching jacket, $17,000, ending 2/21:
Sean McEvoy, who moved to the south from Seattle in April, found a post-war West Point jacket in a picked-over Goodwill bin in Nashville in December. He posted a photo of Lombardi in the sweater on his Instagram and then the sweater and then the tag. In the photo, Lombardi, the Packers coach who has a statue at Lambeau Field and who won football's first Super Bowl, and who was called the premier football coach of his time, was wearing what appeared to be the same sweater. His name was on it. The sweater's manufacturer is Alex Taylor's, a New York haberdashery on E. 42nd that was in the sports equipment business. It fit him. Someone said the NFL Hall of Fame was in contact with Sean—was it Lombardi's sweater? MEARS, the Milwaukee auction house that specializes in sports (and pop culture), graded the sweatshirt as authentic. From their report: Final Grade (Authentic): Per the examination of the style of shirt, tagging, and testing for originality, MEARS deems this shirt to be consistent with respect to the proper style, sizing, and a reasonable supplier as what would be expected to have been worn by Vince Lombardi during his time at West Point.
McEvoy listed the sweater with HeritageAuctions.com and also went on the syndicated TV show "A Piece of the Game," in a Hoffman Estates, Ill. Buffalo Wild Wings and displayed the shirt (to acclaim). The expert said it was worth at least $20,000. The auction runs through next Sunday and is going for $17,000 at press Snake time—$20,315 with the buyer's premium. The shirt is well explained by the MEARS report, the video and the preliminary coverage. From here the best part of the story is either that the sweatshirt is Lombardi's or that McEvoy bought it for 58 cents. Deals like that don't happen by accident. I called Sean on Thursday to talk about how he found it and how he finds everything else.
SNAKE AMERICA: Can we get, for the folks here—you are who and what do you do?
SEAN McEVOY: 15 years ago I was working for a vintage clothing store in Seattle and I just thought everyone was an idiot, and I was pretty wack back then, too, and I got fired and started picking on my own for the past 15 years. Goodwill bins, rag houses and going around and finding stuff to resell. I follow trends a bit to see what sells but don’t stay too close to them. I try and find the good stuff and get as much as I can for it. Anybody can buy but not everybody can find it.
What are your most significant pieces?
I just rathole all the good stuff—I’ve got a 1920s leather jacket and some (probably) blackfoot Indian moosehide turn-of-the-century jackets. Some old band stuff, shirts, old overalls. And my wife collects jewelry—old Navajo jewelry. Plus we have an interest in music so there’s a lot of stuff.
(1)
Do you have a set stable of clients or do you sell online or in a store?
Most of our sales are through our online store on Etsy. For years I was selling on eBay and had some Japanese wholesalers. The prices on eBay for some stuff are lower than you can get on Etsy. What I’ve noticed in the business is that for as hard as you work tracking down the crazy stuff, the big pieces … it takes months to find one. The real money is in the lower-end stuff, keeping it in stock and just selling.
It’s at the point now in the vintage business that Larry McKaughan, of Heller’s Café, is renting stuff to designers for insane money. He sends an old sweatshirt to Abercrombie and Fitch and they try to rip it off. They usually fail…
Why do vintage reproductions fall short? Is it quality that the new two-tone sweatshirts don’t look any good?
They fail because the cotton doesn’t have time to dry out. It doesn’t get a sun-fade or pick up a patina and it looks worse.
Now, the sweatshirt Vince Lombardi wore that’s on auction right now—what about the place you picked it from? Had you been there before?
My one sister is in Charlotte so I was nearby. The outlet was is Asheville. Any time I see a Goodwill outlet I’ll go there because they have the damaged stuff. You know the policy, I’m sure you’ve seen it living in New York ... Goodwill tries to make their stores look like retail. They want the new stuff in there. So the old stuff, the vintage stuff, ends up in the bins, and once in a while you may find something there. So it was like that.
Plus, Japanese sellers are in every thrift store now. I see them everywhere. They leave all the red things alone. A kind of weird thing is that they hate red. My friend Tatsu, a Japanese picker, we were picking together, and he was saying that in Japan it’s an evil color. Bad people wear it. So they don’t buy anything in that color.
That’s funny—I have some old Champion one-colors in red that I got for cheap, maybe that’s why. What kind of stuff were the other guys walking out of that Goodwill outlet with?
Just junk. They buy junk. The thing about the South, there are a few people who know what they’re doing, obviously. But not many. Obviously, with all the Cone denim here—the factory was in North Carolina—that’s why I moved out here. There’s some deadstock here, I’ll see dudes putting out deadstock stuff from the ‘30s and ‘20s, but I don’t think I’ve found an old piece of denim, Cone denim, here. New York, upstate, as I’m sure you know, has all the workwear stuff—overalls … But here you have the chance of hitting the mother lode. I’ve found stuff here, but not anything like this West Point shirt.
I don’t do Inspiration [the giant annual vintage fest in LA that happened this past weekend], I think it’s cheesy. I know why Larry goes and stuff—he sells his book, lots of stuff, so many Japanese people are there, that couple with the dude in the sickest shit squeezing into stuff that's three sizes too small—but you know … it has this big rockabilly vibe. It’s so cheesy. People go there and they look like they jumped out of a boxcar. They have sick stuff but they're holding like Kanye ... the look is pretty much summed up with "just because you can, doesn't mean you should."
Some of the outfits are almost like a cartoon.
Wearing a Brown’s Beach vest and a herringbone jacket and wide-leg jeans … people in LA are such knobs. Those dudes in the '30s wore those clothes because that's what they had laying around. I think the same approach to wearing nowadays applies best. Just wear whatever. It's ill on its own. You don't need all the other shit to cloud up an '30s jacket—fuck that hat-and-bandana bullshit. The jacket and pants are the time piece. It's class ... speak and don't listen.
Did you have a relationship with the other pickers—do you see the same pickers and dealers around Knoxville, or even the other cities you go to, or is it a new crop of people each time?
I found it in Asheville—I’m actually in North Carolina a lot. I'm in eastern Tennessee. Asheville is like the Portland of the south—it's got a hyper-liberal vibe. It’s a slack kind of thing. A lot of people there are comfortable in their everyday thing. They’re not trying to better themselves. It’s “good enough”—never wanting to better their lives. And that’s frustrating—the mentality, the customer service around here. You go somewhere and it takes someone 45 minutes to ring you up for a pack of gum.
Yeah, that’s some Texas stuff. Is that all over the south?
Just all over the south. Maybe not bigger areas. But there are different degrees of how you can still feel the tension between cultures—between blacks and whites. The only place I haven’t felt that was in Savannah. I was just there, I really liked it. People there have more pride for their city ... "We’re Savannahns," or whatever—like, "I’m a New Yorker"—and here it’s very segregated.
So let’s talk about the shirt a little bit. I was watching the show, "A Piece of the Game," where they evaluated the shirt. You were saying the tag was herringbone twill (HBT). That looked like the tag from the old WWII watch caps.
Yeah, like an HBT jacket, like someone had cut off a piece of the jacket and sewed it in there. Because it was West Point, so they just thought, "we’ll just write the names on these tags." So it looked like back in the 1940s, people at West Point had tons of herringbone stuff and they cut a piece off a jacket or a cap and sewed it on their and wrote their name on it. That was really interesting to see. It was the first thing I noticed once I saw the tag—herringbone denim. It was really cool to see. It wasn’t frogskin, but you know... And the zipper is an old 1940s Talon. Also, Lombardi's dad was covered in tattoos.
What’s your picking routine now that you’re in the south—are you in different towns?
It’s a flea market—New York’s a lot like this—you hit flea markets and estate sales hard. Because the stores, like Goodwill, are transitioning to a Target vibe and the old stuff doesn’t pop up there like it does elsewhere. I hit the bins, estate sales and flea markets because that’s where the stuff ends up.
How much of it is new spots and how much is hitting the same ones over and over?
I try and change it up as much as I can. I haven’t found a honey bowl here at all. I have my routine back in the Northwest because I knew all the pickers there and they’d sell me stuff. But here, the pickers will not sell me anything. They’re suspicious—[affects Southern accent and being a meanie]—“You’re going to make $1,000,000, maybe I’ll just hold out and see what I get for it on Eeee-bay.” It has that kind of mentality going. It’s hard to make good relationships with other pickers. Everyone here thinks you’re trying to middle them—which you are—but they don’t understand that they’re not going to sell it on their own. So it’s just going to sit in a pile. They’d rather have rats eat it than you make money off it. It’s that kind of vibe. It’s real frustrating, because it’s going to rot in the corner of a garage, in rat shit. It’s frustrating.
What’s a good day for you?
A good day is if I can find maybe a couple of good pieces but then get a lot of filler in-between, because I make most of my money off of kids who want to dress ‘90s. So I can sell 10 different ‘90s dresses or crop-tops. But the token new-goth hipster stuff goes for good money. If you sell enough of those, that equals one good pair of jeans, double-Xs [old Levi’s], so I rathole the good stuff, and put it on the shop, but for high prices. But I’ll end up selling all the mediocre stuff, like a Shawn Kemp USA basketball jersey, or something like that, to a guy. And I sell more womens’ than mens’. And I also sell a lot of outdoor gear, like Holubar, brown-tag North Face, Alpine Designs.
Before the sweatshirt, what was the biggest ticket item you found thrifting, and was it bigger than this one?
No, I found a Ty Cobb glove 10 years ago from a flea, a baseball glove and I sold it on eBay for about $6,000. But if I had sold it through Heritage [Auctions] I would’ve gotten a lot more. And that was stupid of me but I just didn’t know any better. I knew enough to know it was good, but I didn’t know the sports memorabilia market as much as I do now. You learn stuff constantly. 10 years ago, I was a stupid kid, and now I try and get as much money for something as I can and take the extra effort to go through all the right doors. If possible—if the the item is good enough.
So depending where something’s selling, it might sell for more?
Depends on what you have. If I get something really good, I’ll take a picture and send it to Larry and see if he’ll make me an offer. If he gets first dibs on something, he’s going to pay more. Or sometimes I’ll post it on Instagram and see if there is any kind of drive for it… I love to constantly looking at stuff on Instagram. The only person that I saw who posted good stuff this week is Berberjin(2).
They’re always wild. They have their ‘90s stuff and their reams of ‘30s stuff.
Which is insane. I think they get a lot of their stuff from Toronto and a lot of it from Texas as well. They’re tapped into the rag-house market like nobody’s business. And if someone gets up the gear, they know that they’re going to pay. Larry is kind of in the same position as them—they know that they’re going to pay the most. So every picker that knows anything about picking will say, “Yo, what do you want to pay for this?” That’s why they get everything. Because of the name. It’s like they’re Polo or something. They have that brand, you know? They’re going to get the majority of the crazy stuff—maybe not the majority, but a lot of it. They’re going to get more than anybody else just based on the brand. And they earned it—obviously. They’re on top because they’re the best.
Have they been around the longest, and so they know the most?
I think they know the most and I also think they believe in their reps so much that they can beat out anybody else (?). Their shops are insane. [He has an appointment-only showroom.] Half the time they’re not making that much money on some of their stuff, compared to what they pay for it, but they just want to keep their shop, there’s that thing—you have to keep that brand. Because they’re so reputable to shop at. Anyone that knows anything about vintage is: “Berberjin, Heller’s Café.” Those are the household names. There’s Bobby in Boston, or whatever, there are guys in New York, too. But those two. At least, on the West Coast, it’s Larry, and in Japan, you think Berberjin.
My friend RJ was telling me to ask you about your theory about how ICP shirts do better than actual vintage stuff, but you went through that.
It’s crazy. People now, kids want what their parents wore. Which is funny. 90s stuff—you can sell a Marilyn Manson shirt for $100.
It’s giant here and I don’t understand it. For me, the Mendoza line in vintage is NAFTA. If it’s after NAFTA, it’s dogshit. Before that, it’s kind of worth looking at. But if there’s Spanish on the tag, it’s not ever going to be any good. And that’s what’s in. All the vintage stuff in Goodwills is always 20 years old, but 20 years ago was NAFTA, so it’s just dogshit everywhere. And kids never have a lot of money, and they’re like, “well, I’ve got to look cool somehow,” so they’re just doing that. I don’t know.
Because they don’t have the money for the crazy shit. I sold a Minor Threat shirt to a dude in New York for $500 just a month ago. Maybe $550. He lives in Manhattan. And it was hammered, like cigarette holes in it and paint... It had the look. Like, that gutter Andrew W.K. look is so in. That hammered, anti-Mr. Clean.
Can you tell me the Air Jordans in the Goodwill story—you and the old woman with one Air Jordan each?
Man, which story? That kind of stuff happens so much. I can’t remember the specific era you’re talking about. This is like 10 years’ worth of stuff. That kind of stuff happened all the time because shoe-pickers are so crazy, they take every pair. Well, actually, are you talking about the Forrest Gump (USA, 1994) shoes? I had a pair of waffle-bottom Nikes, I sold them for $650. I was at the bins and I found a pair of OG dunks. Then I found one waffle and this Mexican guy had the other one. I gave him $20 and sold it for $650. Things like that will happen all the time. There used to be this douchebag who used to show up to the Seattle bins all the time, and if you had a single and he had a single, he wouldn’t sell it. A lot times, sellers will flip a coin and whoever’s side it lands on keeps the sneaker. And that guy would buy the singles just, being like, fuck you. There were maybe 150 pairs of crazy shoes and boots in that guy’s place. Why would you do that? It doesn’t make any sense. Having one shoe means nothing.
What are you doing with the money if it sells for what you want?
Maybe I’ll bring Chik Fil-A to Seattle. I don’t know—I have no idea what it’s going to sell for. If it goes for an insane amount of money, maybe look into buying a house? I honestly don’t know. It jumped today—it has over 100,000 views and now it’s at over $14,000 [it's now higher—Snake]. So it’s going crazy. I have a feeling that now with all the press it’s getting, that some rich guy is going to, he has to have it to tell the story. It’s just a conversation piece at this point—in some rich guy’s office, to have that conversation piece, where people being, “Do you remember that story that broke, you actually own that?” That will give him that pat on the back.
Thanks for reading. Rest in power to David Carr.
Snake
Last Snake: Galaga arcade game, weird chambray shirt (still for sale; still for sale)
Snake Before That: Contents of a candy factory, Eddie Bauer Kara Koram snowpants (still for sale; relisted then sold)
(1) Pics are all Sean's. In order: 1930s Northern Pacific railroad jacket, deadstock, 1940s two-tone sweatshirt, GZA tour T-shirt, 1930s-ish leather jacket, 1970s Jamaican T-shirt, 1930s sweater.
(2) Source of the photo of the green T-shirt and most of the photos at the end of these emails come from Berberjin's blog. Used without permission.. but now you know.