Everything Old is New Again

The more things change,” a wise friend once observed, “the more they stay the same.” To process that, a slightly twisted mind is required – the kind of mind that doesn’t balk at the old riddle, “what’s the difference between a duck?*”

This issue of Farm Collector is likely to make you reconsider the meaning and value of the descriptors old and new.

For me, it all started with Sam Moore’s column on the Duesenberg. I’ll leave the details to Sam, but here are three simple facts for you to digest. One, this manufacturer built cars for less than 20 years; two, the company has been out of business for decades; and three, surviving Duesenbergs are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. A niche product produced by a struggling firm at a price only the super-rich could afford: This could just as easily be a page out of the current season’s playbook.

Then Josephine Roberts chimed in with a thoughtful consideration of tractor restoration. She even went so far as to suggest that, sometimes, old things should be allowed to just be old. Rust and scrapes and fading paint can be viewed as a badge of honor. That’s almost heresy in a culture that prizes the new, shiny thing, and in a world where, even in third world countries, landfills are swelling – and yet, in some areas, it’s a growing trend.

The fine print in a 1903 ad for the Kansas City Lightning line was the final thing to catch my eye. The company chose the words “Old and reliable” to describe itself and its products. It was a deliberate choice: Old and reliable were about the best things you could say about a manufacturer and a product in that era.