Barn Fresh

Pickers will often speak of "barn fresh" merchandise. What does that really mean? If you pick, you already know!

We aren't talking about where the item was found, necessarily, but the presence of wildlife in or on it. Animals love to make their homes inside arcade equipment that has been left sitting,undisturbed, nearly anywhere.

Picking can be hazardous work for many reasons. Some of the animals that pickers encounter when they try to load up and transport their finds certainly count as hazardous.

When we were located at Mulberry St, Ben was unloading an old Bally Champion horse ride that we had bought out of a field in Pennsylvania.  The field was full of underbrush and located near a stream.  As Ben put the machine on a dolly, a customer that was standing nearby said,  "Watch out!  There is a snake coming out of the bottom!"  Out came a copperhead snake that was not too happy to have taken a long ride back to Maryland! Snakes love to get inside the base of kiddie rides and other machines because they often have mice in them to eat.

Last year, Lloyd was outside of an old building in rural Mississippi where a lot of old 50s jukeboxes had been dumped.  There were thousands of dollars worth of good parts even though they had been outside for over 30 years, and he was sifting through and taking what he could resell. Suddenly he looked in front of him, and not ten feet away was a water moccasin with the biggest diameter of any snake outside of a zoo that he had ever seen.  Lloyd quickly made for the safety of the building. The rest of the parts are still there!

Last year, when Coinopwarehouse was located in Gaithersburg, one of our employees brought a Space Shuttle pinball  into our shop that he had picked up in Bern, North Carolina and had transported in the back of one of our pickups. A customer was visiting the shop and had brought his dog with him. The dog kept creeping up to the game, sniffing it and then barking at it. Lloyd asked the customer, "What's wrong with your dog?', and he said, "There must be something alive in that machine or my dog wouldn't keep barking." Lloyd peeked inside the game and, sure enough, there was a live opossum in the game, none too happy after a seven hour truck ride. Lloyd moved the game out into the parking lot and opened a door in the game, leaving it there overnight in hopes that the opossum would leave the game during the night of it own accord. 

It did. The next day the game was ready to sell!

One of Lloyd's favorite opossum stories, from picking many years ago near Washington DC, is this one.  Lloyd and Joe Croghan, a dealer from Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, had found an incredible haul of good machines and records in a place called Mt. Ranier, Md. Lloyd's son Ben was pretty young at the time, and loved finding coins in the machines.  There was one room full of old vending and soda machines, and Ben kept busting them open and finding a lot of silver coins in each one. One of Lloyds friends had driven over to see the big find, and decided to open one of the jukeboxes himself to see if the coin box was full. When he opened the door of the machine, a mother opossum was inside with her babies and she jumped out to bite at his nose. Lloyd laughs to this day when he tells the story of how fast his buddy ran out of that warehouse, yelling, "Mary, mother of God!!, " and a stream of other expletives that I can't repeat here.   His friend did not want to come back in that place.

Rats and mice also love to make their nests inside machines, and leave behind their droppings. The corn meal used to make the shuffle alley lanes more slippery are especially tempting to them. A few months ago, Lloyd and I drove out to a home in rural Catlett, Virginia to pick up a Flipper kiddie ride. We had to drive our truck across a crumbling homemade bridge, over a creek, to reach the house, and I wasn't sure it would hold the weight of our truck, beside being so narrow that we barely fit on it! This place was remote, and had a "deliverance" feel to it, as the owner came out to meet us in overalls, no shirt, and bare feet. Flipper had been sitting out in a field for years. As Lloyd loaded the ride into our truck, little mice came running out of it. One of them hid in the bed of the pickup and then started running around in the back. We drove back over the questionable bridge and, worried about that mouse, we pulled over on the side of the road to try to find him and get him out. It wasn't easy!

Pigeon droppings on machines are common, because the pigeons often live in the rafters above the machines where they have been stored.  One of the best video game finds Lloyd ever had was in Frostburg, Maryland on the second and third stories of a building that was missing windows.  Chuck, from the Home Amusement Company that used to be in Rockville, Maryland, had already taken every popular video game title like Ms. Pac Man and Galaga, when he had gone there to get merchandise for his shop.  He didn't care much about collectors of video games, so he left behind the odd games like Atari Quantum.  Needless to say Lloyd was pretty successful that day, as the games left were the rarest ones that every collector now dreams of finding.  Ben literally had to dodge pigeons getting machines out of the place, and there was some cleaning involved before selling them, but Lloyd made a lot of money that day.

Bees, hornets and wasps also love to make their homes inside or near machines. Since Ben is allergic to their stings, he carries an epi pen with him now, after getting stung in our warehouse in Petersburg, VA and having to make a quick trip to the emergency room.

The machines we find often require quite a bit of cleaning up when they are shopped before they are sold or displayed in a retail store or your home, unless they were lucky enough to have been kept inside a private home before we get them.

What kind of wildlife have you encountered in your machines? Please share your stories in Comments for this post!