Gee, I love garage sales! On a warm Saturday morning I set out as usual to locate insulator bargains and anything else at a good buy. My focus was on neighborhood sales so I could cover a lot of ground without using up a lot of gas. After about a half dozen sales, I came across one where the lady was trying to get rid of everything including the kitchen sink because her house had sold and she was in a hurry. 

Now, when I go to a sale, I always ask if there are any insulators they could see if none are in the sale. Well, I asked the lady and she said, "You collect those things?" And I said, "Uh, yea." She pointed to a box under a card table and said, "I think those are insulators over there." She said they came out of a bam on the family farm which was along an old stretch of railroad in southern Indiana.

I went over to them and knelt down beside the box and was amazed at the contents. Virtually all were CD 126's -- aqua Brookfields, with a sprinkling of CD 133 Brookfields. At a glance they were very near mint to mint and all had been cleaned to a sparkling shine! The lady had put 25 cents on the box, so I went ahead and began to count them because I was going to get them anyway for that price. I got half way through when she said, "O.K., if you take the whole box I'll let you have them for 10 cents each. I don't want to drag them back in the garage." I said, "O.K.," feeling guilty at the thought of offering her 5 cents since she was desperate, but I didn't.

I counted the rest and the total was 40. There were 35 CD 126's and the rest were CD 133 Brookfields. I pulled out my billfold and all I had was $2.00! I begged her, "Please cover these and I'll be back with the rest in a minute." I returned in a sweat, gave the the rest of the money and fled with the prize. No more sales that day for me, I was satisfied!

I went directly home to research the treasure. I would say 30 or so were fairly common 126's and 133's, and ten of them were better types. Two were W.U.T. Cauvets with 1870 and 1877 dates with embossing below the wire groove, another with a misspelling of the name "CUAVET" and four or five with ghost embossings that go from where the normal embossing is on the side of the dome to over the top of the dome making the insulator appear to have three or four sets of embossings! They must have slipped out of the molds prematurely or something. What a jumbled mess! I still have these beauties to remind me of the "Summer of 126" and I'm sure glad that there are non-collectors out there who put up insulators for sale rather than toss them out, so we collectors can benefit.