Church rummage sales built on the fun of the find
Boxes filled with toys — well-worn in their presentation but still perfectly functional — pack tables under tents outside St. John Catholic Church in Clearfield Township on Friday, July 25. While they are all used items, many of them are gone within the first few hours of the church’s annual rummage sale, as the early birds make their first run through.
Dixie Mennor, one of the main sale organizers, said even with some items priced as low as 25 cents, the two-day event is a major fundraiser for the St. Francis Parish Marian Guild, allowing it to provide holiday meals to people in need.
That cause is why the organizers work for a week in the July heat to get everything set up and all the donations organized.
“It’s our way of doing charity,” Mennor said. “I think that’s why people come and work so hard on it.
“I think that’s why we get so many people, because our prices are so good.”
On the southern side of Butler County, another church was having its own rummage sale on Saturday, July 26, also featuring donated items on sale for as low as 25 cents apiece. Valencia Presbyterian Church’s rummage sale is likewise one of its biggest annual fundraisers, with many people from the congregation and the greater community offering up their attic items for the church to sell.
Jamie Christy said she went to the sale in search of items she could use at a Hobbit-themed event at Quality Gardens, and figured it would yield good results, like one of her favorite TV shows.
“I watch ‘Antiques Roadshow,’ so it’s kind of like you’re looking through that,” Christy said.
Both of the rummage sales took about a week to put together, and they both started with community call-outs letting people know the churches were accepting donations.
Annamary McMullen, coordinator of Valencia Presbyterian Church’s rummage sale, said the church lists items like toys, glassware, furniture, certain appliances and decorations as potential donations for its sale — pretty much anything but electronic devices. She said a majority of the items found on the tables Saturday actually came from people who are not part of the church’s congregation, because the event is a prime opportunity for storage cleanup.
As volunteers — everyone involved in putting together the sale — start organizing the donations, McMullen and other administrators start putting prices on items.
The price of each item is not usually a hotly contested debate, according to McMullen.
“We look at our computers and decide,” McMullen said. “It’s usually, ‘What do we think about this?’”
Shirley Kennedy Keller, a member of the St. Francis Parish Marian Guild, said her church’s rummage sale only accepts new and gently used items. Its donation list is similar to that of the Valencia church, and St. John fills up quickly once the church puts out the annual notice of the sale.
“We started collecting in April,” Mennor said. “We collect from April to July, then the Tuesday before we ask people to come help set up.”
Mennor also said the prices at the St. John sale are pretty loosely defined.
“People send us very good condition things,” Mennor said. “Today there was a whole set of bowls from the 1950s — a 35-piece set that was all in there — and I had no idea what to price it.
“I said $35, $1 apiece, and the guy said, ‘How about $30?’ So we gave it to him.”
With every rummage sale having untold treasures stacked on their shelves alongside other items, the Valencia and the Clearfield Township churches each generate a lot of hype when they announce the dates of their sales. McMullen and Mennor said people start lining up for their churches’ sales long before their doors open.
“We open Saturday at 8 in the morning,” McMullen said. “At quarter after 7, people start lining up.”
McMullen said a man actually ran into the church when the clock struck 8 a.m. that Saturday, and he was followed by a crowd of people who skimmed the tables, cleaning many of them out in just an hour.
But the sale at Valencia Presbyterian still had some hidden treasures as the day neared its end.
Rachael Frye, of Saxonburg, found a few wooden Santa Claus figures on Saturday, after entering the church not looking for anything in particular. She was one of the only people shopping in the church around noon that day, when the environment was a lot more calm than the start of the day.
“I just came to look around,” Frye said.
Mennor said the sale at St. John goes on for two days, allowing the rummage sale volunteers to restock after the first day for the second round of shoppers. She said the appeal of the rummage sale is similar to that of garage and yard sales, which are shopping opportunities she is a fan of.
“I love yard sales,” Mennor said. “My sister-in-law and I go every Friday just as something to do.”
Neither church keeps the items that go unclaimed once the rummage sales end. Mennor said the volunteers pack up the remaining items to give to its sister churches — St. Joseph Church in Cabot and St. Mary of the Assumption Church in Herman — for their own rummage sales. McMullen said the leftover items at Valencia Presbyterian go to Saint Vincent de Paul.
“We have nowhere to put it all,” McMullen said.
Prior to the sale’s opening, the line at Valencia Presbyterian stretched back through its parking lot, all the way back to the church’s food cupboard, one of the main initiatives that the sale benefits.
Tom McMeekin, pastor at Valencia Presbyterian Church, said the rummage sale funds food programs by the church, and money is used to keep the cupboard stocked. He said these feeding programs are needed by the community, as evidenced by how often the church restocks its outdoor cupboard.
“I’m very proud of that,” McMeekin said. “It’s really utilized. We come look in the morning and it’s cleared out.”
The Marian Guild uses money from the sale to fund its own community food programs, namely its holiday meals, which St. Francis parish distributes to families in need on holidays like Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Kennedy Keller said money from the rummage sale helps provide more than a hundred families with “all the fixings.”
“Our goal is not only to give them a nice dinner that they can have all the fixings for, but we also try to supply basic food that they can use beyond the dinner,” Kennedy Keller said.
