Fifty years is a pretty good run. But the Holliston High School Field House has a beautiful new floor. That fact might be wonderful news for the sports teams that play there, but it signaled the curtain call for the Holliston Scholarship Foundation’s annual antique show, which would have seen 51 years this winter. The show, which has been put together by the same four volunteers for years and drew antique dealers and collectors from all around New England, has come to an end.
Having done the antique show for a number of years, Bob McGrath and his fellow volunteers Peter Cunis, Steve Amrock and Bill Phipps “were in the process of maybe transitioning it over to Celebrate Holliston,” says McGrath, who sent a deposit for the space to the school last March. “Donna Barry, from the school, sent it back to me with a little note that they were going to do something to the flooring. They’d get back to me. Then, they said in September they can rent me the top third of the space.”
That’s not big enough room, says McGrath.
“Donna (Barry) at the high school has done a marvelous job of coordinating the event from the facilities point of view, but then they made a decision they wanted to have a first-rate floor on the gym,” says McGrath, who says that the time has come for the show to end.
“The four of us had been thinking of transitioning to someone else, with a little more energy,” says Steve Amrock. “I’m the youngest of the four. I haven’t hit 70 yet,” he laughs. “I think for us, let’s face it, it was going to stop at some point.”
The annual event was a source of pride as well as funding, although, McGrath says, the bulk of the Holliston Scholarship Foundation funds comes from endowments, and then there’s a mailing. Still, the event pulled in about $10,000 each year. A skeleton crew pulled off the annual undertaking, often with a lot of laughs.
“We used to run the refreshments up there. That was an enormous amount of work,” says McGrath. “Then Chris at the Superette started the last five or six years and he’s been great.”
The show took place right at the end of winter, almost spring, says McGrath. For New Englanders, who had cabin fever, it often signaled the beginning of antique show season.
“The timing worked for us,” he says. “And it was all money from out of town; that was the thing we liked most about it.” With so many booster clubs, says McGrath, fundraisers can seem “almost like an alternate form of taxation. The antique show dealers, almost 95% came from out of town, from New York, Maine, Vermont, New Jersey. They would come and stay at a hotel, and they would eat in town and the dealers would buy stuff from each other. Seventy-five to 80% of the people who went to the show were from out of town. We thought that made it a really good fundraiser,” says McGrath.
McGrath gives a lot of credit to show promoter Steve Alman, who worked with the group each year
Overall, the years of putting the antique show together have brought fond memories.
“And we had had Billy Phipps – he’s a jovial guy, tells all the jokes,” adds McGrath. “he would stand at the door, one year with this real old-fashioned Victrola. He was the entertainment.”
“It’s been a lot of laughs,” says Steve, who remembers a couple years, before Donna Barry came on, where the show didn’t even have heat. “And I can climb very high snow banks. But I’ve only been doing it since 1990. Bob’s been doing it since 1843,” he jokes.
You might not be able to buy antiques for the cause, but you can still make a donation to the Holliston Scholarship Foundation, which benefits students from Holliston each year. Send your contribution to:
Holliston Scholarship Foundation
PO Box 6786
Holliston MA 01746
Or, visit www. Hollistonscholarshipfoundation.org for more details.
Issue Date:
January, 2018
Article Body: