What ‘s it worth?
I’m occasionally asked, in my never ending collecting of the left-behinds of public safety agencies, what is that item worth? Like any antique, the usual rule, it is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. Most of the items in the collection have no actual intrinsic value, they are not made of gold or diamonds. Some of the items are made of inexpensive base metals or are utilitarian, made simply to serve a purpose. Other items are ephemeral, items intended to only be used for a short time, and then disappear.
The most precious items, the most priceless, are often the items that truly have no actual monetary value. Their value lies in the story they tell. For example, a recent new acquisition are several batons, two made of wood and two of polycarbonate. Two were owned by the same officer and his name is on one of them. Once is actually a memento given to an officer who retired in 1943 (more on him later!). The last, we simply don’t know. How much are they worth? What is the value of the years of service the item provided and for the memento, the meaning and affection behind the gift?
When we think of the items that we most treasure that we own, rarely is it the most expensive item. It might be photographs, for example. It might be jewelry, but those would be the items that have meaning behind the item and not the monetary value - your grandmother’s wedding ring, for example. That wedding ring might have been an inexpensive piece, purchased when your grandparents were just starting out and worn down from years and years of wear. Those items are treasured because of the meaning behind it, and not its monetary value.
For many of the items in the collections, those that are of personal gear, a baton or a badge, we may not know who owned it. But we do know that someone carried or wore that item for a period of time, probably every day. They walked the beat (or later, drove a cruiser), with those items. At the end of the day, they hung that baton on a hook and put their jacket on a hanger. Some of the items belonged to agencies that don’t exist anymore, such as the badge and hat shield for a park ranger that patrolled Louisville’s city parks for some years and which was disbanded in 1981.
Some of the items show an evolution - a short wooden baton that became a short polycarbonate baton, for example. Officers went from pocket pistols, yes, rather than a holster, many officers carried their revolver in a specially lined jacket or pants pocket, to big “wheel guns” - from a dump pouch full of cartridges for reload, to state of the art speed loaders to magazines of larger capacities.
A few of the items have been purchased by donors specifically for the museum, as well. One of those items is a radio that has the Conelrad frequencies particularly marked - those are the AM frequencies to which a citizen would have tuned in the case of a national emergency. This tells us the radio was made during the Cold War. (Something similar that citizens might have today is a weather radio.) Other items will be showcased in due course!
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” ― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
General Electric tabletop AM radio, with Conelrad frequencies