A South Jersey Treasure and Whimsy Hunt with Sandy Feddema

Meg McCormick Hoerner (00:19.63)
Okay, so we're back with Sandy Feddema and he's going to give me a little bit of a tour and tell me a little bit about what it is that he does.

Okay, when I came down here, I saw a whole different culture than where we lived in North Jersey because a lot of the people down here either worked in all the businesses in South Jersey, was Coca-Cola, 7-Up, ketchup companies, everything. And people just went right from high school right into work. We're up in North Jersey, we had no idea what we were gonna do so they threw us in college for four years.

We still didn't know what we were going to do when we got out, but down here, people already had established their way of living. And when all the businesses left and these people were trained only in the business that is no longer existing down here, it went to a barter economy sort of. And the barter economy was the people in the glass company were the glass dealers and the people that did metal detecting were Indians and

Fishermen learned fishing and farming learned farming. Everybody had their skill. When I came down here, the boy who just did coins with the little boy had no competition. I just was the coin guy. So I learned the way of South Jersey bordering. When I find something the glass guy wants, somebody who has a glass, they go to the glass guy and all the glass guys come to me for the coins. And it's a wonderful existence.

I've done well by that and I've made a lot of friends because I find a lot of, I stick out here just like Flavie does, like a sore thumb. We'll be tourists down here until we're 90 years old. Well, Flavie is 90 years old. But when I'm 90 years old, we'll still be a tourist because the way of living, you just can't adjust quite. I have great friends and everything else, but we accept each other's differences and we're still learning about how different we are every time something comes up.

Sandy Feddema (02:21.314)
But that's why I feel like part of the society because I was never a big money person anyway, like North Jersey people mostly are. I was stuff, I was always been stuff. So I landed like a pig in mud right down here. I'm just in my own territory. If you wanna see a few of the pieces that I've shown.

Sure, I'll follow you. Show me what you do. Well, yeah, there's so much history in all of these pieces.

There was a house that I cleaned out in Fairton, New Jersey. There was a little split rebel. The door was locked when I went over to look at the house, but there was a little corner cupboard and I saw a few knickknacks and odd things. So she said, well, come back the next day and then you can have everything the family has, what you want, and you clean the house for us. I said, that's a good deal. But when I walked in the door about three feet high,

sloped down in the dining room was sand. This girl, lady, had made a beach in her dining room and there was a was a TV tray, a beach chair, driftwood, play toys and me and my 87th Ford Ranger went six trips back to return the sand to the beach but in the meantime we found lots of treasures. There are treasures that I shared with all my people.

I kept a few of them. We had little fossils and antique souvenirs from Atlantic City and just odds and ends little treasures that were treasure hunt. It was a South Jersey treasure hunt. also, this thing is really heavy. This is a Regina music player. I'm gonna lift it up. This way here is made out of stone. That's red quartz and jade and white quartz was.

Sandy Feddema (04:14.518)
Hmm, hold on a second. We're have to find us a home for it. thank you. That was another little treasure just picked up. He has a eight foot brother down at my shop down to Thrift store downtown. Where is your? you know Goldie's, Thrift shop downtown. Yes. The senior thrift. That's what I'm running for now. okay. And that is another whole story. This is a Regina music player.

I like your giraffe.

Meg McCormick Hoerner (04:28.395)
shops Annie.

Sandy Feddema (04:42.254)
that was made in the late 1800s. In Rahway, New Jersey, we have a, we do an Airbnb. The Airbnb room is right on top. This is the way we wake the guests up for breakfast. If they don't get up early, we go to the marches over here and we get them up. This is one of the treasures that, the story goes a little deeper than that. When the Sewells pulled into here, Dr. Sewell,

They call this the music room and somehow Bitsy Sewell got a piano in here and we can't get a refrigerator from here to the kitchen but they got a piano in here so now it's back to being the music room and we feel very good about that. This piece came from a borderer in Greenwich. He was a lifetime hustler. He went around knocking on doors and asking people

Where did you find this piece

Sandy Feddema (05:35.104)
if they had any treasure that they wanted to share. Something I've never had the courage or the ambition to do, but he did very well by it and he came up with a lot of interesting things.

That's exciting. I'll have to stop in your store downtown one day. Well, I will. One day I definitely will.

You should.

Sandy Feddema (05:53.966)
And also in the way of treasures, we did get this 19th century couch. We don't need two couches in this room. Because of the artwork, the seashell and the beehive, we know that it dates to the mid 1800s and they put little drawers in it.

fine work, but they didn't really care about the back end. They just wanted to have a place to keep their 18th century valuables in. We just let our imagination run wild with that.

I guess they were probably not keeping their remote control.

And there's remotes in their cell phones were not in there. It probably be going beautiful and pistols and whatever else they may have had. I'm going to put this thing that weighs a thousand pounds back on the asperius. So this one is a reverse painted light that if everything has a story, I like it. This is a story of an Indian princess who says goodbye to her.

her brave as he goes off to work in the canoe to war, but the canoe comes back empty. And the last frame is she's putting flowers in the canoe and sending it back down the river. I said, that's for me. I like a story.

Meg McCormick Hoerner (07:14.338)
like a story as well.

This is also handmade in Woodstown. I'm not gonna go through the whole story. I will, but you can edit it if you like. Oak tree with an acorn on top. When I first got it, it was for my scotch glass. It worked very well. And then when I quit drinking, it went for my pistachios. And that served me very well.

But when my teeth left, I went to sweet candies, hard candies, and then when I'd be turned into a diabetic, it went for my pills. And now I'm keeping it out of sight because the next thing it's gonna do for me is hold my ashes at the funeral home. So we're keeping it out of sight for a while. It's all purpose thing. You talk about readapting, that wouldn't have been readapted five times, just in my life.

It's all purpose.

Meg McCormick Hoerner (08:08.514)
I love the clocks.

as Clocks are really good story. They're just very common clocks. This is the original clock, but this guy was a woodworker and he put frames around it to make them unique clocks. He had some clocks that were the whole wall. He would just make a whole wall around the clock. Those are the only two that I could fit. That's the one I took from him.

love how there is a story. All of these-

Everything has a story. If it doesn't have a story, it doesn't have a place here. Going this way, this is a...

Understood.

Sandy Feddema (08:47.704)
This is one of the shells that I found. This is dated 1840 in the sand from Ferdinand and a couple of the shells that I found. Watch your head here. This is something that came to us on Flavia's 80th birthday. It was in a Dixie cup from Princeton. It's a begonia and we've made maybe a hundred cuttings of it now. We replenish it when the cats destroy it. We put another one up, but we give cuttings to all our Airbnb people. So it's all over the country now.

That's wonderful. My mom does that. My mom has, book-

This one comes of course with a story. It came from Princeton and the original cutting came from Albert Einstein's office in Princeton. If you go on the internet and see Einstein's begonia, you can read the story about how this actual plant was in Einstein's office. So that gives it a little more significance. You just rub it on a little bit and you're Erda Einstein. This is a

This is where Flavia and I spend the whole winter because the kitchen being an 1820 house is on a slab and it's cold on the north side. So we have a fire every night. We have our dinner here. We watch TV. That's Banky's chair. This is Puff's chair. And we're just happy right here. watch TV. We get the afternoon, the winter afternoon sun, which helps a little bit. It's gorgeous. It's very comfortable.

You get some nice light in here

Sandy Feddema (10:17.186)
This is, I just got introduced to glass when I came down here. North Jersey didn't know anything about glass because it didn't have the sand and the glass blowing, so we were just enamored by hand-blown glass. And these are what they call whimsies because they do them at the end of the day where the glass blowers can get a little extra cash instead of making vases all the time. They show their originality by just being totally crazy.

This whimsy maker wanted to get out of the office fast. So he just used all his glass at one time and said, okay, I'm out of here. Because you're not allowed to leave the glass still there. You have to use all the glass that you have. And going back in the story, this is what I found. It's a cameo that is still on the shelf. Somebody had did some unbelievable work on it. But to find this in the sand, it was just like, you know, it was a buried treasure. So he gets...

And I showed it to lot of people and I haven't dropped it yet. So I'm gonna continue my good luck and get it back in there, I hope. There you go. This is made out of aluminum blinds. Someone who didn't think it was a treasure and had thrown it in the garbage.

you know what they say.

That's it. This man's my treasure. It just works really good here with the light. I love it. It's a beautiful thing. It really is a nice thing. I love it. And I take you, Flavia's office is always moving because of her. That's Puff. I love books. Lots of books. This was a doctor's, two doctor's offices. So this would be their office right here. And it's really strange that this was

Meg McCormick Hoerner (11:52.344)
love all the

Sandy Feddema (12:00.866)
doctors that were here because when you look out the window you can see the courthouse. Right. Because all the others are filled with those lawyers and they take up all the old... Anyway, so this was uniquely a doctor's office.

I'm glad you know those lawyers.

Meg McCormick Hoerner (12:17.388)
Do know what year this house was built?

What 1820?

Sure, tell me.

The part that we were in first that includes the dining room was built in the 1820s. And then the whole house was added to once they built the walls through, they decided to construct a more Victorian house and added on this section. As you can see the sandstone. I'm gonna go back to that story again. The sandstone, same sandstone as our wall, gray and the granite on the other side of the.

down here.

Sandy Feddema (12:51.192)
so we can date it to when they actually made the war.

and the fireplace goes through into both rooms.

rooms. well, in fact for back too. So this was added on in probably the 1880s, 1870s, 80s, 1880s.

Fireplaces I say

Meg McCormick Hoerner (13:04.44)
So this section was an addition, I say.

Which adds to another story because we do have three working fireplaces and the fourth fireplace was in the dining room where you were. They raised the roof when they put the addition on and the second floor on so that chimney ends in the attic. And supposedly when Dr. Sewell came home from war as a medic in World War II, he brought a souvenir which was a German Luger.

And Mrs. Sewell, who had three kids at the time, was not really pleased with that. So the story through Helen and Bitsy is that mom went up to the attic and dropped the gun down the chimney, which is blocked off over here. So after we told the grandkids the story, it was bamboo and duct tape and clothes hangers. And we went up there because we could see a big white thing and then a plastic bag.

So the little guy, the little grandkid, we hold by the feet, he snagged the plastic bag and pulling it up and it's pretty heavy and we get it up and we're just all sorts of excited and when we opened it up, it was two boxes of bullets. So he said, this is really good. So.

Was it bullets for a Luger?

Sandy Feddema (14:22.734)
No, actually it was nine millimeter. Okay. Don't ruin my story. Okay. I don't tell people that story because anyway, it might even be better. It might've been an officer's pearl handled nine luger. Okay. I get my story back to a treasure in there. Anyway, we have the house tour as you know here, the first Saturday of every December, holiday tour. And everybody gets to the fireplace and we tell them.

the story and wow, wow. So they come back, we said, this time we found bullets. And the next story, this guy who does Delaware dredging said, okay, I have magnets and hooks and stuff, let's get the other piece. So he snagged that big plastic towel actually and got it halfway up and it broke into two pieces and the big piece is still down there. But when we got the other piece up,

It was an 80s Bible. Now, my version of the story is that they cut out of the Bible to put the gun in to cushion the fall and the heavy part is still down there. Then we had the pandemic and I got a little bit of a break for all the people demanding to know the next installment of the story. And now my back's against the wall, against the fireplace because I haven't done anything.

I actually have a $500 offer for the content over the fireplace, which is getting tempting, but then the story ends. And what if anything without a story? So that's the story.

Have a story.

Meg McCormick Hoerner (16:02.102)
Okay, so we still if you ever find more you'll have to let us know so we document it.

absolutely. Exactly. We had all stories do end. You know, we just don't know the ending yet. I just want to apologize for staying in this room, Story might, as you can tell, I guess, maybe you can't tell. don't know. I have an art practice that is represented in this pile of stuff. My daughter is also an artist and we are.

Sometimes that's a good thing.

Meg McCormick Hoerner (16:21.422)
It carries its own s-

Meg McCormick Hoerner (16:34.37)
working on.

on a possible show that we do together. So I'm going through all of my past artwork to try to pick out things that might have value for

That's wonderful. Please keep me posted if you decide to have it here again.

Valerie 50 and Nina and I would both be represented in our work.

Well, we will definitely keep an eye out for that. I did an interview over at Gallery 50. Sharon Kiefer gave me a tour last year. And so we're due for another tour of Gallery 50. It would be lovely if your artwork is on exhibit.

Sandy Feddema (17:12.689)
because they are so booked ahead but we hope it'll come in before something dire happens to me.

Well, I would love to keep in touch and check that out. Okay. Thank you. What is your median? What do you like to use? Do a lot of drawing. Of course,

Well, drawing and lately in the pandemic, started doing digital drawing. So I have a lot of digital drawing, but what you see here is actual physical drawing. That's wonderful. That's Bill Spencer. You may know Bill's center. Yes. This is Sandy himself. And I do some photography. Probably can tell too, couple of photographs there. I actually won a prize at the gallery for

Amazing that

Meg McCormick Hoerner (17:54.434)
photograph. That's wonderful. You're busy.

There's some scraps of artwork in here. She's not giving you the good tour. She really is quite an artist. These are the frames. And sculptor. We're trying to adapt it really.

reuse that's wonderful well thank you very much for showing me all of your treasures or some some of at all but some wonderful maybe before I leave I can go outside and get a photograph of

You're so you're not

Sandy Feddema (18:23.374)
the wall. It was a Tuesday morning, the middle of June at 730. We had just had about 11 inches of rain that previous week and they came to my door of the city and said, your wall collapsed, get it fixed as soon as you can. It's blocking the sidewalk. And we saw the other wall over there, which was exposed. We had winter jasmine over our wall. We didn't really see any problems. But when I went to look, the whole sidewalk was blocked and

I was scared that there might even be some little kids underneath the dirt. It was just a massive amount of dirt. So what happened was the wall gave way on the bottom and just slid everything out.

This is an amazing view from up here.

What's even better, when the parades go by, we spill candy down to the parade. But to make a very long story short, neither the city who built the wall in the mid 1800s to open up all this way for expansion wanted to claim it. And our insurance company didn't want to claim it. And so it's your wall, you rebuild it. Well, bottomless pit of money, was $120 something thousand dollars. And it's not really what you would call an everyday homeowner's task. So.

But we did, for three years, two 70-year-olds put together with the help of a local contractor, a cement contractor, to rebuild the bottom wall. And then we built it. You want to come down? Sure. We rebuilt a second wall because this was a slope going down to the first wall. We decided to put in a terrace, put in this eight-foot wall here. Now, this came from all sandstone throughout.

Meg McCormick Hoerner (19:47.053)
I love you.

Sandy Feddema (20:04.012)
The city people would volunteer their sand, so we have a pile. Here's an old foundation here. You can have the old foundation. But it took us quite a while. We can get a good picture of it from here. It was a legitimate tent. It goes three feet underground. It's four foot wide foundation. We used tip-off tip grains from again and everywhere we could to rebuild this whole.

Was, did you rebuild down here or just up top here?

90 feet of the first wall in this entire wall. it's quite nice. It's quite nice. You feel like you're in a country.

I say, what have you?

Meg McCormick Hoerner (20:39.564)
You too. And the courthouse is just over here.

Like roundhog day, when you look out of our guest room at the industry that's snowing in, you don't usually have a road that comes right into your.

Sure, but it takes a lot of work and a lot of money.

There was no health in the city. I don't want to make negative.

Sure, I understand, but it just, ties into what we've been saying about, you know, how hard all the pieces have to be in place in order to properly preserve properties and the land that goes with it. Right, it takes a village for sure. Thank you very much, Sandy.

Sandy Feddema (21:13.058)
Join effort, it's not a join effort.

Sandy Feddema (21:20.266)
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