On a rare date day, playing hooky from work with the wife, I found myself in a trendy, upscale antique store thinking that there was no way I’d be parting with any of my hard-earned money. But walking into JoRetro on this crisp fall morning I immediately locked eyes on a shelf of vintage PYREX dishware and knew that before the day was over I was going to break one of my cardinal rules of collecting by buying a 40 year-old piece of glass. As a helpless nostalgic hoarder collector I’ve been browsing stores up and down the east coast for well over 25 years, and I’ve always found it funny that 50% of any given booth is usually old dishware. Dish and cookware has just never made any sense to me as a collectible because it’s all relatively boring (unless you consider stuff like Star Wars or McDonald’s character glasses), priced to high to use, and kind of gross. I mean, what if an old mixing bowl was used as a vomit bucket by a family with sick kids? You just don’t know what was in them and I’m sorry, it doesn’t matter how many times you wash dishes, if some kid puked in it in 1986, then it will forever be haunted by spectral vomit, just try and change my mind. Also, I know from experience, as I used one of our large PYREX bowl to vomit in while sick multiple times as a kid.
So heading into a shop full of vintage dishware seemed like a very safe way to keep up my recent spendthrift ways. That was until my vision crash-zoomed in on a display of PYREX Autumn Harvest bowls, and seeing the wheat pattern against the red, rust bowl made me feel like I was just hugged by my mother from beyond the grave. My desire to own one of the bowls was immediate and oddly powerful. What’s the issue with picking up one little bowl I asked myself? Well, for starters, most of the bowls were sold in sets and the asking price was around $150 for four bowls. There were some single bowls, but most were in the “Cinderella” design (with pour lips/handles on two sides) which weren’t the ones my mother had in her kitchen through practically my entire childhood. No, if I was going to buy one of these bowls it had to be one of the ones I distinctly remember microwaving Campbell’s Sirloin Burger Chunky soup in, or scooping mounds of creamy shrimp dip out of with the largest Ruffles chips I could find in the bag. Ideally it would also be $15 or under.
These PYREX bowls by Corning (it’s important to note that it’s all caps PYREX, as the post 90s Pyrex output is of shoddy craftsmanship and is nothing like the opal PYREX that was manufactured between the 60s to roughly 1986) were first introduced in 1979 and were continued to be manufactured for almost a decade. It’s hard to place the bowls to a specific manufacturing year as the original boxes weren’t dated and neither are the etched branding on the bottoms of the bowls, but 1976-1986 is a fairly tight window so it kind of doesn’t matter. If I hard to guess, I think my mother would have purchased her set sometime between 1979-1980 when our family migrated from Austin, Texas to Tampa, Florida. I have vivid memories of these bowls being on the kitchen table in Tampa during Thanksgiving, and in my experience, she splurged on new dishware whenever we moved (which was quite a lot during my childhood.) I also wonder if this was the kind of thing that my mom “bought” by saving up books of S&H Green Stamps which she was fond of collecting on every trip to Albertson’s or Publix while grocery shopping. I found an unopened box of these bowls on eBay that had the S&H sticker on the bottom. The set only cost five books of stamps (or 6,000 total points worth of stamps!)
After checking all the bowls in the display I was a little dismayed to find that the cheapest bowl was $20 and orange (not the rust red my mother owned.) So I forced myself to move on, promising that I would check eBay later to see if I could find something more in my target price range. Hell, even if I could, what the fuck was I going to do with a 40 year-old PYREX bowl? I sure as shit was not going to use it to cook (remember spectral, haunted vomit is a real thing.) Would I just sit it on the kitchen counter? I mean I don’t know about you, but counter space is at a premium in my household. It just didn’t make sense to give into this nostalgic whim just because I lost my mom three years ago, almost to the day, and seeing these bowls made me think of the good years we had together. I snapped a few photos and told myself to save my money.
The wife and I left the store without buying anything and made our way to another local Antique store, a huge one on the edge of the bay in Havre de Grace, MD with three stories of booths and stalls chalk full of all kinds of stuff. The last time I was there I stumbled on a pretty decent comic stall and figured that I pick up a couple back issues of the Uncanny X-Men to fill some holes in my collection. Of course I spent the next hour unconsciously hoping to find some Autumn Harvest PYREX cheaper than what I saw at JoRetro. Spoiler alert, I did find some bowls, and sadly they were in much rougher shape and either the same prices or higher. What the hell was I thinking. Had I become a guy who gets weirdly excited for very specific vintage dishware? Apparently.While browsing through that cavernous store I was also searching eBay on what little 5G connection I could get and coming to the conclusion that though the core prices were cheaper on the auction site, the shipping made all of the bowls listed way more expensive than these stores I was physically browsing.
We left the second antique mart and I made a beeline back towards JoRetro. At this point I could not get the damn bowl out of my mind. The only way to exorcise this demon was to give in and buy one. So I did. And now it’s sitting on my home office desk filled with miscellaneous action figures. $22 well spent. I guess.
