Cormac MacConnell: Forever in the money with blue jeans
The backside was out of them on the left hand side, and both knees were ripped during the harvest.
But that is not why you dumped them, neither that or the fact they were covered with splashes of red oxide paint and grease, and oil stains from the tractor and the fertiliser spreader.
No, the reason you dumped them in the shed was because the zip broke down totally, and could not be closed.
That was a different scéal entirely, modesty and old dacency being involved, and that was why you got a new pair that are not nearly as comfortable yet as the old pair you dumped.
The pure truth, yet again.
I have good advice for you now. Go out to the shed immediately, and rescue the old jeans.
Put them in a box and stow them carefully away in a very safe place. Incredible as it may seem, there is the possibility they will become so valuable in the decades to come that one of your descendants will be able to sell them, probably to a Japanese gentleman, for the price of a forage harvester or a new jeep! And have change left over.
It is truly a wonderful world and, no, I’ve not yet gone stone mad. Bear with me, and read on, after you have rescued the old jeans.
Now that you are back, come with me in spirit to the rocky edge of an old mining town in Arizona, where Mick Harris is already hard at work inside the black mouth of a long abandoned silver mine. He has a small pick in his hand, and he is wearing a head lamp, and he is digging away hard, though he is not looking for gold or silver at all.
Believe it or not, he is searching for any of the ragged old pieces of denim britches which the miners discarded away back in the late 1800s, when they wore out because of their wearers’ crazed lust for the mother lode. Those rags of denim today, if you know how to market them, are worth a helluva lot more than gold or silver today.
And that is the pure truth. I have my information from an impeccable source, as always.
It was mostly early Levis the hardy miners wore. When they got a new pair of britches, they often cannily used the old ones for lagging pipes, and that sort of thing.
There are the remains of a lot of old britches in the areas where Mick Harris does his digging and, in fairness to the man, he has discovered a market for his finds. He can even sell a hip pocket from a long perished old pair of jeans.
His good luck began some years ago, when he announced on eBay that he had bits and pieces of aged old jeans to sell.
A Japanese collector flew all the way to Arizona to pay him over $1,000 for a denim jacket. Mick was delighted with that, but when he fully checked out the unique market later, he discovered that the Oriental gentleman was able to sell a pair of ancient battered jeans (just like yours!) to Levis for their company archives.
He learned that only a privileged few can sell directly to Levis, but the market via eBay is active and lucrative. He has recently been able to sell an 1890 pair of Neustader jeans — as popular as Levis away back then with the miners — for about €20,000. And better still, another Japanese trader paid €30,000 for another pair.
Best of all is the find made by his father-in-law of a pair of 1873 Levis, the very first of the line. These look exactly like your old pair, except that they have no belt loops (the miners wore braces), and there is something called a crotch rivet which singles them out as special.
Mick and his father-in-law have already been offered €100,000 for these!
And they are waiting for the next offer as I write. Again, the pure truth.
Your grandson will be a pensioner before your old jeans begin to become as valuable as a tractor, but you can see why it is a prudent move already to rescue them from the shed and stow them up in the attic for the benefit of posterity.
Now say thanks, Cormac...
