With glittering eye, Valerie Kurokawa roams the Sherman Oaks Antique Mall, in search of reamers.
You and I may have a vague notion that reamers, or juicers, are those venerable kitchen thingies on which the housewives of yesteryear twisted half an orange or grapefruit in order to produce a bit of home-squeezed juice.
But for Kurokawa, who lives in Sherman Oaks, an antique reamer is a prize, especially if the orange is meant to be squeezed, not on a glass dome of some sort, as is the norm, but on something that looks like the head of a dog or clown.
Kurokawa has reamers in which the juice-extraction part resembles a leaf or a small duck. Indeed, her house is filling up with her collection of some 75 vintage juicers. Some are on display in a greenhouse window. There are more in her kitchen, and they have begun to spill over into her living room as well.
"They're taking over," confides Kurokawa's mother and fellow collector, Gladys Moore. "She has them all earthquaked down with that earthquake stuff."
Like many other collectors, Kurokawa doesn't fully understand her obsession, but she makes no apology for it.
"I don't know why I collect them," she says. "I just like them."
Collecting is one of the things she and her mom relish doing together. The Cranberry House, an antique mall in nearby Studio City, is another favorite spot. Moore's passion are the turn-of-the-century prints originally published in Godey's Ladies Book, a forerunner of today's fashion and shelter magazines.
"It's entertainment," Moore says of their mother-daughter visits to antique malls. Moore has been collecting "forever," she confides--40 years anyway. And she admits that she loves both the hunt and clinching the deal. Collectors vary in how they broach the crucial question of whether the dealer will drop the price on an object of a collector's lust.
Moore's favorite gambit: "Is this price firm?"
"They always give you 10%, and sometimes more," she says.
As she and her daughter wander through the malls, Moore points to items that she once owned but cavalierly threw away, never dreaming they would be valuable. Sometimes the women will come upon some 40-year-old serving plate or other familiar-looking piece and Moore will ask her daughter, "Did I give that to you already?"
As those who antique (yes, it is a verb) know, collecting allows you to be both a hunter and a gatherer. We have genes for seeking out this stuff.
