Religion: The Means & the End

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The rummage sale is a well-entrenched church institution, and few people know more about it than Sylvia McDaniel. 63, who helps to run a "next-to-new shop" in Springfield, Mo. With her help, Springfield's Christ Church (Episcopal) has raised funds with rummage sales for 25 years. In the Episcopal weekly, The Living Church, not long ago, Rummager McDaniel let readers in on some trade secrets. Items:

¶ Do not put price tags on the clothes. "These always get shuffled around in some mysterious way and then the arguments begin ... It is far safer and more profitable in the long run for each salesgirl to be a walking price catalogue."

¶ If a "good customer" wants to buy before the sale opens, "by all means accommodate her. Any advance sale brings more money."

¶ Sell the mirrors before anything else. "Those fetching hats may never sell if the customer sees herself in them first."

¶ Rummage-sale workers can have a "good laugh" when a stolen alarm clock in a shopping bag goes off. "Some of the customers are real sharpies who can steal pants from under coats, stuff costume jewelry into their sleeves and pockets, and exchange their own shoes and purses at the rummage counters with a magician's skill."

¶ Do not be softhearted. "The frail young woman with a drove of ragged children trailing her is often an agent for some secondhand store, and follows all of the rummage sales in that same appealing manner. If some customers seem actually needy, tell them how to get in touch with a charitable organization that does not charge."

Such advice shocked Living Church readers. Mrs. Roger Ray of Cape Elizabeth, Me. denounced the article as "explicit directions for organized sinning by church women." The Rev. Henry Johnson Jr. of Evanston, Ill. called it "a new and absolute low in religious journalism . . . The article represents a terrible judgment upon us. and I cannot see how any church publication could be a party to perverting religion, even in the name of any empty, upper-crust Episcopalianism."