Cool, historical and just strange: The items for sale at Second Mile Thrift Shop

I come from a town of bigger and busier thrift stores that are more retail-oriented, but Second Mile, located at 515 3rd Ave., is very different. The wares of this local thrift store are composed completely of donated items — some dustier, some more aged in color and others more collectible.

Every corner hosted a number of unique and beautiful items, coming from a wide range of time periods and from all over the world. General Manager Deanne Vogt, who manages pricing and the donations Second Mile receives, said one of her recent favorites is a vintage Harley Davidson jacket — though it’s not in stock just yet.

Many items are frequently sold throughout the day, including dishware, glassware, eras worth of vintage clothing and shoes, mostly from the 90s. “We get a lot of … Nike’s and Adidas,” Vogt said.

Although the thrift store mostly has older items in stock at first glance, Vogt also says that expensive items can present themselves in stock every now and then. “We had a Ganni backpack, like a $400 backpack. It still had the tags on it, but it had a bleach spot.” She priced it at $85 and sold it soon after.

Vogt says that price is determined through a process of finding the origin of the item by looking up its value over the internet or finding its manufacturer, as well as examining the condition it arrives in. “We look at shoes and go, ‘Okay this is interesting. Never heard of it,’ and we’ll look it up and you might find it made in Spain or made in Turkey.”

Vogt says that the items from outside the country come in when international students, families and traveling community members arrive. “It’s fun to see some of these things that, normally, we would not in the Midwest be able to find.”

Front desk attendants Kathi May and Rachel Porath have sold a lot of items, both cool or strange, from the store’s stock. Porath said she recently sold a blue and green Spanish glass pitcher. Valuable or collectible items like these are kept in a handful of places. The back area of the shop has some glass shelves with most fancy dishware and there is a jewelry counter by the front registers.

A handful of interesting items popped up to Alissa Booth `29, S&B photographer, and I in the back area of the shop. Beside the glass shelves was a book stand, where we saw a self-study book from 1919 titled “Standard Question Book and Home Study Outlines.”

At the shelves, various items popped out at us — a 1945 World War II U.S. military canteen, a pair of grape shears, a bull shark’s jaw bone and a gavel in its box.

There was even a section for Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil merchandise, including mugs, lunchboxes and plush toys.

Later in an area with sports equipment, we found a tennis racket with a press screwed over it — a protective wooden frame shaped like a trapezoid. The label on the side of the racket read, “Frame Only By Dunlop — England.”

Yet with such a variety of interesting items, it’s only reasonable for some donated items to seem a bit unusual from first sight.

A few that Alissa and I found to be this way include what could be described as a figurine of a stereotypical witch with black eyes, black pointy hat, dark purple clothes and the face of an old gnome. I found a strange assortment of statuettes of children with vintage clothing — some of them were missing body parts, like noses, and they had those areas painted black.

We also found a “Jesus Seashell” — a miniature shrine made of seashells, with a crucified Jesus Christ in the center. But the strangest item that Vogt and the attendants say they saw last week was a large model set of teeth, accompanied by an equally-large tooth brush.

Second Mile is open from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. from Mondays to Thursdays, 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Fridays and 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Saturdays.

If you’ve got the time to visit, maybe you could walk away with a new prized possession.