STAN'S HAND PROVES YOU CAN'T PUT PRICE ON, UH, BEAUTY

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 12, 1993                   TAG: 9303120500
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
STAN'S HAND PROVES YOU CAN'T PUT PRICE ON, UH, BEAUTY
He's tried it all. The support groups. The 28-day detox gig. Yard Sales Anonymous.
Stan Hale can't help himself. He still steals away, now and then, early Saturday mornings to hit the yard sales. He's got furniture and gadgets piled high in storage. None of it seems destined for use before the turn of the millenium, but Hale extols each piece's virtue. Every dusty credenza, every slightly busted widget, carries a Stan story.
But Stan's greatest yard-sale triumph isn't in an attic.
It's out on the sidewalk along Melrose Avenue, near 23rd Street, in front of the Mini-Worlds Inter-Community Bazaar.
It's a giant, yellow, cupped hand of molded plastic. It's a chair, as hideous a piece of furniture as has ever oozed from a factory.
But the tacky, not-terribly-comfortable hand/chair has become one of Roanoke's premier roadside landmarks, the bazaar's signature and a tribute to Stan's buying prowess.
"That thing?" asks Stan, rolling his eyes, priming for a tale. "I love that chair! I have had fights over that thing!"
He bought it four years ago at a yard sale in Southwest Roanoke County. It was about 3 p.m. - very, very late on the yard-sale circuit.
"The kid wanted $9," remembers Stan the way some might remember the birth of their child. "I offered him $6. He said, `Oh man, it's my sister's . . . It's from out west . . . '"
Stan held firm.
"I mean, by now it's 3 o'clock, I'm offering him something for it, he takes it," says Stan.
Stan got the Mona Lisa for a song. If the kid knew the true value of the piece, "I'd still be paying." It's the motto of every yard-sale mainliner.
He fetched the hand - Stan's hand - back to the bazaar, a collection of merchants inside a single building, each selling piles of used merchandise.
For years outside, Mr. Mac had held court. He was a scarecrow-type stuffed figure with a mannequin's head. Mr. Mac was Stan's creation. Sometimes, when the spirit moved him, Stan put a face on Mr. Mac. Sometimes not.
"He was too much work. Unlike the hand, he was susceptible to the weather. Kids'd beat on him," says Stan. Mr. Mac was retired to crumple in the corner of a back room.
The hand, a leftie model, replaced Mr. Mac.
"I just set it out there. It's totally maintenance-free. You just can't ask for any more," boasts Stan. The chair gets dragged out to the sidewalk daily about 10 a.m., where it presides over an ever-rotating collection of hubcaps and baby strollers and lawn spreaders. Daily, Stan's hand is dragged back inside at 4 p.m.
It is not for sale. I offered him $20,000, ready with cash in my pocket. Stan didn't flinch.
Prospective buyers have badgered him, hollered at him.
"This is not about money," says Stan. "This chair has an aura about it."
Clara Campbell, one of the indoor merchants, has turned away buyers for four years. They've come from Roanoke and from out-of-town. They've come time after time.
But you don't sell icons.
Everything else Stan Hale owns is negotiable.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB