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Something to treasure

After 30 years, iconic antique dealer finally closing the register

Cicero was an ancient lawyer, not an antique buff. But surveying Treasures by Therese – which is closing its doors this summer after 30 years of business – one can’t help but think Cicero summed up the shop’s business plan well in saying:

“Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things. ... The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”

Located in a warehouse off North Main Avenue that’s cavernous, by Durango standards, the store is cluttered with all manner of charming miscellany, including innumerable dolls, paperweights, petticoats, agricultural tools, maps and assuredly old but art-historically vague tea sets.

Owner Therese Teiber estimated that in her lifetime running the store, she’s easily handled more than 1 million objects.

Every object in the store has a story. And the goods are so tightly packed, it can be physically difficult for shoppers to avoid knocking into them headlong, thereby becoming their final chapter.

For decades, Treasures by Therese has been a vibrant outpost of local capitalism at its most eccentric, helping meet Durango’s biannually throbbing demand for preposterous, dramatic and cheap second-hand costumes come Snowdown and Halloween – as well as being the premier local outlet for galvanized bathtubs.

The Durango Herald reported on Therese’s notoriously diverse offerings as early as 1988, with one reporter congratulating the store on its “tremendous assortment of salt and pepper shakers.”

But now, Therese is having a liquidation sale: Everything’s 20-25 percent off.

Anything that doesn’t sell will go to auction at summer’s end.

Shuttering isn’t easy: “This is a very emotional process for me,” Teiber said. “Sometimes, it just grabs me.”

Therese said, ultimately, she’s closing because she misses her husband and longtime business partner, John Teiber, too much. He died from cancer in 2013.

“It’s too hard without him. I miss him every minute of every day,” she said, crying.

Therese and John Teiber started the store in that location in the warehouse in 1985, “exactly 30 years ago,” she said.

Both Therese and John grew up in conservative farming families in the Midwest, brought up by parents who came of age during the Great Depression – when money was scarce, and poverty, endemic but terrifying.

“We never had any wealth, and our parents raised us knowing what it was like to conserve. You went to a department store to see the things that were new, then looked to buy something similar elsewhere.”

Until her 20s, Therese harbored toward rummage sales’ instinctive feelings of shame then-typical of the lower-middle-class Americans: However financially attractive, shopping at them was a public confession of penury – an embarrassing admission that the American Dream was beyond you.

“I thought second-hand shopping was for ‘the poor’ and didn’t want to be seen at those kinds of things. But then, I met John, and he started dragging me to flea markets. John was the one who taught me to love antiques,” she said.

Her introduction to this thrilling new world – in which all manner of exciting merchandise could be had, by the fearless, for bargain rates – marked the beginning of two, great, lifelong romances, Teiber said: one with John, and one with antiques.

Together, the couple started an antique dealship in 1984. After commuting between Denver and Durango for two years, John’s employer, Frontier Airlines, filed for bankruptcy in 1986; they decided to leverage their hobby into full-time jobs.

The start was rocky. (The couple initially joked it was, “junk by John, treasures by Therese.”) But their venture soon flourished. She quickly became a fixture, organizer and unofficial costumer of Durango’s prominent (and costume-intensive) social occasions. In 1999, a Herald article about various Snowdown events of broad, citywide import (“Human wheelbarrow contest a hit”) dedicated several thoroughly reported paragraphs to Therese’s Wednesday ensemble (a red-and-black dress with a feather boa).

In the 1990s, she negotiated permits and a Coors Light sponsorship for Durango’s “Clean Halloween” block party.

Despite an Elvira look-a-like contest that was well-attended by bosoms, “Then Lt. Dale Smith of the Durango Police Department dubbed the party ‘the smoothest, cleanest Halloween’ in a decade.”

For 14 years, Debi Gurule has shopped at Treasures by Therese twice a month. She said the store’s impending closure is somewhat tragic.

“Definitely, anytime one of those old icons shuts down, it’s sad in my opinion,” she said.

Looking toward the future, Teiber hopes to live the rest of her life on money that comes from putting the property on the market.

After a few months of lying on the floor in a ball, she said she’s certain to relish her retirement by tending vegetables and grandchildren.

In retail – much like life – endings are tragic. Change is hard. Loss is painful.

But this, of course, is why antiques have value: chipped, stained and a little broken, they contain memories even as they transfer hands – and this is their eternal selling point, for everything must go.

cmcallister@durangoherald.com



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