No. 1

May 1997

We were living in California. We went to Pennsylvania to put on a family reunion for Michael (my new husband) to meet the family. The day after the reunion, we decided to take a ride in the country and came across a rather large collectibles shop. We asked the owner if he had any HL's. He thought there were some in a cabinet in the rear of the store, but he wasn't sure what was there. And he said, "by the way, anything I have in the Harbour Lights line is 20% off."


We left the store with seventeen 5500 series retired MIB LE's at 20% off retail and he threw in a Pt. Fermin ornament at $5.


When we were checking out, we felt so quilty that we mentioned to the store owner that some of these had a secondary value that would be well over double what we were paying. The shop owner said no problem, he is a retail dealer and doesn't deal in the secondary market for HL's.


The kicker was when we were checking out he mentioned he had a few more pieces in the the basement and asked if we would be interested. Of course, the answer was yes and I asked him if he might have a Coquille or Hatteras. He said, "you know, I believe I have both." When he returned what seemed to be an hour later (was actually only about 3 minutes) he asked one of his sales clerks what had happened to the Coquille and Hatteras that had just had in inventory. Her reply, "Oh I just sold those about a week ago." Yes, at 20% off retail. OK, which one of you out there got them?

No. 2

We received a phone call one day from a dealer we had dealt with saying he had sold his store and would sell us anything he had in stock at 25% off. We left his store three hours later with 24 MIB Retired LE's at 25% off!!

No. 3

We went to a signing event in Los Angeles one night at Collector's Haven. When we got there we found out Bill Younger was not going to be there and in his stead were going to be Nancy Younger and Harry Hine. This was so long ago, that we didn't even know who these Bill, Nancy and Harry people were. The store had done a deal where if you bought anything in the HL line you were given 3 chance tickets for a drawing. We bought six of the pieces we had been wanting to get and ended up with 24 chances (the sales clerk gave us a couple extra). We won Ft. Niagara, Tybee, Heceda Head, Mukilteo Light and Gross Point; five calendars, two t-shirts, a sweat shirt, a set of note cards, a membership package and Harry just about banned us from the drawing at that point. We don't blame him at all. It was bizarre! It was totally fun! And Nancy and Harry signed every piece we won and the 20 we had brought with us.


We felt kind of quilty, so we gave back 3 of the calendars and the membership. But we didn't feel guilty enough to give back any of the LE's.

No. 4

When we were living in California, we used to go to events at Dana Drugs in Toluca Lake, CA. Everytime we went, we won an LE and one time won the Event Piece. It got to the point, when the rep and shop owner saw us walk in the door at the next event, they would just laugh, knowing full well that we would probably win yet another one!



We actually have a couple more great deals, and we won New London Ledge Glow at the 98 Reunion, but the 4 above were the biggest.

We have been exceptionally lucky in our acquisitions of our HL's as you can see and it has been great fun.