Delivering Patterns on a Platter

GREENSBORO, N.C. —  For almost a decade, Patsy Clarke was four fruit dishes away from her mother.

In 1977, Clarke inherited her mother’s china--an eight-piece set of Multicolored Tonquin by Royal Staffordshire of England. Her mother, who built the set piece by piece in the 1940s and 1950s, died before she could spare enough from the household budget to buy the last four fruit dishes.

“She used to carry on about it so. Those four tiny dishes,” said Raleigh, N.C., resident Clarke, now 70. “When I was young I thought, ‘Merciful heavens, who wants a fruit dish that badly?’ ”

It would turn out that she would. As the years crept by after her mother’s death, Clarke began to feel the pull of those four tiny plates. And, almost in spite of herself, she decided to purchase them.

But she soon discovered that she might be too late. The major department stores hadn’t stocked the discontinued pattern in years. China shops, flea markets, estate auctions and even garage sales were no help either.

She had nearly given up when she ran across a small magazine ad for a company in nearby Greensboro that advertised itself as the world’s largest supplier of discontinued and active china, crystal and flatware. She called them and they had the fruit dishes.

“Oh, it’s all foolishness, isn’t it?” said Clarke. “But it’s the only thing, I think, that’s real. The feelings and the caring. Particularly, when people are gone. There’s an aura about the things they’ve shared with you, and those dishes are one of them.”

Few understand the unusual power of missing fruit dishes better than Bob Page, the founder and president of the company Clarke contacted, Replacements Ltd. Page’s company sells about 40,000 china pieces a week to customers who include Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Lenox Tuxedo), Barbara Walters (Minton Golden Crocus) and Betty Ford (Lenox Westbury). In his 18 years of restocking America’s china cabinets, Page has outgrown three warehouses and now needs a building four football fields long to accommodate an inventory of 3.3 million pieces from about 50,000 patterns.

Page is not alone in trying to fill vacancies in the nation’s china collections. Twenty other companies compete for the business, along with antique stores, flea markets and auction houses. Ebay.com, an Internet auction site, had more than 20,000 pieces of porcelain on the block on a single day last week.

“We had one customer call us every week for two years for a piece of Lenox Wetherly,” said Mike Hollingsworth of China Traders, a Simi Valley-based replacement service with an inventory of about 30,000 pieces. “Needless to say, we got to know her quite well, and she was very happy when the piece came in.”

Reaching Out to the Past

It’s more than mere appreciation for a beautiful table or an obsessive need to complete a china collection that drives customers. When customers buy a piece of china, they are reaching out to the past.

“It’s all extremely sentimental,” said Page, a soft-spoken North Carolina native. “They could be searching for a pattern from their marriage that began 30 years ago or one that their grandmother used for Sunday dinners. They have to find it, whatever it is.”

Indeed, for many in the middle class, “good china” is steeped in the memories of family gatherings for such special occasions as Thanksgiving and the December holidays. The gleaming settings, which bestow a refined elegance to a dining table, have come to symbolize part of the national ritual of coming together.

As such, chinaware is often viewed as a fragile link between the generations. In the same way a quality watch or a fine necklace may be handed down to a son or daughter, china sets too are meant to be passed down, but not so much to an individual as to an entire family. And if that line is broken, it’s seen somehow as a failure to family--past, present and future.

Page appreciates his customers’ sentimentality for china, but he does not wholly share in it. Page’s parents were tobacco workers and couldn’t afford indoor plumbing, much less fine dinnerware. Even today, Page, a 53-year-old multimillionaire, doesn’t own a set of china for his home.

“I’m still too practical, I guess,” he said.

But Page can become emotional when talking about the gratitude customers have shown him over the years. He keeps an inch-thick file of thank-you letters in his desk. His favorite is from a woman who inherited six dinner plates from her grandmother.

In the 1980s, the woman left Wisconsin for Wall Street and took her grandmother’s plates with her, tucking them away in a cabinet somewhere. She went on to great success financially but still felt that “something was missing from her life.”

One day she accidentally came across the plates, which triggered a sudden quest “to look for [her] own roots and place in this crazy world.” After a wide search, she finally found her grandmother’s 60-year-old pattern, Mayflower by Metlox, at Replacements.

She wrote Page that she was going home for a family Christmas for the first time in 25 years and was bringing a dozen place settings of her grandmother’s china with her.

“I hope you will always remember that you do not just replace things,” the woman wrote. “You replace memories, faces and times long past but not forgotten.”

Said Page: “I tear up every time I read that. I really do.”

Sweeping Changes of Victorian Era

Today it’s unlikely that Page would have any such letters, or even his business, if it were not for the sweeping changes of the Victorian era. Before Victoria became Queen of England in 1837, most families in the West ate informally or alone. If they cooked, which was rare, they usually ate directly from a pot or pan. It was only aristocracy and the wealthy that dined in groups off chinaware.

But by the end of the queen’s life in 1901, middle-class families had begun eating together, mostly for dinners. Indeed, the Sunday meal after church was often seen as the social highlight of the week and an occasion to pull out “the good china.”

At its most basic level, dining etiquette was able to evolve because food was easier to obtain, and there were now millions of people with the money, leisure time and desire to mimic the customs of the elite.

But it was the Victorian era’s idealization of the family that crystallized many of the changes in home life, say historians.

“There was a whole lot of inventing of traditions and what families were and were not supposed to do during this time,” said Warren J. Belasco, head of the American Studies program at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. “It gave them something to hang on to, a sense of permanence amid all the change.”

Meanwhile, chinaware, once exorbitant, was becoming more affordable. After centuries as an exclusive creation of Asia, the art of making the translucent porcelain dishes had been mastered by Europeans in the 1700s, and advancements in production dropped costs.

Americans also were eager to display their new affluence and eagerly bought up chinaware.

“It was the filtering down of the customs of the court,” said Deborah Shinn, an assistant curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. “Each social strata sought to achieve the highest it could, which is just human nature.”

Fine dinnerware now is affordable to many more people, although it’s still not cheap. One new five-piece place setting from the New Jersey-based company Lenox, the only major producer of fine china in the United States, can cost from $75 to $300.

Consumers can expect to pay similar amounts for top-quality china from other famous manufacturers, such as Royal Doulton of England and Noritake of Japan. (Once patterns are discontinued, however, prices usually rise 30% or more.)

It was a recognition of this untapped market for discontinued china that eventually led Page to junk a state auditing job for a risky business venture almost two decades ago.

Page was fond of antique shops and flea markets, and a friend asked him to track down some family dishes. When Page found the plates, other friends and friends of friends made similar requests.

Soon, the activity grew into a weekend moneymaker, then into a small side business, and then came the decision to go into porcelain detective work full time. The Small Business Administration said his idea would never work and rejected his loan application. But with the help of a part-time assistant, he grossed $52,000 the first year. The rest, as any of his 550 employees today might tell you, is history.

Replacements Ltd. is the giant of its field, grossing $57 million annually and handling 10,000 daily calls.

Page himself still travels around the country hunting for rare or underpriced chinaware. He buys about $75,000 worth of stock for his warehouse on each trip. “I get a real big charge out of finding things.”

But his buying pales in comparison to the bounty discovered by an estimated 1,500 suppliers nationwide. Armed with copies of Replacements’ quarterly catalog, which lists his buying prices, the freelance scavengers ship in some 50,000 pieces each week, which means the company’s inventory grows by a half-million pieces a year.

Prices vary considerably depending upon Replacements’ supply and demand. A plate that was listed at $50 for suppliers one quarter might be marked down to $25 by the next. The markup for customers is typically around 50%.

With so many pieces flooding the warehouse every week, it’s not uncommon for some to sit around on their 16-foot-high storage shelves for years. In fact, Replacements still has some pieces left over from the founding days of the company.

Despite the company’s huge stock, customers call or write every day asking for patterns Replacements has never seen or even heard of. When this happens, the mystery pattern is assigned a number until its name can be found.

Sometimes, it takes a few weeks for Replacements to pinpoint, label and obtain the pattern. Sometimes, it takes years.

“It’s like a huge jigsaw puzzle,” Page said. “Except we’re always finding more and more pieces. But you know you’ll never find them all.”

In the case of Clarke’s four fruit dishes, Replacements can take pride in solving a small corner of the puzzle.

Clarke still remembers the day she brought the fruit dishes home. She had a dishwasher but chose to hand wash the fruit plates. Then she carefully hand dried them and put them to rest in a kitchen cabinet with the rest of her mother’s dishes.

“I looked at them, the whole set on the shelf,” Clarke remembered, “and I had a sense of completion. I remember standing in that empty kitchen, saying out loud, ‘Well, Mother, I’ve got them. They’re all here.’ ”