Russell Carrell 1916-1998

SALISBURY, CONN. - Russell Carrell, a Salisbury antiques dealer who introduced flea markets to the United States and became an influential manager of indoor and outdoor antiques shows, died on February 19 at JFK Medical Center in Lake Worth, Fla. Carrell was returning from his winter home in St Kitts when he was hospitalized. He was 81 years old.

An innovator who helped professionalize the industry by instituting standards and developing venues, Carrell is best remembered for the support and encouragement he gave fledgling dealers and for his role in popularizing Americana in the postwar United States.

Born November 6, 1916, in Morristown, N.J., Carrell was educated locally and at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He left school prior to receiving a degree and held several jobs, including that of dishwasher in a resort community on Cape Cod, before joining the Navy. It was in the service that he met his longtime companion, Gardner Colby Wolworth, who died in 1984.

Carrell settled in Salisbury, Conn., in 1946, long before the quiet village in Litchfield County's northwest corner had become an antiques mecca. With the idea of opening an antiques shop, he rented a storefront on Main Street that had been a thrift shop benefiting the Free French during World War II.

"I frequently had a hard time coming up with the $35 rent," Carrell recalled in a 1985 interview. Though his only local competition was an antiques dealer named Alice Jane Fairchild, business was scarce.

"I've found that you starve to death waiting for customers," said Carrell, whose long record of innovation began with the simple desire to succeed in his own business.

Carrell said that he was working at a Simsbury, Conn., auction when he first considered opening an outdoor antiques market. Watching furniture being loaded off and on a truck, it struck the dealer that it would be far simpler to leave the material outside to begin with.

Familiar with the Parisian open air antiques market, Marche aux Puces, Carrell began planning an event of his own in Salisbury. "A friend of mine who was an editor at the The New Yorker was visiting at the time," Carrell later recalled. "We firmed up the idea over drinks sitting right here. I had an awful time introducing that word. People kept saying `flea circus.'"

Carrell launched Antiques In A Cow Pasture in a field behind his Salisbury home in September 1958. His original plans had called for 60 dealers to swap and shop among themselves under a big tent. The tent proved impractical, and Carrell found himself with not 60 but 80 enthusiastic participants. Attendance the first year was 1,200. It more than doubled the following year to 3,000. At its height the Salisbury flea market numbered 200 dealers.

The flea-market format was soon adopted by other promoters. In 1959, Brimfield, Mass., auctioneer Gordon Reid opened his own field show with 67 exhibitors. Reid's daughter, Judith Mathieu, said Carrell influenced her father. "My dad saw the potential that was here on the field in Brimfield," noted Mathieu, a partner in J & J Promotions, organizers of one of Brimfield's largest, triannual show concerns.

On September 11, 1964, the The Newtown Bee described the phenomenon that the seven-year-old Salisbury flea market had become. "The sign on Russell Carrell's antiques shop says `Usually Open By Appointment,' but as the Saturday after Labor Day approaches open hours become less and less usual," the article began.

"Why heave? Why not use the wagon as a booth?," the The Bee continued, noting that 180 dealers from more than a dozen states would line up their station wagons or trucks at the gate at the field, many having slept in their cars the night before.

"By 11 o'clock, when the public is admitted, dealers will have set up shop, had coffee and donuts starting at 6 am on Russell Carrell's terrace, and done their own browsing and buying," the The Bee continued. At the request of local police, Salisbury's opening was pushed back from noon to 11 am to help relieve traffic congestion on the access road.

As a dealer himself, Carrell was sensitive to the needs of his colleagues and alert to the preferences of the public. At the same 1964 show described in the The Bee, Carrell organized a raffle to encourage attendance. The prize was a round trip ticket on Pan American airlines to Paris, where the winner was advised to visit the Marche aux Puces.

Whatever prejudice existed towards field shows, Carrell countered it by offering merchandise of a quality unparalleled at outdoor fairs. His shows attracted prominent specialists in early American furniture, folk art, and decorative accessories, both as exhibitors and buyers. Sometimes exhibiting at his own fairs, Carrell, through his personal knowledge and taste, set standards that other exhibitors strove to match. "Beyond everything else, he had a good eye. People may forget that," noted Joel Weber, a dealer from Milford, Conn.

Aside from complaints about foul weather, criticisms of Carrell's outdoor shows were few. "One eminently dissatisfied customer, an auto dealer, drove all the way across the state after seeing 150 station wagons advertised," reported The Bee. "During one of Mr Carrell's shows, Khrushchev's missile rattling in Cuba had everyone, including the exhibitors, more interested in the radio and TV reports than in antiques," another account noted.

"The flea market has," The Bee wrote, "created a whole new following for the established shops. People who might hesitate to go into a more formal setting have no reservation about shopping from wagon to wagon, and many of them have become collectors."

While developing a circuit of outdoor shows, Carrell also began assuming management of the some of the country's most illustrious indoor events. By 1972, Carrell's calendar included antiques shows in Westport, Danbury, Kent, and Greenwich, Conn.; Lake Forest, Ill., Grosse Pointe, Mich.; Stockbridge, Mass.; and the famed New Hampshire Antique Dealers Association Show. Carrell managed flea markets in Millbrook, N.Y.; Topsfield and Weston, Mass.; Ridgefield and Riverton, Conn.; New York City and Rye, N.Y. He briefly managed the Connecticut Antiques Show.

By 1985, some of his most elegant venues were Cincinnati, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Except for Kent, all of Carrell's shows benefited charities, a format the Salisbury dealer perfected. In prestige, however, nothing compared with New York's Winter Antiques Show, a benefit for East Side House Settlement. Carrell resigned as manager following the 1987 Winter Antiques Show.

In 1954, after inheriting several Louis Vuitton trunks packed with haute couture clothes and accessories, East Side House Settlement board members Mrs Harkness and Mrs Lindquist took a booth at the Madison Square Garden Antiques Show to raise money for their charity. The following year, with the help of Mrs Douglas MacArthur, East Side House Settlement secured the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue as a venue for the first Winter Antiques Show.

"Soon thereafter Russell was named manager," recalled James F. McCollom, Jr., co-chairman of the Winter Antiques Show between 1976 and 1994. "Russell could organize. He created the foundation of the structure that exists today for the East Side House charity. Someone has to come down to black and white and Russell was willing to do that. He took charge and I respected that."

"When Russell took over the East Side House show he brought a new dimension to the business," said Portsmouth, N.H., auctioneer Ron Bourgeault, a former Winter Antiques Show exhibitor. "He made it the social event of the season. He was willing to take chances and had an uncanny sense of what would work."

When not working, Carrell devoted time to collecting and to the restoration of his historic home in Salisbury. In the late 1940s, he purchased the 1740 Samuel Moore house for $10,000. Moore was the author of the first book on surveying published in the United States. In an upstairs room that Carrell used as his office, Moore taught surveying, perhaps to Ethan Allen, who was born in nearby Lakeville, Conn. It is thought that Alexander Hamilton was a guest in the Moore home.

As described in the Waterbury Republican,the house was a warren of small, low-ceilinged rooms, casually furnished with objects that struck Carrell's fancy. The dealer's first love was early American pattern glass. Over the years he developed an expertise in ceramics and porcelains. He was well known for his collections of canary yellow Staffordshire and, in later years, mocha.

Books were stacked on the floor and on the furniture. A cluster of antique iron frogs, made by ironsmiths as end-of-the-day whimseys, squatted on the hearth, and wooden eagles peered from bookcases. A collection of carved giraffes began casually with a wooden figure that washed up on the beach of Carrell's West Indies home.

"Like anyone else who is very interested in the business, he was a compulsive buyer and collector," said Ed Palko, Carrell's friend and companion of later years. Soon after Palko settled in Salisbury in 1960, he met the show manager, who offered him a series of small jobs. In time he asked Palko, who owned a florist's shop, to help with the Winter Antiques Show. Soon Palko was involved in all of Carrell's Eastern events.

Palko joined Stonington, Conn., dealer Marguerite Riordan and Portsmouth, N.H., auctioneer Ron Bourgeault in organizing an 80th birthday party in Salisbury for Carrell in 1996. The following year, Palko and Carrell purchased a camper and made one of their last trips together. The cross-country excursion took them to New Orleans, Savannah, Galveston, San Antonio, New Mexico, and back through Nashville, where they indulged their passion for country-western music. "It proved to be extremely successful," recalled Palko. "Russell could no longer walk well but he always loved traveling."

Besides Palko, Carrell is survived by a cousin, Janice Montague, of Wakefield, Mass., and his niece Suzanne Carrell Feldman, of Virginia Beach, Va. His two brothers are predeceased.

Burial was February 24 in Salisbury.