A Chambers in a fish pool, pile of glass block fragments, five Jumbo insulators on one pole, and an E.R.W. seen suspended on wires over the middle of a river. These are the ones that got away. Everyone has his story of the one he just missed by inches. It is the most aggravating, frustrating, but challenging part of collecting insulators.

Repeating that well known phrase, "that reminds me of a story", it does remind me of a story. While trading insulator "fish stories", I heard the following classic. After searching, many miles of travel, and tracing every possible lead, we finally tracked down the location of where many glass block insulators had been discarded. The old farmer said, "I declare, they was a pile of them things there the other day." All that was left was a few broken fragments.

How about the story of the rare insulator on the far end of the cross arm, just inches out of reach. That is almost as bad as that rare insulator out there that is just in reach; however, while removing it ever so carefully, it just falls apart in your hand. What about the forty-foot pole in the middle of a swamp, or that cross arm high up in the structure of a railroad trestle. Also, there is that story of spotting some nice items on a backwoods dirt road. It turned out that this dirt road carried traffic like the Los Angeles Freeway. The way my luck runs, that eligible pole is found across the street from a police station or a popular roadside bar. I guess I don't have the courage of a well known northern collector who summoned the help of a policeman to direct traffic around his van while he removed insulators from a street light circuit.

More of my bad luck occurred recently when walking several miles of railroad track in central Florida. I saw a track crew coming, so I dumped my bundle of goodies in the ditch and left. The next day when I returned to claim them, they were gone. Farther down the line I knew where there were some Whitall Tatum number one purple insulators. A forest fire had moved through the area earlier in the year and had burned off much of the undergrowth, exposing the pretty jewels. Hundreds of S.C.A. Tatum #1's--what a gold mine! That hope began to fade away when I realized what a fire does to glass. All it took was a soft tap with my shoe, and they crumbled. Why me?

While traveling down a dirt road, we spotted some ruby red lightning rod balls on the roof of a farm house. We stopped the car; the farmer looked up from his chair on the front porch. We got out of the car; the farmer picked up his shot gun. We walked up to his front gate; the farmer aimed his shot gun, while shouting classical obscenities at us. We then immediately proceeded to get back in our car, and hurried away empty handed.

Another likely story.... Night was falling as we were traveling on a downtown street in Miami. I was spying each pole for potential goodies when I noticed this unusual piece of glass sticking up from the cross arm. Since reading about the "table leg" insulator, I immediately surmised what I had seen in the darkness. The next day I hurried back with a hired lineman friend, only to find that my "table leg" insulator was just a Coke bottle stuck upside down in a hole in the cross arm.

I have heard stories of a collector having 200 or 300 E.C.& M.'s stored in the basement of a house, a cabin in the New England area where several boxes of threadless insulators had been stored--with piles of broken pieces everywhere.

Of course these stories don't relate to the following reasoning. "I had a chance to get a hundred of those, but did not think they were worth anything." What is worse is that a couple of rival collectors that live in a nearby town found some good insulators on a lone pole only blocks from my home--right out from under my nose.

Every collector has his "fish stories", and a book could be written about them. These are just a few of the ones that got away.

And the story about the Chambers insulator in a fish pond well, your guess is as good as mine.