Estate pipes as we think of them today had a very specific beginning.
A man in Craftsbury, Vermont named Barry Levin bought collections mostly from widows, and mostly at retirement homes (women usually live longer than men, plus are usually younger than their husbands to start with) for $15 a bowl---quality name brands only---and then paid $15 a bowl for Jimmy Cooke (who lived just down the road) to clean them up.
Conceptually, the business idea was: "I'm devastated that Henry is gone, but at least one good thing will come of it... The end of those damn pipes!" lol
The cleaned pipes were then laid on a bed-sized flat area next to number cards and photographed, and thousands of copies of the photos were physically mailed to many hundreds of collectors, along with a typed price list. There were usually 8-10 prints in each mailer, with 25-40 pipes in each shot.
It started in the mid-late 1980s and was in full swing by the early 90s.
Until then, people mostly threw away old pipes because "re-using" them evoked thoughts of used personal items like toothbrushes and underwear.
Barry, however, made people realize that glasses and silverware in restaurants had most assuredly been used by someone else, also sheets and towels in hotels---by hundreds of people, in fact---and that purifying and sterilizing pipes was the same thing. He coined the term "Estate" pipe to get away from the "used" pipe label to create some distance as well.
I'm sure of all this because I was there. I helped Barry do some of the actual work, in fact. They were glorious times. He was one of those Larger Than Life guys you hope to meet every day but rarely do.
He died both unexpectedly and suddenly in early March, 1994.
The PipeWorld---and my world---has never been the same.
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