Cool, unusual: Sale underway of items belonging to Tennessee poet laureate

BELL BUCKLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — If you like to hunt for cool, unusual, eclectic stuff, you're not going to find a sale quite like this. That's because it's being held by an extraordinary person with an important story to Tennessee.

Friday morning, people lined up to get inside the banquet hall in Bell Buckle.

"I've always wanted a bigger Boop!" laughed one visitor, holding up a large statue of Bettie Boop.

"Got a big fork!" added another visitor. "I mean. You can't beat that, right?"

The important part was who was throwing this sale.

"If you're a writer or anything in the arts, you gotta do it," a voice told a visitor.

Margaret Britton Vaughn, known to friends as Maggi, is Tennessee's poet laureate and a country music songwriter.

"Wrote for Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty!" Maggi said.

She always knew she was born to write.

"My mother looked down at me and said, 'are you sure you don't wanna be a nurse?'" Maggi remembered. "'No, mama, I wanna be a songwriter and a poet.' I'm not a fancy writer. I can't spell doodly squat."

However, her words come from her heart.

"People say, 'Maggi, these books, you've written my life,'" she said.

Maggi's dream has led her to meet interesting people and artists. The banquet hall showcased an ice-cold Pepsi phone, a fork and spoon lamp, a musical washboard, doll heads.

"I don't know! I just like unusual!" Maggi said. "Practically everything I have has a story. The stuff? Some of it's junk and some of its real valuable."

"I can't believe this is completed constructed out of coat hangers," said Billy Phillips of Phillips General Store, holding up a wire sculpture shaped like a typewriter. "Maggi Britton Vaughn commissioned Vannoy Streeter, the artist who makes everything out of coat hangers, to make this typewriter."

"If I buy it, I love it, and it's hard to let go of sometimes, but I'm having this big ole sale 'cause I just turned 85," Maggi said. "When I'm dead and gone, they won't know what to do with everything."

Maggi's sharing the items that help tell her story. She's happy to have a moment with every person who walks in to encourage them to follow dreams just like she did.

"I want to put one of her poems right here like it'd be typed on this type writer," Billy said, holding up the typewriter made of coat hangers. "Maggi's the most eclectic person I've ever known in my entire life, and I mean that in every sense of the word."

Maggi's living estate sale continues Saturday, Aug. 12, at the Bell Buckle Banquet Hall. Doors open at 9:30 a.m. and stay open until 8:00 pm.