Almost all of my meager phone collection has come from estate sales, but very seldom at these sales do I find anything of interest. My best finds to date were an old rose WE 302 ($40.00) and a NE 302 ($4.00). Today my wife and I went to one out in the country not far from where we live. I had seen no phones at all, and when we were just about to leave she went into a room we had missed and called me in to point out two boxes. They each contained a WE 211A, apparently brand new. They were marked at $20.00 each, but I asked the lady if they would take $35.00 for the pair, and she agreed.
They will need a bit of cleaning - they both have some sort of cloudiness that doesn't just wipe off. It appears to be some sort of mildew, if that is possible. I haven't opened the phone bodies yet, but the transmitters are both are dated 10-41. One of the receivers is dated 10-13-41 and the other is dated the next day, 10-14-41. The cloth cords seem perfect, and one of them has the strain relief exposed outside the phone body, and it is dated IV 41. The boxes are also dated 1941.
Here's the long-winded story that makes this find really neat, at least to me: My wife's grandparents ran a little mom-and-pop grocery store in Dallas from the 1930s through the 1960s. The store was located just a few steps from their house, and they had a private phone line connecting the two locations. When you picked up the phone in the house, it would ring the one in the store, and vice versa. I have seen photos from the store that show this phone, and it is clearly a dial-less Western Electric space saver type that looks just like these 211As. Now, fast forward to today. We are building a barn on our property and I have been planning to set up a "ring-down" type phone circuit between the house and barn that will be just like the one her grandparents had between their house and store. I had started looking online for 211s to buy for that purpose. And then today we walk into a brand new pair of them in a farmhouse outside Navasota, Texas! The price was better than what I have seen online too.
Mike