Family’s yard sale must go on

The coronavirus pandemic has complicated the Kemp family’s annual yard sale.

But for a woman that has lived through 17 presidents, a pandemic isn’t going to keep her family from selling their odds and ends during the week of the Tri-State Gas Engine and Tractor Show as they have done for decades.

Ruth Kemp, 98, and dozens of members of her family are still hosting their yard sale at the southeast corner of Votaw and Harrison streets and her granddaughter, Diane Bentz Cooper, 55, plans to keep it open everyday this week unless her grandson is playing pee-wee football.

The pair, which have lived next to one another in the east 200 block of Votaw Street since Kemp moved in with her grandson in 2007 (the house has been in the family since Dec. 1975), said they enjoy seeing the customers too much to close their sale because of the pandemic, though Kemp keeps her distance and watches from afar while wearing a mask to stay safe.

Vendors began setting up in their yards and business in downtown Portland as early as last week. Bentz Cooper said traffic has been significantly less busy since she opened her yard sale Aug. 18.

“I’ve lived through the (Great) Depression, World War 2, the Vietnam War, the recession,” Kemp continued, comparing the magnitude of the current situation to what she’s lived through. “And I’ve never missed voting.”

Bentz Cooper, who has lived at 203 E. Votaw St., Portland, and helped host the yard sale since she moved there in 1988, recently unloaded storage units she had been keeping her sons’ stuff in, and anything they didn’t want is out in their yard for sale.

Kemp said she marked the prices on all the items, which include clothes, tires windows, toys, dolls, dishware, car seats, books, cabinets, just about any knick-knack anyone could think of and more.

Some of Kemp’s 29 great- or great-great-grandchildren assist with the sale when they aren’t running around the backyards or playing in the pool.

Regular customers stop to see Kemp, as they do every year, to see how she’s doing and hear her stories, of which there are plenty.

She cooked with Jesse James’ daughter, lived next door to one of the Marsh brothers in Selma and experienced the consolidation of schools in Jay County, which caused her family to move to Portland because they got tired of driving their kids back and forth to activities at the school.

“God’s blessed us,” Kemp said. “He’s blessed us very much.”

Kemp’s mother, Evelyn (Brinning) Nisonger, lived to be 104 years old, so she expects she still has a few more yard sales in her, she said.