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The Trunk That Returned Alone - $300 (Colorado Springs)
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In 1917, when Lieutenant Marshall H. Cobb boarded the SS Carpathia for France, he left Chicago with two things: a leather-bound journal and this trunk. The trunk carried everything the Army told him he needed, plus one thing they did not. Inside was a phonograph record wrapped in a dish towel, scratched but still playable, the last recording of his sister before tuberculosis took her voice. He listened to it the night before he shipped out. Then he locked the trunk and never opened it again.
In France the trunk stayed in a depot near Saint-Mihiel, waiting for a man who never arrived. After the armistice the Army sold unclaimed luggage by the pound. A bookseller in Amiens bought it for the brass hardware, pried it open, and found nothing but uniforms, unmailed letters and a shattered phonograph record. He threw out the letters and kept the buttons. He sold the trunk to a traveling puppeteer who used it as a stage box until the lining began to mildew.
Every owner after him believed the trunk had always belonged to someone else, perhaps a theater or a steamship company or a hotel. The nameplate disappeared and the initials wore down and the wallpaper faded into a pattern no one could identify. Yet inside, under the lifting panel, there is still a sliver of the dish towel, stiff and discolored, with a faint lyric that only looks like damage until you realize it is handwriting.
The estate sale listing called it “Old Travel Trunk, Uncertain Provenance.”
Anyone can see the wear, the rust, the rot.
What you are buying is the only suitcase that ever came home for a soldier who did not.