Ronald J. Dubois Sr.
May 19, 2008
Edna Besson
May 21, 2008
After retiring from the Lafourche Parish School System in the late 1990s, Patricia McNeil took her hobby of collecting home furnishings to a whole new level, making a career out of it.
McNeil opened My Favorite Things and More Inc., an antique, glassware and collectible shop in Raceland, 10 years ago this September.
The Lockport teacher said, at the time, her shop was the only antique store from Thibodaux to Lockport.
“Shortly after I opened, shops started springing up in Houma and Thibodaux,” she said.
Fortunately for McNeil, the antique business is not a competitive one. She has booths at both Uptown Antiques and the Downtown Flea Market in Houma.
“People can call me up and ask me about items. If I don’t have it, I know where to find it,” McNeil said.
With price ranges from 50 cents to $150, she has sold more than 20,000 items and purchased more than 32,000 items to date.
“I’ve done good for myself,” McNeil said.
The antique shop is not open all year because McNeil prefers to work on the school system’s calendar from September to May.
“I keep my summers open so that I can travel to get new things,” she said
She frequents an array of international shops in London, France and Africa searching for merchandise. She also travels nationwide as well as locally in the Houma/New Orleans area searching for one-of-a-kind treasures.
“I try to find unique things that I think my customers will like,” McNeil said.
Over the years, she has collected a fine assortment of Depression glass from the 1940s through the 1950s. And the store has a lot of vintage baby clothes, table setting collections, wall paintings and household linens.
McNeil says she is a little different from other antique collectors. When the schoolteacher started in the business 10 years ago, she knew nothing about selling antiques or glassware.
“I didn’t really have a feel for antiques,” she said. “I mean my mother inherited a lot of antiques from my grandmother, but that was about it.”
However, through research, she has become an avid collector with a keen eye.
One thing McNeil did not have to research was how to be a business owner. The art of owning a business runs deep in her gene pool. Her maternal grandparents, Harry and Enola Arabie, owned a general store in Raceland for years, and her paternal grandparents, Stanley and Angelle Mestayer, owned a country store near New Iberia.
“I can remember hearing stories about when people used to use the ferry to get across the bayou from Highway 308 to Highway 1 in the 1930s through when I was growing up as a child in the late 1950s,” McNeil said. “If they wanted to go to my grandparents’ stores or other stores to shop, the ferry fee was free. But if they just wanted to cross they had to pay a nickel.”
“Those were the days,” she added.
A true collector, McNeil still has some of the items her mother and father saved from her grandparents’ stores.
“Back then, my grandparents transacted business a lot of times on credit,” she said. “I still have some of the pay ledgers from my grandparents’ shops. People still owed them money when they closed down years ago.”
Right now, the business owner is creating her own history. The very land that McNeil’s business sits on used to house the family’s mobile home and garage. After retiring from the school system, McNeil and her family moved to north Raceland.
She kept the land and converted the garage into her store.
“I’ve always wanted to own my own store,” McNeil said. “When I went to (her grandparents’ stores) to visit, I used to pretend that I was a shop owner ringing up items.”
“When I retired I knew that’s what I wanted to do,” she added.
Former teacher-turned-businesswoman Patricia McNeil shows off photographs in a collectible album, one of the many items on sale at My Favorite Things and More Inc. in Raceland. * Photo by SOPHIA RUFFIN
