TIGARD, Ore. — A few days before the end of the auction that might change his life, Quinn Brown went thrift-store shopping with his twin sister, Ellie. They were 19. It was Senior Day at the Value Village, and nearly every other customer was old enough for an AARP discount, but the twins never tired of looking for treasure in someone else’s discarded things.
Ellie was home from college. Quinn was on the brink of something big. They roamed the aisles talking everything but business until Quinn spotted three graphic tees in near-mint condition.
“I think these are pretty good T-shirts,” he said. “And all from the same person!”
“How can you tell?” Ellie asked.
Quinn has sold nearly 10,000 items over the past four years, and he’s learned how to decode things. (The three T-shirts were black, extra-large and looked like they’d been owned by a meticulous heavy metal fan.) But the one mystery he hadn’t yet solved was the one everyone wanted to talk about. How had a Wilt Chamberlain warmup jacket from the 1972 NBA finals ended up in a suburban thrift store? And how had a teenager — a young man whose mom wasn’t even alive when Chamberlain wore it — snagged something so special?
Quinn might never know the answer to the first question, but the second felt clearer. What seemed to most people like luck had required a mix of time and community, family and another boy’s split-second decision.
Sometimes good things slip through a person’s fingers. Sometimes someone else — a teenager, perhaps, with a good eye and $3 — might pluck that good thing from the garbage and grab a little bit of history.
The Goodwill bins are unlike any other thrifting experience. There are no racks, no aisles sorted by size or gender or use, just rows and rows of six-foot-long, blue plastic bins filled with the castoffs of American overconsumption.
One bin may contain discarded lace twisted around a handsewn quilt, the perfect pair of pants, an ancient train set, coffee mugs, books better left to museums, a wool rug, a baby’s shoe, an entire wardrobe circa Y2K. The textiles are unwashed, the electronics often broken. It’s not unusual to see people wearing latex gloves.
Quinn was a freshman in high school when he somewhat reluctantly let Ellie persuade him to visit the bins with her. He arrived, bare-handed, hoping to find something cool-but-cheap to wear. Maybe some ’90s Nike threads with bright logos and a good fit. He dug around until he found a crew-neck sweatshirt buried in the pile.
For most people, even a short bins stint can cause sensory overwhelm. Dozens of shoppers swarm the same buckets. The mishmash feels infinite. But Quinn looked at that endless supply, and he wanted more.
By the time he was 15, he had a ritual and a business account. Every Saturday, he woke up at 6:30 a.m., grabbed an energy drink, then lined up outside by 7 — an hour before the doors opened. Some of the other early birds were older women, but many were teen boys on the hunt for good things to sell online to people with less patience or no access to, say, a “No Fear” tee from the 1990s.
But by the time he was 17, he realized the clothes were only half the point. He and the other thrifting boys talked while they dug. They took lunch breaks together and hit the gym after. When Quinn and Ellie graduated from Lincoln High School last year, Ellie left to study psychology at the University of Oregon’s honors college. Quinn found he already had some of the things college offers — a purpose, a business, the kind of friendships people only make when they spend hundreds of hours in close proximity.
Even before he found the Wilt Chamberlain warmup jacket, that January morning was Quinn’s best day ever at the bins. He’d already found a vintage Carhartt Detroit jacket he figured was worth $150 or $200 when he saw a guy a few years older than him holding up what looked like a short-sleeved Los Angeles Lakers button-up shirt.
Quinn could tell the guy wasn’t sure about the jacket. It was a weird piece of clothing — longer than a lab coat, and skinny, the kind of cut only a man more than 7 feet tall could wear. The other guy examined the item for a moment, then tossed it back into a bin. Quinn grabbed it right away.
Quinn is not a sports guy. He didn’t know exactly what the Lakers jacket was, but he knew it was special. Someone had stitched “Chamberlain” across the back. Even Gen Z guys uninterested in hoops recognize that name. Chamberlain is a legend — the only player to score a hundred points in a single game, holder of 72 records, and winner of two NBA championships and four regular season Most Valuable Player awards.
Quinn didn’t want someone else to snatch the find from his cart, so he went immediately to the checkout, and handed over $3.07. He stashed the warmup jacket in his car, then went back inside to keep thrifting. It was 10 a.m. He still had seven hours of searching to do.
He thought about the jacket on and off while he rummaged. If it was real, he thought, it could be worth as much as $500. But what if Chamberlain had never worn it? What if it was just an abnormally long fake, something mass-produced for fans?
When he went home that night, Quinn measured the jacket, then combed eBay and a bunch of other internet sites for clues about its provenance. The jacket was 23 inches across and 33 inches long — nearly the exact dimensions of another Chamberlain jacket that sold a decade ago for $56,000.
Usually, Quinn takes his haul to the family garage, scrunches the best pieces to give them a hint of movement, then photographs them to post on the reselling app Depop. His average sale price is $13.
This time, he posted the pictures on Instagram, and one of his favorite vintage sellers called it “the greatest thrift find potentially in history.” The head of collectibles for Sotheby’s commented, too, and asked Quinn to message him. Soon, he’d agreed to let the famed auction house handle the sale.
A few weeks later, the Sotheby’s collector sent Quinn a message: They’d authenticated his discovery. Chamberlain wore the warmup jacket during the 1972 finals run against the New York Knicks, the last championship Chamberlain ever won. It could be worth as much as a quarter-million dollars.
Anything that valuable is too precious to mail, so Sotheby’s sent an armored vehicle to Quinn’s house. He watched as the movers packed his jacket into a little parcel, then a box, then a blue bag and finally a safe in the back of the van. They scheduled the auction for July.
Quinn occasionally saw the guy who’d discarded the jacket at the bins, and he wondered how he felt. Quinn was sure he’d missed dozens of good finds himself, but he didn’t dwell on the highs or the lows. He knew he’d likely never find anything else as good as Chamberlain’s warmup jacket, but that didn’t bother him. He just felt happy sifting through clothes.
When he and his sister hit up the Value Village a few days before the auction closed, Quinn smiled easily as they teased each other with silly shirts. Ellie held up an “Easily Distracted by Rocks” tee, and they admired a dinosaur graphic print together.
“What’s the auction up to?” Ellie asked him.
“Only 18,” he said with a shrug. “It’ll sell for what it does.”
“Only $18,000? I know it’ll sell for more than that, but that’s still a lot of money,” Ellie said.
“Bro, it’s worth at least 150,” he said. “It’s hard to find anything from Wilt. There are maybe like 20 pieces out there.”
When the auction ends Monday afternoon, Quinn plans to take some of the money and travel to Vietnam with three of the guys who thrift alongside him. He’d save or invest the rest.
“It had a dry-cleaning tag on it when I found it,” he told Ellie. “From 2018. So somebody could have just left it.”
“How could someone forget that?” Ellie asked.
“Well, I think it could have been somebody who died,” he said.
Chamberlain himself died in 1999, years before Quinn and Ellie were born. This piece had outlasted him and maybe all the other people who’d ever owned it. Someday it might outlast Quinn, too. Good things can slip away, Quinn had learned at the bins, but they can also be found, rescued and preserved even after they’re forgotten.
Ellie and Quinn were quiet for a moment as they shopped. He rejected pieces he considered “fake vintage,” and they admired the soft fabrics that companies used to produce.
“Ooh, a Trader Joe’s T-shirt,” Quinn said. “I’ve sold one of those before.”
“I want a Trader Joe’s hoodie,” Ellie said.
“Sorry, little bro,” Quinn teased his sister. “That’s going on Depop. It’s probably worth $50.”
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