Lost and Found: A Trip to the Unclaimed Baggage Center
By Clay Risen

SCOTTSBORO, ALABAMA — it's a town steeped in historic significance. Centered half-way between Huntsville and Atlanta, it was an important trading center in the Old South. Earlier in this century, is was the site of the famous Scottsboro Nine trial. But today, these take a back seat to Scottsboro's latest claim to fame, the Unclaimed Baggage Center.

The UBC is just what it sounds like - a warehouse filled with the contents of the thousands of pieces of luggage lost each year in the United States. The Center, a private company founded in 1970 by H. Doyle Owens, has contracts with most of the major airports in the country, as well as several in other countries, to buy lost luggage in lots. The UBC's motto is "lost treasures from around the world, all at incredible values." Oprah did a show on it. A world map near the exit has pins for all the places visitors have come from. Abu Dhabi, Tokyo, Colombo, and every country in Europe.

As if they don't have unclaimed luggage in Europe. I learned about the UBC from my mother when I was home in Nashville for Christmas. It was like a siren song - the prospect of seeing, in person, a store filled with things everyone else had given up searching for was too much to pass up. It intrigued and, honestly, frightened me. So one day in early January three friends and I headed south to find it.

Scottsboro itself is, in a sense, kind of a dump. No real downtown, everyone hangs out at the Dairy Queen, the major employer is the new Super Walmart down the highway - that kind of a town. You might not even notice it along the highway if it weren't for the huge suitcase-shape signs counting down the distance to the UBC.

The UBC itself wasn't at all hard to find. The success of the UBC has caused a cottage industry of "unclaimed" stores to spring up around it: the Unclaimed Warehouse Center and the Unclaimed Truck Cargo Center, for starters. We passed those by, knowing the real deal was just down the street. Another time, maybe.

The UBC building is unassuming, and it looks pretty much like any other warehouse store. Long and well-lit, it is fully open inside. There's even a Starbucks near the entrance, the only one for at least 75 miles, and reportedly one of the only ones in Alabama. Like they say down there, it just goes to show, though I'm really not sure what.

If there were a list of the Seven Wonders of American Kitsch, the UBC would be one of them. The UBC prides itself on selling just about anything it finds in the luggage (though one of my friends wondered what they did with all the drugs and kinky sex toys they found. A weird guy, my friend).The UBC is one of the few places you can buy used shampoo in bulk, or one third of a three-piece suit, or prescription toothpaste.

Some of the more interesting items I found were: a video called "Centenarians Tell it like it Is: Over 25,000 Years of Opinions from Sex to Politics," a cassette series called "People Are Lying to You," a 1997-98 University of Chicago Handbook, used toenail clippers, a half-empty bottle of Selson Blue, a mug with "I Love Kusadasi" written on the side (wherever that is), a T-shirt from the 1998 World Police and Fire Games in Stockholm and, maybe the creepiest item, individually packaged shots of Communion wine - complete with shrink-wrapped wafers. And people buy these things.

The UBC recently expanded, adding an unclaimed cargo section. Now you can buy tires, vitamins, blank tapes, and condoms by the bulk. As I contemplated a 400-count box of Vitamin B12, a woman in the row next to me started laughing to herself. When I looked at her, she walked toward me.

HER: Tee hee hee. Here's what you should be lookin' at. [She hands me a jar with a pink label on it.]

ME [innocently]: Hmm, what's this? Picking up the jar, I look at the pink label: "Naughty Can Be Nice ...Chocolate Sensual Body Paint." Ah. Right.

HER: Pretty funny, huh?!? Tee hee hee.

ME: [Slinks away]

Despite what it seems, the exchange wasn't sexual (at least that's what I like to think), and what scares me is not that some 50-year-old trailer park mama shared her edible sensual body paint with me (well, not entirely). It's that her gesture was more like letting me in on an inside joke, a gesture that seemed to say "we're all freaks, and boy, you're one of us now."

On our way out, we ran through the UBC museum. Actually, it's just a small room filled with all the weird stuff the UBC has found over the years. A hat signed by Muhammed Ali. A robot gnome from the movie Labyrinth. A witch doctor's stick. And there's a giant oil painting of Owens, the UBC founder, and his wife Sue, accompanied by the Center's mission statement. The statement attributes Owens' success to "the Glory of God the Creator." As if God has anything to do with lost luggage. Maybe it's the lost Beatitude: "Blessed be H. Doyle Owens, for he shall inherit the unclaimed luggage of the Earth."

I'm not sure there's a lesson in my trip to the UBC; I'm not even sure if I'd go again. It's a piece of Americana, but it's somehow not pure - not like the Cadillac Graveyard or Wall Drug or the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame. You feel dirty even looking at things there, because they used to be someone else's, and that someone else never gave permission for their sale. It's one thing for them to sell things like lost books; it's another to sell baby clothes, jewelry, underwear - intimate items with intimate histories.

I left the UBC feeling soiled. Even the books I bought made me feel like a thief, like I had just paid next to nothing not for a commodity, but for someone's memories.

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com