Donald Bridell came honestly by his penchant for collecting.
He was born in the grips of the Great Depression, raised on a small farm south of Nevis, Minn., and had enough brothers and sisters to field a football team by the time World War II had come and gone.
"We grew up pretty poor, the 11 of us," said brother Ray Bridell, and it was something about that upbringing as the eldest of the brood that compelled Donald to scrounge around garage sales and the like for a vast array of items.
Rifles, sewing machines, boats, fishing rods, lawn mowers. On and on until he had filled two garages on the family homestead and packed in still more at his home in St. Louis Park, where he retired after a career in insurance.
"He knew every piece that he had," Ray Bridell recalled.
Donald Bridell died May 6 at age 89 in a nursing home in Minnetonka, two days after his COVID-19 was diagnosed.
For all the buying and storing, Donald Bridell finally scored big when a painting acquired in a two-for-$5 transaction at a farm auction in 2010 turned an astronomical profit and earned him national television attention.
One piece depicted a coastal landscape and the other a farm set amid the mountains of America's desert Southwest.
