We Americans are rabid collectors. We adore to hoard.
What we choose to collect-be it matchbooks, baseball cards, fossils-is not important. The hunt is what counts.
How else are we to explain the Spark Plug Collectors of America Club or the International Correspondence of Corkscrew Addicts? They exist as surely as the Boy Scouts.
Collecting is an equal-opportunity hobby. There are official clubs for collectors of beer cans, sugar packets, barbed wire, peanut jars, cookie cutters, piggy banks, paperweights and spoons.
There is even a group dedicated ”to stimulating and maintaining interest in the collection of bricks.” (Bricks apparently need all the help they can get.)
No, these brotherhoods don`t have secret handshakes, but they have newsletters, swap meets and annual conventions. Or in the case of the Beer Can Collectors of America, a CANvention.
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Club spokesmen, in most cases the founders or presidents, are eager to talk about their hobbies.
A hard truth
Collectors with eclectic tastes learn to live with mockery. Bill Boyd, president of the Spoon Collectors of America, applied for a $12,500 bank loan. When a bank vice president asked what the money was for, Boyd was honest.
”To buy spoons,” he told the banker. ”She just about fell out of her chair,” Boyd says.
Boyd, of Westwood Hills, Kan., founded the spoon club in California 16 years ago and has watched it grow to more than 1,000 members.
As with most collectibles, commemorative spoons had a golden era-1890 to 1920. The most coveted is a teaspoon with the face of a witch molded in the handle. Origin? Salem, Mass., of course.
When Bill Brownlee of Prairie Village, Kan., began collecting bricks, he believed he was alone in his hobby. ”We started without knowing that there was another crazy in the whole world,” Brownlee says.
As it turns out, brick collectors are rare, but at last count the International Brick Collectors had 375 members. ”We`re amazed,” Brownlee says.
Before 1910, many brick companies stamped their products with inscriptions-towns of origins, company names, etc.
To show off his collection, Brownlee built a fireplace with some of his best bricks. Others were embedded in a floor, and still others are arranged alphabetically on shelves.
A basic collection
Could there be a more humble collectible than brick?
”When you tell people you collect spark plugs,” says William Bond, of Ann Arbor, Mich., ”they look at you like you`ve got about 12 ounces (of brain) to the pound.”
For such occasions, Bond carries a picture portfolio of his collection-some of which are gold-plated.
In the early days of the automobile industry, spark plugs were the weak link in the motor. Between 1890 and 1950, more than 3,000 different plugs were manufactured in the United States alone.
Problems with fuel made most early spark plugs misfire. The race to invent a reliable plug became one of the most heated in U.S. manufacturing history.
”There was a phenomenal amount of money to be made in spark plugs,”
Bond says. ”Everybody had a gimmick. Everybody thought they could beat the spark-plug problem.”
Phyllis Wetherill is the queen of cookies. She has a collection-make that a museum-containing 7,000 cookie cutters.
Wetherill began collecting cutters in the 1950s and founded the cookie-cutters club in 1972. Now it has almost 500 members. Wetherill says collectible cutters today ”are either extremely hard to find or terribly expensive.”
Judith Walthall, of Huntsville, Ala., is involved with Mr. Peanut. You know the guy. Wears a top hat, spats and a monocle in his right eye.
Mr. Peanut, the corporate symbol for the Planters nut company, is a popular fellow among collectors. His mug appears on virtually every Planters product.
Twelve years ago, Walthall decided such a dapper gentleman was star material and, as such, deserved a fan club. She founded Peanut Pals, which has grown from an original membership of 23 to almost 500.
”When my daughter was 4, we would go to flea markets.” Walthall says.
”I just thought Mr. Peanut was cute and could be something she could look for.”
Before she knew it, Walthall was up to her ears in Mr. Peanut items: 8-foot papier-mache Mr. Peanuts, full-length Mr. Peanut costumes, mechanical Mr. Peanuts.
Recently, counterfeiters have tried to elbow in on the action. Phony reproductions of Mr. Peanut memorabilia have begun to surface.
Easy place to start
Who hasn`t toyed with the idea of starting a matchbook collection? At one time, as many as a million Americans dabbled in the hobby, estimates Bill Retskin, editor of a matchbook collector`s newsletter.
”It may be the easiest hobby in the world to start,” says Retskin, of Alexandria, Va. ”There have been literally billions of matchbooks made. Not millions, mind you. Billions.”
Movie stars and sports heroes were among the first to grace matchbook covers in the 1930s. A match cover struck for a reception in honor of Charles Lindbergh is perhaps the most coveted by today`s collectors. Only 250 were printed.
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The matchbook craze may be doomed as a hobby for the masses. The decline in the number of smokers has made the match cover less appealing as an advertising tool.
Beer-can collecting has begun to pull out of a 10-year nose dive. In the late 1970s the Beer Can Collectors of America had 14,000 members. Today, membership has dwindled to about 4,500.
”It has stabilized in the last couple of years,” says Donna Guseman, the club`s office manager. ”It was a fad in the late `70s.”
But popularity is expected to rekindle in the mid-1990s when beer-can manufacturers are expected to switch from aluminum to plastics. The collectible value of older cans is likely to skyrocket.
The first beer can was introduced in 1935 by the Krueger company in Richmond, Va. Today, an original can in mint condition sells for thousands of dollars, Guseman says.
Hearts and flowers
Evalene Pulati, president of the National Valentine Collectors Association, grew up on an Iowa farm in a house full of brothers. Valentine cards were a way to express her femininity.
”I went through the first eight grades in a one-room schoolhouse,” says Pulati, who now lives in Santa Ana, Calif. ”Every year we had a little valentine box. I just took to them from the beginning.”
Today, the valentine-card club has about 500 members, and women members outnumber men 10-1.
Because early valentines were made in such large quantities, 100-year-old cards can still be purchased for $5 to $10. The highest price ever paid at auction for a valentine was $14,000, Pulati says.
Paperweights, another common collectible, also trace to the 19th Century. Europe was home of the first paperweight craftsmen, whose art flourished until the French Revolution in the second half of the century.
A French paperweight decorated with delicate glass leaves and silkworms was purchased by a Chicago industrialist five years ago for $143,000.
The Paperweight Collectors Association was formed in 1953 and now boasts 1,300 members. ”It`s a wonderful world,” says club president Emanuel Lacher, of Garden City Park, N.Y. ”When we have conventions, you can`t drive them
(collectors) out. It`s a disease.”
Don Duer, of Winter Park, Fla., is president of a club for penny-bank collectors.
”A lot of people specialize in cast-iron banks,” says Duer, whose club has about 375 members in the United States and Canada. ”But there are also banks made from wood, glass, metal, tin, ceramic.
”I pursue them because of the history. They are parts of Americana in miniature.”
”Somebody told me they read in the newspaper that collectors were on the way out in the `90s.” Duer says. ”What a bunch of bull.”