You’ve all probably done it yourself, collected one thing or another. A common human trait seems to be collecting. It might have been coins or stamps, to name two of the most commonly collected objects. But, actually, it can be anything. If you’ve got more than three of anything, you’ve got a collection.
With me, I first started collecting when I must have been only 5 or 6 years old, and I started with the usual: stamps. I started saving some of the more unusual stamps that came on some of my parents’ mail. When they got mail, especially from friends who were out of the country, I figured I’d really hit pay dirt.
Soon, however, I just had a stack of loose stamps that needed some organization. My next step was to go down to the dime store and invest in a stamp album so I could show them off. A book on stamps helped, too: It showed me how to correctly handle, mount and preserve those stamps in my early collection.
After a few months of stamp collecting, however, I began to grow bored and started looking for other things to hold my attention. I can’t really remember if I ever got into coins, but I don’t think so. Like stamps there were just too many of them with slight variations, like circulated and uncirculated, or coins minted in various federal mints around the country.
Besides, unlike stamps, you could spend the coins, and being able to buy a candy bar or an ice cream cone was more important than having a nickel from the Denver mint or a dime from the mint in San Francisco.
The start of something big
When I turned 11, in 1957, I found my next collectable: magazines.
Other than an early subscription to Boy’s Life, the Scouting magazine, my parents got me a subscription to Car Craft, an early automobile magazine about Kustom cars and hot-rodding. Reading about restyling and modifying the automobiles of the day really got my interest.
After reading about them, I got my mother to take me and a friend out to a local Kustom car show, held in one of the display buildings at the Pomona, Calif., fairgrounds. There, I saw for the first time, the lowered, candy-colored, streamlined, metal-flaked objects of desire that Tom Wolfe, decades later, would successfully write about.
I also met, for the first time, a later Car Craft advertiser: Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, a goateed beatnik who, at the time, was air-brushing “Weird-o” shirts and selling them. (A “Weird-o” shirt was a simple sweatshirt with a splash of florescent color and then an intricate monster face with a tagline like “Mother’s Worry” or his famous “Rat Fink.”)
I saved every one of those early Car Craft magazines, and as a matter of fact, I still have them. They’ve moved with me cross-country twice, and then from house to house and to numerous apartments. Like my books, I regard all my saved magazines as part of my reference library.
More to collect
Those early issues of Car Craft were only the beginning; numerous other car magazine titles followed that got saved, and then, of course, too, my books.
The printed material is just the beggings of my collections. I’m also an avid collector of model cars, in all scales — both assembly-required plastic models and metal die-cast.
Also, long ago, I started collecting record albums, too — just the type of music that has interested me, but then I have rather eclectic tastes. I’ve got albums that range from good, ol’ rock ‘n’ roll to classical, from what are now termed “oldies,” to surf music, country and folk.
If you think moving that much printed material was difficult and weighty, try moving a few hundred vinyl record albums. And then there are the music tapes and CDs, too.
Then, when I married the Lady Marjorie, she brought along her own collections. The collections merged, somewhat. She brought her books, her record albums and her knick-knacks, but she also has some collections that deserve their own space, like her China teacups and all her tea paraphernalia.
We have often remarked that what we need are two separate warehouses to safely house all of our accumulated stuff. Each time we move, it seems like we need to part with some more of our cherished belongings. What others regard as junk, we look at as treasures.
GARY McDANIEL is a longtime Magnolia resident. To comment on this column, write to QAMagNews@nwlink.com.
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