Historical September–October 2021 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
I’ve been collecting things for as long as I can recall.
As a kid, like many boys at the time, I collected baseball cards; “flippers” we used to call them.
My buddies and I amassed stacks of flippers, but growing up in St. Louis, we never saw a Musial card. Cards featuring local stars probably weren’t available in their home cities but that didn’t stop us.
We all kept buying packets of Topps bubble gum and baseball cards to search for Stan even though the gum tasted like sweetened bug spray.
Then there was a long period when I don’t remember collecting much, excluding poor grades, which I collected routinely.
I guess you could say that I collected books because I was always buying more even though I hadn’t read what I previously purchased.
There were always tons of books throughout my home, most unread, but the stacks and piles looked good.
I believe in the theory of “literary osmosis”: if you have books by your bedside, the knowledge that is packed in them will waft into your brain at night while you sleep, whether or not you actually read the book. (In fact, practicing that theory probably accounts for my collecting poor grades, but that’s a topic for another column.) In early adulthood I began to collect clocks.
I went to flea markets, garage sales, and purchased them on eBay.
My searches for just the right clock were usually successful, so much so that I stopped collecting clocks because I had no space left in my three-story house to display them. Yeah, that says a lot about how many clocks I acquired and most are still here. For example, I have 73 clocks in my study and it’s not a large room. Fortunately, most are simply decorative so I don’t need to wind them or make sure the batteries are working.
All told, my guess is that there are 225 clocks in our house, including two or three that keep accurate time.
My favorite clock genre (love using that word for clocks!) is electric statue clocks. Those were hugely popular in the 30’s and 40’s, and often feature statues of heroic figures posed next to the clock face.
I have several FDR “Man of the Hour” clocks, and one of FDR, Lincoln, and Washington standing together. Will Rogers is depicted in a clock as is the Statue of Liberty.
I also have electric statue clocks that feature pirates on a ship, majorettes dancing, a matador flaunting his cape, fishermen with their catch, along with trains, steamships, eagles, elephants, owls, cowboys and castles. About 20 years ago, recognizing that I had no more room for clocks, I went petite and began collecting salt & pepper steamships.
These small ships have two smokestacks, one for salt and one for pepper.
Some ships were fashionably new and others were old, some had intricate windows and a deck while others were vividly painted.
I even have a steamship sinking. For a while, I used to collect neckties. Unlike baseball cards, clocks, or salt & pepper steamships, ties were actually useful because I wore a tie to work every day.
The aesthetic range of my ties was quite remarkable because I figured that ties should be vivid since they weren’t functional. Vivid is a euphemism for gaudy, some might even, gasp, say ugly. Students at school knew that I liked wild ties so they often brought me a vivid tie as a souvenir from their vacation. Although it took a while to do so, it was easy to cycle through wearing most of them since I didn’t worry about compatibility with my shirt or pants.
I had 500 or so ties when I retired from New City School. That’s a lot of vivid.
I define a collection as having a bunch of something that goes beyond use.
I mean, how many salt & pepper shakers can you use or how many ties can you wear? Given that criterion, since I will never read all of the books that I have, yet I continue to buy more, it must be that I collect them. So while my flippers disappeared long before I knew they might have value, I now have collections of clocks, salt & pepper shakers, ties, and books. That is a lot of stuff (as my wife frequently reminds me).
However, I’m not the biggest collector in our neighborhood. Founder of the St. Roch’s kids’ Halloween Party, Art Santen, who sadly died recently, used to collect bottle openers and corkscrews, and every time I saw Art, he had a new bottle opener or three to describe.
In fact, Art was noted in the Guinness Book of Records for having the “World’s Largest Collection of Bottle Openers Guinness Book of World Records (32,411 Different Openers & Corkscrews).” That is one impressive total!
This video shows him on Living St. Louis, talking about his collection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLa7d7YsptE.
But Art collected other things too.
Here is talking about his collection of photos and memorabilia for the St. Louis Arch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyWqcaOE11g Friends tell me they collected egg cups, matchbooks, 45 records, marbles, foreign currency, baseball cards, dishes, t-shirts, and electric parts. How about you? And please contact me if you have any extra electric statue clocks or steamship salt & pepper shakers.
I can promise them a good home.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, September–October 2021.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times2021_09.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 5.
