One Has 300 : Collectors Put the Squeeze on Citrus Juicers
Every morning, Mary Walker ignores the 300 citrus-fruit squeezers displayed throughout her Sherman Oaks home and reaches instead for a can of tomato juice.
“I really don’t like to hand squeeze oranges,” she admitted, burying her face in her hands with a embarrassed laugh. “I tend to drink tomato juice.”
Walker’s embarrassment is understandable. She’s the founding member and national president of a 150-member group that calls itself the National Reamer Collectors Assn. It is a club whose membership is rising, she said, as people come forward to profess their obsession with citrus-fruit squeezers--reamers--after years of “closet” collecting.
Reamers?
‘A Comical Thing’
“I know,” said Walker, 44. “When I tell people that I collect reamers, they kind of look at you and say, ‘What’s that?’ What most believe to be a basic orange juice squeezer--that cone-shaped kitchen gadget that extracts juice when an orange half is twisted into it--is really called a reamer.
“It’s kind of a comical thing to look at: the cone, the shape, the name. Reamer. It’s a funny word.”
Walker found herself collecting reamers after an interior decorator put several of them in her home to use as candy and soap dishes. Walker discovered that they make good ashtrays and went out looking for more.
“After I had about 75, I had to admit to myself that I was a collector,” she said. “When I first started, I honestly thought I was the only person in the world who collected reamers. It wasn’t something I tended to talk about, because I had this fear people would think it is a silly thing to collect.”
But she and her brother-in-law, Allan Roberts, 54, of Northridge have about $200,000 invested in their collections. Roberts, the regional director of the club, has 800 reamers in his kitchen, living room and den.
In 1980, 45 people, most of whom Walker and Roberts had met while collecting reamers at antique shops, assembled in St. Louis and organized the collectors’ association. Since then, membership has tripled.
What compels people to collect reamers is the same impulse that attracts people to any collectible, Walker said: “They don’t make ‘em like they used to.”
Except for electric juicers and “cheap glass” or plastic imitations now manufactured, Walker said, the reamer fell victim to frozen orange juice around 1940.
