I have never let go of anything I’ve ever embraced.

Winston Wutkee is a collector. He has taught geology, geography and California history at College of the Canyons in Valencia since 1970, where he has surrounded himself with maps, rocks and homemade source books for field trips. Wutkee, his wife, Barbara, and their two children live in Thousand Oaks.

I was born with this feeling. I can only tell you that looking through the slots of my crib, I was aware of my surroundings, aware of people, of animals, and so collecting is a function of that. If you are sensitive to things on the ground, gum wrappers, whatever, you become a collector.

I was always gathering little trinkets around me as a little boy. At 18 months I picked up rocks out of a trash can behind our apartment near Pico and 29th. I collected vignettes about people. I was always talking to the old men playing dominoes at Queen Anne Place Grammar School that I went to. They were born in the 1860s and ‘70s; they told me about the Indian wars.

I started collecting coins out of my father’s cash registers in his cleaning shop in the late ‘30s. My mother had rock collections from the prairie, blowouts as they are called, and gave me those for geology, my first awareness.

So I collect rocks, minerals, stamps, coins, books, selected photographs, primarily of nostalgia, an older time. Artifacts from the 1800s and down through the time that I grew up. Now I try to surround myself with those dear hearts and gentle people type things. I have never let go of anything I’ve ever embraced.

I was literally born an eclectic person. That means one who is absolutely interested in everything and seeks out the essence of each item, be it natural history or human history. It’s very difficult for that kind of person to find a particular career. The best career is teaching. Although I didn’t come to it until rather late, at the age of 33, I’ve been a natural teacher all of my life.

Money cannot buy the freedom that a junior college instructor has, as a hobbyist, as a daydreamer. The freedom I have, to be inspired, to come in and teach something that I feel is universal, that I know others want to have. I’ve never stopped daydreaming, never stopped becoming inspired by fantasizing.

I’m an old-style workaholic-type teacher, who is not here punching a time clock. It’s a dying generation, I believe. Advancing technology, advancing frivolity, so to speak, is enticing us away from sunup-to-sundown type work.

My students are an eclectic crew, agewise, ethnically. Affluent Anglos have flooded into Valencia. The old-time redneck ranchers, hidden-back-in-the- canyon people, instead of being the majority, are now less than 10 percenters. They are being flooded out by the down-belowites coming from Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley.

It’s surprising how many people do not know what I consider just basic things about geology and geography and will therefore ooh and ah, just to be standing in front of a mountain range, the Sierra Nevada, for instance, or going up a back road out of Lone Pine, which they’ve never done. You see the dawning of an awareness of something that was automatic with their great-grandparents or grandparents, but has somehow been lost in this urban-suburban setting. They want to know how come there’s a sun or how come there’s a glacial valley, or how come Yosemite occurred.

I teach both human and natural history. In cultural geography I can talk about anything, politics, religion, sex, whatever. For a moment I have a chance to spin the tale of jazz because it’s relevant to the cultural history of the United States of America.

I’m fulfilled not only from teaching wonderful things to inspire people with, but I have an outlet for my eclecticism. I am no genius, I’m just super super aware. The only genius was being lucky enough to know this as a little boy.

We are strange people who love everything and bite into everything. And we confound friends and relatives and wives alike.