As Collections Go, Here’s One That Sure Isn’t Chopped Liver

Gary Kelder likes hamburgers so much that he decided to collect them.

“My friends don’t have to think about what to get me,” said Kelder, a Costa Mesa tobacco shop manager. “My first hamburger was in the form of a candle.” His collection includes hamburger earrings and watches, a radio, music boxes, pencil sharpeners, relish dishes, salt and pepper shakers, note pads--and even erasers.

“I guess it was bound to happen,” Kelder said. “I’ve always liked hamburgers, and now it’s turned into a hobby. Every time I go out shopping, I’m also trying to find something that looks like a hamburger.”

But he said collecting simulated hamburgers--with or without all the trimmings--is a difficult chore, one he has been at for 20 years. He knows of only two other people with hamburger collections.

“I once had to go to Solvang to pick up a hamburger that was probably used as a prop in a movie or a play,” Kelder said. “It looks more real than a real hamburger.”

He paid $45 for the trinket and placed it in his collection, which is stored in his wife’s china cabinet.

Kelder said most of his hamburger- shaped treasures have been found in gift shops and department stores, although a number were gifts from friends. “I think they get a big kick out of finding hamburgers for me.”

Some items look so realistic, Kelder said, that “I sometimes feel I should put a note on them saying they’re not real.”

Two years ago, Kelder entered his collection of about 100 items in the Orange County Fair and took fourth place in the hobby division. He has it entered in this year’s fair, which begins July 12 at the fairgrounds in Costa Mesa.

“When I tell people about my collection, they can’t believe that many things are made in the form of a hamburger,” Kelder said.

Although he likes to hunt for new acquisitions, Kelder admitted that “I like the real thing better. . . . I’m what’s known as a purist. I want a hamburger that’s a hamburger and I want it on a bun. Of course, I also want mustard, mayonnaise and a tomato on it.”

He admits to experimenting from time to time, and he once tried blue cheese on a burger. And despite having favorites among commercially sold hamburgers, he said, “I enjoy home-cooked best of all.”

When Kelder isn’t eating or hunting for hamburgers, he works on his stamp collection. Someday, he said, he hopes to find a stamp with a hamburger on it.

Once again, the thinkers at the Leukemia Society of America chapter in Orange have come up with the “Royal Gelatin Slide” to raise money for the group’s programs of research and community service.

They figure there are enough people who will pay or raise $100 to slide into 575 gallons of orange gelatin at Wild Rivers water park in Irvine.

Anyone who raises $300 gets a key that may win him a new car.

“The first year we tried the slide, we offered a weekend use of a new car,” said Lisa Whaley, spokeswoman for the society. “Now we’re giving away a new car, and we think it will help raise a lot more money.”

Top fund-raisers will also have a chance to win a trip to Hawaii. And a prize will even be awarded to the “slider” with the craziest costume.

The chapter must be onto something, because the gelatin slide event has raised a total of $18,500 in the last two years.

Acknowledgments--Anaheim High School junior Heather Bartchard has been selected as one of 40 students from Southern California to participate in a 38-day tour starting Monday to Washington, Moscow, Leningrad, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and England.

One of the trip highlights will be a visit with President Bush and his Cabinet. Heather and the others were nominated for the Student Ambassador Program by their teachers and counselors, and were selected from several hundred applicants.