FIXATIONS : A Harmless Quackpot : Fullerton Collector Fell in Love With Rubber Duckies Right Off the Bath

There’s a somber power and mystery to stained glass, a quality that suggests that the light on the other side of a church window may be from a strange and better world. One feels guilty to not be thinking deep, compassionate thoughts when sitting in the weighty glow of a stained glass window.

So let’s talk about rubber duckies instead.

Roger Ellison’s bathroom is ringed by seven shelves loaded with rubber ducks, some 522 at last count. And one can only wonder if spirits might not better be lifted in churches if they were to adopt a similarly mallard-minded motif. In ranks and tiers of unflappable idiot cheer, Ellison’s ducks give off a mirthful Crayola-yellow glow, and stupid though it sounds--stupid though it actually is --they seem to radiate happiness.

“I’m kinda happy anyway,” Ellison says with an oft-used chuckle, “but it really tickles me to collect something this harmless.”

The 47-year-old’s rubber-duck collection extends from rare, early Donald Duck toys to the standard five-and-dime variety. As long as it’s rubber and a duck, he wants it. He thinks he’s the world’s biggest collector of the bathtub ducks and sometimes suspects he may be the only one. After he once took a break from collecting, he returned to the antique malls and swap meets to find that duck prices had dived in his absence. “At one place it used to cost me around $100 for maybe a dozen ducks, but after being away, I got 17 of them for $33.”

Being the Rubber Duck Man has led to some ribbing from his work mates (he’s a precision press break operator at Fullerton’s Beckman Instruments) and in social settings it’s not unknown for a roomful of people to begin quacking when he walks in. Ellison is planning his revenge: He’s getting a talking toy duck for Christmas that is going to go on his toilet reservoir. A friend is going to rig a switch so that when people sit down the duck starts spouting recorded phrases such as “Eggs-cuse me!” and “Waddle we do now?”

If Ellison revels in the “harmless” aspects of his fixation, it doesn’t mean he’s unacquainted with harmful ones. Earlier in his life Ellison collected weapons, adorning walls with antique swords, guns and knives, as well as sickles, scythes and other rending wares.

“I used to be quite a cutup,” he said, though going beyond the pun to detail an out-of-control life of alcohol and substance abuse. He pulled an old photo from his wallet showing him at 326 pounds, not all of them kindly looking.

He still appears as if he could twist a head or two off if the mood took him. His giddy ducks, though, seem more representative of his current mood. “Once I bought a rubber duck from a gal at the swap meet for a nickel,” he grinned, “and I had to tell her, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but I get almost the same satisfaction out of this little 5-cent duck that I used to get out of a half-pint of whiskey.’ ”

He’s now in his 11th year of sobriety, and it was nearly a decade ago that some friends gave him his first rubber duck, along with a pacifier. “I’d known these people for a couple of years at this time and I guess they figured that’s how far I’d matured.”

The following year Ellison bought his then-wife a duck, so they’d have “his and hers,” and then he bought a few more.

“My wife got tired of picking them up whenever she got in or out of the shower, and one day she threw them all in the corner of the bathroom floor. And I kind of took offense to that, and told her she might as well have thrown my clothes out the door. And she said, ‘That’s one option, or you could build a shelf for these ducks.’

“So I built one shelf, and of course eight ducks didn’t fill it, so I went looking for more and then I was hooked.”

He now averages about 50 ducks a year. The most he ever paid was $50 for a ‘30s-vintage Donald Duck riding a rubber tractor. Ellison said, “It was one of the earliest Donald Ducks they ever made. The same day I bought that I’d also bought a Donald from 1961 that was still in the box. I paid $18 for that and my ex-wife said she thought that was getting a little out of hand, so I never told her about the $50 one.”

A year ago he thought he might finally have overdosed on ducks, after spending $278 at a Westminster Mall specialty shop for 34 ducks from all over the world. That barely slowed him down though.

However avid Ellison might be about collecting them, he says he keeps his ducks in perspective. “Before my first daughter, Leslie, was born, friends asked me how I was going to keep my kids away from the ducks, and I told them, ‘It’s just stuff , and that ain’t what life’s about today.’ The kids are more important than those ducks. I don’t care how old it is, they can play with it. The only rule I have is they can only each play with four ducks at a time--meaning five; I figured they’ll take one more than I allow them--because I’m willing to pick up 10 ducks but not 510.”

Ellison lives in a neat, small house, made to seem even smaller by his two visiting daughters romping through it. Asked which duck is her favorite, Leslie, aged 4 1/2, diplomatically said, “They’re all my favorite.” Carly, aged 2, simply opined, “Duck-duck, duck-duck,” which only needs exclamation points to become some sound advice for this uncertain decade. But on the shelves around Ellison’s old-fashioned free-standing tub, at least, things are just ducky.

“When people ask me how I’m doing, my standard answer is, ‘Better than I deserve,’ ” he said. “I’ve got friends in the penitentiary who will never get out and several who are dead, either self-inflected or otherwise. And I’m standing here playing with rubber ducks and clean and sober. I’ve got a good job and two wonderful little kids and, I am better than I deserve.”