Collector’s Not Your Average Joe : Maj. Bill Mimiaga of Costa Mesa, who served in Vietnam and Saudi Arabia, has amassed military dolls--including the Hasbro kind--and paraphernalia.

Some good children took care of their G.I. Joe dolls, keeping them and their innumerable uniforms spotless through the years, as if anticipating a surprise inspection from Gen. Hasbro. That prudence paid off: Today some of the dolls and their outfits can command thousands of dollars with collectors.

Me, I started playing with G.I. Joes at nearly the exact time I discovered that cans of hair spray made swell flamethrowers. Poor Joe. My friends and I broiled the dolls. We’d lob M-80 firecrackers at ‘em. We’d cover them with pet food and throw them to dogs. Not for nothing was G.I. Joe called an action figure.

Despite the concerns of responsible parenting organizations about the effects of war toys, some of us did grow up to be harmless dweeb reporters. But when one hears of a Marine officer who collects G.I. Joes, it is easy to jump to stereotyped conclusions, expecting him to perhaps be uptight, gun-laden and just a tad cretinous, and maybe with a living room carpet torn up with entrenched G.I. Joes and large burn marks.

Maj. Bill Mimiaga has no such obstacle course in his Costa Mesa townhouse, but he does have several hundred G.I. Joes, from the lowest grunt to the rarest specialist. And that’s only part of his collecting urge. He has a room devoted to nautical items (including diving helmets and rare shells), as well as collections of autographs of famous sports figures and aviators (from Babe Ruth to Wiley Post), Civil War relics, Nazi regalia, ship’s caps and a sole Raggedy Ann doll.

Maj. Bill, as he refers to himself, is an effusive character, with a face both open and weathered. The 46-year-old, 28-year career Marine talks glowingly of wrestling with lobsters while diving in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay. “Some of them put up such a good fight I let them go,” he said, though a good number also wound up buttered.

He did two tours of duty in Vietnam and then nine months in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. The only gun in his house is a Civil War Springfield in a glass case. “Other than that I don’t own a gun. I abhor weapons and don’t have anything to do with them on my own,” he says. “The dolls and stuff are my collection.”

Perhaps the only common thread to the things Mimiaga collects is that they all set him to wondering, giving him a tangible jump-off point to explore history.

“Everything has a story to it; that’s what makes it special to me,” Mimiaga said. “Here’s a German winter hat worn on the Russian front that my Uncle Bob brought back (from World War II). The rabbit fur and the eagle marking is worn off on this side, so another collector might throw it out. But it’s worn like that because that’s how the soldier carried it in his pocket. I know how I carried a cover (cap) in Vietnam, and it got rubbed and chaffed like that. So is it worth any money? No. But to me it is, because it tells me something.”

Looking at his Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig signatures sets him to thinking about the emotion that swirled in Yankee Stadium at the ceremony where Gehrig’s number was retired. Seashells get him talking about the eco-chain. Some things spur memories of his own doings, such as the rusted 10-inch nails he retrieved on a dive from the Monongahela, a Civil War-era military vessel that sank off Guantanamo. His ties to the G.I. Joes aren’t quite as personal or deep. Mimiaga bought one, a frogman, for his son in the ‘70s, and then became interested himself. He enjoys the challenge of finding rare pieces and likes the history involved in the uniforms. Some, such as an Annapolis cadet’s outfit, can sell for $1,500.

Most of the Joe dolls, though identical, are a bit rare, going for about $100. “Barbies tended to stay on beds, but G.I. Joes, kids blew ‘em up,” Mimiaga said. Do tell.

There were some that weren’t from the same mold. There was a series of foreign Joes--Russian, British and other soldiers--that sell for $1,000 or more, and a black soldier and female nurse doll that were unpopular when first introduced in the ‘60s. At least in the doll world, discrimination has its comeuppance: those two dolls are now by far the rarest and most sought-after of the Joes, with the nurse going for $3,000.

G.I. Joe was a victim of the ’73 oil crunch, when escalating petroleum prices led Hasbro to discontinue the line. When reintroduced in 1982 they went from being 12 inches tall to four inches. The company has recently come out with a new 12-inch model of a Desert Storm soldier.

Along with owning hundreds of standard-issue Joes and their accompanying footlockers and vehicles--most of which are stacked in closets--Mimiaga also has some dolls with custom-made uniforms. Another collector made him a number of exactingly detailed German military uniforms. One of the dolls also has a custom-made head, making it perhaps the only G.I. Adolf in existence.

Of the life-sized German items Mimiaga collects, some are bought for their high level of craftsmanship, others for their historical import. Much as he considers the Civil War to be a prime event in the shaping of the United States, he thinks World War II continues to reverberate through this century.

He pointed to a recently acquired fez, with death skull and swastika, worn by Yugoslav Nazi collaborators. “The Serbs, Croats and others were using the war to commit all kinds of atrocities on each other then, and they have long memories,” he said, noting the present Yugoslav violence.

Asked if he thought collectors are attracted to Nazi wares because of the stigma of evil attached to them, Mimiaga said that may partly be the case, but added, “I collect U.S. military campaign badges,” and pointed to a glass case on a wall:

“Here’s one for the Indian wars, for when we practiced genocide on the American Indians. There’s badges for Nicaragua, the Costa Rica banana wars, one for the genocide on the Filipinos during the Philippine insurrection. So our hands aren’t so clean either. Look at all the people killed and maimed in the Civil War. So, no war can you ever justify. There’s no way you can excuse it.”

Asked how he reconciles that with his line of work, he said: “I’m like the biggest contradiction in the world. I may not believe in the political reasons why we’re doing things, but I believe in the little guy. I go in there for the little farmer who’s getting his butt kicked in the middle of these things. That’s who I want to speak for. I’m still the idealistic son of a gun. When we go in somewhere, I still like to think we’re going in there for a purpose. We may have gone into the Gulf because of the oil, but Saddam Hussein didn’t belong in Kuwait. That was the real issue there with me.”

Mimiaga grew up in South Central Los Angeles and signed up with the Marines when he was 18 because, “to be honest, when I got out of high school I didn’t have enough smarts to go to college, not at all. The best alternative at the time was to go into the military.”

He has since attended officers school but also attributes a good deal of his education to his fascination with learning everything about the items he collects. He said: “Even the dolls are a real bit of Americana, and they can tell you things about this country, like them being discontinued due to the oil embargo. Then, because no one was buying the nurse and black dolls, you can see what chauvinist pigs and racists we were in the ‘60s.”

Though he spends much of his free time collecting, he’s more caught up lately in his volunteer work at Hoag Hospital, where he is the first male president of its auxiliary in the hospital’s 40-year history. His first wife (he has since married and divorced a second wife) died of cancer after 19 years of marriage, and he chiefly works in the cancer and pediatrics wards.

“The collecting is fun, and you can learn a lot of history from it. But, hey, life’s too short. I can’t take any of this garbage with me, so I don’t worry about it. I’ve given a lot of things away. I’m not going to die a rich man; I’ll probably owe people when I go. But you hope to leave a better person and help the world a little,” he said.