Liberal Amounts of Memorabilia : A passion for the Kennedys and the civil rights movement has been a lifelong interest with Erik Hoffmann, 34, of Huntington Beach.

Erik Hoffmann has a photo of himself and a friend trying to uproot and carry off a historical marker sign designating John F. Kennedy’s Massachusetts birthplace. The shot was staged in jest, but there are few other Kennedy items he hasn’t earnestly amassed.

It’s entirely possible that his apartment holds more Kennedy campaign items--for both JFK and brother Robert--than there ever was in the whole of then-arch-conservative Orange County in the ‘60s.

Hoffmann has JFK Zippo lighters, huge red, white and blue-backed posters of John and Bobby, a press pass from JFK’s 1960 campaign tour purchased from a former ABC news correspondent, door-hangers, bumper stickers, pamphlets, magazines, “Let’s Back Jack” tie-clips, a mod paper skirt emblazoned with photo likenesses of RFK, and chest-loads of buttons, including ones reading “Sock it to ‘em, Bobby” in lumpy psychedelic lettering.

His favorite possession of all is a large campaign poster of JFK, beaming with optimism, that says, “A Time for Greatness.”

Hoffmann has a smaller collection of buttons and posters from the civil rights movement, including very rare buttons worn on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington--they show a black and a white hand clasping--and for the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. The latter button’s rarity was sadly assured by King being assassinated before he got to make that march.

A passion for the Kennedys and the civil rights movement has been a lifelong interest with the 34-year-old.

He says he was aware of JFK when he was 2 or 3 years old and sensed a goodness in him. He has a photo of himself at age 5, shortly after the assassination, posed in front of a drawing he had asked his dad to do of the late President.

In another photo four years later, he’s seen showing off a Bobby Kennedy button affixed to one of his Vans tennis shoes. He got that button and other memorabilia he still keeps while working as a volunteer at at age 9 at Kennedy’s North Hollywood-based campaign headquarters.

“There was something about the Kennedys that you just loved, or you didn’t, I suppose. I’d watch them on TV all the time, and I knew that I liked them. And somehow as a little kid I had an interest in civil rights and I just knew about it without really knowing about it. I always thought racism was so stupid, mankind’s worst invention, and I wanted to do something in my lifetime to help fight it. I can remember in 1968 dreaming of heading up a civil rights movement and being at the forefront of this big fight against racism,” Hoffmann said.

Although Hoffmann’s father was a Democrat, his mother made the rules around the house, and she was a lifelong Republican, having once been voted Miss Young Republican in a party beauty pageant, Hoffmann said.

“To work on Bobby’s campaign I actually had to defy her and sneak over to the office. I thought it was all a matter of making the world a better place. I felt he was the one who was taking up and carrying the banner of the civil rights movement. I stuffed envelopes, licked stamps, all the little tasks they’d give a 9-year-old to do. They’d give me flyers to hand out and I’d ride down Victory Boulevard on my Stringray bike handing them out and yelling ‘Vote for Kennedy!’

“I lived close to Valley College in Van Nuys where Bobby spoke in May of 1968. My house was about a mile and half away, but I could hear the applause, the roaring excitement. The sound carried over. I have friends who were there and actually shook his hand. I could only stand outside the house wishing I could be there. My mom would never have let me go,” he said.

A month later all he had left were his buttons and bumper stickers. On June 6, “I was in bed sleeping. My sister woke me up about 1 in the morning and said, ‘Erik, your buddy’s been shot.’ I didn’t want to believe it so I just pretended to be asleep. Then I woke up the next morning and watched it on the news.

“All my heroes were dead by the time I was 9 years old. That’s affected me to this day. I’m still very emotional about it. I lost JFK when I was 5, Bobby and Martin Luther King when I was 9. That’s enough to leave some emotional scars. Even though I worked in politics and was involved in my collection, I spent a lot of my 20s trying to make sense of things and pull myself out from the depression I felt.”

In 1976 he worked on Jimmy Carter’s campaign, doing the same for Ted Kennedy in ’80 (He has framed photos of himself with the latter). In 1982 he was assistant Orange County campaign coordinator for Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s run for the governorship. “That was really sailing against the wind. We’d put up signs for him and the next day they’d all be torn down. It was not easy running a black Democratic campaign here then,” he said.

Hoffmann eventually became frustrated after all his candidates kept losing, and he retreated from the fray and contented himself with collecting political artifacts from a time he preferred.

“Now 19 Cents” proclaims the 1959 issue of Life magazine with the cover story “Jackie Kennedy, the Frontrunner’s Appealing Wife.” Hoffmann has a stack of Kennedy-era mags, including several issues of Mad that made lighthearted fun of JFK. He has wrappers from Good Humor ice cream bars, which in 1960 offered rival Kennedy and Nixon (with a stubbly coating perhaps?) bars, so people could vote with their tongues.

Sitting atop a bookcase is a Coffee With Kennedy paper cup, a survivor from JFK’s 1952 senatorial campaign, when various members of the Kennedy clan hosted kaffeeklatsches supporting him. “There’s one of these in the JFK library and it’s ensconced in this big museum case behind all this glass. And I’ve got one at home I can touch all I want. I like that,” Hoffmann said.

He has a photo of himself sitting in JFK’s rocking chair in the curator’s office of the JFK Library. Hoffmann also has an exact replica of that beige-upholstered rocker in the Kennedy room of his apartment, which he had made by former White House upholsterer Larry Arata. Also in the room are Hoffmann’s old custom license plates, reading TED IN 80, JFK LBJ and JFK 1960. His next one, he says, will be END RACSM.

His civil rights collection is necessarily smaller, he says, because there’s less to collect since the movement wasn’t funded and marketed the way the political candidates were. Most of his Martin Luther King Jr. posters are more recent, some from the drive to have a national holiday named for him.

Hoffmann’s ‘60s collection includes the buttons from King’s marches, as well as ones that trace the radicalization of the movement, from an SNCC pin to ones reading “Stay in the Streets, Free the Panthers” and “All Power to the People” with a photo of an armed Huey Newton.

He also has a more recent assortment of items from the anti-apartheid movement. Including VIP passes he used when Nelson Mandela was feted in Los Angeles. Hoffmann recalled, “I sat with Don Jackson (the former Hawthorne police officer who, in conducting an anti-racism sting, was pushed through a plate glass window by a Long Beach policeman). I was so excited to meet him I started crying because he’s one of my heroes now. He’s been bringing a lot of things to light.”

While Hoffmann has participated in rallies and says he’s tried to interest his friends more in civil rights, he recognizes that spending huge amounts of time on his collection isn’t exactly pushing at the barricades of social justice. At times it has seemed more absorbing to him than his relationships and other aspects of day-to-day life.

“Sometimes I feel like that, because my collection can’t talk back to me, can’t cause me any problems or anything. Then, sometimes I’ve wondered why I couldn’t just have lived a normal life like all my other friends. Some people have referred to this as an obsession, but it’s something I’ve felt a calling to do. There have been times when I felt I could be driving a nicer car or this and that, and instead I’d buy things for my collection. It really consumes me. There’s nothing in my lifetime I’ll ever do that’s more important than this.”

On occasions in the past couple of years he’s done presentations at schools with his collection, using it as a springboard to discuss civil rights. He says he intends to do that a lot more now.

“I’m realizing that I don’t just want to be a collector,” he said. “It would be ridiculous to have all this stuff just sit here and never get seen. So I see the collection becoming a tool to fight racism. As often as I can I’m taking these things to junior highs and high schools.

“The times I’ve done it I’ve been (afraid) that the kids wouldn’t enjoy or even be interested in what I had to say or show them. But the last one I did over at Westminster High, the kids converged on the button display to the point where the teacher couldn’t even get in to see. They were fascinated. History books just don’t being you close to a period in time, but these buttons and things gets a response.”

Hoffmann says he senses a new spirit of hope in the country and wants to be more involved in it.

“This is my 25th anniversary of collecting, and the 25th of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King’s death. It’s the anniversary of a lot of anticipation and excitement for me, and of reflection and sadness. You always think of what could have been. But the way it happened is the way it happened, and I still think after all these years that there’s time to turn things around for the better.”