Holiday Gifts : The $1,000 Cookie Jar and Other Stories

In the late ‘60s, when she was an art student still living at home, Linda Campbell Franklin and her mother would spend their weekends antiquing in the Ohio countryside. While her mother admired all the pretty china and brass and silver, Franklin rooted in the bushel baskets heaped with old, unwanted kitchen gadgets and gizmos that the owners had set aside.

“They were considered low-rent, junk,” says Franklin. “No one could understand why I wanted to collect those things. Even mommy would say, ‘I’ll wait for you in the car.’ It would take me forever, and she couldn’t stand it.”

Today, there are so many collectors of kitchen-related memorabilia that in the past few years prices have been doubling and tripling. Even common pieces such as flour sifters and tin eggbeaters that sold for as little as 50 cents are now fetching $5, $10, $20.

Franklin went on to write the definitive “300 Years of Kitchen Collectibles,” a 600-page pictorial price guide that has become a bible for collectors. She says the hottest kitchen collectibles right now are old electric toasters, coffeepots, blenders and waffle irons. “(These are) the sexy areas,” she says, “the things that get shown at the Modernism show at the Armory in New York.” In those areas, prices have skyrocketed from about $40 several years ago to as much as $300 to $400. Serious money.

“One year no one wants it, and the next year it’s hot,” says Pat Clancy, a long-time antiques dealer. “Like those flowered tole trays from the ‘40s. I never would have bought them before. Now they are so hot, I can’t even find them.”

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Also highly prized are eggbeaters, nutmeg graters, cherry pitters, apple parers and combination tools made during America’s industrial revolution. Some say that it’s these gadgets that have attracted men to a field that was once dominated by women. “Men used to collect tools until they started to get scarce, so it was a natural segue,” says Franklin, who estimates about 80% of the kitchen collectors now are men. “Also, it’s a social change--men no longer feel embarrassed about being involved in the kitchen.”

Collecting is also a way to express individuality. There aren’t any rules. Plus, you don’t need to have a degree to be a collector. Simply buy what you like and what you can afford.

And there are still plenty of old affordables around: salt and pepper shakers, cocktail memorabilia, cups and saucers, teapots, wooden potato mashers, trivets, ice picks, rolling pins, popcorn poppers and figural ‘50s tablecloths, to name a few. Antiques dealer Clancy predicts that dishes and glass made today by Mikasa and Fitz & Floyd will eventually become hot collectibles.

“The trend now,” says Franklin, “is to specialize. For some reason, many collectors feel they have to complete something, they need closure. But why get so serious? Collecting is supposed to be fun. Who needs to have every egg beater or apple parer that was ever invented?”

But I understand the madness. . . I was at a rummage sale with table after table heaped with new-old merchandise: Roy Rogers gabardine cowboy shirts, chintz fabrics, Catalina tiled tables, Fiesta, Bauer. I kept grabbing and grabbing and piling the stuff on the floor next to me. I turned my head for a minute, and when I looked down, it was gone.

My scream woke me up. I had been having a shopping nightmare, and now I knew I too had become a victim of the collecting obsession. I blame it on the fact that I have been talking to many others just like me in the past few weeks.

Annet Peairs and Walter Moore

Walter Moore already owned the elf with the yellow hat when he met Annet Peairs. She liked it so much she bought a cat in a basket. When the two moved in together, they bought the clown with the red nose. Then they really started getting serious--they began shopping for famous names. They bought the McCoy basset-hound, the Regal Davy Crockett, the Shawnee smiley pig, the Metlox Pinocchio. Today, the couple have amassed more than 60 roly-poly cookie jars from the ‘40s and ‘50s . . . and they’ve have run out of room in their small kitchen.

Still, Peairs and Moore haven’t stopped. Any time they can escape from their hectic public relations business, they head to one of the local antique malls. “It’s how we relax,” says Moore. “But you get into these things and before you know it, you have 50 or 60 and you don’t know what to do with all of them.”

The market has tightened in the 10 years since Moore and Peairs became part of the cookie jar movement. Today there are probably as many cookie jar collectors as there are varieties of cookies.

Moore and Peairs blame Andy Warhol.

In 1988, when Sotheby’s auctioned off Warhol’s estate, 175 fairly common cookie jars went for a mind-boggling $247,830. “People bought them just because they were Andy Warhol’s,” says Peairs. “It was ridiculous.” Rare jars in mint condition that would have cost maybe $100 started selling for $1,000. (Since the recession, many of those same jars can once again be found in the $100 range.) But even a price of $100 for a cookie jar is amazing considering that when they were first manufactured during the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, most sold for less than $5.

Moore and Peairs do have their limits. They refuse to pay more than $150 for a jar, and then it has to be rare and in mint condition. Of course, they say they would break their rule if they ran across the churn boy. “He’s got the cutest little face,” says Peairs, “and you just never see him.” The last time they did see him, he was priced at $275 and had a hairline crack. Moore and Peairs would also go over their limit for the Shawnee clown--the one where he is on his back holding a ball with his feet. “I really want him,” says Peairs, “I’ve only seen one--for $450. That’s too much money.”

The couple’s cookie jar habit is only a part of their fixation on the ‘40s and ‘50s. Their Studio City bungalow is filled with rattan and Heywood Wakefield furniture, kitschy lamps, Bauer ring-ware and other pieces, and the kidney-shaped pool and landscaping they had done last year was fashioned after a photo from the ‘50s. They even dress the part--a lot of the clothes they wear are from those years.

Moore also collects Davy and Roy and Gene and Hoppy and other box-office buckaroos. “They are true extensions of my childhood,” says Moore, who was born in 1951. “Davy Crockett was a big hero of mine.”

“Walter collects so many things,” says Peairs, “that I only get one room in the house for my stuff.” A few weeks ago, Peairs ran across a couple of yellow plastic Eames chairs at a garage sale for only $35 a piece. “I loooooved those chairs,” she says, “but I didn’t buy them. They wouldn’t fit in the bathroom.”

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ADVICE: Buy only what you like. “Annet’s sister also collects cookie jars,” says Moore, “but she buys them because she thinks they are going to be worth something. We only buy the ones we like, ones that are from our childhood.”

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FAVORITE PLACES TO SHOP: Sherman Oaks Antique Mall, Cranberry House in Studio City (“It’s top-dollar,” says Peairs, “but you do find great things there”), On The Twentieth Century antique store in Pasadena.

Bruce Johnson

It was about 1970, and Bruce Johnson was in a dump digging for old bottles and telephone pole insulators when his shovel struck a piece of metal. He dug it up and shook off the dirt. It was only a piece of old tin--still, there was just something about it that he kind of liked. So he kept it. Later, he found out the object was called graniteware, an enameled tinware that has been used in kitchens since the late 1800s. Soon Johnson was hitting thrift stores and swap meets in search of more.

Johnson now has what is believed to be the best collection of graniteware on the West Coast. The most common color is a mottled gray, but companies also made special pieces in swirls of blue, green, brown, red, orange, lavender and aqua. These are the unusual pieces Johnson seeks.

In his continuing quest for rare graniteware, Johnson has made 12 trips to the East Coast in the past 15 years. On some of those trips he has found many of his best pieces: an orange-mottled pie plate, a pink-swirled pan and ladle, a cobalt-swirled candleholder, a blue-mottled salt box and a skimmer once used to get the bugs off cream and milk.

“Back East, that’s where all the good pieces are,” he says. “If any pieces are out here, it’s because people brought them along when they moved here.”

Still, one of his favorites, a cobalt-swirled frying pan, was bought at a garage sale in Huntington Park in his early years of collecting. “The guy was still using it,” says Johnson, “but I talked him out of it. He knew it was a nice item, so he charged me $6. It was a lot of money to spend then.”

Normally, Johnson hates to tie up a lot of money on one piece, but recently he couldn’t pass up a unique gray granite coffee urn with pewter-trimmed legs, patented 1876. After thinking about it, he decided the hefty $390 price tag was worth it. “I took a chance,” says Johnson. “It’s not the best thing I have, it’s just the most expensive.”

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ADVICE: Watch out for reproductions. “It takes years of looking to get to know the real from the reproductions in graniteware,” says Johnson. “Now I can tell from 10 feet away. The repro color is slightly different, it just looks newer. You’ll look at a blue-swirled piece and you’ll see light through it. The new stuff is also lighter in weight. On the old you’ll see the wear.”

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FAVORITE PLACES TO SHOP: Country Antique Fair Mall in Saugus, Rose Bowl and Long Beach swap meets. (“The last time I was at Long Beach,” Johnson says, “I bought a child’s toy in graniteware and it was only $4.”)

Chuck and Bonnie Badger

Chuck and Bonnie Badger could care less about Cuisinarts and KitchenAids and all the other fancy modern tools of the kitchen. Collectors for more than 25 years, the retired couple would much rather hop into their motor home, drive the interstates and stop at antique shops and flea markets along the way, hoping to discover unusual American kitchen gadgets made from the industrial period of the Victorian era. All kitchen stuff during that period was made from wood, tin, iron or wire.

The Badgers started collecting the tools because the mechanical aspect fascinated them. First they bought a few apple parers, some nutmeg graters, a couple of cherry pitters. Then, in a small shop in Oregon, the Badgers ran across their first pie lifter, a clever invention used by housewives to insert--and remove--pies from deep, hot wood-burning ovens. When they bought it, the couple didn’t even know what it was. They just liked its feel, and they also liked the price--$1. Before long they not only knew what the gadget was used for, but were searching for more. Today, the Badgers have one of the best collections of pie lifters in the country.

“This one right here would rotate the pie 180 degrees so that the pie cooked evenly and didn’t burn,” says Chuck Badger, pointing to a wall in his San Fernando Valley home that is entirely covered with the lifters. “You realize, wow, each one of these is different.” There are lifters with long handles, some with short handles, others made specially for small pies. They’ve even got one with a lip, invented to protect tender crusts.

When one pie lifter increases to two-score and a few early apple parers propagate into dozens, it gets difficult to accommodate them all. The Badgers got to the point where they decided it was time to sell some. A couple of years ago they opened Mom & Apple Pie in Heritage House Antiques in Glendale, where they sell duplicates or items that don’t fit into their collection. “There’s a fine line between displaying nicely and just jamming stuff in,” says Chuck. “We don’t want our house to turn into a junk shop.”

When the Badgers are not out collecting, Chuck can be found downtown at the library searching page by page through volumes of patent books, looking for information on the many patented tools they’ve collected. “I’m interested in the history,” says Badger, “of putting a collection together and being able to put it into perspective so it’s not just a bunch of stuff thrown together.”

It’s also not just for show. “You could still use these,” says Chuck. Then he pauses and shakes his head: “The problem is nobody bakes pies anymore, they all go down to the market.” *

ADVICE: Even if something is not for sale, don’t be afraid to make an offer. “We met a woman who had this egg beater but she didn’t want to sell it,” says Bonnie Badger. “She told us she was planning to give it to her daughter. So we said, ‘Do you mind if we make you an offer?’ Chuck offered her $150. Then she said, ‘Oh fine. I thought you had $25 in mind.’ So you just never know.”

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FAVORITE PLACES TO SHOP: Troubleshooter in Orange, King Richard Antique Mall in Whittier, antique stores in the Redlands and Riverside areas.

Doris Willis

When someone once asked Doris Willis where she went to buy antiques, her husband answered, “To Mars, if necessary.” Indeed, with a house filled to near-capacity and with more than 40 years of collecting under her belt, it would seem that Willis has been just about everywhere and found at least one of everything.

Willis started out buying early lighting fixtures in the early ‘50s. “It’s big bucks now,” she says, “and was getting that way back then.”

Soon she branched out into advertising memorabilia--clickers and whistles and things like that. Then it was oak furniture. And, between marriages, she went through her dog license period. “I call it my cheap time,” she says. “They were all I could afford. I had to buy something. “

It was during the ‘60s that Willis got interested in egg beaters. She’d heard about an old car lantern someone wanted to sell. When she went to look at it, she admired the antique light, but liked the old egg beater hanging in the woman’s kitchen even better. When Willis ask to look at it, the woman said it wasn’t for sale. But if it was, she told Willis, she’d want at least $1 for it. “I thought, ‘A dollar?’,” says Willis, “that’s when you could buy egg beaters for a quarter.” After some dickering, the woman said Willis could have the egg beater if she bought the car lamp.

One egg beater led to another and then another. One of her favorites is the Express Beater (patented Oct. 25, 1887) that looks more like a fly swatter than an egg beater. She also owns the largest of five 1893 patented “Jaquette” models with scissor-type handles, probably made for restaurant use (“My bust-and-biceps developer,” she calls it). But her most precious piece is a very early clamp-on, rotary-crank eggbeater patented by Monroe Bro’s. To get it, she had to trade a woman two of her best hog scraper candlesticks. “It hurt a little,” says Willis, “but to the egg beater collector, the Monroe is worth about $700.”

An avid garage saler and flea marketer, Willis attended the very first Rose Bowl swap meet. As it is with most collectors, the discovery is more thrilling than ownership. “I used to say I am going to only buy something that’s different ,” says Willis. “That’s how I got all this different stuff. You see one or two or three or four items you never knew existed. What can you do? You still can’t get it all.”

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ADVICE: Don’t let anyone push you around. “I was at Long Beach looking at this waffle iron,” says Willis, “when this man comes up and says to the gal, ‘How much is that waffle iron?’ She tells him and he says, ‘I’ll take it.’ I said, ‘Oh, no you won’t. Where did you get your manners?’ He would have bought it right out from under me. When I was younger I would stand back. But when I got older, I thought, ‘No one is going to do that to me again.’ ”

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FAVORITE PLACES TO SHOP: Pasadena City College, Long Beach, and Pierce College swap meets.

Bill Stern

Until he bought a set of dishes from a neighbor who was moving, Bill Stern had never been to a flea market or a thrift store. It was that afternoon in 1981, as he was pulling pieces of the colorful Vernon dishes out of a cardboard box and arranging it on the bookshelves in his living room, that Stern thought he heard a little voice whisper, “mmmore, mmmore . “

Since then, Stern has been making up for lost time. At first he bought only Vernon, and only solid-color pieces in the Early California pattern. “At some point I realized this was part of something larger,” he says, gesturing around the room of his large second-story duplex, “and I started buying other California pottery.” Besides the Vernon, Stern also has good examples of Brayton Laguna pottery, Bauer, Pacific and Catalina.

Amassing probably the world’s largest collection of Vernonware hasn’t been easy. The Vernon factory, located in the city it’s named after, was a major producer of dishware from the time it began in 1931 until it closed in 1958, and everybody wants it. “We all go to the same places,” says Stern. “I am out at the Rose Bowl or at Pasadena City College flea markets, and there’s Jim from Laguna Beach and a lot of the dealers.”

Yet in the 12 years he has been collecting, Stern, a film dubber and the restaurant critic for The Weekly, has assembled more than 3,000 pieces. He keeps an inventory in his computer. The Disney dishware, especially the Fantasia pieces, and the Our America pattern decorated by Rockwell Kent are extremely rare. Stern has lots of it. He’s also got at least 20 coffee carafes, 60 salt and pepper shakers, 11 complete sets of mixing bowls, and five of the rare covered muffin servers. He even has a photograph of the Vernon staff taken at a company picnic on March 2, 1937.

When Stern first met Tim Higgins, Higgins told Stern that all that stuff made him nervous. “Tim still panics sometimes when I bring something home,” says Stern. “He’ll ask, ‘What are you going to do with that?’ and I say, ‘Well, I’m going to put it in the closet.’ He says, ‘You have boxes of stuff in the closet.’ ”

Lately though, Tim has been coming around. He’s even been setting the table with Vernonware. “Now,” says Stern, “it’s gotten to the point where Tim will say, ‘Where’s that, ahhh. . .’ If he starts collecting, that will be terrible.”

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ADVICE: Don’t get stuck in a rut. “I remember the day I was out shopping with a friend,” says Stern. “I was admiring this piece of Bauer, and she said, ‘Why don’t you buy it?’ ” I said, ‘But it isn’t Vernon.’ She said, ‘So what? Do you like it?’ And that unleashed the floodgate.”

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FAVORITE PLACES TO SHOP: Rose Bowl, Pasadena City College, and Long Beach swap meets. Hollywood Flea Market, Flying Unicorn on Melrose, and until about three years ago, Piccolo Pete’s in Sherman Oaks. (“He threw me out of his store. He said all I did was come in and look at his prices.”)