COVER STORY : Gathering No Dust : Collectibles--they’re not antiques, but they hold just as much value for those who search for them.
You see them at swap meets and garage sales, antiques shows and flea markets. They have magnifying glasses in their pockets (the better to look for flaws and identifying marks, my dear) and a gleam in their eyes. They are not simply buyers. They are collectors, people whose notion of the good, the true and the beautiful extends to some very odd stuff indeed.
These are people who know what they want, whether it’s a vintage Chatty Cathy doll, an old pocket watch, a 1940s cookie jar in the shape of a smiling pig or a pre-1969 Matchbox car in its original box. And when they find whatever functions as their own private Holy Grail, they are willing to pay top dollar for what looks to the rest of us--the uninitiated, the unpossessed--like junk.
We are not talking here about people who spend thousands of dollars for genuine antiques--objects of varying degrees of fineness made more than a century ago. We are talking about people whose acquisitiveness is of a more personal, more idiosyncratic nature.
Such people see something that charms them, that amuses them, that reminds them of their childhood or their parents’ childhoods, and they think, “Neat. I have to have that. Maybe I need more than one. Maybe I’m going to buy every single one I can find anywhere on the face of the Earth from now on. Oh, please, dear God, cloud the eye and paralyze the arm of anyone else who tries to collect them. Thank you.”
How weird do these obsessions get? Remember those paint-by-numbers sets that were all the rage among the “Howdy Doody” crowd? You think Pogs are hot today? At one point, Craft Master was cranking out 50,000 paint sets a day, and half the children in America were getting ulcers from trying to stay inside the lines. But the fact that the completed paintings are not rare, that the subjects range from the trite to the appalling and that the artists who completed them had to possess all the talent of a porch swing doesn’t mean that people won’t pay good money for them.
Not long ago, actor Chevy Chase shelled out $250,000 for 200 choice examples, a collection that would be perfect if it only included the two critically acclaimed portraits of clown Emmett Kelly I did when I was 8.
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The collecting virus--the junking virus, if you will--can strike anyone at any time. Van Nuys resident Natalie Hall got it several years ago during a trip through the Gold Rush country of Central California with friend Galen Kues. Kues has a collection of almost 4,000 beer cans, including some rare cone tops from the 1930s, and Hall couldn’t help noticing that his passion for the foam-filled artifacts gave a pleasant urgency to their frequent stops at stores where collectibles were sold. Hall decided that she needed a passion of her own.
“Every store had fascinating old bottles, and that’s how I got started,” says Hall, who has a modest collection of 50 such bottles, mostly for turn-of-the-century patent medicines, as well as a handful of glass insulators once used to keep live wires away from wooden telephone poles.
Like so many of her breed, Hall talks with lyrical enthusiasm about the odd objects she has painstakingly amassed. Love, after all, is notorious for its ability to transform the mundane. “They come in every color you can think of,” she says. “I have one in a lovely blue-green that’s just a delight.”
And Hall, who writes educational materials for AIMS Media in Chatsworth, loves the tangible link her bottles give her to the past. For $16 (the most she’s ever paid for one of her treasures) you can get a remarkable history lesson. Most of her favorites contained alleged cures marketed “before the Food and Drug Administration made it illegal to make outrageous claims.” As a result, she has a bottle once full of hair tonic that promised results beyond Sy Sperling’s wildest dreams.
Before the era of paper labels, vital information was pressed right into the glass. Some of her favorites illuminate women’s history, such as a bottle for a Lydia Pinkham tincture that promised to cure the ails that only women are heir to. “Women’s health problems were not well understood--they’re still not, in my opinion--and women flocked to anything that promised to give them relief from PMS or hot flashes,” Hall says. She also has an old bitters bottle that recalls the time when no respectable woman would enter a bar or a liquor store, but a lady could drink herself comatose nipping at patent medicines that were virtually pure alcohol.
Local collectors stalk a remarkable range of stuff, from plastic snow globes to transistor radios, from Civil War memorabilia to early computers, from vintage vacuum cleaners to Pez dispensers.
Among the collectibles being sought or sold in a single recent issue of the local Recycler, a favorite read of rabid junkers, were vintage lawn mowers, casino chips, coffins, GE refrigerators, Persian Gulf War memorabilia, stuffed animal heads, old safes, items made in occupied Japan, “Star Wars” figures and old Avon bottles in the shape of cars. There are always people in the market for Bakelite purses, advertising art, old cameras and salt-and-pepper shakers in every shape imaginable.
Some of these have relatively long histories as collectibles, but new enthusiasms are being born all the time. A brisk market has developed in telecards, plastic cards issued by phone companies for prepaid calls. Collectors are already hoarding a series that promotes last summer’s movie “The Flintstones.”
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Rick Johnson, who manages the Sherman Oaks Antique Mall, says he never knows what to tell dealers who ask him what appeals to local collectors. “Everything sells,” he says.
But certain items can’t miss. These include vases, dating from the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, in the shape of women’s heads, which he calls lady-head vases or lady potheads. Five years ago, you could pick one of these up for $5 or $10. Now a choice one (some people especially like those on which the woman is holding her hand up to her face) commands $65.
Costume jewelry is also a bestseller. “People are now buying the kind of stuff our moms used to wear to church,” Johnson says. But collectors don’t want just any 40-year-old gold-wash earrings studded with fake pearls. They want those made by Trifari, tending to disdain those made by Monet. The market for costume jewelry extends far beyond the San Fernando Valley. “Japanese dealers take it out by the suitcase, and it’s also popular with the Italians,” he says.
Overall, “kitsch sells better in our store than antiques. We will sell a boomerang-shaped coffee table before we’ll sell a crystal chandelier.” Johnson speculates that this reflects the hipness of the local community. Los Angeles is, after all, the place where an inordinate number of trends are born. One result is that some traditional antiques and collectibles--kitchen items such as juice reamers, for instance--cost less here than they do in places where country is king, even places as close as Lancaster and Riverside.
According to Johnson, nothing is moving faster than toys from the late 1960s and early ‘70s. He can’t get enough Nutty Mads, grotesque figures that 38-year-old Johnson used to buy as a youngster for 79 cents and now sells for $45 apiece. He also sells enormous numbers of Hot Wheels race cars, which can bring $350 apiece (those from the late ‘60s to the early ‘70s with a red line on the tires are especially sought after). “I do $2,000 to $3,000 a month in Hot Wheels alone,” Johnson says. “The $10 to $12 ones just fly out the door.”
The typical toy car enthusiast--a man of 25 to 30 with money in his pocket--is a major force in the collectibles market. According to Ralph and Terry Kovel, who publish best-selling price guides to antiques and collectibles, Generation X is changing the very definition of a collectible. In the Kovels’ view, “an ‘antique’ has become anything older than the buyer.”
Johnson has a theory as to why a 30ish collector was willing to pay $1,000 for a box of Quisp cereal and why dozens of young men compete for the Hot Wheels in his display cases. “They’re either guys who had them then and want them again and can afford them,” he speculates, “or they’re trying to make up for something in their childhood.”
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The desire to fill some emotional void is a motive for acquisition that many self-aware collectors acknowledge. Richard Carleton Hacker, for instance, is a writer, living in Burbank while his Sherman Oaks home is being repaired. The author of “The Ultimate Pipe Book” and “The Ultimate Cigar Book” (both published by Autumngold and available at tobacconists), Hacker is a collector of many things--enough to fill 17 commercial storage bins, in fact--including humidors and other tobacco-related items and anything to do with Teddy Roosevelt. But some of his passions reflect the hole-in-the-heart school of collecting, Hacker admits.
He has 200 vintage train sets and has no doubt that part of the reason he loves to buy them is that his parents couldn’t afford to give him one as a child. And he also suspects that his fondness for Christmas collectibles, including such crossover items as Santa Clauses smoking pipes, date back to his Orthodox Jewish upbringing, when Christmas seemed a wonderful, exotic event that included everyone but him. (Hacker maintains that you don’t have to be Gentile to love the North Pole. “It never diluted my religious upbringing,” he says.)
Even though Hacker is a collector, he is amazed at what some people will buy. When he had a post-quake garage sale, there was a buyer for virtually everything he bothered to carry outside. Someone bought a bronze elk that lost its antlers in the quake “so what was a bull elk was now a cow elk” for $10. Hacker writes knowledgeably about small-batch bourbons and single-malt whiskeys and was amazed to find people would pay for his empties, such as the handsome bottle in which Jim Beam distributes its Knob Creek bourbon. “I had finished up the bottle the night before,” he recalls. “I rinsed it out, put it out there and somebody bought it for $2.”
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Some Valley collectors have a very personal interest in the items they seek. Former teen heartthrob David Cassidy and his wife, Sue Shifrin, are regulars at the Sherman Oaks Antique Mall, the monthly shows at the Pickwick Entertainment Center and the Equestrian Center in Burbank and other venues. Their 3-year-old son, Beau, shows signs of becoming a collector of Mickey Mouse, Alvin and the Chipmunks and objects related to horses. Shifrin collects Lalique glass, antique jewelry and vintage needlework that she thinks could be made into pillows. Cassidy likes Art Deco watches and Weller and Roseville pottery.
The family is also always on the lookout for items relating to “The Partridge Family,” the musical sitcom that Cassidy starred in from 1970 to 1974. “David has some pristine lunch boxes,” Shifrin says, mostly given to him by fans. “One time we found an old David Cassidy guitar, one of these little plastic things. He was very tempted, but it had a crack in it, and they wanted too much for it.”
The biggest Partridge Family collectible of all--the bus--has managed to elude them, despite reported sightings in Downtown Los Angeles and Pacoima. “David has always wanted to buy the bus and donate it to the Smithsonian,” Shifrin says.
Frank Piccolo owns Piccolo Pete’s, a Sherman Oaks shop whose stock includes everything from classic Ronson cigarette lighters to the blond wood bedroom sets that young marrieds of the 1940s and ‘50s regarded as the height of modernity.
As a collector as well as a dealer, Piccolo makes no apologies for his fondness for Fiestaware, and not just because it has skyrocketed in value. “Yes, they’re material things,” he says of his beloved turquoise plates and ebony cups and saucers. “But they give you enjoyment that other people may not. And it’s a hell of a lot better than doing drugs. And you don’t have to pay alimony.”
Junkers’ Strategies
Hard core collectors prepare for their forays as if for war. Mary Randolph Carter, author of a new coffee table book on collecting called “American Junk” (Viking Studio Books), offers serious junkers this advice:
* Dress for the occasion in layers. She collects old fishing vests for the purpose and tucks credit cards, pre-moistened towelettes and other survival items into the many pockets.
* Don’t carry your purse--it gets in the way.
* Make sure you have lots of $1 dollar bills and checks on you. Some dealers won’t make change.
* Don’t hesitate to haggle.
* Never, never walk away from something you fall in love with. You may never see it again.
