Flights of Fancy

When Niek Vermeulen saw the movie “Independence Day,” he laughed at the scene in which a passenger on Air Force One pulls out an airsickness bag and uses it. “They showed the presidential seal on the bag, which it doesn’t have.”

Vermeulen should know. He has one.

“I was at an air show in Washington, D.C., and they had one of the planes used as Air Force One on display.” A security guard gave him the bag, “but I was disappointed,” Vermeulen says. “It doesn’t have any seal or anything that identifies it with the president.”

Nevertheless, the bag made it into Vermeulen’s collection of 8,000, certified by the Guinness Book of Records as the largest accumulation of airsickness bags in the world.

Still, one bag eludes him: the type used on the space shuttle.

He has one that he thinks comes close. A friend in Hong Kong who sells men’s suits to tourists rescued it from her trash bin and gave it to him. “It has a mouthpiece that makes an airtight seal when you press against it; there’s some absorbent material inside to contain any liquid and it has a Ziplock-style closing device,” Vermeulen says, intently pointing out the features. “This has to be similar to NASA’s.”

A retired investment banker from the Netherlands who started his collection 20 years ago on a lark, Vermeulen has pestered NASA repeatedly for a bag from the shuttle, only to be told that they are government property.

He still hunts for unusual bags from around this world. Friends pick them up whenever they fly, and Vermeulen himself has waited outside airline gates and asked flight attendants to retrieve an airsickness bag for him. “They rarely say no.”

He spends much of his free time at airline memorabilia shows around the world, where the hat he wears says it all: Barf Bags Wanted.

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Vermeulen is one of many people fascinated by the treasures and junk of the world’s airlines. Want a dining service for eight from TWA’s first class? Somebody’s got it. How about a Braniff timetable from March 1979? Talk to the “timetable guy.”

“There’s a market for these,” says a man from the Valley, who wants to be known only as Joel, about his collection of thousands of old timetables. “Lots of people like to collect items from one airline or region, and a timetable is valuable to tell you when and where an airline flew. It’s geography.”

It’s also romance. For most people nowadays, the allure of flying has scattered into the jet stream. It’s no longer an event for which people dress up, with flight attendants leisurely chatting with passengers or handing out playing cards to while away the time.

So what can you get for that old Western Airlines swizzle stick that has been in your junk drawer? Will late Aunt Mabel’s uniform that she wore as a stewardess in the 1930s pay for your son’s college tuition?

“It’s all relative,” says airline poster aficionado Steve Carroll of Loma Linda. “If you have something someone’s trying to get to complete a collection, obviously the price goes up.”

One item that often turns up during a thorough spring cleaning is junior pilot wings. “In the good old days the stewardesses would walk down the aisle and hand out little kiddie wings to all the children on board and most kids really treasured those,” says wing collector Phil Martin of Long Beach. “It was the closest you could get to the cockpit.”

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Martin--who recently wrote a book on his hobby, “Pilot Wings in the United States” (Beach Cities Publishing, 1997), says the most valuable wings and memorabilia come from carriers of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s. And the most prized possessions are from the early Pan Am Clippers, flying boats that traversed the globe in the ‘30s.

“There’s such an aura of intrigue and adventure that surrounds those early airlines,” Martin says. “It took a week to fly from San Francisco to Hong Kong, with several stops along the way. Having Clipper wings or some other part of those flights makes you think about who used them and what it was like.”

While none of the early Pan Am memorabilia will allow you to retire early (that is, unless you have one of their flying boats buried in the backyard), old Clipper wings in good condition can command $300 or more, and other items such as uniforms and china sets have reached into the thousands.

“People often find these things by accident,” Carroll says. “Maybe grandfather took a trip on Pan Am and came home with a shot glass that got stuffed in the bottom of a suitcase. Or your dad picked up an old pilot’s hat for a costume party in the 1950s and it turns out it’s from Lufthansa from the 1920s. You never can tell if what you have is treasure or junk.”

Jim Belknap, a pilot from Corona, found a unique metal ashtray in the shape of a slipper for $30 at a recent memorabilia convention. Made in India in the early 1950s, it is marked “Bombay to San Francisco” and was used on TWA flights between those cities. “There’s a real charm to something like this. If only it could talk, I’m sure it would have stories to tell.”

Of course, some memorabilia would be better off silent. Vermeulen, who has paid as much as $50 for an airsickness bag that he wasn’t able to get by trading or begging, keeps a separate collection of the oddest bags in the world.

One has “Doggy Bag” written on the back, “as if you’d use it and bring it home to your dog,” Vermeulen says. “Others have a gin rummy scorecard on the front, or a photo developing form in case you don’t feel ill and want to send a roll of film out after you land.”

His favorite, though, has an unusual instruction: “ ‘After you use this bag, it must be turned upside down to seal it.’ I don’t think I’d want to take that chance.”

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* For information on airline memorabilia, contact the World Airline Historical Society, 13739 Picarsa Drive, Jacksonville FL 32225, https://www.aircruise.com/wahs/