Passionate Pezheads Popping Into Town

Press the plastic clown head and it dispenses those 29-cent candies that a generation of children eagerly gulped down.

Press the self-styled Pezhead and she dispenses all of the reasons baby boomers don’t gulp at all over spending hundreds of dollars years later for that same Pez candy dispenser.

“They remind you of your childhood,” said Linda Adams, a 48-year-old San Jose software company administrator. “They’re so cute and colorful and innocent. And they’re easy to keep--it would be hell collecting, say, pianos.”

Adams arrived Thursday for Los Angeles’ international Pez-a-Thon--a two-day gathering of Pez lovers that runs tonight through Saturday at the airport’s Sheraton Gateway hotel.

She is eager to expand the collection of 3,500 Pez dispensers that she displays behind glass in her living room. “They’re seat-belted in with little black elastic straps,” Adams said.

That kind of fanaticism is common among those who delight in labeling themselves Pezheads.

Convention organizer Jim Presnal of Tarzana rolled up Thursday in a 1977 Dodge covered with more than 1,400 Pez dispensers. He plans to drive the Pezmobile into the hotel’s grand ballroom this afternoon before the start of the show, which could attract as many as 2,500 Pez people.

“I had no concept of the history of Pez when I started collecting 15 years ago,” said Presnal. “But the next thing I knew, I was totally spun up in all of this.”

The name Pez is taken from the first, middle and last letters of pfefferminz, the German word for peppermint. The candy was created in 1927 as a breath mint for smokers and sold in dispensers designed to look like cigarette lighters.

Fruit flavoring and toy character heads were added to the spring-loaded dispensers after the candy was introduced in the United States in 1952, according to collector Sue Wheelis, 41, of Huntington, N.Y.

About 400 variations of the heads--fanciful replicas of cartoon, animal and human characters--have been produced by the Pez candy company since then.

Collectors say the most valuable Pez is a Mr. Potatohead-like container that originally sold for 79 cents in 1972. It’s worth $5,500 now, according to several collectors.

Scott Luther, the owner of one of the few surviving “American Make-a-Face” Pez pieces, says it usually takes him a few tries to explain to strangers why he’s willing to spend that kind of cash on tiny plastic candy dispensers.

“Most people think I need intervention, actually,” said Luther, a 35-year-old Seattle software engineer.

“People tell me I should get out more.”