Bitten by the Garfield Bug
To one group of funny pages fans, the home of Gayle Brennan and Mike Drysdale is the cat’s meow.
From the Garfield doormats in front to the Garfield window shades out back, their Duarte residence is an orange-tinted shrine to the wisecracking comic-strip cat known for his coffee-guzzling, spider-whacking rude attitude.
Their living room is crammed with Garfield figures, Garfield lamps and Garfield posters. A Garfield cartoon video is showing on the television set beneath the Garfield clock. Tables are lined with Garfield radios and Garfield wind-up toys. Garfield throw-rugs are on the floor, beneath the Garfield banners that hang from the ceiling, and the sofa is covered with a Garfield blanket.
“Everything here is a treasure,” said Brennan, gesturing at the room with an arm that bears a Garfield tattoo just above her Garfield wristwatch.
“It’s a cheery look,” agreed Drysdale, gently rotating one of the Garfield mobiles hanging from the ceiling. “It’s relaxing. It relieves stress. You get awed-out just looking at it.”
Brennan, a fortysomething assistant parts manager for a Monrovia car dealership, credits pet kittens for launching her unusual cartoon cat collection.
Four years ago she purchased a Garfield kitty bed for them to sleep in. The cats took a liking to it--and so did she. And the next thing she knew, nearly everything she was buying seemed to have the tubby cartoon tabby’s image on it.
Soon, a gaudy laminated Garfield purchased at a shop in Las Vegas was hanging on the wall near the front door. A human-size stuffed-silk Garfield was sitting in a wicker chair in the corner. Garfield beer steins and coffee cups were popping up on tables and shelves.
“It just festered and festered. The collection started rolling and didn’t stop,” said Drysdale, 39, an insurance broker.
These days their bathroom is outfitted with Garfield towels, Garfield toothbrushes, Garfield soaps and Garfield shampoo. Along with Garfield scrub brushes, Garfield bandages and a Garfield toilet seat cover.
In the kitchen--next to the refrigerator covered with Garfield magnets and topped with Garfield lunch boxes--there are Garfield cookbooks, Garfield stirring spoons, Garfield spice jars, several bags of Garfield tortilla chips, Garfield cookie jars, a Garfield paper cup dispenser, a Garfield toothpick holder, Garfield drinking straw dispenser, Garfield gum ball container and Garfield pet food storage jars.
Food is served on Garfield plates set out on Garfield place mats on a dining room table covered with a Garfield tablecloth. Table settings include Garfield bowls and water glasses. Nearby are 100 Garfield coffee mugs hanging from hooks.
Dangling above the dining area are Garfield puppets, along with figures of Garfield comic strip characters Odie and Pooky. Every wall is filled with Garfield pictures, drawings and shadowboxes stuffed with Garfield figures and toys.
Visitors encountering the house for the first time break into wide smiles. After their jaws have dropped, of course.
“You can get a quick read on someone’s personality by watching to see how they react,” said Drysdale.
“I’ve had Blue Cross reps freak out when they stopped by here to drop off insurance proposals to me. I have to give an explanation,” he said.
Mike Nelson, an Azusa bowling alley employee whose insurance is handled by Drysdale, said he left the couple’s home in shock after he dropped in.
“You can’t begin to explain what they have to other people. I just say if you want a weird experience, go to their house,” Nelson said.
Rialto resident Bruce Lovejoy, a co-worker of Brennan, said he was stunned when he visited their home. “ ‘Wow!’ is the appropriate word. That’s ‘WOW!’ in capital letters,” he said.
Brennan said her brother “thinks I’m a nut” for filling the house with Garfields. “But at least everyone in the family knows what to give me for Christmas and for my birthday.”
Brennan and Drysdale prowl yard sales and swap meets on weekends looking for new Garfield items, often with Drysdale’s parents, Doug and Mary Drysdale of Glendora. They look for bargains: They calculate they have spent several thousand dollars on their estimated 3,000 Garfield items.
But they have more things like Garfield bedroom slippers (20 pairs), Garfield clocks (27 wind-up and digital versions), framed Garfield baseball cards (40) and Garfield Christmas tree ornaments (50) than room to display them. So they’re thinking about moving to a larger house.
“We’ve never sold anything. Oh, no,” said Brennan. “I’ve given a few duplicate things to kids in the neighborhood. But this is all for us.”
That sort of attitude is appreciated by cartoonist Jim Davis, who created the Garfield strip 20 years ago. His comic strip appears in The Times and in 2,600 other daily newspapers in 111 countries, and Davis licenses Garfield merchandise from his Indiana headquarters.
No accurate count is available, but since the first suction-cup-footed Garfield popped up on car windows a decade or so ago, as many as 8,000 authorized Garfield items have been produced.
Naturally, Garfield’s artist draws the line at suggesting that people like Brennan and Drysdale have maybe gone overboard collecting his characters.
“To those who would say collecting Garfield stuff is a bad habit, I’d say there are a lot worse habits to have,” Davis said.
