Collectors Living in the Magic Kingdom

You can’t miss Jay Aldrich’s parking space at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage. It’s the only one marked with a silhouette of Mickey Mouse’s head.

For that matter, you can’t miss Aldrich, or fail to see that he is one of the mouse’s biggest fans. Director of tourism and public relations at the museum, Aldrich is the tall, lanky guy wearing a Mickey Mouse tie (he has more than 400), from which a Mickey Mouse pin dangles. There’s a Mickey Mouse watch on his wrist, pen in his shirt pocket and note pad on his desk, not far from the Mickey Mouse holder for his business cards.

He eases his back into a Mickey Mouse pillow on his desk chair and swivels over a custom-made Mickey Mouse floor protector.

“I’ve been called a fanatic,” said Aldrich, 58, who lives in North Hills and has one of the largest collections of Mickey Mouse merchandise in the country. But Aldrich will tell you he is not a fanatic, just a lover of all things related to the character that launched the Disney empire.

“Mickey,” Aldrich said, “makes me happy.”

Aldrich, who has more than 16,000 pieces in his collection, is president of the National Fantasy Fan Club for Disneyana Enthusiasts, a worldwide organization of nearly 4,000 people who never met a Pocahontas snow globe they didn’t like or, more recently, a Disney pin they didn’t covet.

“I lost count after 20,000,” Stefan Sztybel said of his collection.

“I love Disney merchandise,” said Sztybel, a retired 58-year-old actor who moved from New York City to Celebration, Fla., the Disney-sanctioned housing development near Orlando, to be closer to Disney parks and shops.

“I go to the parks three to five times a week, more if you count dinner in one of the hotels,” said Sztybel, who said he spent $400 on memorabilia during one recent visit.

There is plenty of merchandise to choose from. According to a company spokesman, gross sales of Disney consumer products, which includes royalties for licensed items, were $2.6 billion for fiscal 2000.

Sztybel has been collecting since friends threw him a Mickey Mouse-themed party on his 30th birthday. Like most longtime collectors, he narrowed his focus because he was rapidly running out of storage space.

“My big specialty is vintage Mickey Mouse from ’28 to ’38. The retro Mickey is what they call him--the black-and-white Mickey, the nasty little mouse with teeth,” he said.

Mickey “completely changed my life,” said Sztybel, who made enough money selling appreciated items to retire four years ago. He said what remains is worth about $500,000.

Thomas Tumbusch is publisher of Tomart Publications in Dayton, Ohio, which produces price guides to Disney collectibles and the bimonthly magazine Tomart’s Disneyana Update. Tumbusch, whose company ships more than 18,000 copies of the magazine, puts the worldwide community of Disney collectors at 250,000 to 300,000.

Among collectors, Tumbusch said, there is always interest in the so-called Fab Five: Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy and Pluto. Daisy Duck also has her fans, especially in Japan, he said.

Tumbusch said the hottest things now are pins. The Mickey Mouse clubs that the Disney company organized in the 1930s produced them, and Cartier made them in 1938 of gold, platinum, rubies and diamonds, now selling for up to $6,000 each, he said. The craze began when Disney produced a series of pins in anticipation of the millennium.

“Up until the pins, there was a graying of the Disneyana collectors,” said Tumbusch. But the frenzied sale of Disney items on the Internet is being done by young collectors as well, he said.

“I saw many younger faces and crashed my shins on more than a dozen strollers at the pin celebration at Epcot a month ago,” he said.

Thousands of pins, he said, are offered daily on EBay: One night last week, 11,000 pins were for sale, “and that’s down because of all that’s been going on.”

Kim Petersen, 44, a computer consultant in Brea and member of the National Fantasy Fan Club, said she is “teased a lot that I was collecting in utero. My mother was a collector.”

Unlike Aldrich’s family, which tossed out his childhood Mickey Mouse lunch box, Petersen’s mom saved such treasures as Kim’s first toy, a plush Mickey Mouse.

“It’s an amazing phenomenon,” said Petersen, who bought her first pins as a teenage visitor to Disneyland and now trades them online.