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MAGNIFICENT OBSESSIONS

Five people who collect pieces of the past
By Amy Cunningham |

For some, it’s a challenge just to collect thoughts. For others, collecting garage-sale or swap-meet doodads happens as naturally as not thinking at all.

So it is risky-this business of saying why certain people collect or restore things and why others cast their possessions to the winds. It’s like pretending we know why some people chew tobacco or cut their cuticles or crave huge quantities of moo shi pork. Such obsessive impulses seize select groups of people for no reason. Look at it this way: Some individuals live for the here-and-now; the rest float off and vaporize in the there-and-then.

Every neighborhood has its pack rat – the widow whose world view is wrapped in layers of memory and whose apartment seems fortified by all the published issues of Redbook magazine. And every city has its great benefactors – the prominent men and women who have seen the world through the windows of a cab and who have assembled internationally recognized collections of ceramics or paintings or priceless gems along the way. When the proper time arises, such private collections go public, and civic-minded friends flock to the openings to say nice things. A great collection of anything, if it has a sense of conviction and completeness, is well worth the accolades.

Knowing this, we rummaged through musty phone books and club rosters until we found a handful of humble collectors who are of a weird and rare breed. These people use the word “investment” only to defend their hobby to a half-hysterical spouse. Collecting, they say, is a commitment that left them little choice.

They accumulate things that remind them of an aspect of the past they knew – their youth – or of a past they would like to have known. Whether it’s the saintly expression on the face of a doll or the way sunlight catches on a piece of Packard chrome -in these sentimental things our collectors see themselves. And into that obsessive desire to control and order something outside themselves, they channel their time, their money and the emotional energy they’ve been unable to entrust elsewhere. These people don’t necessarily put their faith in material things; they chart their lives by them. In the process, they’ve saved a piece of the past that might otherwise have been forgotten, abused or mislaid.

Jim hollingsworth



Packards



Jim Hollingsworth’s parents in Beeville used to kid him and say that the first word he ever muttered was “car.” The other important words in Jim’s life have been “doctor,” “pepper” and “sales.” He left the Dr Pepper plant two years ago at the age of 49 with the title of vice president of sales. He intended to retire at 55, but when the company offered him a position in Europe that he decided he didn’t want, Jim left very cordially and began to concentrate his energies upon his true love and only passion-1940 Packard cars. Jim has ten 1940s, one 1941, one 1956 and a 1959 Thunderbird he can’t seem to abandon. He has restored all his Packards from the chassis up, and he’s a stickler for detail right down to having the engine parts marked with the right decals. Jim says 1940 (which happens to be the year he learned to drive) was an especially good Packard year. The model car had the last of the truly classic Packard looks along with several modern innovations – air conditioning being not the least among them. “Peo-’ ple restore Packards for different reasons,” Jim says, “but I wouldn’t want to own one if I couldn’t drive it.” For the sake of practicality, he keeps a pickup truck and a 1978 Chevrolet Caprice at home to drive, but neither can surpass that sublime Packard ride. Just ask the man who owns one.

MILLIE SEATON



Dolls

Millie Seaton knows that when she and her husband have new friends over to play bridge, they leave thinking she is some kind of nut. Millie has dolls stashed on bookshelves and staring from special cabinets literally all over the house -in the bathrooms, bedrooms, hallways and studies -and they’re not just the precious bisque doll babies most collectors covet. Millie’s collection includes Barbie dolls in fresh-out-of-the-box regalia, Shirley Temple dolls, Dionne quintuplet dolls, Spanish Klumpe dolls, wax dolls, celluloid dolls, apple-head dolls, Japanese dolls, Campbell Soup kids and that’s just for starters. “I’m not one to talk to my dolls or name ’em,” she reassures us. Her doll-mania began in 1965. She opened a doll shop nine years ago, after her own kids were grown, and devoted much of her attention to doll repair while enlarging her own battery of babies. “Each doll has its place,” she says. “Each has its own particular reason.”

Millie doesn’t have any dolls from her childhood. She’s not even sure she was close to any dolls as a kid growing up on a farm in the Panhandle. Her own mother died when Millie was five, and Millie was the only little girl among many male students in her two-room school. “But I don’t think all that has anything to do with anything,” she says, nervously shifting her hands.

VICTOR TOOGOOD



Motorcycles

Victor Toogood maintains the largest collection of European motorcycles in Dallas, and while he has titles to some Czechoslo-vakian, Italian and German bikes, he is truly, but not exclusively, a Norton fan. The great bikes of Britian are almost things of the past now that Japanese competition has driven most of the plants out of business. But Vic, who was reared in suburban London, bears no grudge. “For the money, and the short-run,” he says, “you’ve got to hand it to the Japanese.” Nevertheless, he makes it clear that the Yamaha parked in his shop belongs to a friend. Vic says a cleft palate prohibited him from speaking until he was 21, “and of course girls didn’t want to have anything to do with me,” so he fell in love with bikes, instead. He served in the Royal Air Force in World War II and came to the States after the war on a Gl-bride’s boat. In Dallas, he worked as an accountant until he was able to retire on the proceeds from a lucrative stock deal. Vic is currently struggling to get his favorite 1947 Norton back out on the road. He lives with two cats, dabbles a bit in coin collecting and occasionally tinkers with the 1960 Hillman Husky he’s driven for years. He had a telephone once -“didn’t much care for it” -and now communicates with the outside world by leaving notes on his shop door.

Helen Boyd



Toothpick. Holders



Helen Boyd’s husband should have taken the hint and stopped playing golf during weekends 10 years ago. For almost every ball he’s sunk into a hole, Helen has brought home another toothpick holder from the flea market she habitually visits to pass idle time. Helen is a past president of the National Toothpick Holders Collectors’ Society and is the only person to have served in that office for two consecutive terms. Her living room is virtually insulated with 1,300 toothpick holders lined three- and four-deep on handmade shelves. The holders, she says, were once completely accepted as integral parts of a table setting; but now, most people hide their toothpicks inside kitchen cupboards where they never get used. Truthfully, toothpick etiquette and its history are not what interest Helen. She likes to see her collection as a colorful history of American glass. She has holders made from carnival glass, rubyflashed glass, flint glass and real crystal. She says the big controversy within the national society (the thing collectors quibble about for hours) is what differentiates a legitimate toothpick holder from, say, an egg cup or a shot glass. Helen has a rule of thumb: Stick your finger in it. If the holder swallows you up to the third knuckle, what you’ve probably got there is a vase.

Larry Herndon



Comic Books



There are only two types of comic books that collector Larry Herndon has never cared for and doesn’t want – Romance comics and Archies. Any other comic is a prize; that’s why he owns more than 50,000. Larry learned to read by reading comics when he was five. He insists he didn’t find comics interesting solely because he was handicapped from birth, considerably less powerful than a locomotive and unable to leap tall buildings in a single bound. He does admit that he absorbed a super-hero’s share of grief during high school when other boys made fun of him for still being interested in comics and cartoons. Larry’s patience paid off when he met his wife at a nostalgia convention in 1974. The two of them now own and manage two successful memorabilia stores. Larry’s favorite comic in his collection is an early Walt Disney four-color Donald Duck #9 worth a few thousand dollars and stored in a bank vault for safe keeping. It bothers him that his valuable comics have to be tucked away; he’d rather live with them. “If all the comics were in one place, I’d feel as though I were expressing myself,” he says. Larry even likes the way old comics smell. And although he says newspaper comics are a pale shadow of what they once were, he still clips Prince Valiant every day from the Morning News.

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