Collected History

Collected History

Some, including my wife, claim I hoard things. I prefer to think of it as collecting history. I’ll admit that I have a collection of various odd things, but I don’t really hoard things...well, other than school stuff. When I retired from the classroom two years ago, I was faced with a very real problem. Where to store all of the junk I had collected over the years. My wife and I had a similar problem when we moved to Roanoke about ten years ago. We had rented the largest U-Haul for our entire home and school stuff. As it turned out, the entire home took half the truck and the other half was filled with school stuff. Since then, my wife has whittled down her collection of school stuff to one or two boxes, but I could never bring myself to do that. So my collection grew. It was loaded with lots of discarded library books and class rolls from my twenty plus years in the elementary classroom. When I left the classroom, that stuff had to go somewhere, and that somewhere ended up being one quarter of our basement. I think I’m almost ready to deal with all of it now. Perhaps this summer.

I really have some cool collections. In the school category, I have all kinds of old school equipment that various schools were getting rid of. The prizes of my collection are an old deluxe Cram globe from 1932 and a set of poster maps for the classroom from 1939. Perhaps the coolest contraption is a model of the Sun, Earth, and Moon.

The contraption operates with a complex system, of gears that allow you to crank the Earth around the sun while the Earth also rotates. The sun has a light inside that brightens a room. Apparently, it brightened a bit too much as it semi-melted the plastic sun once. My absolute favorite collectibles from school came from an ignored drawer in the Nathanael Greene Elementary Library about 15 years ago. The librarian was tossing out her whole collection of filmstrips since no one checked them out anymore, so I grabbed them along with an ancient, solid filmstrip projector. Most of the filmstrips were from the 1950’s and were stored in yellow painted steel cases. My favorite is one entitled “Space Travel A.D. 2000” which documents how men will travel from planet to planet in fancy fission spacecraft by the year 2000.

School libraries are also a great place to find old books. Every year, my school will discard a certain number of old, lonely books. So I play “Johnny on the spo" and scarf up as many as I can. I’m always looking for quirky titles and real steals. My all time favorites: Dust, Our Friend the Atom, and Horny (a book about a frog). Over the course of the years, I’ve found some excellent books like a collection of miniature Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit books. I also came in to possession of a very old atlas from 1902 with excellent illustrated maps. I've got my eye on several soon to be discarded storytelling books from the 30's.

About twenty years ago, one of my wife’s family friends gifted us many of her old books from her private library. She gave us an old set of Compton’s Encyclopedias from 1921, a travelogue set from about the same time, and several really old books. The oldest is a first or second edition of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre which was published in 1847.

I collect many other things. In my basement are buckets filled with thousands of golf balls. Over the years, I’ve traipsed around many golf courses looking for lost balls. Once I find them, I toss them in buckets in the basement or give them away to family. I’ve separated out the balls that have business logos painted on them. The coolest ball I own is a plain white golf ball with a caricature of Spiro T. Agnew on it. I have a small collection of coins. My favorite is a VF set of 1943 Steel Pennies. They aren’t worth much, but they are quite a conversation piece. Over the years, I’ve managed to hold on to my collection of Boy Scout patches and mugs. The most valuable patch is a Powhatan Flap patch (456). These were extremely rare and became very collectible when the 456 order merged with the 161 order to create Tutelo Lodge. I’ve seen the patch on eBay going for well over $200.

Some of my other collections include Happy Meal toys. My favorite is a set of clapping hands. You can grip the pistol-styled handle and squeeze the trigger to make two plastic hands clap together. I've managed to collect several of these most wonderful toys. Cassette tapes, records, and CD’s are quite popular with me. I just finished entering all of them in a database and found that I have about 1000 unique titles. Two odd collections right now are empty Clementine boxes and empty tissue boxes. I use the wooden Clementine boxes to store other little stuff I collect, and I plan to use the tissue boxes to as boxes to ship my baby tomato plants to customers this Spring.

I learned about twenty years ago to never get rid of a collection. When I was growing up, My brothers, sister, and I collected all kinds of baseball cards. Together, we had amassed quite a collection of cards from players from the 60’s and 70’s. The prizes in the collection were the1963 Pete Rose Rookie Cards. One of them, a picture of Pete’s head and four other guys’ heads is selling on eBay for between $1000 and $15,000. The other card was from that year was a traditional card pose with Pete.

As all of my brothers and sisters grew up and moved out, they left behind all of the baseball cards, so I gathered them all in a shoebox and took care of them. When I moved away from home and moved in to my first apartment working my first job as a teacher, I took the cards with me. Every day after teaching school, I’d go outside my apartment and play basketball with the neighborhood teenagers. One kid, Keith Collins, and I played a lot of basketball. One day, Keith was showing off his card collection to me. I was impressed so I went to get the family collection to show him. He just went nuts over the old cards. Seeing his excitement and not really having a terribly strong attachment to the cards, I simply gave them all to Keith right there, right then. He was overjoyed and thanked me profusely. I felt great! Many years later, my brothers were asking about the cards, and I confessed that I had given them away. They were shocked and very disappointed. What was I thinking giving away that collection with those valuable Pete Rose Rookie cards? That’s one collection that I’d love to have back.

Collections for me are a way to mark my life. Instead of marking my life by ticking off calendar pages (although I do like to collect them, too), I choose to mark life by gathering evidence of everything I’ve experienced. Some might think that’s hoarding, but I think of it as the uncontrollable act of collecting history. It's as the character Jane describes in my edition of Bronte's Jane Eyre concerning matters of the subconscious, "It seemed as if my tongue pronounced words without my will consenting to their utterance: something spoke out of me over which I had no control."