Staying Alive
The past dies hard, thanks to those who collect memorabilia of former times
By Sandy Sims
Photographs by Kathy De La Torre
Los Gatan Carl Lepiane collects old gum. Los Gatos artist Luis Gutierrez collects old candy bar boxes and old photographs. Lyn Marsh, who lives near Westgate, collects old chocolate molds. There's a man in the east who collects plastic bread bags, another collects plastic carrot bags. There's a woman in the mother lode country who collects buttonholers, and one in New York who collects toothpaste and tooth powder.
Collectors gather up all kinds of crazy things: spittoons, buttons, old used toothbrushes, bottle caps, marbles, razors and razor blades, suits of armor, children's banks, used postcards, and even false teeth. There are conventions for people who collect McDonald's or Coca-Cola paraphernalia, including wet-floor signs and (unused) toilet paper, mainly common "stuff" the Waltons would buy at the mercantile--stuff most of us would call junk.
Nonetheless, to collectors this "junk" is treasure.
It's the finding of the treasure that keeps collectors going--a piece of unchewed gum made in 1890 and still in its wrapping, a 1930s candy bar box, a pre-1900 beer bottle.
But finding isn't all of it.
Collectors learn the history of their finds, imagine its owners and feel a connection with the past. They even feel a responsibility to it, to restore it and care for it. "Just think," Carol Payne of Carol's Antique Gallery in Saratoga says, "we are temporary custodians for these things that might last hundreds of years."
This child's toothbrush is part of Shirley Henderson's used toothbrush collection.
Denise Harr, daughter of Shirley Henderson who owns the Antiquarium in Los Gatos, takes the custodial responsibility to heart. Harr likes keeping memorabilia alive that would otherwise be lost or buried in some attic.
She never knew Lucille or her husband Elmer, but she loves wearing Lucille's pinkie ring. "I feel like it's a little piece of history that Lucille existed," Harr says.
Harr collects death objects. She has a picture of 16-year-old Esther Roberts lying in a casket. Roberts died in 1912. "Everyone who sees it asks me what she died of. I don't know," Harr says. She also has a collection of mourning jewelry--jewelry woven from the hair of someone's dearly departed. "I love knowing that these people are not forgotten, and I'm making sure they aren't," Harr says.
One day a young boy pulled up to the Antiquarium with a truck full of casket hardware to sell. "We've used it for pot holder handles, curtain tiebacks, hat hooks and things like that," Harr says.
Harr's mother, Shirley Henderson, has made herself custodian of used toothbrushes. The toothbrushes in her collection are mostly pre-1900, made of bone and ivory and wood and used by laborers. Some of these bristleless relics still have Chinese language characters on the handles. One of them is a child's toothbrush with a small china doll on the handle. "Just think of the stories those toothbrushes could tell," Henderson says.
Brad Fortier, a bottle digger from San Carlos and a frequenter of the Antiquarium, says he imagines the lives of people who used the bottles he collects. Once he dug up 15 consumption-tonic bottles in one location. (Consumption is the early name for tuberculosis.) "That stuff had 80 to 90 percent alcohol in it," Fortier says. "I felt sorry for the person who owned those bottles. He must have had TB, and he was probably alcoholic. Lots of [TB patients] did become alcoholic in those days," Fortier says.
While gathering up old "stuff," collectors also dig deep into the common man's history and find the most amazing bits of trivia. For example, Carl Lepiane was surprised to learn that when Prohibition stilled the Blatz brewery, the company turned to manufacturing grape drink and gum.
Lepiane also learned that during World War II, all of Wrigleys' Spearmint, Juicy Fruit, and Doublemint gum went overseas in ration packs to GIs. The thinking at the time was that gum improved morale, eased tension and promoted alertness. In response to rationed ingredients, Wrigleys created the inferior Orbit gum solely for distribution in the United States. Eventually, Orbit became the gum for the ration packs.
Shirley Henderson, owner of the Antiquarium in Los Gatos, keeps her pre-1900 toothbrush collection--and a slew of other collectibles--in the bathroom of her home.
Shirley Henderson discovered that toothbrush bristles used to be made of horsehair. She says, "You can tell if a town was a drinking town by the bottles you find buried there." Harr says that before photography was invented, hair jewelry was one way to keep an image of a deceased loved one, which is why it's called mourning jewelry.
Saratogan Carol Payne says hair jewelry was also used for keepsakes by people traveling abroad or by soldiers going to war. Hair jewelry was so common that publishers put out books and magazine articles with instructions. Payne says mourning jewelry was any kind of black jewelry. That tradition started with Queen Victoria who grieved for years over the death of Prince Albert. She wore only black clothing and black jewelry.
The way we were is also wrapped up neatly in these collectibles. They present tangible proof of our social attitudes and beliefs of a particular time. Carl Lepiane has a pack of Pickaninny gum with graphics of five barefoot African American children on the wrap, a relic of U.S. bigotry. (Pickaninny was once an accepted pejorative slang name for African American children.)
Lepiane's walls are decorated with tin lithography advertisements. Brilliantly colored graphics of buxom women with cinched waists and fleshy legs reflect the ideal figure of the time. At the turn of the century says Lepiane, a little or a lot of extra weight was a sign of wealth and well-being. Today, those models would be considered fat.
Jerry Jacobsen collects robot toys from the '50s and '60s.
San Josean Jerry Jacobsen who collects toys, antique brass fans, victrolas, beer steins, ocean liner memorabilia, cars and robots among other things, says a person can tell a lot about the boom and bust of society from collectibles. "During the Depression," he says, "toys were not made of metal."
And chocolate-mold collector Lyn Marsh says during World War II bakers had no use for chocolate molds because sugar was rationed. In fact, many European bakers went out of business. The metal chocolate molds were melted down for bullets. With the discovery of plastic after the war, metal chocolate molds became a thing of the past. Marsh's collection of 600 molds includes elaborate scenes and figures such as a 22-inch Santa Claus, a little boy on the pot, and one of three children on a sleigh going down a hill. Marsh uses her molds to make presents for her friends and family.
Denise Harr can tell a lot about the people who come into her store. One man brought his old toys to the Antiquarium. "I knew he was an only child," Harr says, "because his toys had all the wheels, pieces and parts." She says, "That's how you get when you're in this business a long time."
Shirley Henderson's been in the business some 30-plus years and has seen the ups and downs of collecting. For example, she believes "antique advertising," a popular collector's item these days, began with bottle collectors. "They'd find bottles and then want to find the ads to go with them, things like beer trays, paper ads, billboards."
Offshoots such as these are why collectors wind up with so many different collections.
Carl Lepiane holds one of his prized possessions, an antique gum display case with beveled glass and a clock that sounds when the front door is opened.
Carl Lepiane, for instance, who's been collecting now for over 30 years, started by collecting Yellow Kid memorabilia. Yellow Kid was the very first cartoon character. The Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers used Yellow Kid for advertising and political propaganda. (In fact, Yellow Kid is the origin for the term yellow journalism.) Lepiane's collection shifted 12 or 13 years ago when a friend showed up with a pack of Yellow Kid gum, which is extremely rare.
That started Lepiane on the hunt for gum. Now he has a database of 1,599 kinds of gum. He has 1,880 Colgan's Taffy Tolu gum, the first gum ever. Because gum was cheap to produce and profitable, many companies went into the business.
They wrapped it in beautiful graphics and gave it such names as Forbidden Fruit, Lime Ricky, Sparkle Gum, Selby's Fleur Kiss, Flavor Pencil gum, American Beauty, Paul Parrot, Yankee Doodle, Tutti Fruitti, Soldier Gum, Silver Bell and Red Ball. Happy Days, a 1940s gum, has red, white and blue, and Uncle Sam on it. The small print on one gum claims it will prevent seasickness, indigestion and sweeten the chewer's breath, and the lovely little tin it came in could be used to store matches.
Lepiane's gum collection led him to gum advertising and to gum vending machines, each of which grew into collections of their own. He has advertising memorabilia all over his house, including figure ads (statues): the RCA dog, the Kool penguin, Planter's Peanuts peanut and hundreds of other items. His meticulous home is a virtual museum with everything restored, working and carefully displayed.
Several of Jerry Jacobsen's robots-memorabilia of the '60s and '70s-go for a stroll.
Another reason collectors switch subjects is money. Popularity and pricing by reference books drive prices up. Jerry Jacobsen used to collect Coca-Cola trays when they were $300 or $400. Now they are $1,000 and $2,000. Jacobsen says the Internet is also driving the prices up.
Some collectors, like Henderson and Harr have been in the business all their lives. "There are four generations of us," Harr says. "It's in our DNA." Harr remembers her grandmother selling the bottles they found at her Civil Air Patrol thrift store near Mammoth Lakes. "During the '60s when other teens were into drugs and whatever, I was out with mom digging for bottles," Harr says. They went to ghost towns and old dumping sites. They dug where Interstate 580 is now. Bottles are still the biggest item at the Antiquarium.
And old bottles can bring some big money. Henderson says, when the builders were excavating for the new stadium in San Francisco, they unearthed a Saratoga Springs blue water bottle from the 1870s, very rare and worth around $3,000.
"I don't know what people do without this stuff, Harr says, sitting in the store her mother's owned for 33 years. Harr sweeps her arm to indicate the "stuff" crammed into shelves, sitting on the floor, piled into little display cases, hanging from the ceiling, perching on top of cases.
There are such things as a one-of-a-kind Li'l Abner Dog Patch band that winds up and the characters move; razor blades from the 1930s to 1950s worth 25 cents to $2; spy cameras; old ice skates; hat boxes; marbles worth 50 cents to $350; bottle caps worth 50 cents to $3; children's shoes from the late 1800s; a bed doll that Henderson says was made to look like a hussy; and a huge coffee grinder worth $1,500.
There are also beer bottles; bottles of bait eggs and fishing lures; children's blocks; a beautiful mid-1800s; an old wooden sleigh worth $375; a thread rack; a 3-foot, turn-of-the-century wax doll worth $495; real sleigh bells worth $195; cathedral bottles which were used by teachers to fill student's ink wells; buttons; and even several dolls' eyeballs on one shelf.
"We don't move a thing," Harr says, "or we'd never find it again."
Harr and her mother no longer dig. They don't have to. They get calls from collectors and people who hear about them. "They want us to come and look through Grandma's trunk or attic and tell them what's valuable," Henderson says. "That's how we get 'stuff' for the store these days." She recalls getting a call in 1970 after Charlie Chaplain's mistress died to look over some very "fru fru" stuff.
Jerry Jacobsen says collectors are a close group. He remembers how, after the 1989 earthquake, many of them came to help Shirley move to a store behind the current Antiquarium store on Main and University.
The fact is, once a person is bitten by the collector's bug, he's hooked, and what was just a little hobby often becomes a way of life. Collection becomes the purpose for vacations, conventions, writing and reading books, magazine subscriptions, internet searches and talk. They are always on the hunt for that find and for more little bits of fact and history.
"It's fun as long as you keep finding," Lepiane says. "It's especially great when you think you might have one of kind, even not knowing how many others are out there is fun," he says.
Maybe there's a little collector in all of us, with that impulse to pick up shells on the beach, restaurant matches, pretty rocks, dishes or even those newly minted quarters for each state.
Los Gatos, California Since 1881
