By Robert Freedman
I come from a family of collectors. My mother collected Depression glass, those lovely green, sometimes red, dishware made in the thirties. My Aunt Genevieve had an extensive collection of glass globes — the solid, artistic ones, not those with Santa Claus and fake snow. My brother Paul still collects watches, both new and antique, and often gives them to other members of the family. I’ve also had a number of collections over the years, starting when I was a kid and collected stamps. Not just any stamps, but First-Day Covers. When the post office issued a new commemorative stamp, they would also provide to collectors these first-day covers. To get one you had to send an envelope to the post office along with your request, and soon thereafter would receive the envelope back stamped on the first day of the release with the new shiny stamp. It was very exciting, waiting for that precious new, usually quite attractive, postage to arrive. Later in life, I collected kitchen scales, old ones. And still have many of them displayed around our house. And, oh yeah, there was my baseball-card collection from the fifties and sixties, thousands of them, stashed in boxes that my mother, I later discovered, had thrown out after I went off to college. She didn’t like the clutter, she told me. I was devastated.
Aunt Elaine, a wonderful artist, had the most impressive collection. Elaine would draw a pencil or charcoal sketch of some famous person and then send it to that celebrity and ask them to autograph it and send it back to her — which most of them did, often along with a message. Clark Gable, Hedy Lamarr, a young Marlon Brando, and scores of others entered Elaine’s scrapbook. That album is still somewhere in the family. Someone should take it on to the Antiques Roadshow program. It’s probably worth a bunch of money. But money is not the reason most collectors pursue their individual passions.
If not monetary value, what then is the motivation for collecting. I can’t speak for others, but my interest in collectibles has more to do with the search, rather than the actual possession. It’s why I still pick up agates on the beach, even though I have more of them than I ever could need or display. It’s the hunt that matters. Some days now, I won’t even bring a pretty agate home with me. I leave it there for someone else to find. And while we’re on the beach, so to speak, how about collecting floats. Every garden in our town is decorated with them. It’s a good day of collecting to find a brightly colored float on your perambulation — a treasure to be proud of. Collecting is yet another way to stay interested. You have to keep a sharp eye out for the special piece, the one that will add diversity to your collection, and give you a reason to visit every funky little store and garage sale up and down the Coast.
To be frank, though, I don’t do much collecting anymore. I’ve fallen out of the habit. We don’t have room left in our home for any more of my displays. My wife and I now avert our eyes when passing garage sales. “There’s nothing we need,” we tell each other. We already have too much clutter. It’s sad in a way. Eventually the collector has no more room for his collections, and the hunt fades away. Old age, anyone? Well, I still have other pursuits that keep me engaged—ones that don’t take up physical space. Still I enjoy looking at my scales, and Aunt Gen’s glass globes.
