One by one, the half-dozen women filed down the First National Bank`s escalator and threaded their way to the maw of the silvery vault. ”For your protection,” a sign warned, ”a confidential film record is being made. . . .”
Looking innocent as grandmothers, the women stated their business and signed registration cards. A flashbulb popped, recording each face. Two gentlemen in gray suits gave them escort, filing past the aisles of safe deposit boxes.
At last, left alone in a tiny room, they spread out their treasures. It was noon, a burning Wednesday in July, but only artificial light streamed through the vault.
”Bunny,” said Mary Louise Vande Berg, sitting straight up with the bearing of a leader, ”would you read the minutes of our last meeting?”
Bunny Halama shuffled papers, cleared her throat. And the Chicago Loop Button Club, which has met every month in the First National Bank`s vault for longer than most members can remember, was open for business.
All over the country, ever since the Depression, button collectors have been meeting to buy, trade, swap, clean, classify, study and show off some of the tiniest collectibles on Earth.
”Unless you`ve seen antique buttons, you can`t understand,” says Peggy Townsend, president of the Chicago Button Club, whose buttons have been photographed for the World Book Encyclopedia. ”They are more beautiful than jewelry.”
Here`s what true collectors don`t do: Run their fingers through mounds of smooth, clicking buttons. Mix buttons with seashells and pour them into jars. Sew them on sweaters. Snip off the shanks and wear them as pins.
No, the serious collectors gingerly clean their finds and mount them on cards, like entomologists fixing beetles with a pin. Then they sort the cards by category: glass buttons, celluloid buttons, rubber buttons, metal buttons, fabric buttons, buttons depicting birds, buttons depicting opera scenes, military buttons, garter buttons, Bakelite buttons, jeweled buttons, commemorative buttons. . . .
”I have a friend who collects only buttons that have Joan of Arc on them,” notes Lois Pool, secretary of the National Button Society in Akron.
”He has over 40 different ones.”
Other collectors aren`t so picky. Mary Louise Vande Berg, an Illinois collector who runs the Loop club and competes fiercely at button shows, owns thousands of buttons: ”Everything but military,” she explains. ”I work on my buttons almost every day. I`m always using them for one competition or another; I take them apart and rearrange them.”
But this can hardly be riveting for the young and the restless-and therein lies the crisis of this gentle passion.
Button collecting took off as a hobby in 1938, when Gertrude Patterson discussed it on the ”Hobby Lobby” radio show and the first national button show was launched in Chicago. (It now travels around. The 50th annual show opens Sept. 26 in Moline.) Thousands of collectors got button fever in the 1940s and 1950s; as a result, many impassioned button experts are grandparents today.
”My husband and I are both 41,” says Bonnie Nelson, a button dealer and president of the Illinois State Button Society. ”We`re among the younger members.”
To the Velcro generation, old buttons seem trivial and old-fashioned.
”The word button is almost laughable,” admits Millicent Saffro, co-owner of the Tender Buttons store in New York. Besides, while many buttons cost only a quarter, a rare, handmade antique button can run hundreds of dollars today. (In New York, a 17-year-old girl recently stunned seasoned collectors by paying $300 for her first button, an antique.)
Finally, young professionals who do hear the call may feel excluded from local clubs, which, like the Chicago Loop Button Club, typically meet on weekdays.
”Those of us who are younger are worried about it,” Nelson says.
”We`re trying to open it up. The movement is afoot.”
Another problem: The world`s antique button supply may be dwindling fast. Fashion designers, antiques dealers, jewelery makers and artists seem to have just plugged into the button bonanza-witness Patrick Kelly, the American dress designer who adorns his clothes with scores of buttons, none of them fastening anything.
Now the artist-types have started picking through the wares at auctions, flea markets, stores such as Renaissance Buttons in Evanston and local button shows.
”If it`s a very good button, I refuse to sell to them,” says Nelson at the Illinois State Button Society. Seeing the shank sliced off a fine button
”makes me cringe,” she says.
But Sheila Schiller, a Highland Park jewelry designer, thinks a button pinned to a square of cardboard is a button wasted. She works with old Bakelite buttons made from the 1920s to the 1940s, stacking them in layers for pins and earrings or stringing them into necklaces.
”Now the buttons are recycled and living again,” she says. ”It`s like an ecological contribution.”
The expert collector works almost like a mini-museum, setting aside at least one extra bedroom for buttons.
At Mary Louise Vande Berg`s suburban home, one room won`t do it; the buttons have spilled over into the den, and trays filled with buttons are framed on the walls.
Vande Berg adores buttons; she sees each one as a tiny piece of art. She also loves competing and won more points at the national show last year, she boasts, than any other collector.
(At a show, you score points not for pretty buttons, but for having a dozen or so of the finest specimens in whatever categories you enter: picture buttons that illustrate fables, for example, or military buttons. Collectors may enter dozens of categories, vying for prestigious if modest awards of $1 or so.)
Like other impassioned collectors, Vande Berg is a button scholar. She collects opera-scene buttons, for example, and knows a lot about opera. Her knowledge of history is formidable.
So nothing makes her bristle like a jeweler who wants to cut the shanks off these exquisite bits of handiwork.
”It diminishes the idea that it was a button and should stay a button,” she says. ”Jewelers ruin the button for collectors. You can understand why they want to wear them, but the buttons are destroyed.”
Sheila Schiller loves buttons, too. A jewelry designer whose pins sell in stores for $70 and up, she feels no guilt in filing off the shanks.
”It`s not corrupting the beauty of the past,” she says, ”because my things will be enjoyed and worn and passed on. They`ll have a longer run than buttons in a box somewhere.”
Schiller, who lectures on button jewelry, agrees with Vande Berg on one thing: Many antique specimens, such as celluloid, Bakelite and the glittering cut steel, are getting hard to find.
”I go to every flea market I can bear,” she says. ”Things are beginning to dry up.”
But that will not stop her hunting. ”I`m not destroying these things,”
she insists. ”I`m using them to create another work of art.” –
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For more information on button collecting, write: Chicago Loop Button Club, c/o Renaissance Buttons, 516 Dempster St., Evanston, Ill. 60202; Chicago Button Club, 350 Rollwind Rd., Glenview, Ill. 60025; or the Illinois State Button Society, 2905 27th Ave., Rock Island, Ill. 61201. For information on the national show in September, write: National Button Society, 2733 Juno Pl., Akron, Ohio 44313.
