Although songwriter Tom Waits said of life in the music world, “Today’s star is tomorrow’s gas station attendant,” a sort of reverse alchemy seems to apply in the world of collectibles. Here, yesterday’s ordinary stuff is today’s treasure.
Consider the list of everyday objects that once were taken for granted but today are celebrated in collectors’ newsletters, national associations and glossy coffee-table books: Doorknobs, swizzle sticks, shot glasses, peanut-butter jars, G.I. Joe figures, paperweights, spark plugs and pocket knives. Collectors scour the cultural landscape for bits of Americana to purchase, polish, sort, buy, sell and cherish.
Bernard Beck, an associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University, says some old objects are popular now because they failed to survive as commercial products.
“Part of the special value is that these things belonged to a brief period. Things that people once took for granted, that they believed would be around forever, have been replaced because of the rapid changes of technology.”
Bob Rau, author of “The Collectors” (Graphic Arts Center Publishing, $19.95), an introductory guide to the world of collectibles and antiques, chalks up much of the current interest in ordinary objects to nostalgia, plain and simple.
“I’ve been a collector for 35 years, and in that time, I’ve seen a tremendous increase of interest in items that were once seen everyday-shot glasses, sewing equipment, soda-fountain articles have skyrocketed in value just because they’re not in use anymore.”
“For example,” says Rau, who collects postcards, vinegar cruets, kewpie dolls and advertising memorabilia, “an old straw holder from a ’40s-era soda fountain will sell for $50.”
Marbles, too, are collectible. “They used to be something you’d shoot games with,” says Rau, “and now we put them on a shelf.”
In some cases, entire walls of shelves.
“It’s a fine line between healthy interest and obsession for some collectors,” says Northwestern’s Beck. “How much is enough? No standard is set up for how much is reasonable. If they can afford to write the check, it’s their business.”
As nostalgic Baby Boomers have driven up the price for vintage comic books, less expensive categories of collectibles such as baseball cards, Bakelite jewelry, lunch boxes and other mass-culture products have emerged.
Here are four Chicago-area collectors who have veered off the beaten path to pursue common objects with uncommon zeal.
LINDA PALERMO
Linda Palermo’s spacious bilevel home in Barrington Hills boasts a view of a meadow-like back yard and forest. But the apple of Palermo’s eye is a china clown figure that resides in a living-room hutch.
The clown, worth about $600, is the most valuable piece in Palermo’s collection of about 150 decorative reamers. She stores many of the ceramic figural reamers in a kitchen cabinet and displays others in an antique, glass-front mug cabinet.
The reamers’ original function early in the century was to drain the juice from oranges and lemons. But when the electric juicer and frozen orange juice were introduced in the ’30s, the fascination with figural reamers fizzled, leaving the simpler, purely functional models to remain. Now, the vintage, decorative reamers are valued for the clever forms they took.
“I used to see reamers at garage sales 30 years ago, and I never gave it a thought,” says Palermo. “But three years ago, I saw them talking about reamers on this TV show (“The Collectors,” 1:30 p.m. Fridays on WTTW-Ch. 11) and right after that I started looking for them.”
What converted Palermo into a reamer zealot? “They’re so whimsical, sweet. They just look so content,” she explains.
Palermo, who belongs to the 400-member National Reamer Collectors Association, says that nuances differentiate one reamer from the next. “There are so many different kinds,” she says. “With clown reamers alone, there are 80 styles. You have three or four different sizes, different color combinations, some are made in Japan, some in Yugoslavia.”
Palermo’s collection includes reamers depicting cartoon characters (Disney characters, in particular), British tipplers, cats and fruits such as oranges. Although she has paid $25 to $500 for reamers, most pieces cost $75 to $150, she says.
Palermo says she’s a fierce shopper at the flea markets she frequents on weekends with her three grown children. “There are other reamer collectors out there, and it makes me move fast. What makes it so darn hard is that there are also people who collect anything having to do with clowns, so I’m competing with them too.
“When I spot a good reamer, I’ll climb over people to get to it. I’ve left my friends talking to thin air; they turn around for a second to take a breath, and I’m half a block away.”
And now Palermo is broadening her horizons to include an even more esoteric specialty. “See this?” she says, pointing to a 1930s ceramic breakfast set with a hen-and-chick motif which includes an egg cup, cereal dish and salt shaker. The $12 set is the first in her new collection. “That’s what I’m getting into now,” she says.
So does this mean Palermo’s interest in reamers is tapering off?
“Reamers are just now becoming hot. More collectors are looking, and that means more reamers are going to come out of Grandma’s attic. Will I ever quit? No. In fact, I’m looking for another cabinet.”
SALLY AND HERB LOEB
Collectors Herb and Sally Loeb clearly have no patience for the modernist’s “less is more” dictum. Just about every nook and cranny of their north suburban home is crammed with collectibles.
Raggedy Ann and Andy get a bedroom all their own-there are nearly 180 dolls, including a 6-foot-tall pair plopped on a bed in the corner. The kitchen pantries are larded with boxes of cereal, ketchup bottles and maple syrup tins dating back 70 years. The bathroom is decorated with containers for miracle ointments and painkillers from the turn of the century.
Herb, 64, a businessman, gravitates toward advertising memorabilia. Sally, 54, who works as a wardrobe coordinator on “The Untouchables” TV show on WGN-Ch. 9, is fond of all things Bakelite-a colorful precursor to plastic that was used to make jewelry, radios, bowls and flatware in the 1930s to the ’50s.
One of Sally’s more recent passions is baby rattles, teething spoons and crib toys, an interest inspired two years ago by an encounter at an antiques show.
“I was waiting in line at the show when I saw a buyer wearing this crib toy as an earring,” she explains as she shows off a red, yellow, green and black Bakelite figure pinned to her sweater. “I called her a month later to see about buying it, but (she) had sold it to a local dealer. I called the dealer and bought it from her.”
Loeb says her fascination with vintage trinkets can be explained in part by their vivid colors and partly by their charm. Pointing to an elephant crib toy from the ’20s with a pink head, she says, “Isn’t this just adorable?” Explaining why she was compelled to purchase a vintage plastic cow encircled by a ring, she says, “You just get a feel.”
Family souvenirs play an important part in the Loeb collection. Herb’s baby T-shirt, his grandmother’s sewing machine and his baby rattle are all on display. “My family didn’t collect things at all, but they kept things around. A lot of this just comes out of family love,” Herb says.
Serious collectors for about 15 years, the Loebs shop flea markets nearly every weekend during summer, equipped with walkie-talkies in case they get separated in the course of their pursuits.
Behind the thrill of the hunt is a curiosity about past eras. Going through her collection of memory rings, which feature tiny photo portraits as the centerpiece, Sally Loeb points to one of the photos and says, “Look, that was somebody’s grandmother.
“That’s originally what I loved about antiques: Asking yourself, `Who used to sit in that chair?’ That’s what makes collecting this stuff so much fun.”
JULIE GEORGE
Julie George has two perfect roommates in her Wilmette townhouse: The blond and the redhead perched in opposite alcoves 6 feet above the living-room floor don’t play music too loud, don’t hog the phone and never argue about paying their share of the gas bill. They’re mannequins.
The two store dummies are just a couple of the kitschy trappings with which George, 31, surrounds herself. An artist who works with recycled materials, George takes a wry view of her latest collection: spangled fruit and vegetables.
Pulling out a blindingly pink Easter basket kit, George smiles and says, “This is really tacky. Sometimes, I think the tackier the better.
“It’s a kind of campy, ’50s folk art that people enjoy,” says George, who has sold about 100 of her spangled fruit specimens.
The fake produce, made from craft kits in the ’50s by sticking pins tipped with beads or sequins into balls of plastic foam, boast a surreal, brighter-than-life appeal; grapes are more purple, apples more red, pineapples more yellow than anything found in nature, which is part of their appeal, according to George. “Anybody who likes color would like this stuff,” she says.
George has been collecting one thing or another as long as she can remember. “When I was a baby, my mom had about 30 Steiff plush toys. It was a whole menagerie that she kept under plastic, so I saw things as collections from an early age. What can I say? I’m a material girl.”
She started with miniature toys from Cracker Jack boxes and gumball machines and now includes vintage fabrics, buttons, Bakelite jewelry and pincushions among her collections.
George began collecting spangled fruit about two years ago, beginning with a basket of the sequined produce at a flea market in Mason, Mich., and now has about 30 pieces. She pays as much as $25 for a single fruit, $50 for a large grouping of them at flea markets at Kane County and Grayslake.
“I think maybe people recognize themselves in this,” says George. “There’s a lot of nostalgia in any kind of collecting, when you see stuff that reminds you of your childhood.”
JOHN VAN AMERONGEN
When John van Amerongen opens a bottle of beer for visitors, he disdains the modern screw-it-off-with-your-hand method. Instead, he picks up a cast-iron bottle opener in the shape of a braying donkey and pops off the cap.
Sitting in the kitchen at the rear of his Bucktown storefront that doubles as workshop and living quarters, Van Amerongen gestures toward scores of hot sauce bottles and decorative muffin pans, which he also collects. “I would-if I had the money and the space to store them-like to collect big, old farm implements. But I can’t do that, so instead I collect smaller things-the hot sauce, bottle openers-that are relatively cheap. People like me are sort of the bottom-feeders in the collectibles food chain.”
Even so, prices can go as high as $800 for rare figural pieces.
“When I started, you’d get openers for a nickel, 50 cents. Even 10 years ago, you could buy this for $60,” says Van Amerongen, holding an iron opener depicting a drunk hanging onto a lampost. Now it’s worth $400 or $500 according to Just for Openers, a national club and newsletter for bottle opener collectors, he says.
Van Amerongen’s collection of more than 2,000 openers includes promotional give-aways and combination implements, such as spatulas with bottle and can openers attached.
But it’s the bizarre, sometimes bawdy, figural openers that fascinate Van Amerongen. “Look at this guy,” he says of a bottle opener sculpted in the shape of a man’s face with four bulging eyes. “This is wacky.
“Here’s Mr. Undertaker, or false teeth, or a horse’s rear end,” he says, reviewing three wall-hung openers. “These are intense.”
“I mean, a man hanging onto a palm tree in a hurricane (as a) bottle opener. What is that about? There’s this obscure, eccentric sensibility at work that I really enjoy.”
Van Amerongen, a 35-year-old sculptor who taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for 11 years and now works as a carpenter and rehabber, started collecting in 1979 when he came across a cache of old bottle openers promoting Coca-Cola.
“I started out with 11, then 30, then 200, and now 2,000,” says Van Amerongen, whose favorite hunting grounds for openers include the Kane County Flea Market and antiques shops along U.S. Highway 12 in southern Michigan.
Van Amerongen is so taken with the bottle opener as a creative form that he has begun a company, Cast Iron Creek, to market his own line of limited-edition, hand-crafted bottle openers in the shapes of muskies, red-hot chili peppers and outboard motors.
“The fact is that, really, none of these are necessary anymore,” says Van Amerongen about the openers. “It isn’t about necessity. It’s an indication of a time in our past, and I think this manic interest in collecting in America now is a coming of age, a way of getting a grip on our past and a sense of stability.”
Finally, Van Amerongen says, “America has found that it has its own treasures.”
