I Was Twelve Years Old in 1964 Part 2
by Mike Tiefenbacher
I blame the
Little King.
Perhaps blame is too strong a word. On the other hand, as my
cat scampers into her hiding place in the closet due to the crash of
a stack of boxed 45s that I've already re-piled twice, I ask myself,
"How did it come to this? Why are there stacks of perhaps
never-to-be-read comics on the dining room table, and why is there a
case of unassembled long whites in my bathroom? Why are the walls of
my bedroom lined floor to ceiling with bobbleheads, and why do I
spend hours on eBay looking for Augie Doggie Soaky toys? And why am
I attempting to reverse my third-shift sleep schedule from day to
night for one day just to attend the spring Minneapolis comic
convention?" And while the easy thing to tell myself is that it's
because I enjoy all these things, the bigger question of why arises
and goes unanswered.
I'm not terribly fond of self-confessionals, either writing
or reading them, but if you're reading this you've already declared
yourself a member of my club, and perhaps we share some behavior.
You not only read comics, but you're a Collector with a capital "C"
and if you're like any of my circle of friends you don't limit it to
just comics. Whether it's stamps, casino chips, vintage Fiestaware,
postcards, action figures (aka dolls) or ViewMaster reels, everybody
has some other related or unrelated collection besides their fixation
on comics. The fact that my own ancillary interests tend to
overwhelm the available space necessary to house them is perhaps
where I differ from others, but given the lack of other similarities
I have to my other friends that collect, I suspect the impetus to
collect and subsequently horde are not the product of any particular
set of genetic, social or familial factors. I think.
This may be the lure of the local comics shop or the comics
convention. Apart from the obvious presence of lots and lots of
comic books to buy, read and add to the collection, there is a
distinct lack of critical judgment from those who attend, because
they are all of like mind when it comes to collecting. I doubt that
anyone is immune to the dismissive reactions when "normal" people see
what you've chosen to money and effort to, as opposed to real estate
or the stock market. You can sometimes appease them by ascribing a
monetary value to your collection, but it gets harder and harder as
the years go by and they realize that you're not going to sell the
stuff you've collected, or if your estimate of its value is overly
vague. Me, I neither know or care what my stuff is worth, and I've
long since gotten over any embarrassment or defense of my
collections. If I ever need to sell it off to pay the bills, I tell
them there's eBay now, and that shuts them up pretty quickly.
Otherwise, the collections are what they are. They make me happy, so
it's your problem, not mine.
But how did it come to this, I ask myself again. I don't
think it has much to do with a lack of love and affection as a child,
or substitution for any material deficiencies. I never felt unloved,
and I never thought of my childhood was particularly deprived, though
I did bring a cloth blanket instead of one of those tri-folded
multi-colored vinyl cushioned sleep mats to kindergarten, and to this
day I still want a regulation yellow rubber rain slicker with black
buckles (though I'll admit being proud of my grey Roy Rogers plastic
raincoat with snaps, which you could fold up into a small pouch with
Roy and Trigger on it). I had (still have) a Brave Eagle lunch box,
and a procession of baseball gloves I loved (and I still have most of
those, too). My brothers and I would get games and puzzles featuring
cowboys or cartoon characters for Christmas and birthdays (they're
still around), Golden Books and kids records aplenty (many of which
remain in my possession, minus those given to cousins by my little
brother), and other assorted non-licensed toys. We may not have
gotten everything we ever asked for, but I don't think I fretted
about not having anything in particular.
I did tend to keep what I was given, but none of those
presents became collections, per se. I avoided lunch-box collecting
(way too expensive), and I have restricted myself to reacquiring some
of the games that somehow got discarded along the way. My couple of
hundred Golden Books remain uncatalogued (thus far) so I've got an
excuse not to try to collect them. EBay has enabled me to buy many
of the kids records I never got when I was a kid, so I suppose that's
become one offshoot of my record collection. But that was much later.
My parents weren't collectors, at least in the same way I am.
My dad collected trading cards in the '30s, a collection of a couple
of thousand cards that he gave to me when he thought I was old enough
to appreciate them. Till well after he retired and my brothers and I
got him started on collecting 1/18-scale model cars, he didn't
collect anything, though he saved silver dollars, Indian-head
nickels, Liberty and then Kennedy halves, and whatever else became
rare--till my brother decided that he'd "borrow" them, and replace
them later with their face equivalent in modern money. My mom has
collected stamps since I was in grade school, and I had my own shadow
collection soon after, and though she spent hours on it and
eventually even ordered from catalogues, it all fit in a small album
and never seemed to be an obsession with her. I liked the collecting
part of it, but I never bought the stamps myself so it fit the
accumulating definition of my previous possessions rather than an
actual collection.
No, my first collection was baseball cards, which, when I was
a kid, was easily the cheapest hobby you could have at ten cards for
a nickel. It started humbly in 1960, when a girl who liked me gave
me a rubber-banded pack of 1959 cards she'd grown tired of. I bought
many packs that year with the limited amount of money an
eight-year-old had, the same year I started to buy my first comic
books. The combination of my love for baseball and the fact that
comics were twice the price made cards an easy choice for my nickels
and dimes. I got a couple of hundred that year, but in '61 my dad
was laid off, so it wasn't till '62, when I could start earning some
spending money, that I really got into it. I'd walk to the drug
store two or three times a week to see if the new series was in yet,
checking out the grocery stores and the dime stores that also carried
cards. I mounted the '62s in a big scrapbook with photo corners, or
sort the later series into up-to-date team sets that I'd look at
while listening to the teams play on the radio. I'd make checklists
and trade my duplicates with neighborhood kids. If I managed to save
a dollar or two I even managed to buy full boxes. From '62 through
'64, I probably had near-complete sets which I kept in the
surplus-cheese boxes we received from Family Services. I grew up in
Milwaukee, and though I kept collecting in '65 and '66, my enthusiasm
diminished considerably when the Braves moved to Atlanta. Besides,
I'd rediscovered my love for comics in '64, and the Beatles around
the same time, both of which became the predominant collecting
subject matter of the rest of my life. (Which isn't to say I didn't
renew my card collecting in the '70s when the Brewers moved in,
though my mom had thrown out the thousands of earlier cards when we
moved in 1968, and those are now well outside my ability to replace.)
A couple of years later, I was given a Hardy Boys book, and
that qualified as a collection soon after, with my grass-mowing,
car-washing and paper-delivering money going toward the dollar
hard backs that were especially fun to read on a stormy night in dim
light. (Some day, I'll dig those out and re-read them, which will of
course mean I'll need to collect those I never bought back then.)
Though I knew records existed because we had those kids
records and my parents had their share of singles and albums, it took
the Beatles to make me actively seek them out. I say "I" in this
instance when I really mean "we," in that it was two of my brothers
and I sharing the collecting, and while the focus on the Beatles
remains to this day, it eventually covered any popular music we
liked. My brothers Larry and Ron shared the cost of the albums,
while Larry became the possessor of the 45 collection when it became
clear that I couldn't support two major collections at the same time,
and I traded my records for his comics. Since he lived five feet
across the hall, visiting them wasn't ever a problem, and when he
finally moved out to live on his own, I bought them from him and
began collecting 45s in earnest in 1975. Though the record industry
has helped my effort by reducing the number of 45s that come out each
year to a couple of hundred, I'll probably be working on completing
my collection of every charted single on 45 for a long time to come.
I haven't counted for many years, but I think I have between
50-60,000 singles, another 10,000 LPs, and about 5000 CDs, which take
up a lot of space and require a lot of cataloguing. (My three
brothers each began their own collections when they moved out on
their own, and two of them eventually gifted me with theirs.)
When I learned that the videorecorder had been perfected for
home use in the mid-'70s, I knew I wanted one, and I managed to pony
up the $700 (for a demonstrator!) in 1978. Beyond being able to
permanently record what I had watched for years, it enabled me (by
the time it was economical enough to have more than one) to watch two
or three or four things that were on at the same time. Collecting
TV series has been a full time effort since then, and I have,
conservatively, 3000 videotapes of perhaps 500 series. Now that
they've been making affordable sets of TV Series on DVD, of course,
it makes more sense to collect them that way, and very soon I plan to
begin converting to recordable DVDs. Whether prerecorded or recorded
myself, this is another collection that consumes a lot of hours, both
in watching and cataloguing, and, along the way, 15 different VCRs.
Which brings me to comics. The impetus here for my
enthusiasm for comics grew from my love of drawing, which was
initially fueled by animated cartoons--Mickey Mouse, Popeye, Huck
Hound and Yogi Bear, Rocky and Bullwinkle. I knew I wanted to become
involved with cartoons when I was five, and my first encounters with
printed cartoons were undoubtedly with Sunday newspaper comics. My
parents favored the liberal Milwaukee Journal, but my grandparents
got both it and the Hearst paper the Milwaukee Sentinel, which had
the far better selection of comics in King Features' Puck The Comics
Weekly:
Mickey Mouse,
Donald Duck,
Scamp,
Br'er Rabbit,
Blondie,
Popeye,
Katzenjammer Kids,
Beetle Bailey,
Little Iodine,
Bringing Up Father,
Beetle Bailey,
Dennis the Menace,
Henry,
the Little King, and adventure
strips I learned to love later, like the
Phantom,
Flash Gordon,
Mandrake,
Prince Valiant,
Buz Sawyer,
Steve Canyon and
Jungle Jim.
Well before I began to actually collect comic books, I read my
cousins' copies of
Walt Disney's Comics and Stories ,
Blondie,
Dennis the Menace,
Popeye,
and many other funnies of the late '50s. I also
loved anything with
Superman,
which was one of my favorite TV series.
Somehow, I was given several of them, and in 1960, a stack (many of
which had lost their covers by the time I got them) from my aunt,
though I only bought a half-dozen for myself that summer. In 1957,
they opened a Marc's Big Boy restaurant on the block of our new
house, and since
The Adventures of The Big Boy comics were "free to
our guests"--which we weren't, technically, since we couldn't afford
to buy their hamburgers--but we did join the birthday club and got a
free Big Boy sandwich for our birthdays--I had a sizable run of that
particular comic.
(Until we moved, and they, along with the baseball
cards, somehow managed to miss the truck to our new house;
ironically, the comics that started it all and the issues I remember
so well from reading so many times are the only ones I no longer
have, since most are also priced well beyond my means. Little did I
know at the time that the issues I had were actually Marvel Comics
done by Stan Lee and Dan DeCarlo.)
When my sights changed from funny animals to super-heroes
(coinciding with my new interest in animated adventure cartoons like
Space Angel and
Jonny Quest), I began with a title which featured
Superman again:
Justice League of America.
Because of the "collect
them all" mentality I'd developed by then (possibly from offers on
the back of cereal boxes), I quickly went back and grabbed all of the
Superman-family titles,
Batman and
Detective,
Green Lantern,
Green Lantern,
Flash,
Aquaman,
the harder to locate
House of Mystery,
and my favorite,
Hawkman.
I soon expanded to all the DC super-hero titles (getting
beyond my initial confusion, in which I mistook the Comics Code
Authority seal for an indicator that titles like Amazing Spider-Man,
Avengers and Blue Beetle were related to them, which one reading soon
disabused me of), then all their adventure titles except war, then
war too. By this time, I'd begun buying Marvels (later their
westerns), then Charltons, Gold Keys, Dells, Towers, Harveys,
Mightys, ACGs, MFs and Lightnings. When I started, I kept my
collection in a box approximately the size of a small white that I
watercolored blue and stuck pictures of the characters that I (gulp!)
clipped out of the comics' subscription blanks around the top of the
box. I quickly outgrew that box and the comics went into the
built-in cabinets in my bedroom, then after we moved, into a hall
closet, then onto new floor-to-ceiling shelves on one wall of my new
bedroom, then two walls, then all four walls, and piles on the floor.
When we moved again, the dismantled bedroom shelves went into a long
walk-in closet and were filled with all of my DCs and Marvels--but
all the other companies are in long whites in the closet, in the
laundry room (where I found the wick like-quality of comics left flat
on a floor near a washing-machine sink) and in the room I use as an
office (designed to be a large master bedroom). I haven't counted
them in a long time, but there may be 60-70,000 of them, sharing the
space with my records and my videotapes. And books. And DC Direct
mini-busts, and PVC figures, VCRs, DVR, TV, PC and other initial-only
devices. I can navigate, usually, once everything is filed away in
its proper place, but it's clear that the collections are straining
the limits of the house.
All of these hobbies have plenty of their own possibilities
for expansion, yet two years ago I launched a new hobby. Initialized
by my affection for the classic Hanna-Barbera characters, I
discovered that a company named Funko had issued six or seven
bobbleheads of Huck and Yogi and others. It started out like the
comics, where I was briefly satisfied with the H-B characters, then
added cereal characters animated by Hanna-Barbera in the '60s, then
other cartoon characters, then any licensed characters, then other
companies bobbleheads, then anything I found attractive. Over a
little more than eighteen months, I got more than 300, and as I said,
they line the walls of my bedroom. I'm still getting the occasional
new ones, but the available space has become limited.
And I won't even mention my cereal box collection.
Obviously, forces other than logic are at work here. The
physical act of collecting, of paying for and receiving objects that
I can have for my very own, must obviously be a strong source of
satisfaction for me, but I don't truly believe I'm helpless to ignore
it. In fact, my collecting bug was pretty much limited to recording
free TV for well over a decade, as I attempted to freelance in the
comics industry and never earned enough to afford much else. When I
surrendered the idea of making that my career to take a regular-world
job, ignoring comics became easier, in fact. But at some point, my
collector friends, still collecting and still paying attention,
managed to rekindle the fire and I find myself back into it, wanting
to fill the holes left twenty years ago and finding that the wonder
of eBay now makes it possible to do so. And though collecting, as
I've described, can be reduced to the simple money-for-object
denominator, I find as much or more satisfaction in the art of the
object as much as I do the content. Whether I read that comic book
or not, looking at the pictures or even just the cover (depending on
how well either is done) can be pleasurable in its own way,
especially when I can connect it to a time or a place in the past.
So reading a comic, or hearing a record, can be two or three or more
sensations at the same time: the experience of the moment of reading
it now, the experience of holding it while reading it now, the
experience I had when I read a similar issue or issues in the past,
or even the experience of seeing the issue pictured in an issue I had
in the past. In this way, even an unpleasurable, poorly executed
comic done today can overcome all logic: I remember when it was good.
Anyway, this brings me around back to the Little King.
Somewhere along the line, I was given a copy of Dell's The Little
King #677. It came out in late 1955, but I wasn't the original
owner, so it's likely I first read it in '57 or '58. I must have
read it many times, many more times than I read issues I acquired
after I started seriously collecting. (I replaced it, eventually,
having read it so much.) All four stories in the issue are
permanently imprinted in my brain. The stories may well have been
written by John Stanley, though whether they were or not is of no
real importance as a measure of how much I love them. But the final
story in the series' final issue is the one that may well have
inveigled itself into my psyche nearly fifty years ago.
"The Search" begins with the Little King, the rotund
red-robed ruler of a tiny European kingdom, declaring that "Today is
a day of important significance and significant importance!" It
seems that he is to finish eating his box of breakfast cereal,
Snapples, "The cereal with cards of baseball players in each box!"
Somehow--perhaps the cards are being issued one per week or
something--he knows that he will get "the final card in the
series--number one hundred..." which will entitle him to a free
baseball cap and a ticket to the big game today. Imagine his fury
when he gets to the card and it's another #99! And so he eats
another boxful--and gets another ninety-nine! Another, and another
(I count five empties on the table and another seven on the floor;
his majesty is very fat) and all are #99s. Having cleaned out the
castle's pantry, he ties some sheets together to avoid his prime
minister's admonition that he has an important event over which he
must officiate and shinnies out the window to go to the grocery,
where (after climbing into a shopping cart and knocking down the
displays) flees the store with another box of Snapples. Having
evidently had his fill, he empties the box on the ground to find
himself in possession of another #99! Back into the supermarket, out
again with what appear to be at least fifteen more boxes, he and a
gathering flock of birds discover that each and every one is a #99!
Some more off-panel searching must go on, because he hails a passing
young subject riding his bike and offers him 202 #99s for one #100.
(Either Stanley or whoever wrote the story, or the artist if he too
was not Stanley, never saw a baseball card, since these cards are all
cardboard rectangles with a huge number on them.) The lad doesn't
have one but takes him to his school where a classmate claims to have
one. The king attempts to ask the schoolmate but winds up in a
corner with a dunce cap on when the teacher mistakes him for a new
boy. The king and the boy follow the classmate to his riding lesson,
where the king winds up in the water when his horse fails to jump a
hurdle, then to his music lesson, where Professor Crescendo and his
new glasses again mistake the King for the classmate and he's forced
to play Mozart for an hour. Finally arriving at the child's palatial
estate, he learns that the boy is Master Snapples--of the breakfast
cereal fortune. When the king knocks to get the attention of the
boy, Snapples orders his butler to dump garbage on him. The king's
subject notices something sticking to the king's crown, and--wouldn't
you know--it's a #100! The king is touched when the boy tells him
how lucky he is--that he's never seen a game himself despite trying
to collect the cards for a year. He gives him the cards and the
delighted child goes home whistling. The despondent king is driven
to his dedication ceremony where he learns that he's actually
throwing out the ball at the selfsame baseball game--where he's
joined by the lad, who allows the king to wear the cap, if he can
wear the crown in return.
See? The moral is that tenacity in collecting, despite
whatever adversity fate may have in store, will bring about a happy
ending. Perhaps this, in my still-formulating mind, has led me
through life, attempting to complete whichever collection that
happens to appeal to me. Perhaps this is why, when I buy a
factory-packed complete set of baseball cards, it seems far less
satisfying than laboriously spending three or four times that price
to get them individually from packs. (Sadly, I periodically forget
how much it costs to do it that way, and have to relearn that
lesson.) And like the Little King's relentless pursuit of his goal
card, what would be the fun if you could just go to the store and buy
every comic that has ever been published, all at one time, for one
price? Why none at all, I think. (Though it would be nice.)
Of course, the other lesson is that, after completing his
set, the Little King gave away all of his cards to the lad, because
it was the noble thing to do. And of course, in order to get to see
the game and get a cap, he would have had to turn his baseball cards
in anyway. Assuming the pictures of the players were on the
unnumbered sides of the cards and they weren't just squares of
numbered cardboard, I doubt that I'd have thought either the game or
the cap was a sufficient return for collecting them--even assuming no
duplicates, the king or the boy had to eat at least 100 boxes of
Snapples, which is at least two boxes a week over the year!
Relinquishing the cards is hardly characteristic of the
collecting/hoarding behavior I've held to all these years.
But I don't remember that part. Isn't it funny how the mind works?
|
