Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 3, 1995 TAG: 9509010010
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Why on earth does she do this?
Allison Burrows-Greeley doesn't have a clue.
"Why do I do it, Mary?" the hairdresser calls to a customer entering her beauty salon, The Cutting Edge, on Campbell Avenue. "Because I'm a sick puppy?"
It's a thought.
One could certainly look at those weird lamps, that gaudy gold starburst clock, the squat maple TV set with the transparent knobs on the side - and all the other items that the rest of the world left behind, probably with relief, back in the l950s - and conclude that their new owner might benefit from medical help.
Though the truth is, she's hardly unique.
Burrows-Greeley, you see, collects.
In so doing she adds to the long, occasionally distinguished, occasionally disturbing history of collectors, which begins with our earliest ancestors and has no end in sight. Past practitioners have ranged from Napoleon Bonaparte - who sought cultural artifacts and objets d'art - to the Jibaro Indians of South America, who sought heads.
"There have been collectors about as long as there have been people," says Ruth Ann Smith, an associate professor of marketing at Virginia Tech who is studying the phenomenon.
And if collectors in their zeal may sometimes strike others as, well, eccentric, collectors may be relieved to know Smith does not see collecting as deviant behavior.
"It's so pervasive," the professor says, noting that up to 30 percent of the population collects something or other. "I think people do it because it's satisfying and it's fun."
Serious fun, perhaps. According to Douglas and Elizabeth Rigby, authors of the 1944 book about collecting, "Lock, Stock and Barrel," collecting began with the primal drive to stockpile food.
It later evolved, say the Rigbys, into a way for people to stand out from the anonymous human herd - something akin to what drives the arctic explorer or flagpole sitter of more recent times.
Collecting, then - as Samuel Johnson once indelicately put it - is "that desire which distinguishes many by whom no other distinction could ever have been attained."
Through the ages, the collecting urge has assumed many forms, some of them macabre. In Renaissance Italy, Lorenzo de Medici once struggled to reclaim the body of famed Florentine painter Fra Filippo Lippi from Spoleto (he failed). Composer Franz Josef Haydn's skull similarly was a bone of contention among competing European collectors for more than a century.
Skulls, in fact, loom large in the history of collecting. The marauding Huns, the Chinese and the Gauls all collected the noggins of vanquished chieftains, often converting them into drinking cups.
Concerning competition between collectors, meanwhile, the Rigbys tell the tale of the missionary who overheard two natives of Borneo bragging about their skull collections:
"I have cut off four heads," said the first native.
"I have cut off seven," replied the second, unimpressed.
Shortly afterward, the second Bornean's body was fished from a nearby river - headless.
Thus had the first native added to his own collection and eliminated the competition at a single stroke.
To Smith, the sensational has been overemphasized.
"People have committed murder and mayhem in the interest of collecting," the professor conceded. But she also says, "I have come to the conclusion that, for the most part, collecting is pretty healthy."
Smith became interested in collecting through watching her father, a longtime lover of old boats. Though her father insists he is not a collector, Smith said, the boats somehow accumulate nonetheless.
"One of the things that I think distinguishes collectors is the objects take on a meaning that they don't to the rest of us," said Smith, who is studying collecting as a type of consumer behavior.
Smith believes collecting is on the rise. This is partly because there are infinitely more things to be collected in the mega-marketplace of the 1990s than were available to our ancient ancestors - who were pretty much limited to naturally occurring collectibles such as skulls, sticks and rocks.
But there is more to it than that, Smith believes. She thinks contemporary collectors may well be trying to assert their individuality in an increasingly monotonous world.
These days, "It's pretty hard for people to be unique," Smith said. "Life is pretty homogeneous."
Perhaps this accounts for Lois Lewis' 250 string holders.
String holders, for those who don't know, were once common household items made to hold balls of string. Designs were limited only by the paucity of the maker's imagination - but all included an aperture through which the string could be pulled as needed, then snipped off for use.
Lewis, who lives in Salem, has string holders in the kitchen. She has string holders in the den. "I've got them in the basement in boxes," she said. "I've got them under the bed. You name it."
Why?
It all started, Lewis said, when her husband died.
"I had to have something to do," she said, "and I've always loved collecting. I've collected so many things. It's a family trait, if you want to know." Her grandmother collected quilts, Lewis said, while her father collected wall-mounted telephones.
Lewis is more eclectic. In addition to the string holders, she collects salt and pepper shakers and Morton's Salt ceramic tiles. Teddy bears line the edge of the staircase, on every step. Lewis also collects quilts - like her grandmother - and pretty cans by the dozen.
"It's my own little museum," she says of her house.
Roanoke's Bonnie Clark collects miniature sewing machines.
"The first one I bought was at a flea market for I think $8," Clark recalled. "The last one I bought was $300.
"Some of them were made by toy companies, some were made as models," she said. Typically they are 8 inches long by 5 or 6 inches high. Many of them work, or did at one time - the idea being, apparently, that as Mom sewed, her daughter would be there beside her, sewing away as well, dreaming of the day when she could have a full-sized machine all her own.
Clark has more than 50 miniature sewing machines now, from several countries.
Why?
"I had grown up in a sewing family," Clark explained, sort of. "I was taught to sew when I was young. I have a real sewing machine upstairs."
David Kunka of Kirk's Antiques and Collectibles in downtown Roanoke has seen plenty of collectors: pen collectors, record collectors, furniture collectors, Coca-Cola memorabilia collectors. He even knows a judge who collects gavels.
Kunka collected things once himself, back before he became a dealer.
"I used to collect coins when I was a kid," he said. "It was something you could assemble. There was history to it ... I guess it gives identity, too."
All of which, reasonable as it sounds, for certain collectors seems simply beside the point.
Think of Allison Burrows-Greeley.
The beautician began collecting 1950s-era furniture, she said, from necessity. "It was the most affordable - and nobody liked it," she recalled. "I liked it."
Affection has long since turned to passion.
Nowadays, Burrows-Greeley has '50s-era furniture and decor in her beauty salon. She has it in her home, and in a storage compartment. She brings it back by the van load whenever she goes on vacation.
Whenever she gets tired of something, she said, she just stores it away for awhile and brings out something else. She has plenty to choose from.
"You've got to love it to do it. Plus I think there's something a little wrong with you, too," said Burrows-Greeley, who looks a little like a cross between Shirley Temple and Marilyn Monroe. "My friends say, 'Who the hell would pay for that?' They don't understand ... I'm obsessive about it. I don't think I'll ever have too much."
And who knows why?
"I wasn't even around in the '50s," she said with a laugh.
by CNB