Reflections: Memories amid collections

Ed Hungness

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Ed Hungness

September 4, 2011

By ED HUNGNESS Local columnist The Record Eagle Wed Mar 14, 2012, 02:25 PM EDT

I was rummaging around in the garage like a man on a mission. I had purchased a fishing license but when I looked in my tackle box, it wasn’t there. If I were stopped by the DNR, they wouldn’t be pleased.

Next, I emptied all the little hiding places in my wallet. No luck. The longer I looked, the more frustrated I became. Unspeakable words began to tumble out of my mouth.

While rooting around in the cabinet where fishing tackle is stored, I found something that temporarily made me forget about the missing license. Tucked behind a tackle bag was a white lidded box about the size of a five-pound brick of American cheese. The box looked vaguely familiar. I removed the lid and realized that I was holding my long-forgotten grade school collection of playing cards. They were not full decks; each card was unique, from a different deck.

I sat down at the workbench and began to sort through the treasure. There were cards depicting boats, planes, dogs and cats. Others were of trains, scenic views, and a few pin-up girls. After almost 60 years I remembered many of them.

In the ’50s it was one of the things children did. We collected and traded stuff. During the post-war era, card games were an inexpensive and popular form of entertainment. Businesses had decks of playing cards imprinted as a form of advertisement. With a full deck of worn playing cards, a young collector could keep one or two cards and trade the rest with other classmates. If we weren’t swapping playing cards, we might be bargaining for marbles, bottle caps, matchbooks, baseball cards, postage stamps or coins. At one time or another I collected them all. So why do we collect things?

Many of the unusual things that people collect have little monetary value. Collections are seldom amassed with the idea of profiting from the finds. So why go to all the effort? Psychologists suggest that we collect things to help us remember the past.

Reminiscing over the well-worn playing cards, I could visualize myself sitting on the red brick retaining wall of our grade school playground. With me were several of my school friends, each with their cigar box assortment of cards. We swapped this one for that, each trying to expand a collection.

My favorites were always of trains and planes. Looking at the four-engine Pan American Airways plane on the playing card in my hand reminded me of the days when commercial airliners all had propellers and served hot meals with real knives and forks plus a cloth napkin. A train card pictured a Union Pacific passenger train winding through a mountain pass when rail travel was glamorous and exciting.

A feeling of completion or accomplishment drives other collectors. At one stage of my youth, I collected Lincoln head pennies. I had received a collection book as a birthday gift from my grandmother. There were indentations for each Lincoln head penny that had been minted along with the date, initial of the mint and the number of pennies produced that year. Tirelessly, I sorted through rolls of coins looking for one of each date. Eventually I filled up the book, pressing the last penny in its slot. With my book completed, I soon lost interest in pennies and moved on to stamps.

Friends and neighbors who knew I was a collector saved canceled stamps for me. Some were from faraway and mysterious places like Zanzibar and the Belgian Congo. Stamps were removed from the envelopes by soaking them in a cake pan filled with water. When the glue dissolved they were carefully dried on old newspapers spread about the kitchen table.

I haven’t observed the youth of today collecting much of anything. If I were to dust off one of my old stamp books and show the grandchildren my collection of airmail stamps, they would probably yawn, stretch and slowly drift away from the table. I’m sure they find Facebook and their Wii more exciting.

I wonder if I could interest them in my marble collection.

Ed Hungness and his wife became full-time residents of Fife Lake in 2005 after Ed’s retirement. He can be reached at edhungness@yahoo.com or by mail at P.O. Box 57, Fife Lake, MI 49633.