People have all sorts of motivations for collecting: Sometimes a beloved family member introduces them to a certain curiosity, such as stamps or coins or commemorative spoons, and it’s a way they stay connected to their memories. Others collect items connected to their travels that conjure happy memories. Or they enjoy the community they found with like-minded collectors who are drawn to the same things.
“Almost everybody collects something,” Sarah Wasserman, assistant dean for faculty affairs at Dartmouth College who studies literature and material culture studies, said in a May phone interview. “It’s such a universal human activity.”
This semester she is teaching a collection-themed undergraduate literature course.
“I think collections are just a fascinating way that individual interests, social knowledge and creativity come together,” said Wasserman, who authored a book titled “The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel.”
“I think it’s always been and will be a connection point for people,” Wasserman said.
The Upper Valley residents interviewed for this story collect things, primarily, because it makes them happy. They find joy in hunting for their collectibles and telling other people the story behind them. And their collections — even though the items are varied — show that people can have more in common than they know.
‘They make me smile’
Around 20 years ago, Susan Feige was wandering through an antique fair in California when she stumbled across a miniature toilet. Feige, who now lives in Grantham, picked it up: She’d always liked old things, especially those that are a little unusual. And priced at a couple dollars, she decided to take it home. Shortly after, she found a tiny baby doll.
“I thought, how cute would that be sitting on the toilet?” said Feige, a retired elementary school teacher.
She bought the miniature doll and added it to her tiny toilet tableau.
At first, Feige did not consider it to be the start of a collection, but her family members had other ideas. A few years ago, one of her daughters was dog-sitting while Fiege was away. When she returned home, the miniature commode had a partner.
“They laugh at it, but then they also indulge me,” Feige, 61, said in an interview at her Grantham home, where two windowsills in her bathroom hold a dozen-and-a-half tiny toilets and other bathroom-related items, including sinks and bathtubs.
“It wasn’t until maybe a year ago that I said, ‘I think I’m gonna start looking for more toilets,’ ” Feige said.
She’s not quite sure why: Part of it was for fun, something to look for when she went to antique fairs and thrift stores. After that, family members joined in. Feige’s sister-in-law gave her miniature toilets that were part of her mother’s dollhouse. Her sister sent her another one.
The majority, she said, likely are dollhouse furniture pieces and are not particularly valuable. The most she’s ever spent on one was a set that included a miniature toilet and sink, which she purchased for about $30 (including shipping) on Etsy.
Some she’s been able to date to the mid-20th century, but their age and monetary value are not the point.
“Those toilets, as silly as they are, every time I go in there, they make me smile,” Feige said.
She’s not exactly sure when she’ll consider her collection complete, but she has a feeling there are more pint-size potties in her future. Her bathroom walls do have room for a shelf her late husband made.
“That isn’t up, (but) if I put it up in there, we have room for toilets,” Feige said.
‘Fascinated by lights’
In 1987, David Bisno inherited his late mother’s Victorian student oil lamp with its red-glass dome.
“I honestly didn’t pay very much attention to it until she died,” Bisno said in an interview at his Hanover home as the same lamp cast its light on a table.
Oil lamps were primarily used during the Victorian era and relied on kerosene to feed the flame. His mother had the lamp in her childhood home and Bisno recalled seeing her use the lamp — since electrified — when she did her work as a professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis.
When he inherited her lamp, he decided to start learning more about the style.
“I have always been fascinated by lights, colored lights,” said Bisno, a retired ophthalmologist. He also likes the historical connection, thinking of professional people in earlier generations using the lamps to further their studies. “I like the soft light … it’s excellent for reading.”
Victorian student oil lamps provided that: They come in a variety of colors and Bisno, 87, sought out those that appealed to him, including shades with different colors.
He found them on his travels, picking up lamps in Italy and Scandinavia and closer to home in Plainfield, among other places. He has electrified lamps in most rooms of his Hanover home; he only lights the kerosene ones outside.
While Bisno doesn’t remember the most he’s ever spent on a lamp, he has seen some listed for around $1,800. He said he never spent close to that amount.
At the height of his collecting, Bisno had around 35 lamps spread between multiple homes. Around seven years ago, he started reducing his collection and now has around 20.
“I’ve given a good number of them away to family and friends,” he said. “I give them to my children. They all use them.”
‘Functional art’
When Richard Cook was a preteen, his late father, who worked as a lineman, gave him an old telephone he’d gotten from the Windsor Station, a former train depot that now houses a restaurant.
“It didn’t mean much to me, but … I was fascinated, looked it over, put it in a box and it went into the attic,” Cook, now 74, said.
More than a decade later, he found the box and put the phone back together.
“That started it,” he said.
In the nearly 50 years since, he’s amassed a collection of at least 300 telephones — the majority of which sit on shelves he built in his garage. He also has linesman’s phones — similar to what his father would have used on the job — hanging on a wall.
“I like people’s surprise when they walk in,” Cook, of Wilder, said. “And they probably think I’m nuts.”
Cook had no trouble finding older phones at yard sales. When households started switching from rotary phones to touch tone phones, he found gems for $2 or $3.
“My goal was, oh, prevent it from ending up in a landfill somewhere, I guess, is part of it,” Cook, a retired nurse, said.
His collection includes sets, matching phones in avocado green and harvest gold, sourced from antique shops as well as yard sales. When family and friends started hearing about his collection, they’d pass along novelty phones; Cook now has around half a dozen shaped like Mickey Mouse.
His costliest purchase — $900 — was a payphone, circa 1920s and 1930s, from an antique store that used to be in the Powerhouse Mall.
“I did buy a couple phones off from eBay, but I didn’t really like eBay,” Cook said. “That felt like cheating.”
He has a particular affection for candlestick phones, which became popular in the late 1800s. Users had no way of dialing numbers themselves and instead had to go through an operator.
His knowledge is extensive and he can name the company that produced every phone in his collection.
“I look at this as being art, functional art; art that you actually use,” Cook said. “When you see all the different styles and configurations it made it very interesting to collect.”
‘Either interesting or pretty’
Mary Jean Lamphier was wandering through a sale around 20 years ago when she came across a floral frog, which are used in flower arrangements. She bought it for a few dollars, thinking she’d use it for taper candles or makeup brushes, but they didn’t fit.
“It had put me on the lookout for other ones,” Lamphier, 66, said from her Windsor home.
She started actively hunting for them at yard sales, antique shops and flea markets, eventually amassing 10. She likes them, in part, because no one else she’s come across sees them as collectible items.
“The ones I collect, they’re either interesting or pretty,” Lamphier said, holding one shaped like a frog in her hand. “This is my favorite, it’s a frog, it’s a frog frog.”
An avid gardener, Lamphier actively uses her collection. Peonies, which bloom in June, are perfect width for the floral frogs. Sometimes she’ll mix them with irises, lilies, hostas and “anything else that’s growing.”
When they’re not in use, she keeps them in places where she can see them.
“I don’t buy stuff so to put it away and save it for special,” Lamphier said.
Lamphier, who works as a nurse, said she’s always been a collector. She keeps an eye out for Nancy Drew books, which she read as a child. She also likes glass bottles, which she groups on shelves and pieces of furniture throughout her home, as well as orange-colored carnival glass.
“The collectibles don’t do anything but give me something nice to look at,” Lamphier said. “They don’t perform a function, they don’t increase in value.”
What’s in a name?
Judy Howland doesn’t collect objects; she collects people’s names.
Around 30 years ago, the Hartland resident started writing down names of people whose names corresponded with their professions. One of the first she remembers is a Dr. Float, who taught sailing lessons.
Howland, 82, finds names in the newspaper, TV and online. She doesn’t exactly go looking for them — how can you? — but she said she seems to have an eye for it.
“I can pick out a name and say ‘oh’,” Howland said in a phone interview last month. “You make the connection and maybe other people wouldn’t. Maybe the person themself doesn’t see it.”
Howland is a retired school guidance counselor and if she had to guess, her former profession might have something to do with it. She also writes a column for the Vermont Standard about Hartland news.
She writes the names on a list that hangs on her refrigerator. Current names, which numbered nine in late May, include Jessica Storm, a Burlington-based meteorologist; Dr. Sonja Wild, an ecologist at UC Davis in California; and Dr. William Petri, an epidemiologist.
“Over the years I’ve collected a lot of names and lost quite a few,” Howland said, adding that that’s part of the fun. “Sometimes the magnet on the refrigerator fails and the list goes in the trash. It’s too late to remember it’s gone.”
And so she starts again.
