When Jim Heideman of Kelso called about an ancient gum
wrapper he'd found in the late 1960s while he and his
stepfather were tearing down the old Ostrander school, I was
skeptical about my ability to help him find more
information.
He wasn't considering a hobby of collecting wrappers. His
interest was in the historical aspect of his wrapper, which
is from a kind of gum called Selby's Mayberry made by the
National Pepsin Gum Co. in San Francisco.
Heideman discovered the wrapper in the old school.
"We were tearing up old flooring, the main from the
sub, and it was just laying there," he said. "I
knew it was old, so I hung onto it and put it away."
Recently when he unpacked some boxes, he found the wrapper
between two pieces of glass.
"I started searching for information about two months
ago," he said.
When he called me, I thought there was little hope. After
all, I thought, who would collect gum wrappers?
Plenty of people, I found out.
One is Roberto Back of Chile, who has operated the Web site
"The Gum Wrapper Times" for three years. "My
interest in having a Web site is to be in the Web and to be
available for contact to other collectors, so I didn't spend
a great effort in Web design," he said.
Folks fall in to gum wrapper collections for the same
reasons they collect stamps, coins, matchbooks and other
items, Back said.
"Because it is a nice hobby, not an expensive one,
something not common and maybe because it is a mean to have
something for ourselves that brings us beyond the
existential problems of modern life, returning us in some
way to child hood and surely healthier way (of escape) than
drugs," Back wrote in an interview via e-mail.
Other collectors simply enjoy the designs of the wrappers
and how they changed with the times, he said.
"I started when I was 10 years old with a couple of
friends," he said. "In this period I gathered
around 800 wrappers. Later I found my collection in my
parents' house a couple of years after I married and
returned to collect, reaching to 4,500 wrappers."
Through the Internet, Back found other collectors and began
trading wrappers, until his collection reached more than
17,000.
Back estimated there are probably 80 to 100 people around
the world with active collections, in areas such as the
Czech Republic, England, Japan, South Korea and the United
States. In the Czech Republic, there's a club that holds
meetings twice a year, he noted.
"The more common gum companies in our collections are
Wrigley (from about a dozen gum factories in the world),
Adams, Beech Nut, Bazooka (Topps Gum Company)," he
said. In addition, he said, collectors enjoy Lotte from
Japan and other Asian countries, Perfetti from Italy, Joyco
from Spain, and Stimorol ( Dandy) from Denmark. There are no
reference books available for collectors, but that shouldn't
keep folks from starting a collection.
"The best way is to begin collecting the gum wrappers
from the gum that is sold in (the local area), to keep the
duplicates and to contact other collectors through Internet
and begin to trade wrappers," he suggested.
As far as Heideman's gum wrapper is concerned, Back said it
probably came from the 1920s or 1930s, which is when the
National Pepsin Gum Co. operated.
But Heideman wonders if it isn't a little older, given the
age of the building. Anyone with information can call me at
577-2515.
n n n
While Mr. Heideman and I were talking about gum wrappers, we
happened onto another subject: How items that are commonly
thrown away (old tin cans, wrappers of all sorts, etc.)
become available to collectors.
I theorized that this kind of collectible would often come
from people who purchase old grocery stores, pharmacies or
other places of business. Such businesses may close up
without removing the stock. I've heard stories of the people
who subsequently buy the buildings and find items from the
past --- in pristine condition --- sitting on the shelves.
Surely this type of thing doesn't happen nowadays, right?
Wrong. According to one of the Collectors Newsletters from
April, which quoted a story from the Billings Gazette in
Montana, a local grocery store that had closed its doors in
1952 recently was found to be full of "thousands of
items, most of them in mint condition."
The items ranged from bars of soap, tubs of honey and packs
of cigarettes, to the kind of stuff that makes collectors
salivate: an American Flyer miniature train set with a
windup locomotive, a souvenir postcard from the 1929 World
Series and an antique Coca-Cola display still in its
wrapper, an unused Ultratone record player and radio, a
complete Shinola shoe shine kit, Kool-Aid packets in an
original display case, an old set of golf clubs made in
Scotland and a large oil-cloth poster of cowgirls holding
cans of Golden West coffee, among thousands of other items.
Beneath the store was a small tavern with a bar and six
homemade stools. There were also a family home, three
outbuildings and two small miners' houses that were all
owned by the same family that had owned the store. Each
building was full of belongings, artifacts and merchandise.
The stores contents were being auctioned off
"One of the problems was that they had so much stuff
gathered around them," said Frank Braun, personal
representative for the estate. "They apparently didn't
throw anything away."
Those store owners never intended it, but they were the
ultimate collectors.
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