The Collecting Gene....

My parents were both collectors.  My Dad collected trains, but most of the collections were my mothers. When I was quite young my mother collected Kokeshi dolls, which was an inexpensive way of being able to collect with four children to feed. (Another child came later!)  She also bought some dolls that were little fat hard plastic people with very short molded hair.  She would sew them clothes, make them wigs, repaint their faces and then resell them.  Sears bought them by the gross.  One Christmas she was trying to fill her orders and got so tired that she sewed up her thumb on the sewing machine.

For a brief time in the mid 1950's she ran a small gift shop (with a playpen in the corner....) in Denver called "The Ho Bee Gift Shop" and her logo was a cute little smiling Bee.  I have books that belonged to her that are full of stamps of that bee logo.  Which brings me to another of her collections....books.  She was an avid reader and one living room wall was floor to ceiling bookcases.  In later years there were more bookcases throughout the house.  Wherever there weren't shelves of other collections, that is.

When I was six she had been taking ceramics lessons and began teaching her own lessons at our kitchen table.  She let me pick out a piece of "greenware" and I chose a fat little pig and painted it purplish pink.  I still have it.  By this time she was collecting clowns.

As I moved into late elementary school she was teaching ceramics in our basement and at one point had almost a hundred students.  We had a "pop" machine, or soda machine, if you will, that delivered cold Pepsi products for a quarter.  The "pop" man came and brought cases and took the empties about once a week.  A guy that lived next door to us didn't know about the ceramics classes and he once said to me, "Your parents must be real partiers to go through that much pop!"

I moved to California just after graduation from high school and two years later when I moved back Mother had switched from teaching ceramics to teaching porcelain doll making....

 To Be Continued.....