Alex Shear's obsession with consumerism has created
a mirror of modern America
Cigar Aficionado
February 1998
When Alex Shear was 32, he had an epiphany that changed the course of his life. He discovered the bumper car. He was in Pennsylvania Amish country at an antiques market called Renninger's, scanning the field for Victorian hat pin holders -- not the pins, just the dainty, porcelain holders -- that he collected for his mother who thought he needed a hobby. His singularly focused mind was saying hat pin holders, hat pin holders, hat pin holders as he made his way through the market aisles, when he noticed a booth that contained 1940s bumper cars from nearby Hershey Park. The 10 cars were shiny and colorful and stopped Shear in his tracks.
"Something went off in my head," he says emphatically, recalling his favorite childhood pastime -- sneaking up on girls and smashing into them in bumper cars. "I'm going to graduate from hat pin holders! I saw the beauty of nostalgia here in front of me. I saw culture in everything I did and it was all out of Lancaster, Pennsylvania." For Shear, bumper cars embodied both America's mania for cars and America's love affair with amusement parks and roadside attractions. Bumper cars from the 1940s symbolized postwar prosperity, when the emerging Levittowns and new highways placed the American dream within the grasp of the middle class. What's more, these bumper cars were from Lancaster County, where Alex was born and raised, and evoked his childhood in such a visceral way they could be likened to Charles Foster Kane's Rosebud sled. "Stuff" was fast becoming "iconography." Shear recalls, "My entire life went past me. I had this calling to chronicle the America I knew in the 20th century. This was the beginning of my dream to someday build the Museum for Regular People."
Now, it takes a certain audacity to make the leap from collecting hat pin holders to chronicling 20th century American popular culture, but Shear is an intense kind of guy. At the time -- the early 1970s -- he was working as a housewares buyer for JC Penney, building the store's first kitchen shop, although Penny's had developed a full-fledged kitchen department as early as the 1950s. Finding no suitable reference materials with which to study consumer trends, Shear began cultivating his own reference base, not with a camera but with a checkbook, obsessively buying the best examples of the twentieth-century American kitchen. Soon he had acquired a collection of the most stylish and innovative toasters, mixers, and coffee pots ever produced in this country. He knew that he was building what he claims is the only kitchen archive in the country, but saw no connection between his work as a buyer and the bumper cars.
Since Shear had no room in his Manhattan apartment for a bumper car he couldn't buy one, but in his mind a collection had begun. Of course, it would take another 25 years of amassing some tens of thousands of artifacts, or as Shear says, "building lines," for the housewares buyer to evolve into a product designer with his own firm, Alex Designs, and then into his present profession. But who becomes a nostalgia consultant over night?
On a humid July morning at Shear's Upper West Side apartment, the bearded, 57-year-old nostalgia consultant sits in his living room, reclining in a futuristic yellow chair from the 1962 Seattle World's Fair that was originally designed for the Space Needle Restaurant. He has on a short-sleeved denim shirt, pleated khaki trousers, and large tortoise-shell eyeglasses. Suddenly, he looks up from his datebook and says matter-of-factly, "This is not about accumulating stuff."
His expression shows no irony, no hint that he is in what once was a six-room home and is now a six-room museum with a bed and a sink. His kitchen is too cluttered with diner memorabilia, newspapers, and juicers to be of use. His study contains shelves filled, not of books, but of advertising paperweights, model cars, and old food tins. The long entryway has so many promotional thermometers, rocket-inspired sleds, work shirts, wooden manhole covers, and chest-high stacks of board games, like Capital Punishment for 2 to 4 Adults and What Shall I Be? The Exciting Game of Career Girls, you have to wade through it sideways.
Although Shear is serious, his roommates are all smiles. A life-size, cardboard Coppertone woman in a white string bikini grins seductively. A bust of Farrah Fawcett with a string that pulls out of her head to make her hair grow stares blissfully from a pink plastic pedestal. Seven-foot-tall tin men, once used as trade signs, from the 1920s through the 1950s, line the living room wall. There are men made of galvanized steel and men made of plumbing pipes. Men made of radiators and men made of baked bean cans. Men with air ducts for hands, electrical-outlet boxes for stomachs, taillights for eyes, upside-down funnels for hats, motor oil cans for necks, and gutter pipes for arms. "This is a certain love affair, a passion," Shear says, sharing a smile with a tin man.
Nearby, on a streamlined 1960s "Boomerang" sofa, Shear's son, a 15-year-old in a Mobile Oil work shirt and green army shorts thumbs through an issue of Popular Mechanics. He leans on what appears to be a grocery shelf of pillows -- Chef-Boy-ar-dee, Spray Net Professional Hairspray, Tootsie Rolls, and Oreos -- and orders catalogs from the back of the magazine that he has no intention of buying anything from. "I just like to look at stuff," he says. What kind of stuff? Phone-tapping equipment, government surplus, beer-making supplies, and tools.
When I ask the teenager, what has invariably been an awkward question for the Shear family to answer ever since Shear's collection overtook his 9-to-5 job -- namely, what his father does for a living -- he pauses for a long time and blurts out, "He's a corporate exhibit designer who has thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands of items. He also has a marketing business."
In fact, Shear has one of the most extensive private collections of American popular culture in the United States. With more than 55,000 artifacts that document the twentieth century (including more than 10,000 postcards), his holdings are more numerous than those found in many museums. Two-thirds of the items reflect postwar consumer culture, including everything from classics of industrial design by Raymond Loewy to Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf dolls.
The collection is Shear's passion and his art, and he has managed to combine his eye as a buyer, his background in marketing and his penchant for interpreting American history through material goods into what is perhaps the only marketing company that boasts a museum-quality collection as one of its credentials. His company, Shear America, uses his vast resources to help other companies package the American Dream though traveling exhibits, displays and advertisements.
Shear's unique take manifests itself in a variety of job descriptions that are well-suited to the upcoming fin de siécle celebrations. He calls himself a retro-marketer, a millennium planner, a corporate curator, an exhibit designer, an armchair anthropologist, a fad forecaster, and, of course, a nostalgia consultant. Basically he's a marketing consultant and a collector who uses his vast resources to help companies package the American dream. His long-term vision is to establish his own museum, The Museum for Regular People, but he'd gladly host the "Antiques Roadshow."
Ever since contributing items to "Great Stuff," a 1992 exhibit at the Children's Museum of Manhattan, Alex's collection has been in demand. He's exhibited his tin men -- actually steel-dipped-in-zinc men -- at a Congressional meeting of the American Zinc Institute in Washington, D.C., and his industrial paperweights at an American Iron & Steel Institute meeting. He's been featured in The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor. The History Channel filmed a segment on 100 years of the American home, using many objects from Shear's kitchen archive. (He had 24 hours to rummage through his 5 cluttered storage facilities outside the city for the best of his 60 coffeepots, 60 toasters, and 25 vacuums.) And if he has it his way, Good Housekeeping magazine will launch an exhibit of items that didn't get their seal of approval, such as a 1980s, .357 Magnum Hand Gun Blow Dryer that you place to your temple and click on.
Still, Shear's high point in terms of credibility was when the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, which is the National Museum of Design of the Smithsonian Institution, included objects from his collection in its 1993 exhibit, "Mechanical Brides." The show featured objects designed specifically designed to make housework alluring to women, to show the gender-based division of labor from 1920 to 1960. Nearly half the items were lent by Alex: miniature 1950s AT&T Princess phones in pastel colors; "just-like-mommy" electric washing machines for girls; five rare Corning "Silver Streak" Pyrex glass irons that took Shear 20 years to collect, at around $800 each. Today the jewel-like irons, made mostly of glass during the Second World War because of the metal shortage, are nearly impossible to find due to a fatal manufacturing oversight. Use them often and the gem-like colors -- ruby, emerald, cobalt -- turn as brown as a Sylvia Plath mood ring.
Unlike a museum curator, who must adhere to certain directives and social obligations, not to mention established organizing principles, Shear serendipitously buys from instinct. "You see this is so personal from my eyes," he says. "A curator in a museum setting is given an assignment to cull, to develop a whole collection. That is different from building an arcade of products from the heart." To bolster his claim he produces a letter that Rodris Roth, curator of Division of Social History at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution, wrote to him in 1993: None of us has or can gather objects to the extent that you have or display them in quite the way you do. As you know from having lent to "Material World," our exhibits provide an index of sorts to our collection -- as well as what we may lack!"
By collecting everyday consumer artifacts such as hair dryers and coffeepots, Shear has built a time capsule that reflects and records daily American life. While curators and auction-house buyers were acquiring exceptional, one-of-a kind artifacts from the past -- such as paintings and fine furniture-- that reflected a limited segment of the population, Shear was building an archive of mainstream Americana for mainstream America. As such, his collection offers broader insights into the average American's life during the twentieth century, from Depression-era ingenuity to postwar materialism to 1970s disco culture.
As we cross into the next century, Shear's collection has become a fantastical window into a side of American culture that, aside from Andy Warhol, wasn't officially recognized or considered important. That is, until now. "Alex has created an invaluable resource for serious scholars by seeking out things that people did not value, which is what great collectors do," say Ellen Lupton, a curator of Contemporary Design at the Cooper-Hewitt. "As a museum curator, I'm interested in the social and aesthetic value of material culture, but you can't study that without the objects. Alex has the actual stuff."
Shear views his collection as a verb, not a noun. He has a patriotic mission to communicate through his stuff. This is why he won't buy, say, one of Andy Warhol's Little Red Riding Hood cookie jars - or any cookie jar for that matter, unless, of course it is in the shape of Famous Amos. (The self-made cookie entrepreneur is one of Shear's heroes.) Or why he'd pass up the ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore in the Wizard of Oz that are now behind glass at the Smithsonian Institution. Alex yearns to understand the regular guy, the working stiff who had to put milk on the table, not the celebrity. "Through these artifacts I might better define who we are as a people. This is about this country's social mosaic, its problems, its hopes, its desires, its unfairness," he says. "I celebrate America. I'm a patriot who does not wave a flag."
To demonstrate the point, he reaches two shelves below Brook Shields: The Most Glamorous Teenage Doll, below the "Music for Washing and Ironing" record album and grabs a foot-tall, ceramic ashtray in the shape of a nuclear cooling tower. The ashtray, which was mass-produced, has a thin brown-and-white glaze like a coffee mug you might buy at a tourist-trap gift shop. The tower says "Three Mile Island" in brown block letters and has turret-like cutouts on top. Rest a lit cigarette in one of them and the plumes of smoke suggest a nuclear meltdown. Although highbrow collectors would dismiss the ashtray as mere kitsch, the piece is the equivalent of a Rembrandt to Shear. It forms part of his Duck-and-Cover/Fallout Memorabilia, which comes under the heading of Atomic Bomb Memorabilia. He owns 62 items in this category, from a low-budget board game called Reactor: A Radiating Experience to a first-run fallout shelter sign.
"There's a collective response from average folks that I'm interested in hearing. You have The New York Times and then you have this, the popular response," he says. When Alex gets going it's hard to cool him down. "This is America at its best," he goes on. This is the Three Mile Island disaster that they are covering up. This is our Chernobyl. They don't know what they are doing! This is scary. This ashtray is, in a sense, the middle finger to the whole thing."
Conversely, when you browse through Shear's collection you are, in a sense, looking at his life. During the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, he had to evacuate his mother who lived 15 miles from the reactor, a task he incidentally has some training in. During his military service he was trained in decontamination techniques with the U.S. Army 318 Chemical Corp. By the same token, his collection of miniature brides and grooms began during his divorce eight years ago. And in the 1980s, after a line of drinking glasses he was mass-producing was copied by competitors, Shear entered into a seven-year copyright infringement lawsuit that inspired him to collect knockoffs. He owns 40 bottles of 7UP-like derivatives with names like 7-Down, Upper-Ten, and Upside Down.
The longer it took the court case to be resolved, the more Shear began to see business as a type of warfare. Not only did he show up for court dressed from head-to-toe in khakis, but he expanded his collection into trench art - items crafted by soldiers out of spent artillery shells and cartridge castings during lulls in the fighting. He bought sleek coffeepots, a hurricane lamp, a rug-hooking kit, a 1942 field officer's mug, and dozens of other items, all made by soldiers during wartime. He refuses to buy guns or other weapons.
The nostalgia consultant grabs a wooden swagger stick from a shelf of trench art and becomes a squadron commander on an aircraft carrier stationed in the South Pacific in 1945. "We are going to take a run into Iwo Jima at night. Now MacArthur is going to send in Jimmy Doolittle. They're going to drop the big bomb here," he says, cracking the swagger stick on an imaginary wall map and finishing the briefing.
Shear's off-the-cuff, anecdotal style has been compared to that of Sister Wendy Beckett, the bucktoothed nun who hosts a series of art programs on the BBC. He speaks in long tangents, linking items to legends, history to billboards, fathers to basement workshops. During the course of our interview he often asks himself the questions, answers them and comes back with his own follow-ups. One way he engages people in his collection is by spinning stories about what he wished had happened, a distinct advantage that a nostalgia consultant enjoys over a museum curator.
Although Shear craves recognition for his efforts, he's reluctant to invite people, whom, as he says, might "not "get it," to see his collection. Especially women he is dating. They may not understand his enthusiasm for, say, hair spray or bathing caps. Take Collection 159: Vanity in America. On a high shelf is a stack of 1960s plastic bouffant wigs for little girls who wanted to look "just like mommy." Next to the wigs are several bathing caps (he owns 50) that appear to have grown out of a coral reef -- one, an "Aqua Original Exclusive Mermaid Millinery Creation," has a platinum wig attached. Soon he's strutting around the living room in a Buck-Rogersesque aluminum welders helmet that is actually an E.Fredericks Hair and Scalp Treatment Vaporizer from a 1930s beauty parlor or, as Alex calls it, a compression chamber for an Art Deco lady.
The subject of hair inevitably triggers Alex's deepest childhood regret of never having the perfect 1950s flattop haircut. Flattops were as popular in the 1950s as jeans with rolled-up cuffs. "I wanted my hair to be as flat as an aircraft carrier. I use to jump around to barbers who had steady hands. I liked my flat top flat, not listing, and I'd tilt my head three degrees to compensate," he says with a laugh, waving a 1950s Miller "Level Head" flattop comb, complete with an attached carpenter's level. "It would have changed my life if I were the lucky user!"
Alex is a baseball card collector who chews the bubblegum. He buys from the gut using his own criteria of value rather than consulting collecting guides or experts. (Ironically, it's the curators who often have to come to him for items.) He avoids auctions, preferring the thrill of the hunt. His collection comes largely from flea markets, garage sales, and regional antiques stores. Although he once had to dip into his pension fund to buy an eight-foot-tall wooden roller skate for $4,000, most of his items are not costly. On the other hand, the uninitiated may find it odd to spend $10 on a 13-year-old box of Wheaties. But then again, not all collectors have a thing for gymnast Mary Lou Retton. "I like her perkiness. I like her can-do. I like her gold medal," says Shear, beaming. "She's an icon of the '80s." Shear's approach involves anywhere from 230 to 500 overlapping categories, depending on the day you ask. One category is electric lunch boxes (they worked like toaster ovens to make hot meals). Another is five-and-dime-store toys. Still another is roadside memorabilia.
When asked if his collection has ever been appraised he seems a bit put off and responds, "Can you appraise Andy Warhol's eye?" Ever consider selling the collection to a collector or a museum? "Would the Smithsonian sell its archive?" he balks.
Shear would never buy a repainted object or a reproduction. The surface must have integrity. It must be well designed, too, exhibiting common sense ingenuity over technological prowess. Novelty items inspired by fads (like 1950s vacuum cleaners in the shape of rockets) and products resulting from planned obsolescence give him a thrill. Humor, spontaneity, honesty, and his sense of can-do are key. His shelves of Shaker-quality Depression art (funnels, lunch boxes, toys, and musical instruments soldered out of used tin cans), reflect American resourcefulness in the face of poverty. His boutique "line" of obsession art handbags and wallets meticulously woven out of thousands of cigarette wrappers by prison inmates shows how the waste basket, and lots of free time, can inspire art.
"There's a gallery in everybody's home that displays this popular art," Shear says, referring specifically to a shelf of 500 popular brand radios that mirror actual grocery products. The transistors were promotional giveaways in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s and turn his study into a virtual 7-Eleven. There are radio replicas of Hunt's Manwhich sauce, Diamond Crystal Salt, Pepperidge Farm Stuffing, ScotTowels, Avon's Skin-So-Soft bath gel, and Adolph's Meat Tenderizer, not to mention generic cheeseburgers, hot dogs, and bananas. Then there are Heinz Ketchup flashlights and Hershey's chocolate milk telephones. "It's on the television set, it's in the pantry, at sporting events and picnics. You can't get away from this onslaught of consumer brands," he says.
When Shear kneels and opens a 1959 salesman's sample suitcase with a miniature, Plexiglas-enclosed above-ground swimming pool, post-Levittown suburban life emerges. Here, in dollhouse size, is the swimming pool, the inflatable raft, the lawn, the topiary. A second case has a pull-down aluminum awning for a car port. A third one contains eight, 1950s miniature AT&T phones in "new-fangled" colors. As Americans filled their suburban homes with gadgets, labor-saving appliances, and convenience products, the door-to-door salesman, while inefficient, was far from obsolete. The 50 cases in Alex's collection -- 13 of which feature above-ground swimming pools -- reflect this golden age of consumerism.
Shear's mind wanders from the backyard pool parties to the front yard aluminum car port where a turquoise '57 Chevy is parked in front of a 1950s ranch house. Without pausing for air, he dashes into his study and fumbles in the dark for a turquoise vinyl dinette chair. He drags the chair into the living room, plops into it, and demonstrates how the kitchen became an extension of the automobile. "You went right from your Chevy into the kitchen and had dinner at the wheel," he explains. "All of your appliances enabled you to never leave your '57 Chevy. Mom was all dolled up to sit in the shotgun seat. Dad began to look like Elvis. Your entire life was '57 Chevy."
In the year 2000, Shear will turn 60. He was born in 1940, into a conservative Jewish home in rural Lancaster. His grandparents were Eastern European trade merchants who had immigrated through Ellis Island and instilled in the family a love for merchandising.
As seven-year-olds Shear and his twin brother, Ted, spent every Thursday night at the Lancaster city auctions, watching their mother, Sarah, buy china, glassware, and, of course, hat pin holders, and their father, Paul, buy old tools. However, Shear's early passion for Americana began in what once was an old, brick cigar factory. (At the turn-of the-century Lancaster was a major tobacco-growing region.) Here, Paul Shear, a true fad forecaster, ran a wholesale warehouse that distributed toys and seasonal goods. Shear credits his passion for pop culture to growing up in a warehouse full of the latest crazes, such as the slender polyethylene tube that was all the rage in 1958 - the Hula Hoop. A steady stream of yo-yos, early Shmoos from Lil' Abner, Betty Boop dolls, and Flexible Flyer sleds fascinated the young Alex.
Aside from his baseball cards, Shear was never much of a collector. His desire to collect was more of a yen to recapture the thrill he felt as a teenager, delivering the Lancaster Mirror on his Schwinn Panther to the surrounding new suburbs. "I use to go into these suburban ranchers and see this 'world of tomorrow,' " he says, referring to the excitement he, for the most part, experienced as an outsider.
Still, the best way to know Shear is to accompany him to Lancaster and neighboring towns, a pilgrimage he makes at least twice a month to scout the flea markets and antiques shops.
We are in Shear's 1996 teal Chevy Astro on a buying trip he calls "an icing-on-the-cake mission." He has no agenda, but Mafia memorabilia is on his mind. So are baby items. As we drive past green hills and lush Amish farms, he gestures with his hands for emphasis, sometimes lifting both hands off the wheel and waving them like an orchestra conductor. His latest line is what he calls his Goo Goo Goo and Ga Ga Ga: A Celebration of the American Baby in the Twentieth Century. It started on a previous buying trip when he landed a trophy from the 1938 Ocean City, New Jersey, Baby Contest. "It hit all the marks! It was a ten!" he says excitedly, letting the car drive itself for a spell.
Alex was born here. And this is where he returns at least twice a month to scout the flea markets and antiques shops in neighboring towns. He points to a grain silo with a weathered, hand-painted Cadillac 5-in-1 Dog Food advertisement on it and you know it also "hits all the marks."
By 10 A.M. we arrive at our first store in Morgantown, Pennsylvania, just as the manager opens the door and hangs a flag out that says Antiques. The nostalgia consultant faces the stucco facade and white lace curtains of this quasi-strip mall and says, "This is known as a scan. I will scan this place rapidly." He's off.
He knows every booth in detail from years of shopping here and pauses occasionally for a moment of silence to mourn the booths that have given way to "folk art creations" -- stuffed bear footstools and paper-maché fruit. He loathes the cloying smell of potpourri. He detests it when dealers "bow-and-gingham" everything, but he remains unfazed though because lately the fields have been drying up and it's become harder for dealers to buy wares, prompting him to expand his range into West Virginia, Indiana, and other parts of the Midwest. "Morgantown is picked," he says nostalgically, but you never know when "these ladies will empty a house and there may be a pink Mixmaster still in the original box. A lot of my Desert Storm memorabilia comes out of these places."
He makes his way through knickknacks and bric-a-brac, summing up the personality of the dealers by their displays like the armchair anthropologist he claims to be: "This booth is too researched;" "This lady has an unexciting eye"; "You don't want to go fishing in an aquarium." Finally, his eye zeroes in on a Handyhot Whipper for making meringue. "This country is totally immersed in whippers," he says with a sigh. He rocks on the balls of his feet, holding up the small precursor to the blender like Lady Liberty's torch. "No, it doesn't speak to me," he says. A 1940s whipper may be something most people would disregard, but to Shear, who owns 15 Sunbeam Mixmasters in every pastel, including his favorite '57 Chevy turquoise, the whipper speaks spades. He smiles widely, his eyes sparkle, and his mind wanders to his mother's 1940s kitchen where he licked icing out of the bowl.
The self-professed steward of American culture, perhaps naively yearns for simpler times when America's outward identity seemed less fractured than it does today, a world of bank tellers, not cash machines, human telephone operators, and door-to-door salesmen. A boyish grin shines through the silver beard.
At another booth, Shear rifles through a fruit crate of record albums until he sees The General Federation of Women's Clubs Presents the Songs America Love. "This is America at its best," he says. "In America you can cut a record. In America you can do anything you want. I like ladies like this." He reads the entire jacket out loud, buys it, and walks off with it under his arm. Nearby, a fog horn sounds, followed by the cry of gulls and the crashing of waves. Shear walks into his favorite booth, a small space filled with old lobster traps, ship pulleys, and toy sailboats. "You get a feel for these ma-and-pa dealers," he says. "My pulse rate lowers in here. I relax here. I love this lady. She buys who she is. I like her through her stuff." He stretches out his arms and breaths in deeply as if on a beach inhaling the salt air. He points out items that reflect all the seasons -- wooden water skis, picnic baskets, snow shoes. Then he appraises the booth with the eye of the JC Penney buyer he never really stopped being. To the right is the dealer's gardening department. To the left, her seashore department. He praises her extra effort -- she has created the illusion of looking out a window onto a rocky Maine coast by framing a seascape in an old white window frame.
"What would Sotheby's say of this?" Shear says at another booth, holding up a 1960s Lady Schick Consolette hair dryer. He admires the seductive form of the half-globe carrying case and the feminine script lettering of the logo: Consolette. "I love ladies and their vanity! This is American vanity and it was manufactured in Lancaster, PA. For $10 how can you go wrong?"
As Shear makes our way out of the store, a hairdryer in his left hand, a record album under his right arm, he makes one last purchase - a pair of handmade wooden stilts (he already owns 20 pairs of stilts and 15 pogo sticks) -- and invents the grandfather who built them.
By the time Shear climbs back into the Astro and heads for New York, it is 9:30 P.M. He has visited all the significant sites of his life as if they, too, were part of his collection -- the old toy warehouse, his mother's 1950s ranch house, his favorite antiques shops, the Lancaster New Era building, covered bridges, Amish farm stands. He even pays his respects to the soon-to-be-defunct original Woolworth's on the last day of its lunch counter. Shear has been on the road for 14 1/2 hours, but he continues to reminisce, pointing out old haunts. An Amish woman in a black bonnet climbs out of a horse-drawn carriage and walks into an enormous grocery store. Grain silos shine white in our headlights. Television sets glow from condos and farmhouses alike. A sign points right for the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the quickest way back to New York. But the nostalgia consultant, his van full of treasures, wants to prolong our trip. He veers left and takes the back roads home.
© 1998 Melissa Milgrom
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