text: What am I going to do with them? *Display them on a shelf*? Frame them? Put them in a safety deposit box? Sell them for a profit? Keep them as lucky charms? Use them as a conversation opener with someone I might want to meet? Form a club?. Make a living?! I had no clue. What worldwide event may have inspired me; was it something I inherited from my parents who lived through the depression? What motivated me to do such a thing? What was I thinking? I have questions that need to be answered. Maybe **I WAS CRAZY**, but getting better, because I was beginning to acknowledge that what I had been doing... was insane! I soon realized that everyone does it at some time in their life. &#x200B; It is 1947, and I am five and in the first grade. Our school is at the top of a small hill. It is called "the Old Brick Schoolhouse", and it is still there in 2018, only now, it is a library. It is a two-story structure all brick and looks like a child's block in design. It is very small with only four classrooms, grades 1-4. Two rooms are above the two at the ground level. I don't even remember seeing a principal's office, just the classrooms and two sets of stairs. There was no kindergarten for children. We all started in first grade at the age of five. There was a large grassy play area with a slide, a teeter-totter, and a large spinning apparatus that nearly all the children could ride on at once. Grades 5-12 all go to the high school, which actually had a gym, just a couple of miles away. &#x200B; Mrs. Wilson, our teacher, tells us to settle down and take out our reader. We will go around the room row by row with each student reading a paragraph. She would read to us so that we could catch the rhythm and flow of the written words. It was an interesting time just a couple of years after the end of World War II, and there was happiness and friendships, but not a lot of extra money around. A nickel would buy two loaves of bread and most residents owned a sewing machine, often one called a Singer. They made a lot of their own clothes. Thus, we kids didn't have too many toys. Some had bicycles and many had homemade wagons. We took to collecting a variety of things. &#x200B; There's a red, another red, a blue, 4 blacks, another red, a green. How many red today? My hands are smeared, must wash them. A bell rings. "Everyone, sit down!" comes a sweet, soft voice. It had only been a few minutes, but I was doing well. Must get up from the dirty floor. "Please, take your seat, *now*!" comes the command, not as sweet this time. It seems as if everyone is looking at me as I return to my desk with my finds. All of the desks are the same; they are old with obsolete holes for inkwells near the front, wooden with a seat that doesn't swivel, and a top that opens up for books and other supplies. No one says anything to me. They are my friends--all 17 of them. They probably hunt for treasures of their own. Most of them will do it when they are outside or walking home. They may collect unusual rocks or colorful leaves. Every day I search for my personal cache knowing that I am the only one in the room with this unusual collection. I fill my treasure chest, a small box I use for pencils and erasers, with my prizes. &#x200B; I collect the lead tips from broken pencils. **Yes**, broken pencil tips. I would easily find them on desks, the floor and around the pencil sharpener. Besides pencils, most of us had a combination pencil which may be still made today. It was a red pencil on one end and the other half was blue. Some kids had colored pencils with green, yellow, and other colors that they used for drawing when we did art. Those were my favorites as they were hard to find. To this day, I don't know why I did this, or whatever happened to the lead. It was just something to do to have some fun. I also had a second collection because my dad worked at one of the two filling stations in town. A bottle of pop at the station was five cents, but I was allowed to take one for free because my Dad worked there. &#x200B; Soda pop was the source. There was no soda machine, just sodas in a large ice cooler. They were bottles kept in ice water that had a large block of ice in the middle. A bottle opener was attached, and it was where everyone opened them. I collected the soda caps out of the catcher and took them home; The Dad's Root Beer cap was my favorite along with Hires Root Beer and Cream Soda, and 7-up and any type of Nesbitt-- Orange, Grape, and Strawberry. Not only could they be kept in a small box, but they could be used as war metals when playing or a badge for a sheriff in a cowboy game; just take the cork from inside the cap and put it inside of your t-shirt and push the cap back onto it from the other side. I kept only the ones that were hardly bent. It was always fun to find ones that I did not already have. &#x200B; Larry, my neighbor, collected something else that cost no money. He strung string in an *"x"* fashion across the ceiling of his bedroom. He collected matchbook covers and would open up the "books" and drape them over the string. Nearly every store in town had free matchbooks with their store names on them: taverns, hardware stores, banks, filling stations, etc. A great percentage of people smoked at this time, so these matchbooks could easily be found. And, as there were many nearby towns, many were available. &#x200B; When I was a pre-teen I collected marbles. We had pockets filled with pretty marbles. Some were unique and were used as shooters when we played games at grade school. We would draw a large circle, ante a few marbles and take turns knocking them out. You kept whatever you could blast out of the circle using your shooter. You shot until you missed. Should your shooter not knock a marble out, and was unfortunate enough to remain in the circle, it could be knocked out and kept by another player. It was a big loss to lose your *lucky shooter*. We played other games such as poison, a game like croquet. Sometimes we would "lag" them, toss for a line and closest would win all the marbles from those that were in the game. I guess we were gambling on school grounds, but no one ever said a word. &#x200B; When I was around 13, I began to collect baseball cards. A pack of them cost around a nickel. There were around 10 cards and a large piece of bubble gum in the pack. They were major league players throwing or hitting or pitching. All of their statistics were on the back side. We all wanted the big stars such as Willie Mays, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, and Bob Feller. The stars were in the packs, but few and far between. Instead, lesser players' cards abounded. It was fun trading the cards. Sometimes you could get ten for one if it was one that another collector didn't have. I never knew a kid that ever assembled a complete set. The "Topps" company was smarter than the average kid. &#x200B; As an adult, I have collected around 1,000-1,500 wood tennis racquets, many new! I have displayed them, sold them on eBay, traded a few, and managed to get a few actual tennis legends to sign them--Jack Kramer, Rod Laver, etc. A movie studio called a collector friend of mine and wanted around 25 early 1900-1930 racquets to be used in a movie, and he came to me because he needed a few more. So, I have had some of my collection in a movie! &#x200B; I know what I did with the wood tennis racquets, with the baseball cards, with the marbles, and with the bottle caps, but for the life of me don't understand what happened to the pencil lead. Still, I guess everyone from time to time will collect something for one reason or another.