Cat whiskers and fur-balls. That was the subject line of an e-mail I received this morning. Now, some of you may have automatically deleted that message. But, I think you need to be careful about that deleting stuff. For example, I can't tell you how many members of how many royal families want to give me hundreds of thousands of dollars or how many total strangers are concerned about my love life and increasing bald spot...not necessarily in that order. Anyway, "cat whiskers and fur-balls" did not strike me as odd. No, quite the opposite...it brought back fond memories.

About ten years ago, I first met Bobbie. She was going in the Guinness Book of World Record Collections for having over 2000 cat whiskers. Bobbie had three generous cats of her own and also took whiskers from friends and family (their cats not themselves)...naturally occurring...not cut off or, worse, plucked! She'd attach them to note-cards and file them away. While visiting with Bobbie, she mentioned she also saved something else from her feline friends: fur-balls. She had a box full of them. There has to be a joke there somewhere but I can't seem to cough one up. Today, Bobbie wanted to let everyone know that her collection is part of the Crown Center exhibit Oodles More Things People Collect, and she will be at Meet the Collector Day on June 3. The display will be there through June 25.

Lots of collections start by accident. When my wife was a Rotary Club Foreign exchange student in Germany, back in her high school days, one of her host mothers called her "gluckliche Gans" or Lucky Goose. So, she started to receive all things goosey as gifts. Porcelain geese. Pictures of geese. Inspirational posters featuring geese--"Don't Let Life Bring You DOWN!". Apparently, what was good for the goose was good for my wife to give a gander. I'm just happy the German host mother didn't call her "gluckliche Hasselhoff."

As a child, I collected marbles and, just to silence the snickering, I still have all of them...but my shooter is chipped. There was a time when I received lots of clown stuff. I'm not sure where people got the idea I liked clowns although watching my family of six get out of a 1962 Corvair may have had something to do with it. As a teenager, I also started to collect Frank Sinatra stuff. In fact, the local paper did a story about this boy who liked The Chairman of the Board, rather than all those evil rock and rollers. They took a picture of me in an Old Blue Eyes is Back t-shirt! Well, the reaction was overwhelming. Lots of calls from interested women...most of whom were about 35 years older than me and former Bobby-Soxers. They weren't calling for anything illicit, they just wanted to know if I had an older brother...much older, wealthy, and better-looking. The answers were as follows: yes...absolutely not...and, it depends on the lighting.

I've done stories about
people with Winnie-the-Pooh collections, Happy Meal collections and Pillsbury Dough-Boy collections among others. That last one was kind of interesting. After we were done doing the story the woman asked if she could have a picture taken with me. I was flattered until she said she thought I looked like her hero,the Dough-Boy, in athree-piece suit. At least that explained why she had been poking me in the stomach the whole time. She was disappointed that I hadn't been giving the little dough-boy chuckle. Instead, the finger to the abdomen made me cough. Not unlike a cat with a fur-ball.