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Hobbies are channels to our passions. For a hobbyist, a comic book is not merely an amusing throwaway for youngsters – it’s a wonderful fantasy world where the writers and artists become heroes along with the characters they create. For true baseball card and stamp collectors, the possession of a valued card or stamp allows them to pore over every detail and ponder the time when these items were created.
Some hobbies are most definitely not run-of-the-mill, prompting the inspiration for this article. Before we embarked on our search for unusual hobbyists in Los Altos, we never would have guessed local residents collected tea bag labels, created critters out of rocks or engaged in the ancient Middle Eastern art of belly dancing. Diverse hobbies, indeed, but our interviewees all had one thing in common: inspiration and devotion to their unique interests. We salute them all.
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Erma Bandel’s enthusiasm for rocks rivals that of even the youngest hobbyist. Ninety-one years young, Bandel recently returned from a “rock powwow” in Quartzite, Ariz., where she scavenged the desert looking for the mineral alunite. She is the director of the California Federation of Mineralogical Societies, and she can pick up a fossilized whale vertebra weighing at least 10 pounds as if it were nothing. A seasoned rockhound, Bandel said her hobby is not so much collecting as it is “polishing and making things out of rocks.”
Using stones she gathers from coastal beaches and her own back yard, Bandel, a retired teacher, creates rock critters. Her animal creations include penguins, owls and turtles. She makes spiders with pipe cleaner legs and mice with rubber band tails. They are, literally, pet rocks, small enough to fit in the palm of a hand.
“When I sit down, I’ll have a pile of rocks,” she said. “I don’t do just one. I’ll do 15 or 20. It’ll be two to three hours before I’m finished.”
Bandel’s husband, Herman, cuts and shapes the rocks that she uses for the critters. On the Bandels’ back porch, there are buckets, shelves and tabletops filled with rocks as well as machines for tumbling, sawing and polishing. Bandel said the entire polishing process takes one month to complete.
When Bandel talks to fourth-graders at St. Simon School about semiprecious stones, she gives each student five rocks to start a collection. She donates her critters to the Garden House, a gift shop run by the Peninsula Gem and Geology Society of Los Altos.
“A hobby is a hobby,” Bandel said. “You don’t do it to keep things. You do it to share things.”
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Some hobbies begin where other enthusiasts have left off. Such was the case for longtime Los Altos resident Valerie McCarthy when she inherited a large collection of tea bag labels from Theodore Werkenthin, a veteran tea drinker who traveled the world.
“He was so fascinated by foreign tea bags – he used to put them in his pocket,” McCarthy recalled.
McCarthy, born in Australia and “winged on tea,” first gravitated toward tea collecting through a tea taggers club she joined in 1949, where she met Werkenthin. She inherited his tag collection upon his death in 1973.
“I’ve got the first Lipton tag ever printed!” McCarthy said, beaming, as she pored over binders of tea tags, often organized by country or brand.
McCarthy talked about the progression of tea tags: “First, tea tags were stitched, then they were poked with a hole, now they’re stapled.”
She pointed to one wall in her bedroom that, she said, “was filled with packages of tea” at one time. “I have tea tags in all different shapes – clams, teapots … I could go on forever.”
She tallies 35,380 tea tags and an additional 2,137 tea sacks or sachets.
McCarthy hooked up with Rosanna Ponchick, a second-grade teacher in New York who is apparently crazy for anything involving tea. She has her students counting tea bags as part of their math assignments.
Recognizing a kindred spirit, McCarthy, now 86, has offered to donate her entire tea tag collection to Ponchick when she dies. Ponchick has opened a tea tag museum.
Tea tags and tea bring true warmth and happiness to McCarthy’s soul. “I can close my eyes and smell that tea that grandma gave me,” she said.
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Since the late 1960s, Paul Johnson has been hooked on collecting nationally syndicated and local comic strips. He has amassed more than 15,000 individual strips. Johnson acquires comics from community newspapers and either pastes them into binders or stashes them in folders. His only criterion for clipping and saving a strip is that it has to make him laugh.
Johnson organizes his comic strips into 100 different categories, including golf, religion and lawyers. He said he has too many binders to count, but he owns 435 comic strip books, compilations of work by his favorite cartoonists such as Mort Walker, the creator of “Beetle Bailey,” and Scott Adams, the creator of “Dilbert.”
Johnson’s all-time favorite cartoonist is John Gallagher, who designed single-panel cartoons between the 1940s and 1960s.
According to Johnson, collecting cartoons is a great hobby because it is inexpensive, cartoons are everywhere, and the subject matter and styles of comic strips are very diverse.
“When you go home and you’re tired and grouchy and you don’t want to do anything, you can pull out some comics,” Johnson said. “And then you can’t stay angry for very long.”
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Los Altos mom Peggy Hennessee’s passion for the ancient Middle Eastern art of belly dancing germinated when, as a little girl, Hennessee saw a belly dancer shimmying. “I thought it was so fascinating,” she said. “I wanted to do it.”
Like most young girls who start dancing, Hennessee initially tried ballet. But as she grew to 5 feet 10 inches and more than 120 pounds, she realized ballet was geared for petite women who could be easily lifted by their male counterparts.
In 1989, Hennessee, now married, with three sons, took a belly dancing class through the Los Altos Parks and Recreation Department.
Working with a teacher whom she refers to as Luceen, Hennessee embraced myriad styles of belly dancing, from an American cabaret style using zils or cymbals, to the tribal, traditional forms that include several yards of draped material as part of the costume.
Hennessee described belly dancing as “the art of isolation, concentration on specific muscle groups.”
Now 43, Hennessee clearly is in the prime of her dancing career. She regularly participates in belly dancing events, such as the Middle Eastern Cultural and Dance Association event in the fall.
“I saw women as old as my mother dancing with swords on their heads,” she said. “There were big smiles on everyone’s faces. I love the exuberance.”
When she performs, Hennessee goes by the stage name Rawiyah, which is Arabic for “transmitter of ancient Arabic poetry.” But, she said with a laugh, “I’m just a poor Irish girl.”
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Randall Hull started collecting Pez dispensers when he learned about the unique history behind the invention. More than 70 years ago the peppermint candy, which came in lighterlike containers, was invented to help smokers kick the habit. The name Pez is derived from the first, middle and last letters of “pfefferminz,” the German word for peppermint. Around 1950 the product caught on in the candy market, and since then its popularity has soared.
After eight years of collecting, Hull owns 326 dispensers. His memorabilia includes Pez dispensers with dual purposes, such as a Pez flashlight, a bubble blower, several whistles and an assortment of magnets. The size of his Pez dispensers ranges from a few inches to a foot in height. He has Smurf dispensers, Star Wars character dispensers, a giant Santa Claus dispenser and a Snoopy dispenser that plays the “Peanuts” theme song.
When questioned about his favorite Pez dispenser, Hull said, “How can you choose? It’s like asking which one is your favorite child. All of them have their distinctive personalities.”
Before Pez, Hull collected corporate mascots.
“I started with Mickey Mouse,” Hull said. “Disney really figured it out. The characters extend beyond the experience of being in the theater or at the theme park.”
Since Hull is an advertising creative director who runs a virtual ad agency, his affinity for corporate mascots isn’t surprising.
“They are a good representation of capitalism at its best,” Hull said.
Hull has been interested in collecting since he was a boy.
“Maybe I just never grew up,” he said. “I get older; I just never grow up. This is a lifelong commitment.”
