which were of the straightforward who, what, where, when, and why variety, but it was this last question,
Before our meeting, I had read about where Gilkey grew up, hoping it might provide clues about the man and his motivations. He was born in 1968, in Modesto, California, a medium-sized town in rural San Joaquin Valley, which has since grown to nearly two hundred thousand people.1 The first settlers arrived during the Gold Rush, their pockets empty and their heads filled with dreams of striking it rich, but like most immigrants drawn to California in the mid- 1800s, most of them did not find their fortunes panning for gold. Over a hundred years later, Modesto developed into the idealized suburb popularized by native son George Lucas in
Taking sips from his bottle of orange juice, Gilkey told me that he grew up the youngest in a family of eight. His father worked at Campbell’s Soup Company as a transportation manager, and his mother was a housewife.
“My parents were just a normal couple, I guess. My mom’s a homemaker. She loves to take care of children, take care of the house, that’s all she likes to do. My father worked all the time. Eight to five, to bring in the money. My father did a lot of the gardening. My mom used to like to go to garage sales. Just regular stuff, I guess. Just regular family stuff.”
When I asked Gilkey about when he started collecting books, he said, “I kept a collection of Richie Rich comic books in my bedroom.”
Richie Rich was an odd-looking character who wore short pants and a large bow tie, but was a pleasant and likable boy from a family with bottomless wealth. The allure for kids was the fantasy of great riches and instant gratification. Richie Rich could get whatever he wanted with minimal effort. That Gilkey, a man whose dream is to be wealthy and refined, would have collected not
“I liked the kid, wearing a bow tie . . . and the colorful cover. Nice stories, easy to read. He was so rich. [He was] just playing baseball with Pee Wee or Freckles, doing the things that kids do. But they were rich, they had vaults and all that, where all the money was, diamonds and jewelry, treasures. I guess everybody wants to be rich.”
Maybe, but not everyone wants desperately for others to see him as rich. It was this aspect of Gilkey’s collecting that set him apart from other collectors I had met and read about. For them, however gratifying it might be to have the admiration and envy of others, it is not the driving incentive of their collecting. There are, undoubtedly, those who collect to impress (Sanders likens them to African big-game hunters: “Take aim—boom— you’ve got a trophy!”), but I had the sense that it was usually secondary to other reasons. One collector I met was delighted to show me her extensive and varied book collection.4 She had been gathering them for over a decade, but no one had ever asked to see them before. “None of my friends get it,” she said. Her growing library was a private pleasure, pure and simple. Gilkey had other motivations, as his enthusiasm for Richie Rich indicated.
I wouldn’t be able to name a single issue of a comic book I read as a child. Occasionally, I glanced at my older brother’s issues of
Going over Gilkey’s childhood seemed to be a good way to begin satisfying my curiosity. He told me that one afternoon when he was around nine or ten, he climbed into the family station wagon with his parents and sister Tina, and headed toward downtown Modesto, to Montgomery Ward, where he was about to commit his first crime. Wandering through the department store, he admired the thirty-nine-cent Hot Wheels cars and action figures like Superman and The Incredible Hulk, but kept browsing. No one in his family was looking when he picked up a catcher’s mitt, and they didn’t notice it on the way out. Once outside the store, he held up his prize.
“Look what I just did,” he said.
They looked, said nothing, and continued walking through the lines of cars in the parking lot. When they got home, Gilkey, a right-handed boy, realized that the catcher’s mitt he had just swiped was a lefty.
When I asked Gilkey why his parents hadn’t punished him, he shrugged.
“I wasn’t surprised they didn’t say anything,” he said. “I’d just get in more trouble if I returned it.”
I couldn’t let this one go, but when I asked further questions about it, Gilkey seemed puzzled by my insistent probing. Maybe the memory, like most family legends, had taken on its own kind of logic over the years. For him, there was no mystery to it. Still, telling me about snatching the mitt seemed to have jogged similar memories, because Gilkey was off and running. He told me that his family had a penchant for stealing from one another. He claimed his sister and brother had stolen some of his books while he was in prison. He said he and one of his brothers stole from a sister when they were helping her move from one apartment to another. He claimed that another sister and brother had both stolen from their mother’s belongings. Apparently, this familial filching was going on even a generation before.
“My father’s mom collected books,” said Gilkey. “She gave him the books, but his sister stole some.”
I returned to the main subject I was there to learn about: Gilkey’s book collecting. When I asked if his parents had collected, he said that at an early age he learned from them that seemingly worthless objects could grow in value, so if you could get them cheaply, all the better.
“I used to go to garage sales when I was younger and wait in the car with my dad. I didn’t really care about them, but then my parents would come back with stories. ‘Look what I got for a quarter, and I bet it’s worth seventy or eighty dollars. . . . They’re just giving it away!’ ”
They brought home their finds and set them on shelves or in boxes, along with the rest of their beloved collected objects, and waited for their value to climb.5
At DVI, Gilkey had told me that his family owned thousands of books, and now he remembered some of his favorites, “a couple of leather-bound Time-Life books, especially the Western series.” He said, again with no apparent awareness of irony, that another favorite,