The Collection: Dick Wilson

In 1979, at the invitation of the Chinese government, violin virtuoso Isaac Stern performed a series of concerts with the China National Symphony, the first Westerner to ever collaborate with that group. It was an unprecedented extension of good will on the part of the historically cloistered People’s Republic, and Stern’s concerts are considered to be a historically integral piece of soft diplomacy that helped renew dialogue and cultural exchange between the East and West in the 20th century.

The trip was documented in the film, “From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China” which won an Academy Award for best documentary in 1981. To mark the significance of the trip, and the success of the film, a friend to Mr. Stern commissioned a sterling silver cigar box engraved with Stern’s likeness accepting the Oscar, along with the words “From Mao to Mozart.” The box isn’t a treasure. It was a personal gift, a modest gesture that symbolized affection and marked a moment in time with craftsmanship and intrinsic monetary value.

Things get lost. After Stern’s death in 2001 the cigar box fell through the cracks of his estate. A few years ago it resurfaced at Christie’s Auction House where it was purchased by an admirer and given to Stern’s grandson for much the same reason it had been gifted to the maestro himself; as an elegant physical reminder, both of Stern’s achievements, and of someone’s appreciation of those achievements.

Said grandson put the box on eBay and Dick Wilson bought it.

Last Thursday, blinking heavily at my cellphone, which read 7:05 am, I considered canceling my interview with Mr. Wilson whom I was to meet, clear across town, in ten minutes. I called him up and told him I was “running a few minutes late,” to give him the option of backing out.

“Don’t worry about it,” he insisted reassuringly. “I just got done working out. I’m gonna go to Starbucks. I’ll be drinking coffee. Don’t be in a rush. I’ll be there.”

When I arrived, miraculously only 30 minutes late, I found Mr. Wilson sitting in the courtyard of an upscale shopping center designed to look like the old quarter of some sleepy Mediterranean port town whose precise geographical location has been left intentionally vague. The morning was cool but, correctly anticipating the heat of the day to come, Mr. Wilson was drinking iced tea instead of coffee. My arrival drew his attention away from something, and he stood up long enough to shake my hand vigorously with a smile that made me sure that he was, indeed, pleased to meet me. Before I had a chance to drum up a poorly rendered apology for my tardiness, he was sitting down again looking intently at his phone.

“Have a look at this. This is amazing. I bought this app for my phone. Cost me four dollars. Look, scroll down the screen here. There’re these flags from countries all over the world. Turkey, England, Greece, Canada…. you just tap one of these flags and up comes a hundred different newspapers from that country. Today’s newspapers, from all these countries. This cost me four dollars. Isn’t that amazing?”

“Jesus. That’s a pretty good deal,” I said. “How can they do all that for a one time fee of four dollars?”

“Don’t know. They must have it automated somehow. I’m not much of a computer person. Look, here’s another thing,” he said, obviously losing interest, moving on. “I bought a subscription to this at  my office. It’s called GetAbstract.com.” He handed me the phone. “Just scroll down there and pick a topic you’re interested in.” I was momentarily embarrassed when choices like Leadership and Management, Sales and Marketing, Finance, Career, and Self-Development didn’t actually interest me. Eventually I found and opened a tab marked Economics and Politics.

“See, there’s a list of books.” I had randomly picked Marx’s Das Kapital. “They’ve written abstracts for all these books, so when you’ve got four or five minutes where you’re not doing anything, you can get a quick overview of what they’re about, stuff you should know about.”

Dick Wilson makes his appointments about a week in advance, and, in some cases, makes them very early in the morning. He’s not in a hurry though. He tends to carry things around with him that will keep him occupied.

The purpose of our visit was to discuss the recent donation by Dick and his wife Ardi Wilson of more than 2,000 vintage comic books, now held in perpetuity by the University of Louisville Library Archives. Wilson bought his first comic book for five cents in Japan where his father was stationed in the Army. “One morning I walked by myself to the cartoon show that they had on base, it started at 10am. I happened to have a couple of nickels in my pocket. There were some kids selling used comics in front of the theater for a nickel a piece. So I bought a Superman with a yellow cover. He was fighting a robot building.”

By his own accounting, Dick didn’t have very much growing up. He was an army brat, bouncing all over the globe, making new friends at every post, and likewise leaving them. The uncertainty of army life and its attendant loneliness for an only child were instrumental to Wilson’s interest in collecting. He found solace in having things, his things, which could go with him wherever he went. If your home is your castle, and your castle is moved 10 times in 12 years, the possessions that make you at ease in your home need to be portable.

Wilson found comfort in his comic books, which offered a movable means of escape. “If you’re transient, you’re somewhat limited in what you can take with you. Comics were one of the few things I could transport from place to place. I had my comics. There was a feeling of familiarity and consistency in having your own stuff with you. But you get older and your focuses change. My interest in collecting shifted from comic books to model cars, 1:143 scale model cars. I could sometimes get them in Europe when they were difficult to get here. It was a lot of fun. By the time the internet came around, it became too easy and I lost interest. If it’s too easy it’s not worth collecting.”

Wilson’s voice is underlaid by a comforting drawl of indistinct origin and sometimes rises up at the end of a sentence, encouraging you to listen a while longer, lest you feel compelled to speak up before he’s done. Whether he is naturally gifted with confidence of voice, or learned how to maintain the interest of a listener in his 18 years delivering daily stock reports on WFPL, I forgot to ask. He’s Senior vice president of UBS Financial Services. He thinks about value, and about what money can do. When I asked him about his job he said simply, “I help people use their money to get what they need, and what they want.”

Things – objects – have material values, and values we ascribe to them. The investment of emotion and sentiment into an object endows it with something different than the value of the material it’s made of. Stern’s silver cigar box is a good example. The original gift of the box came with an associated symbolic message; the giver appreciated the talents of the receiver, and the object was meant as a physical reminder of that affection and respect.

When it was purchased again at auction and given back to the family, the sentimental value was folded back on itself, redoubled and ascribed with the even greater legacy value of family heirloom, the message being something like, “This object is beautiful and was given as a personal gift in appreciation of someone’s talents. I find the story that this type of sentiment tells very valuable, and I think this box should stay in your family. Here you go.”

Still a third conception of value is reducible to the amount of money available on the open market for an object. Silver is currently worth $41.50 per ounce. The message being something like, “How much can I get for my grandfather’s silver box?”

Wilson’s concept of value is a composite of all of these. He understands each perspective implicitly. He’s an investor and a collector.

When I tried to get a better understanding of the motivations behind Wilson’s various collections (model cars, real cars, paintings, lithographs, stuffed bears, silver cigar boxes, comic books) I sensed that each collection exists at a slightly different point on the spectrum between monetary value and emotional interest, at different elevations on the topography of purpose and principle. For Wilson, these differing valuations don’t necessarily conflict, but they sometimes require a gentle push to make them dovetail as they should.

“If you’re going to collect, you collect because you really love the subject, or you’re collecting to make some money, or some combination of the two.

“I love art, I owned an art gallery, but I always expect to make money off of my art. Most of the art that I still have has moved over to the other side of the equation where it’s an asset that I expect to appreciate. I’m a little flinty about this so Ardi moderates me. She buys art that represents moments in time, intimate personal experiences where we were both with the artists, they told us about the stories of their work. There are great stories. She’s buying art from the heart, for the totality of an experience. Her very favorite piece was bought in Saigon three years ago; she sat with artist while he was painting it. It was a heartfelt personal experience for her. It’s the least expensive piece in our collection, cost sixty dollars, and it’s her favorite piece. It’s in the most prominent place in the house, right above the mantle. She loves that piece.”

Dick’s impulse to collect began with comic books whose stories of adventure, travel, and heroism offered comfort and momentary escape. The urge to collect books that tell stories has transformed into the desire to find objects that have a history, and have acquired stories which are now somehow intrinsic and inseparable from the objects. In a sense, Dick collects the stories of the things themselves.

“Anymore I won’t collect something unless it’s got a really great story. Initially I figured, you know, [the price of] silver’s going up, but instead of just buying silver coins as a commodity, what could I buy that would be more meaningful. Look, silver’s forty dollars an ounce, but I’m not going to go out and invest in silver bricks.

“I had a sterling silver box from the turn of the century- 1905. I’ve always really liked it, and I thought, why don’t I seek out more of these? [The boxes] are definitely an appreciating asset, but to me they’ve shifted over to that love of collecting, and are more of a legacy statement than an investment. I think it shifts when you become more interested in the love of the object than the monetary aspects. As I sought them out, the value of the commodity became much less interesting to me than the story behind the commodity.”

There’s a small British-made WWI-era cigarette case given to “Sgt. Major Burns from the NCO’s and Men of the 4rth Northern General Hospital.” Burns carried the case with him at the Battle of the Somme and, battered with a hundred dents from the years it spent in his uniform in the trenches, one can’t help longing to know where else it’s been. To Wilson, it represents a piece of history.

Another box offers little more than a mystery. “I’ve got one box that just says, ‘To Jane From the Ten Troopers’ The Ten Troopers’ signatures are engraved on the box and it’s like, who the hell are the Ten Troopers? Thinking of the stories that are wrapped around these things, that’s my main interest.”

Dick collected comic books from the Golden and Silver eras of comics until the intensity of his passion for them cooled about 25 years ago. He’d amassed a few thousand. He’d created a collection. As a comic book enthusiast myself I was eager to understand what would compel a collector to, essentially, give away his entire collection, one he’d spent the better part of a his life compiling.

Dick said that he and Ardi donated the comics in hopes that their gesture of giving might encourage other philanthropic donations to the University, and also because his collection, something he never once thought of as an investment, is safe there. No one will ever put it on eBay. He explained that, to a serious collector, giving your collection to a museum or library is the ultimate expression of devotion to that collection.

“That whole collection is a legacy of my interest in comics, and the ability of UofL and the archives to safeguard those comic books. It’s the one place you can have a complete collection that will always stay a complete collection, and it encourages other elements of gifting. I was finished with that collection and now to have someone embrace it, and protect it. It’s really the best deal in the whole world for a collector.

“If it hadn’t been for UofL all my efforts would’ve been for naught. [The comics someday] would be scattered to the four winds. Now all my efforts are going to mean something to other collectors and other people of charity. Everybody, I think, wants to have some sort of legacy moving forward. If there’s something you’re really passionate about in life, to be able to preserve that passion, to share it, and to amplify that passion through a museum or library, that’s the greatest damn thing in the world.”

–Joe Manning

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