![]() A bust of Farrah Fawcett with a string that can be pulled out of her head to make her hair grow stares blissfully from a pink plastic pedestal. A life-sized cardboard Coppertone woman in a white string bikini grins seductively. The long entryway has so many promotional thermometers, rocket-inspired sleds, work shirts, wooden manhole covers and chest-high stacks of board games, such as "Capital Punishment-for 2 to 4 Adults" and "What Shall I Be? The Exciting Game of Career Girls," that you almost have to wade through it sideways.Īlthough Shear is serious, his roommates are all smiles. His study contains shelves filled not with books but with industrial paperweights, model cars and old food tins. His kitchen is too cluttered with diner memorabilia, newspapers and old juicers to be of use. Suddenly, he looks up from his datebook and says matter-of-factly, "This is not about accumulating stuff." His expression shows no irony, no hint that he is in what was once a six-room home and is now a six-room museum with a bed and a sink. He wears a short-sleeved denim shirt, pleated khaki trousers and large tortoise-shell eyeglasses. On a humid July morning at Shear's apartment, the bearded 57-year-old nostalgia consultant sits in his living room, reclining in a futuristic yellow chair from the 1962 Seattle World's Fair that was originally designed for the Space Needle's restaurant. But who becomes a nostalgia consultant overnight? Of course, it would take another 25 years of amassing tens of thousands of artifacts, or as Shear says, "building lines," for the housewares buyer to evolve into a product designer with his own firm, Alex Designs, and then into his present profession. Since Shear had no room in his Manhattan apartment for a bumper car, he couldn't buy one, but in his mind a collection had begun. He knew that he was building what he claims is the only kitchen archive in the country, but he saw no connection between his work as a buyer and the bumper cars. Soon he had acquired a collection of the most stylish and innovative toasters, mixers and coffeepots ever produced in this country. Finding no suitable reference materials with which to study consumer trends, Shear began cultivating his own reference base, not with a camera but with a checkbook, obsessively buying the best examples of the twentieth-century American kitchen. At the time-the early 1970s-he was working as a housewares buyer for JC Penney, building what he says was the store's first kitchen shop, although Penney's had developed a full-fledged kitchen department as early as the 1950s. It takes a certain audacity to make the leap from collecting hat pin holders to chronicling twentieth-century American popular culture, but Shear is an intense kind of guy. This was the beginning of my dream to someday build the Museum for Regular People." I had this calling to chronicle the America I knew in the twentieth century. "Stuff" was fast becoming "iconography." Shear recalls, "My entire life went past me. What's more, these bumper cars were from Lancaster County, where Shear was born and raised, and they evoked his childhood in such a visceral way that they could be likened to Charles Foster Kane's Rosebud sled. ![]() Bumper cars from the 1940s symbolized postwar prosperity, when the emerging Levittowns and new highways placed the American Dream within the grasp of the middle class. I saw culture in everything I did, and it was all out of Lancaster, Pennsylvania." For Shear, bumper cars embodied both America's mania for cars and its love affair with amusement parks and roadside attractions. "I'm going to graduate from hat pin holders! I saw the beauty of nostalgia here in front of me. ![]() "Something went off in my head," he says emphatically, remembering his favorite childhood pastime-sneaking up on girls and smashing into them in bumper cars. The 10 cars were shiny and colorful and stopped Shear in his tracks. His singularly focused mind was saying "hat pin holders, hat pin holders, hat pin holders" as he made his way through the market aisles, when he noticed a booth that contained 1940s bumper cars from nearby Hershey Park. ![]()
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