• August 10, 1998
• Vol. 50
• No. 4

King Pack Rat

Be It Ever So Humble, There's a Place for It in Alex Shear's Vast Americana Collection

What do you do with a man who has spent the last 25 years of his life snatching up six Stars-and-Stripes lunch boxes, 400 transistor radios that look like brand name products, 10,000 matchbooks and countless other items of vintage Americana that give visitors to his cramped New York City apartment the feeling of having stumbled into Uncle Sam's attic? Divorce him, concluded Alex Shear's ex-wife. Admits Shear, single since 1990: "I know I'm an oddball. She used to ask me what I was doing, and I'd tell her when I figured it out I'd let her know."

No sooner had Shear recovered from his former spouse's departure than he filled the extra space in his apartment with even more model trains, paperweights and Pyrex glass irons, plus 1,000 bars of hotel soap and a pristine Farrah Fawcett Make-Up Center in its original box. Now Shear, 58, a former product developer for J.C. Penney, and his vast collection may soon become the subject of a coffee-table book and a proposed TV series on secondhand shopping. That could do for America's flea-market foragers what Bob Vila did for home improvers. "I think Alex Shear is a genius," says famed Philadelphia architect Robert Venturi, who supports Shear's idea of building a museum on New York's 42nd Street to house his collection.

"It's all a little nuts," says Shear, whose apartment has become so jam-packed that he stores most of his objects in a warehouse near his hometown of Lancaster, Pa. "But I believe this stuff is important. It's a celebration of the regular guy."