Hitting all the right buttons When it comes to this clothing accessory, East St. Paul collector has the market all sewn up By: David Sanderson Posted: 6:00 AM CDT Saturday, Jun. 17, 2023 Last Modified: 2:30 PM CDT Saturday, Jun. 17, 2023 Updates

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This article was published 17/06/2023 (838 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

EAST ST. PAUL — Stop us if this sounds familiar. You are in a public setting, perhaps at a work function, a wedding reception or a social, and you’re seated next to a complete stranger. That can often make for an uncomfortable situation, as the two of you struggle to come up with things to talk about; unless of course you’re Rita Wasney, a button collector extraordinaire who is always thinking two steps ahead.

Whenever Wasney, a mother of two and grandmother of two, anticipates being in the described predicament, she brings along dozens of buttons of all shapes and sizes, packed in a cookie tin. If a person she’s never met before asks what is it she does, she tells them that, first and foremost, she collects buttons.

“Usually they’ll look at me and go, buttons…what am I talking about?” says Wasney, seated in the East St. Paul abode she shares with her husband John, the lower level of which houses a rainbow-coloured cache that gives new meaning to the query, button, button, who’s got the button?

“It sounds funny to say, but the second I start spreading my buttons out on the table, to show them what I mean, it almost always acts as an icebreaker.”

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Wasney doesn’t recall collecting much of anything in her younger days. On the other hand, she was never one to toss stuff out, either, especially if she thought it might prove useful down the road.

About 15 years ago, she realized she was keeping a fair number of loose buttons. Because she enjoys quilting, she began incorporating some of the more attractive fashion accessories into her designs, to serve as accent pieces.

One afternoon, a friend of hers was admiring a quilt she’d just put the finishing touches on. “My, you sure seem to like buttons,” the woman said, noticing Wasney’s predilection for the utilitarian objects. Where did Wasney store her stash, she wanted to know?

Oh, just here and there, came Wasney’s reply, to which her friend shot back, “No, no, buttons need to breathe, and must be sorted properly.” (Who knew? Apparently, buttons containing celluloid release a gas that can damage or corrode whatever else is in their proximity, to the degree that they can become flammable, if kept in a covered container.)

Heeding her pal’s advice, Wasney began divvying her buttons up; first by shade (reds with the reds, blues with the blues), then by material. Rubber buttons were placed in one receptacle, those made of metal in another, and so on and so forth.

“That was kind of the turning point, when I went from what I call gathering buttons to actually collecting them, now that I had a good understanding of what I had,” Wasney says, laughingly comparing herself to a crow that is attracted to shiny objects.

Before joining the National Button Society, a U.S.-based organization currently toasting its 85th anniversary, Wasney assumed hers was a solitary pursuit, and that people who went after buttons were few and far between.

Yeah, not so much. From what she came to understand, button collecting is right up there with stamps and coins in terms of popularity. How big do collections get? According to the Guinness Book of World Records, a person in South Carolina has 439,000 buttons and counting, and has used them to decorate a vehicle, guitars and — to each their own — an outhouse.

With that, Wasney murmurs, “where should we start?” as she prepares to conduct a show-and-tell of some of her preferred treasures, the majority of which were garnered from garage sales and thrift stores, for mere pennies each.

Wasney firmly believes a collection isn’t worth having if it can’t be shared with the world. For that reason, she spends a fair bit of time every week organizing individual buttons onto high-quality display cards, by fastening each in place with plastic-coated wire.

“These are called theme boards — they’re what we bring to competitions — and as you can see, each one is different,” she says, waving her hand over a raft of eight-by-11-inch cards labelled, for example, shell buttons (for seashells), wafers (an ultra-thin variety), animals (buttons boasting images of critters) and ABC, the latter of which holds a button for every letter of the alphabet: C for one shaped like a clock, D for dog, Q for queen — you get the picture.

Stop us if this is a dumb question, but how does she instantly recognize that a dark-coloured button is made of glass and that an identical looking one — at least to us — is ceramic? Or that ones with painted-on Raggedy Anne dolls are buttons at all, and not simply children’s playthings?

When you know, you know, she says, reaching over to fetch The Big Book of Buttons, an 818-page tome that has been dubbed the “bible of button collecting.” Spend enough time leafing through it and you, too, will become an expert in the field, she promises.

Susan Smith is the publicity chairperson of the National Button Society. The group, whose current membership is around 3,000, was formed in 1938, not long after an article on button collecting appeared in an American hobby magazine, Smith says from her home in Ottawa.

“Yes and yes,” Smith replies, when asked whether people typically focus on one area of collecting or, similar to Wasney, take an everything-and-anything approach.

People new to the hobby will start off concentrating on a specific category but over time, as they acquire more and more, they tend to branch out, she says. When it comes to demographics, the majority of club members are female retirees who first became interested in buttons after inheriting a relative’s button jar, but there is a junior division comprised of youngsters under the age of 18, Smith points out.

As for holy grails, well, that ultimately depends on the individual, Smith says. Colt buttons, made of amino resin and produced by the Colt gun manufacturing company until the early 1950s, are highly collectible. So, too, are miniature buttons made for a Barbie wardrobe, although you’ll probably have to battle with toy collectors to net those.

Price-wise, a set of 10 buttons from the 18th century fetched $28,000 during an online auction this past winter, she continues. As impressive as it sounds, the amount pales compared to the $225,000 a deep-pocketed person forked over for a set of buttons that adorned U.S. president George Washington’s inauguration jacket in April 1789.

While Wasney doesn’t put a price on her own possessions, she does allow that some are more valuable than others, from an emotional standpoint. Last summer, she was at an estate sale, where she inquired if there were any buttons available. There weren’t, she was told, but on the way back to her vehicle, a man who overheard her question waved her down.

If it was buttons she was after, he had a slew he’d inherited from an aunt that he had no particular attachment to, he said.

“It was the nicest exchange, and even though he insisted he didn’t want a cent for them, and that he was just happy they were going to a good home, I made him a batch of cookies as a thank you, anyways,” says Wasney, who would never dream about taking the shirt off your back, but may inquire about that button on your shirt.

Finally, when asked if she has ever bothered to count how many buttons she’s amassed through the years, Wasney shakes her head no, saying “numbers” ruin all the fun. Last month, she returned home from a trip to Minneapolis, where she attended a convention staged by the Minnesota Button Society, of which she is also a card-carrying member. Noticing her suitcase had more buttons in it than when she left, her husband jokingly remarked, “are you telling me you really needed more buttons?”

Of course she didn’t need more buttons, she told him. But did she want more buttons?

Here she winks, as if to say, hey, you be the judge.

For more information, go to nationalbuttonsociety.org

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca