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In the mid-1960's, while
still in high school, I began collecting bottles. It was on a
bottle hunting trip to Utah in 1967 that a friend an I happened upon an
abandoned power line in the Bonneville Salt Flats. As far as we
could see in both directions, lying beside each pole stump (for the
poles were long gone) were three CD 321 Knowles insulators. The
115 undamaged insulators we picked up provided the basis for a decent
collection.
In 1969, I helped publish a
booklet called, Directory of Bottle and Insulator Collectors and
Dealers. Dora Harned founded Crown Jewels of the Wire
the same year. When she decided to publish an annual directory,
the need for our publication ceased.
Other collecting highlights
for me in those early days included: attending the first-ever
insulator swap meet (at Greg Bickford's home); participating in the
first national insulator show in New Castle, Indiana in 1970; and
serving as the executive director of the National
Insulator Association when Ernie Rostock was president in the
mid-1970's. My greatest insulator find was locating 25 CD 317
Chambers lightning rod insulators still in use!
By the late 1970's,
insulator collecting was placed on the back burner while I got married
and raised a family. I began actively collecting again in
1997. My interests today include brightly colored CD 162 signals,
CD 123 EC&M's and relics from the historic Collins' Overland
Telegraph Line, constructed through Oregon in 1864.
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