Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [63]
Rob has collected things all his life. As a boy, he started with stamps, like everyone else, but then he diversified. He now has one of the largest personal collections of guitars in the world, including more than five thousand historical pieces. And he had an entire room dedicated to the trusty banjo, with some dating back to the 1800s. Rob’s collection wasn’t for sale or auction, and he didn’t want anyone knowing where he kept it. So we weren’t allowed to film the approach or the exterior of his warehouse. I thought that was fair enough, and I couldn’t wait to see the collection.
Inside a nondescript warehouse, I met Rob, a man in his fifties with a big, beaming smile. ‘You must be Billy,’ he said.
‘And you must be Rob. Lovely to meet you.’
‘You look just like yourself.’
That immediately broke the ice and we both laughed.
It was soon obvious that the stringed instruments were only a small part of Rob’s collection. He also collected all kinds of memorabilia, and especially anything to do with 3D – like stereoscopes and Viewmasters and holograms. But I was primarily interested in the instruments, so he took me to them.
Guitars, ukuleles, banjos, harps, zither banjos and mandolins – he had them all. The first thing I saw was a long row of zithers – those alpine instruments most of us know from the soundtrack of The Third Man – hanging on a wall. Most of them were made between 1865 and 1905 by a company called Schwarzer that had been based in Washington, Missouri. The company folded around the time of the First World War because of anti-German sentiment in America. Rob told me he was one of the few zither collectors anywhere in the world. ‘I don’t know anybody else who’s crazy enough to buy them,’ he said.
I love the zither, though. ‘I’ve got a friend in Amsterdam who comes to my stand-up shows and he can play one,’ I said.
Rob’s collection was so extensive that he even had consecutively numbered zithers with their shipping records from the manufacturer. He bought one in 2002 and the other in 2003, reuniting them after 113 years apart. Some of them were real beauties, like a Smithsonian zither that had taken more than a year to make. It had more than five thousand inlaid pieces of wood, carved ivory and gold plating.
‘Do you have people look for stuff for you or do you do it all yourself?’ I asked.
‘I have people.’
‘Spies?’
‘Not really spies, but I’ve been going to shows since 1985, so most everybody knows what I buy, and there’s people out there looking for me all the time.’
At one time, Rob had twenty guys searching for a Gibson toy guitar that was missing from his collection. He couldn’t even know for sure that it existed – having seen it only in rough illustrations in books – yet he’d spent more than two decades looking for it.
‘I was on my way to a national sports collectors’ convention in Cleveland – I collect baseball cards too … ’ he said.
‘Of course you do.’
‘And we stopped at the Heart of America antique mall in Springfield, Ohio. [Yes, there’s yet another Springfield.] It’s the largest antique mall in America. I was with a friend who doesn’t care about collecting and we got there when it opened at nine-thirty in the morning. I started going through the mall and my friend was checking with me every two hours to see if I was done yet, but I wasn’t.’
Rob’s eyes were sparkling with excitement as he continued to tell the story.
‘I was getting ready to go down to the last wing and in a showcase was this toy. I knew immediately what it was and so I immediately rang the buzzer to get somebody there. Nobody would come. They were all busy, I guess. But I wouldn’t leave. I didn’t want to take a chance of missing this toy. They finally got to me about twenty minutes later and I didn’t care what it cost. But I saw it was a hundred and ninety-five dollars, so I asked if they’d take a discount. You gotta ask, you know?’
‘Oh yes,