One man’s trash is this man’s toaster

SPRINGFIELD, Ore. – As a child in the early 1930s, Paul Wellborn would tag along with his grandmother when she went to work as a housekeeper in Marcola.

During each visit, her boss showed young Wellborn a box of arrowheads unearthed on his property and told the boy to choose only one. It would become Wellborn’s first collection.

“I’ve been a collector all my life,” said Wellborn, 77, knuckles bloody from making custom knives using horseshoe files, his latest hobby.

The Springfield resident is well known in antiques and collecting circles for his trove of toasters, waffle irons, tobacco cutters, guns, knives, axes and coffee grinders.

It would be considered a handsome body of work for an average collector – but he is far from average. He has more antiques than most shops, and almost every square foot of wall space in his three-bedroom home is covered with his treasures, displayed neatly on improvised shelves.

“He has so much stuff, I can’t even keep up,” said Dennis Ellingsen, who met Wellborn more than 30 years ago through knife collecting. “I think it’s like when you start a book you want to finish it. He’s like that with toasters. It’s all part of the chase and part of the excitement.”

Wellborn began stockpiling toasters shortly after he retired as an automotive instructor at Lane Community College in 1980. He has since amassed between 700 and 800 toasters, some of which are worth up to $2,000. Still, he toasts his bread with a $1.50 secondhand store find.

He’s not much of a coffee drinker, yet he has 100 double-wheeled coffee grinders, some displayed elegantly in his living room.

Before he sold his collection of antique Ford Phaeton convertibles – because he had no place to store them – he had every body style change between 1913 and 1936.

He was once the president of the Road Kings hot rod club, and he held a Northwest record of 187 mph before it was broken the next day.

Now, when he drives, he’s behind the wheel of an old Volkswagen and only before dark.

He’s owned airplanes, boats and motorcycles, and he’s made a career working on engines as a mechanic before he became a college instructor.

He has fond memories of tearing across Fern Ridge Lake on speedboats and flying all over Central and North America in his airplanes.

“Those were the good old days,” he said. “We’re not going to see them again.”

He thrills in finding appliances, cutlery and gadgets from those good old days at good prices.

Wellborn has two new hips and doesn’t move easily anymore. So he admires old stuff that still has working parts, things that fulfilled a function back in the day that might seem absurd by today’s standards – such as electrical gadgets designed to tone skin.

“If I don’t know what it is, that kind of turns me on,” he said. “I buy it because I like it, then I find out what I have.”

He relishes in learning history through relics. His collection of appliances shows the evolution of electricity, as used in the home.

For example, there was a time when indoor electrical outlets were not standard, so it was difficult for manufacturers to create products that would work in every home. Light sockets, however, were standard, so they made appliances that screwed into ceiling sockets.

Wellborn stays connected to other enthusiasts by attending regular meetings of an antique tools club, a knife club and the “Road Kill” club – a sort of antiques show-and-tell for grown-ups. Ellingsen, who runs the annual Oregon Knife Collectors Association show, said he’s amazed that Wellborn catalogs his finds mentally, without a computer.

“In your life you are going to wander by and see some special people. He’s one of those people,” Ellingsen said. “He is a mystery.”

Twice divorced, he lives alone with his Yorkshire terrier. And he has his collectibles.

Everyone has vices, he said, and acknowledged that some think he has too much stuff.

“Some people say it’s cluttered, and that’s their view,” Wellborn said. “My view is ‘God, I like that stuff.’ The more the merrier.”