April 28, 1999

Button, Button, who's got the button?

By Garret Leiva
Herald staff writer
       For most of us, buttons bring a shirt together. Perhaps they keep a pair of pants up. Roy Hajek and Joyce Wilburn, however, find buttons suitable for something else - framing.
      As big-time collectors of these small antique treasures, these Suttons Bay residents see buttons as more than mere brass or Bakelite. Instead, these simple fasteners hold so much history you often have to use a magnifying glass to take it all in.
      "I think that so many have stories behind them. It's rather interesting to see the history a button can portray," said Wilburn, who has in the past decade amassed a collection numbering in the thousands.
      Wanting to share those stories, Wilburn and Hajek have found an appropriate place to hang their tiny art treasures - the Con Foster Museum. "Buttons, the Smallest Antiques" is a colorful exhibit of more than 800 buttons on display in the Traverse City museum's Steffler Community Gallery until September.
      On Thursday, Wilburn and Hajek were guests of honor at the exhibit's reception and open house where the general public was invited to bring special and keepsake buttons in for examination and explanation by the area experts.
      Those not gaga over gingham China buttons or stirred up over Syroco wood buttons might wonder what all the fuss is about. For Hajek, the real thrill is hunting down a brass button, not necessarily buying it.
      "It's like mushrooming. The mushrooms taste pretty good but they're not that great to spend hours and hours out in the woods," said Hajek, who displays only a handful of the 200,000 "good quality" buttons he has collected over the past 12 years.
      "Part of it is the hunt ... but some of these buttons are just beautiful little masterpieces."
      Strangely enough, Hajek noted that his foray into collecting was really a case of mistaken identity.
      While out shopping one day with his wife, he noticed her admiring a beautiful button. Wanting to cheer up his spouse, who was very ill at the time, Hajek bought her the button she had fancied along with another button with a moon and star motif. Two buttons quickly turned into too many, however, after Hajek bought 14 banana boxes full of buttons from a friend.
      "I brought them home and I told my wife 'I've got something for you that is really going to make you happy' and she said 'Oh, a puppy,'" noted Hajek, whose interest in buttons dates back to childhood sorting through the family button box on rainy days.
      "I guess it's like the fellow that buys a chainsaw or a shotgun for his wife. You buy for people what you really like yourself."
      Childhood is also when Wilburn was bitten by the button collecting bug. As a fifth-grader she attempted to collect buttons from every state in the Union.
      "I even sent a request to the White House. I received a letter back but no button," recalled Wilburn, who did receive a button carved from a walrus tusk from a boy in Alaska.
      Despite her unsuccessful venture, Wilburn held on to both her collectibles and her desire to collect. Today she is a member of both the Michigan Button Society and National Button Society, which has more than 4,000 members.
      Also a member of both button societies, Hajek said that despite their diminutive size, buttons can be a big money hobby. National level competitions even feature narrowly defined categories such as horse heads not showing the body of the animal.
      "You can spend quite a lot of time and money scouring to get a card full of buttons," said the 1998-99 president of the Michigan Button Society. "I'm not into competition like many collectors are. Going after that blue ribbon is not my cup of tea."
      For most people who attend the exhibit, like Mary Lautner of Traverse City, the importance of this small piece of history is not its price tag, but its value as a piece of the past left to hang on to.
      "This button was either off my grandpa's cap or uniform from the Civil War," said Lautner, pointing to a small metal button inside a box of family heirlooms that included buttons from her wedding dress.
      "After he came back from the war a few years later his house burned down and I presumed most of his things were destroyed. How this button survived, I don't know. I'm very proud of this (button), it is the only thing I have left from him."