Cecil Munsey wrote his doctoral dissertation on "The Personality Characteristics of Collectors." It takes one to know one. The retired educators Poway home is filled with collections, including bottles, Civil War revenue stamps and an entire bathroom dedicated to a legendary medicine maker named Lydia E. Pinkham.
She was a school teacher in Massachusetts who invented something called Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound in the 1870s. It was marketed to women, supposedly to cure "female weaknesses."
It was huge in its day. It made millions of dollars. Only later did people learn that it had a high alcohol content, about 20 percent. It made them feel good, all right.
When the Pure Food and Drug legislation came out in 1906, it limited what the company could claim the medicine did, and like a lot of patent medicines it pretty well died out in the 1920s and '30s. But you can still find products out there with the Lydia Pinkham name.
Almost everything in here is Lydia Pinkham. She was so famous, and they churned out all kinds of stuff besides the bottles of patent medicine. Tape measures, sewing kits, perfume, powder, a mirror, a mechanical pencil, a spoon.
I especially like the trade cards. The company issued them for advertising and left them around everywhere. It's fascinating to read what's on them. I had the back of this one blown up big so people could sit on the toilet and read it. Everybody seems to enjoy this room.
I probably got started collecting this stuff about 35 years ago because of my interest in bottles. A couple of us were crawling under a building one time and we found a bottle with this label on it for the vegetable compound. "Recommended for the treatment of non-surgical cases of weaknesses and disorders," it says. They kept it general that way, to get the whole crowd. That's what patent medicine was all about.
Here's a picture of her tombstone. The advertisements used to encourage women to write to her with their health questions, and they did. In 1904, the Ladies Home Journal ran the tombstone photo, pointing out that Lydia had been dead for more than 20 years.
It turns out the company had like 50 women on the payroll working in a loft somewhere, answering the letters as if she were still alive. It blew everybody's mind. But it didn't stop people from writing, asking her questions.
Cecil Munsey was interviewed by Union-Tribune staff writer John Wilkens. If you have an interesting collection, contact him at (619) 293-2236 or at
john.wilkens@uniontrib.com.
