Collector manic for Mickey

This story first appeared in the Sept. 29 edition of the Kansan.

Shirley Bowers never intended to collect Mickey Mouse and Minnie and related Disney memorabilia. But then her 3-year-old granddaughter brought back a tiny ceramic Mickey Mouse from Disney World as a gift for Bowers 25 years ago. Today, a collection of 72 such gifts and garage-sale finds line a back bedroom of Bowers’ home in Marion.

“When Cheryl was 3, she went on vacation with her parents to Florida and came back with this little thing,” said the 77-year-old Bowers, who with her husband, David, have nine children, 20 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. “And ever since, this collection just evolved over time.

“Sure, I watched ‘Snow White’ with my kids, but I never desired to go to Disney World myself. But once this thing got set in motion, I didn’t have to. The idea of giving me Disney gifts made it handy for my kids and their kids, who never had to worry about what to get me for my birthday or Mother’s Day.”

It wasn’t until years after receiving this first gift from her granddaughter, Cheryl Jennison, now 28 and soon to be married, that Bowers focused on gathering the items and putting them in one place. What she found surprised even Bower.

“Once I started putting the collection on display, I couldn’t go into any room of our house without finding some such Mickey or Minnie,” she said. “I’d clean a room and suddenly find a Minnie serving tray in the kitchen or a red bandanna with a Mickey in the bathroom. They were just everywhere.”

One of the most treasured surprises she uncovered was a Mickey Mouse on top a John Deere tractor — a gift Bowers gave her husband years ago. Every day, Bowers visits her husband who lives in a local nursing home. And the tractor — it sits on center stage in the bedroom.

“Once the collection got going, I looked for items myself, too,” she said. “I read an ad in a magazine about Mickey driving a John Deere, and I ordered it for David, who was a John Deere man.”

John Deere tractors for a husband and a tiny gift for a grandma are only the tip of the iceberg. In the bedroom one finds items ranging from the common to the bizarre to the precious. Most precious is an old stuffed Mickey her granddaughter had bought on that same Florida trip years ago and played with as a child. Later as an adult, she gave it to her grandmother to keep company with the tiny ceramic gift she’d given Bowers.

Other items include a pair of Mickey and Minnie dolls and pens that display the Mickey Mouse image as he evolved from the years spanning his birth in 1928 to 1936 to 1947 to 1955 until today. Other items range from toys to a box of Kleenex to a bracelet created with Mickey Mouse heads to a watch to a deck of cards to an earring holder.

The list goes on and on, but one of the strangest items Bowers retrieved came from a very strange place.

“We had an old, abandoned car parked on our farm east of Marion, where we raised our family,” Bowers said. “The kids used to play in that car, and one day, we cleaned it out. In the trunk, we found an old magnetic dart board with Mickey and Minnie on it. We wiped it down and brought it inside.”

The dartboard is one of the older pieces in her collection, along with a cross stitch of Mickey and Minnie, created by her maternal grandmother, the late Hazel Higgins.

“I would guess she made that at least 20 to 25 years ago, and we found this in a box when she moved from her farm into town,” Bowers said. “I can tell by the yellowed fabric that this is really old.”

Other equally as old items include an old hankie that Bowers found in a box of old hankies she bought at a garage sale. Another decades-old find was piano sheet music of the Mickey Mouse birthday song, titled “The New Song Hit.” Bowers, a longtime church organist at the Eastmoor United Methodist Church in Marion, often bought sheet music — either by piece or even whole boxes — at garage sales. She had no idea this birthday song was hidden and unsung for so long. She pulled it out, dusted it off and sat down at the piano to play it.