Ted Hake has spent most of his life chasing after “old stuff.”
A kid from York, Pennsylvania, Hake used to follow his father — a dedicated bird watcher — on trips around North America, where the son hunted for fossils along the way.
At the age of 7, Hake began collecting coins. He exchanged all the dollar bills relatives gifted him on holidays to pennies and quarters, and used them to fill in his blue coin album.
He loved it — until a colorful and small William Jennings Bryan presidential campaign button at his friend’s house suddenly caught his eyes.
“They fascinated me,” he said. “Because unlike coins, where you know exactly how many are made right down to the last one, nobody knew anything about this stuff.”
Hake would embark on a decades-long journey collecting, dealing and cataloging political and cultural memorabilia. He carried buttons across the country — New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan — and sold to Wall Street brokers, textile designers and more. He has published 17 books on buttons, establishing a reputation among some insiders as the “godfather” of the circle.
Hake is among roughly 200 dealers attending the annual national convention of the American Political Items Collectors in Nashville this year. The event will feature a two-day public show and sale on Saturday and Sunday at the Sheraton Music City Hotel near Nashville International Airport. An exhibit of not-for-sale items documenting different periods of history, including the decades-long women’s suffrage movement, is also on display.
Formed in 1945, the organization has now grown to about 1,350 members, said Winston Blair, co-chair of the group. Over 100,000 buttons are on sale, he said.
But dealers do not just collect buttons. Political banners, posters and tickets help fill the showroom, too.
Luke McKeehan, an Elizabethton, Tennessee native in his late 70s, loves collecting historical items in the state. Intimately involved in local politics, he chaired the Carter County Republican Party and served in the county’s circuit court clerk’s office for 30 years.
McKeehan’s buttons chronicled prominent races in Tennessee: One campaign button features Prentice Cooper, Tom Stewart and W.D. Hudson, who respectively won the 1938 race for governor, U.S. Senate and Utilities Commissioner in Tennessee. Names of politicos were imprinted on other buttons, such as Bill Frist and Fred Thompson, both former U.S. Senators from Tennessee.
“My wife said she collects dust and I collect buttons,” McKeehan joked.
Most event dealers are old friends. But the convention attracted new faces as well.
Mason St. Clair, a 19-year-old from Niles, Ohio, said this is his first national convention since he joined the organization in 2015. He owns 8,000 items after six years of collecting.
St. Clair said he enjoys the graphics of the 1960s and the 1970s — which he called the “golden age” of buttons since they were invented in 1896. Additionally, he loves the idea of trading political memorabilia without worrying about opposite political views.
“We all collect political without being political at the show,” he said. “We have a shared passion of history and collecting and preserving the history.”
‘These are not souvenirs’
For David Crane, a historian and instructor at the Alamance Community College in North Carolina, tiny buttons can be of great political significance.
Participants of the famous March on Washington wore buttons saying “WHOOPEE! EQUAL RIGHTS IN ’63,” Crane said. But since the Civil Rights Act didn’t become law until 1964, someone put a sticker on their button amending the year to ’64, he said.
“What that to me demonstrates is … these are not souvenirs,” he said. “There is a direct line between the march, the button and the legislation.”
Crane, also founder of a traveling exhibit called “Making the Movement,” collects items dating back to the emancipation. He owns a stool from the lunch counter of the Woolworth’s in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Black students conducted a sit-in movement in 1960.
“These objects achieved objectives,” he said.
Carter Todd, chair of the convention, said buttons were ways for people to express themselves.
“These buttons were the Twitter of the day,” he said.
For Hake, button collection is a way to retrace history.
“I think you are either born a collector or not,” he said. “Some people live in the moment. Some people live in the past. I get to do it all.”
Reach Yue Stella Yu at yyu@tennessean.com and on Twitter @bystellayu_tnsn.
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