The traditional, Freudian view is that collecting represents an anal retentive bent. That’s kind of scoffed at these days; it’s a colorful way of classifying people. [A more contemporary view is] that collecting satisfies the need for closure that many people have. Some people don’t need completion; they never finish anything. But those who really need to finish [things] are the ones that are more likely to collect.
“Certainly we’ll need to have it finished by Thanksgiving,” Ron says. Geri adds, “We are going to have a major house walk in January with the club from Woodstock–they’re going to be renting a bus. We have to really redesign and do something different. I know Ron wants to put running water in the North Pole.”
“The way it’s designed,” he explains, “it runs from Santa’s area to the south. Now that includes his house, his workshop, his reindeer barn, the elves’ bunkhouse, and all those kinds of things. We’ve tried to set it up where Santa would have his forests for cutting trees, that’s to the left. There you’ve also got your lookout mountain and then”–here Ron gestures toward the center of the huge diorama–“you work your way into the town with pieces like the tin soldier shop or the candy cane or snow-making factory. That’s surrounded by things like the Crayola crayon school for elf children.”
“Even after 30 years of being together you sorta do your own thing,” says Geri. “We don’t need to be with each other 100 percent of the time; we have our own people. I don’t bowl anymore because of my back, and he doesn’t come out with my girlfriends and I. So this is the thing that we do together. We’re not painting the house or going shopping–we’re working on something that we’ve created together.”
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What happens in the normal course of development is that most people give up this collecting phase in adolescence. Relations with people replace relations with objects.
Irene and Joseph Ehle (pronounced “ale”) were German. Joseph owned George’s Market, a butcher shop in Edison Park. Geri, their only child, born in 1950, remembers, “My dad came home on Saturday nights with everything that was left on the counter.” Irene worked as a hairdresser from home. Geri recalls a wonderful childhood. “I baby-sat, I had a part-time job; I worked at Kresge. Christmas I got what I wanted. In a sense I was spoiled, but not with values. My dad worked hard as a butcher all his life. He wasn’t like a stockbroker–he worked six days a week. I appreciated everything my parents gave me.”
In 1972 Ron’s boss decided to move to Florida and asked him to take over the business. But, Ron remembers, “I didn’t think I was ready for it.” Instead he got a job at Grainger, where Geri had taken a job the previous year. In 1973 Geri Ehle became Mrs. Ron Hennessey. “I was at his house with his mother and his sister,” Geri says, “and my ring was in a hardware store bag. Ron had to buy his mother some lightbulbs, and he gave me the bag and said, ‘There’s something else in there,’ and I dug in and found the ring. That’s my Mister Romantic Husband!” Geri received a cookie jar from her father at her wedding shower. “Every year from then on my father bought me one for my birthday, and it always had a $100 bill in it.” Ron and Geri honeymooned at Disney World, which had just opened.
