ORANGE — Steve Mihaly is always cautiously polite when discussing politics, even when the matter at hand is 100 years old. It's not issues he's concerned about people becoming upset over, but, rather, political artifacts and their worth.
Mihaly collects campaign buttons and other items dating as far back as 1896, the election year when the modern campaign button made its debut. He advertises his wants in local classifieds, and people often bring their old keepsakes to him to sell to him.
"And a lot of times folks are kind of disappointed," said Mihaly. "They've got an old Nixon button, and they feel they're going to send their child to college on it. Yes, it may be 25 years old, but they made 5 million of them; 4 1/2-million are still around, and not many people want them.
"If I told them the true value, which is less then 25 cents, they'd think I was insulting them. So I always try to be extremely polite and tell people the best thing they can do is keep the piece for the sake of the memories or pass it on to a child that might like it."
I can see the advantages of that soft approach, because it didn't sit so easily when Mihaly informed me that the wall-size poster of Barry Goldwater's head I've been hoarding for 30 years is worth so little I might as well have my friends over to play Twister on it.
On the other hand, there are items Mihaly has paid hundreds of dollars for, and others out there can be worth thousands. And, for those with a third hand, there is the value Mihaly sees in these items that goes far beyond money. To him, they are fascinating pieces of history and a mystery without end.
The 40-year-old has been collecting for nearly 30 years, with about 15,000 pieces now, "and all the time I'm still being surprised by things I've never seen before," he said.
He had a representative sampling spread out in the living and dining rooms of his antique-filled home, and it's easy to see his fascination with these little signs of their times.
Chronologically, his collection begins in 1896, with examples of the first political pins and the printed silk ribbons they replaced that year.
William McKinley was running against William Jennings Bryan, and the campaign's divisive issue was the monetary standard, with Republicans holding out for the traditional gold standard and Democrats pushing for silver. Hence, most of McKinley's pins have a gold background; one ornate piece is a gold bug brooch with pop-out wings revealing likenesses of McKinley and his running mate.
Mihaly has several buttons for Bryan, who ran for President three times. "You can pretty well date the buttons by his looks, since he keeps getting pudgier and balder," Mihaly said.
Anyone remember McKinley's original vice president, Garrett A. Hobart? He died in office, and Mihaly has several black-draped memorial buttons. His successor was Teddy Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was made President upon McKinley's assassination a year after his election, and he had qualities well suited to the campaign button, which often depicted him in his Rough Rider hat, while one merely depicted his famed "big stick." Meanwhile, his Democratic opponent in 1904, the long-forgotten Alton Parker, produced anti-T.R. buttons dubbing him the "Grand Old Tyrant."
Negative campaigning is far from new. An antecedent to today's Hillary-bashing can be found in Republican, anti-Franklin Roosevelt buttons of the '30s that go after his activist wife, reading, "We don't want Eleanor either," and "Eleanor? No Soap!"
A Republican button from 1960 shows the White House with a "not for sale" sign in front, a comment on allegations that Kennedy money was buying the presidency for John F. Kennedy. But that's not much of a character attack compared with another of Mihaly's buttons from 1964, which has Goldwater's head superimposed on a nuclear mushroom cloud, declaring, "What, me worry?"
Mihaly said, "I'm bipartisan in my collecting, and quite frankly, I'm not very political. I'm not the type of person who's out there campaigning, and, though I know a lot about politics, I think it's boring to talk about. When I vote, it's for the individual candidate, not a party."
He began collecting when he was around 10, growing up in New Jersey. His father had encouraged him to have a hobby, and when he found some old political buttons at a garage sale, he said, he was hooked. During the 1968 presidential campaign, he got his parents to drive him to Nixon and Humphrey campaign headquarters every so often to see what new buttons might have come in.
"They would have bins of buttons, and I would try to get as many as I could, just stuffing them into my pockets. In many cases they'd just say, 'Take 'em.' They'd be talking to my parents, trying to win their vote, so they weren't going to yell at me," he said.
