A STRANGE HOBBY

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 203, 25 May 1936, Page 10

A STRANGE HOBBY

“Centenarian” Clippings Collected

WORLD EXCHANGES MADE

Dominion Special Service

Wanganui, May 23

After a correspondence lasting several months, a Wanganui man has unearthed a rare hobby. He has discovered that a friend In New Jersey, America, collects dippings about centenarians, and that to his knowledge there are only six other known collectors in the world.

Perusal of a bundle of letters handed by Mr. G. Sutherland, Wanganui EaW, to “The Dominion” t<his morning, showed that Mr. William P. Norris, if Haddonfield, Now Jersey, collects insects, cancelled postage stamps, postmarks, tram tickets, milk bottle tops, matchboxes, articles on stamp-collect ing and snakes, so that he may exchange them for “centenarian” clippings. In one letter, Mr. Norris says he began “cutting out things” which Interested him before be was old enough to vote, and khat was before the Span-ish-American War. One day, whi'e running over his collection —this was in 189S —he noticed he had several dippings about centenarians, in which he then and there decided to specialise. “As not many people live to be lt>o years old,” he writes in a later letter, “naturally newspaper dippings about them are very scarce. I would be tickled to death to find a centenarian scrap-booker in New Zealand.” Some Surprising Centenarians. Looking through other letters, it was found that in the 37 years Mr. Norris has been "riding his nobby,’’ he mis clipped over 170 different newspapers i-o obtain the necessary articles, which number 4600—a1l reputable centenarians. He spends about 25 cents a week on his hobby. Just recently he sen;, a dozen dried Japanese beetles to an English collector .and received in return a score of clippings about an English centenarian. The best exchange lie ever made was when he traded several Philadelphia theatre programmes of the gay ’nineties for 400 clippings, most of which were different.

It appears that not all the clippings announce the death of some venerable greybeard. He tells his Wanganui correspondent that some of his clippings reveal centenarians who referee prize fights, get married and divorced, and even get arrested for drunkenness. One has actually flown an aeroplane, and another walked 240 miles in six and a half days. Other stories In his collection tell about the first centenarian to see a motion picture, the first to have an automobile ride, the first to have herffiair bobbed, and the first to swim 250 yards. The latter was a woman. The oldest centenarian in his collection is Zaro Agha, the Turk. Mr Norris has this gentleman’s* thumbprint, as, it seems, although having lived for that length of time, he has never learned to write. There is also a clipping about a Chinese who boas’s that he is 200 years old, but the collector does not put much reliance on this. "Possibly,” he writes, “this fellow has got his birthday mixed up with one of his ancestor's.”