Posted on 01/08/2009 7:34:02 PM PST by RDTF
An eccentric loner in Britain hoarded so much trash he had to burrow through it to get around his home — then got lost in the maze of tunnels Friday and died of thirst.
Human mole Gordon Stewart, 74, had filled his rooms up to the ceiling with 10 years’ worth of garbage and clutter, making it impossible to walk around.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Dad told me Mr. Collins (who was like 9 or something at the time, same as Dad, probably) was able to receive radio copy just fine in his garage as a hobbyist, whilst the US Navy, who presumably knew what they were doing, couldn’t get squat! Gotta be one of my favorite radio stories.
Interestingly I saw analog of that in Korea - whole buildings devoted to electronics, very speciaised. Imagine selling computer power supplies, used, and nothing else.
I dont doubt it. Some people are just gifted.
I love his old stories about dragging radar sets home to his horrified mother
No, never did. But the overall situation sounds incredibly familiar! I’ll check that site out, thanks! When my folks sold the house we lived in back then, there were 37 TV sets they had to throw out, plus all manner of other stuff I had built, plus boxes and boxes of tubes! When I think of how many TVs I dragged home from the garbage coming home after school, I can’t even imagine how I did it. Probably starting when I was maybe 9 years old, how the hell did I move 60 and 70 lb TV sets 3/4 mile? And I was a little guy too.
Very sad. Just the other day I thought of, and mentioned, good old f.Christian, and here it seems he’s left us. I trust now he’s in a place where there are no “devilutionists.”
It does seem true that you can’t help those who don’t want help.
We had a hoarder in our community last year — a 62-year-old woman, noticeably neurotic, who had lived by herself for years after a brief but disastrous marriage.
She never invited anyone into her place, & usually gave off vibes so that no one cared to visit her anyway. Secretly, though, over the years she had hoarded literally tons of magazines & newspapers. The tall piles crowded her entire apartment.
Her secret disorder wasn’t discovered until a few days after Shavous (Jewish holiday), when a family who had invited her for dinner wondered why she never showed up. After knocking on her door, they summoned the police & Hatzlaha (Jewish ambulance service).
It took them 3 days just to get in there & clear out all the garbage. With the help of cadaver dogs they found her body lying underneath a pile, which presumably had toppled over her while she was trying to climb up & pile more newspapers.
To this day I wonder what makes these people tick. Usually women — probably abused in their childhoods, seeking security, perhaps?
Does anyone recall those old farts that hoarded plastic bread bags? and jelly jars? I never understood that bread bag thing.
How many grocery sacks do you all have squirreled away?
I bet half the country has 50 of them stashed away for some reason
I will read the reply’s in the AM
After buying a new one, I find the missing thingy the next day, and when I need it a year from now, I can't find either of them, so I make another trip to ACE Hardware and buy a third one.
Thanks for the ping, Slings and Arrows. I love threads like this.
Its the truth! LoL!
To be honest, I was never into Ham radio! I had an old Heathkit receiver that my brother had built that I used to listen to RSA the Voice of South Africa on. They had a great show where people would write in and ask how they could improve the performance of their Hallicrafter XYZ radio, and this guy would get on and say...."looks like if you change C343 to .002 from .047 and R157 to 10K ohms from 22K ohms, you'll change the center frequency of the low pass filter to 5 kilocycles and get a higher "Q" in the tank circuit after V23, which absolutely blew my mind.
But I never had much, if any desire to transmit. I dunno, I was enough of a nerd all by myself and it seemed exactly like what CB truckers were in the 70's (even tho that hadn't happened yet)...just worthless chatter. I liked industrial and test gear and audio gear and recording electronic music. My buddy and I used to spend weekends in WNYC studios and we constructed an absolutely devilish setup with the guts of 2 scrapped electronic organs, 4 or 5 oscillators I had built, and five tape recorders all set up in two lines across his bedroom so a single reel of tape ran thru 3 machines on one pass, looped around the pole of a lamp, and then thru the last 2 machines, LOL. We were the original 30-second delay. The pile of crap we had going must have rivaled Dr. Frankenstein's lab except we didn't have the Jacob's ladder sparky things nor the dead bodies or flasks. His mom went completely ballistic when she saw what we were doing. Just classic.
“... along with several hundred Beanie Babies...”
Sitting at home? With your folks? And you off to college? You better send them an email RIGHT NOW and tell them not to get rid of any of that stuff.
For me it was my “Hot Wheels” collection.
For my father-in-law it was his baseball card collection!! (Babe Ruth, etc.)
LOL! I just spent a LITTLE bit of time looking for a lamp part that I just knew was around here somewhere. Then figures - “I’ll just run up to ACE for the $6 part”.
I fixed the lamp three days ago. Today trying to find something else I came across the part I knew I had here SOMEWHERE! (Still in its unopened package, about 18” from where I repaired the lamp!).
I'm convinced that they breed in captivity.
I helped pay for several large rooms like that. They were called "library stacks".
I have about ten PX bags stashed in a drawer. I really do use one for something now and then.
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