PHOTO: NICK WHITMAN
NWPHOTO.COM
Hoarders Don’t Advertise If ever there was a poster-boy for hoarding, it was A.K. Miller. The rare visitor found Miller and wife Imogene in a ramshackle house down a dirt road in rural Vermont, with a large cache of Stutz automobiles in various rundown outbuildings and no visible means of support. Miller believed in paying pennies on the dollar and was generally formidable. He had no social security number, never paid federal taxes and lived under the most primi- tive conditions. "There was an indoor toilet," says Miles Morris, former vice president of auction house Christie's, "but no walls around it."
If you banged on his door and he didn’t send you packing, Miller might put you to work chopping wood while dangling the possibility of a glimpse of his Stutz trove. In later years, the Millers became obsessed with their newfound fundamentalist religion and increasingly reclusive, and the cars continued to deteriorate. Yet despite their eccentricities and painfully frugal existence, the couple had amassed well over $2 million in gold, silver and securities, not to mention their many Stutz cars.
Not So Sweet Home Chicago Dr. Hacker explains that compulsive
hoarding is not really a complex problem. “You’re talking about a high-energy person with the inability to release anything. And you have an enabling person, possibly a spouse.” The enabler was certainly present for A.K. Miller, as well as for Chicago col- lector/hoarder Lee Roy Hartung, who proved that Miller was hardly the only man for whom collecting old automo- biles devolved into something dark
and unhealthy. But as Dr. Saxena ex- plains, “Compulsive hoarding doesn’t always stand alone.” Clinical psychol- ogist Marc Perlman, Ph.D., agrees: “Sometimes we get lucky and there’s a singular issue, but much of the time it’s intertwined with other stuff.”
When he died, Hartung left behind a large building filled with layers of ar- tifacts. Collector friend Dale Walksler said that when Hartung started his collection in the 1960s, “it was very orderly, with precise rows of cars. But he held onto everything, from baby buggies to one of the largest known license plate collections.” Walksler ex- plained that in time the storage build- ing turned into “a tunnel you walked through and it became chaotic.”
After his death, Hartung’s lady friend invited Auctions America to auction the collection. But, says Auctions America’s Ian Kelleher, she also wanted to keep random items. Kelle- her recalls that it took the Auctions America team two full months to sort Hartung’s lifetime of gathering into
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