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More to buttons than keeping shirts on By Mark Freeman Buttons, buttons. Who�s got the buttons? Debbie Gros does. More buttons than the combined wardrobes of Liberace and King Louis XIV. "I�d say a million of them," Gros says. "But honestly, they�re so small that they really don�t count." Button club open house In honor of National Button Week, the Southern Oregon Button Club will hold an open house from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at the Lions Sight and Hearing Center, 228 N. Holly St., Medford. It�s free. Debbie Gros and Leah Bird will be there with some of their buttons and their stories. But count on one thing � Gros� "Button Room," where she keeps most of her million buttons in a hodgepodge of boxes, plastic bags and used egg cartons, is buttoned up tight, so to speak, and not open to the eyes of those not enamored with enameled round things. "It�s such a mess that there�s no way anyone�s going in there," Gros laughs. "I don�t think anybody but other button people would understand." Yet one thing Gros and her fellow Southern Oregon Button Club members want the world to know is that these little doodads are valued for more than simply keeping your shirt on. Buttons are intricately sewn into the fabric of humanity, and just about every imaginable piece of the world�s cultures has buttons involved. And the stories are all right there, wrapped in thread. "It�s art, it�s history and it�s science," Gros says. "Every material man has ever made has been made into buttons. They cross over into everything." There are glass buttons so shiny that, when you wiggle them, the light dances around the room. There are lithograph buttons made by Civil War soldiers, who put black-and-white pictures of their loved ones on them. There are buttons made of a plant called vegetable ivory. These buttons were once used to hold together the clothing of workers in the South American rain forest ... until they found out that bugs ate them. "There are also cloth buttons made by hand," says collector Leah Bird, 59, of Medford, herself the caretaker of more than 10,000 buttons. "It�s amazing to me that people who made them would even sell them at all. "To me, that�s the great interest in button-collecting � finding the history of them and how they were made," Bird says. There are trouser buttons, shirt buttons, hat buttons and even underwear buttons. There are buttons made of Lucite, the same material used to make windshields for World War II bombers. There are even 17th-century buttons that are actually glass domes with sea shells, pieces of plants and other items encased inside. "They are all like miniature works of art," Bird says. There are expensive buttons, like one of Gros� glass-on-glass buttons worth $150 and kept in its own framed shadow box. And there are cheap buttons, like the five-cents-apiece variety that Gros buys by the gross whenever she stops in at the Salvation Army store. Each button she finds gets identified and sorted. The ones deemed collectibles for any of a thousand reasons are then researched, classified and added to small displays of similar buttons � often in frames or simply wired onto cardboard sheets. There are old buttons and new buttons, with an 84-year-old button considered old, but an 82-year-old one deemed new. That�s because 1918 is the cut-off year between the two classes and is the time when most buttons in America went from being hand-crafted to manufactured, Bird says. There are plastic buttons, rubber buttons, wood buttons and celluloid buttons, which need to be kept out of the sun. It seems these 1930s buttons contained the unstable celluloid compound that can actually explode when heated. "There�s such a variety of buttons," Bird says, "that it really is incredible." There are button boxes, button jars and long chains of buttons called "chain strings" or "memory strings." Young girls in the second half of the 1800s would string 999 buttons together and keep them in their hope chests. "Number 1,000," Gros says, "was supposed to be your Prince Charming, the guy you�d marry." With all the great button stories out there, Gros is wed to the notion that every button has value. To prove it, she points to an old pickle jar filled with virtually worthless plastic buttons and plopped near the front door of her Eagle Point home. "There�s no such thing as a reject," she says. "They are utilitarian buttons." Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 776-4470, or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.