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Photo by Andy Atkinson Show us your Pez: Bonnie Brekke, left, Dee Anne Everson, center, and Barb Brazier show some of the 195 Pez candy dispensers at United Way of Jackson County. It just grew, one head at a time Kids' candy toys sweeten the day at United Way By BILL KETTLER Pez heads have taken over the United Way of Jackson County. Barney Rubble, Wonder Woman and Garfield the Cat stand in a doorsill. Tweety and Sylvester crowd against Scrooge McDuck and a rank of Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles. Bugs Bunny and Spider-Man hold down part of a window ledge near Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog. At last count, 195 little candy dispensers adorned most of the slender, flat spaces around the United Way office. There may be larger Pez collections in Southern Oregon, but no one at United Way has heard of them. The collection started humbly enough in the summer of 1996, with a slip of the tongue. Dee Anne Everson, United Way's executive director, was working as a part-timer back then. Toward the end of a long day, Everson mangled the names of two colleagues, Barb Brazier and Bonnie Brekke, and "Barney" came out of her mouth. Everybody got a good laugh from Everson's twisted tongue. She stretched the joke a little farther, and bought Brazier and Brekke matching Barney Rubble Pez dispensers. They brought her a Dino (the Flintstone dinosaur) Pez. "It just kind of mushroomed from that," said Brazier. United Way volunteers noticed the little candy dispensers and started bringing others to the office. "People brought in a few more, and pretty soon we had 10," said Brazier. "Then it became a challenge to see if they could bring us some we didn't have." United Way staff and volunteers started looking for unusual Pez dispensers on vacation. They asked friends in Europe to send Pez dispensers that couldn't be found in American stores. Everson found a shop in Vancouver, British Columbia, that sold Pez dispensers generally found only in Europe. The United Way crew has plenty of fellow travelers on the Pez road. More than 70 Internet sites are devoted to Pez dispensers. A man in Burlingame, Calif., maintains a Pez "museum." And people regularly buy and sell unusual or out-of-production Pez dispensers on Internet auction sites. "Christie's (the international auction house) has auctioned them for as much as $3,000 a piece," said Scott McWhinnie, "Pezident" and chief executive officer of Pez Candy Inc., in Orange, Conn. "Collections have gone for $10,000." McWhinnie said there's so much interest in the little toys (which cost about a dollar, with two packages of Pez candy) because they rekindle happy memories of childhood. "It's in people's mind forever as a fun thing," he said. McWhinnie said it's impossible to say exactly how many different Pez dispensers have been produced. Some heads have been made with several different colored bases. Some heads, such as Mickey Mouse and Batman, have been issued more than once in different styles. "It depends on how you count," he said. "I say `hundreds and hundreds.' There's 125 on the market right now." The little sugar candies were first sold in Vienna more than 70 years ago by Eduard Haas. The Austrian candymaker marketed them as a breath mint, and coined a name from three letters of the German word for peppermint, pfefferminz. Fruit flavors were added when Pez came to the United States in 1952. Today the candy is sold in lemon, orange, grape, and strawberry flavors, as well as the original peppermint. Everson said the United Way crew always keeps several of the dispensers loaded, and a drawer of refills for stressful days. "It keeps us sane." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA