August 16, 1996

Apel displays his wares at a recent flea market at Pershing Audiorium.


His Paper Trail is Quite a Hike

UNL's Larry Apel Has a Passion for Paper


By Robert Sheldon
News & Information

To Larry Apel, recycle is the seven-letter equivalent of a lot of four-letter words not usually used in polite society. It's a euphemism for the worst of all possible sins - the wanton destruction of potentially valuable paper materials. Apel dreads the sight of paper condemned to the recycling bin. He gets shivers from watching paper smolder in a bonfire, or rotting away in a rural drainage ditch.
Apel, retiring as associate director of financial aid at UNL, collects paper - all kinds of paper, although he isn't particularly fond of newspapers, which turn yellow and decompose too swiftly for his taste. But old magazines, maps, travel brochures, yearbooks, trade cards, calendars, train schedules, or anything that has to do with Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, or the Beatles will set him to quivering like a hunting dog on the scent or a fire horse responding to an alarm.
"I'm always on the hunt," Apel said. "I drive 5,000 miles a year around Nebraska and Iowa, and if I hear that somebody wants to sell a good paper collection I'll travel up to 250 miles to get to it."
The result of Apel's fascination with paper is a basement stacked with it. Some of it, like old car magazines or Life magazines, is arranged in order in bookcases and old orange crates. A lot of it is piled in stacks waiting for Apel to sift through it, organize it and catalog it somehow.
It's a task that Apel thinks will take him several years, even with the increased time he will be able to devote to his avocation now that he's retired. His retirement comes at an age 57 when he remains boundlessly enthusiastic and relentlessly energetic, able to look at his future in terms of a new beginning rather than as a vantage point from which to look back on where he's been.
He's already had two careers. Before he joined the UNL staff in 1978, Apel was in the U.S. Air Force for 20 years, serving as a navigator aboard large aircraft, first on KB-50s, which were B-29s converted to tankers for refueling other aircraft in the air, and later guiding C-130 cargo planes in more than 1,000 sorties over Vietnam. A native of Falls City, he came to UNL to teach ground school to AFROTC cadets from 1972-76. He retired in 1978 as a Lt. Colonel.
The Falls City connection is important in terms of its relationship to his love affair with all things paper. Before he went away to Peru State College, his boyhood was spent in Falls City, which had all of the bucolic flavor of small town mid-America in the '40s and '50s that was immortalized on cover after cover of the old Saturday Evening Post.
As a matter of fact, a lot of Saturday Evening Post covers did depict Falls City scenes, as the work of artist and illustrator John Falter, a Falls City native whose covers adorned more issues of the Post than those of any other artist except Norman Rockwell.
"My mother kept a copy of one cover by Falter that showed the main street of Falls City as it was in the 1940s," Apel said. "It showed a lot of places I knew when I was growing up, and I always wanted that cover for my own."
He got his wish about 15 years ago, when his mother conspired with Apel's wife to have the Falter cover for Dec. 21, 1946, framed and presented to him as a Christmas gift. That prized and still revered illustration was the cornerstone of Apel's paper collection. It whetted his appetite for still more of Falter's magazine illustrations and fueled a lust for paper collectibles of all description.
"I ran an ad for Falter covers in the newspaper and an elderly woman called me," Apel said. "'I think I have one,' she told me.
"She did, along with a lot more, a whole lot more. Her house was full of magazines, comics, catalogs, old books, and advertisements and illustrations from magazines."
Apel ended up spending "hours and hours, days and days, weekends and weekends," sifting through a lifetime of materials the woman and her husband had collected over the years.
"I liked the visual part of it," Apel said. "It reached out and grabbed me and has never let me go."
To this day, Apel remains a generalist, as opposed to collectors who specialize in something like old railroad schedules or magazines devoted to cars or tractors. A lot of what he has, once it is cataloged and packaged, is for sale. He displays some items, mostly books, in BB& R Antique Mall at 1709 O Street in Lincoln.
He can't go wrong with some kinds of materials, he said. "There are things that last. Marilyn Monroe has always been hot (he adds, 'Sorry about that, but you know what I mean'), so has Elvis, and so are the Beatles." Sports figures are popular too, and for some reason, a lot of collectors are looking for pictures of a model named Bettie Page, who was a magazine pinup girl in the 1940s and 1950s.
Paper collectibles don't have to be old to be popular. Relatively recent Star Wars and Star Trek books become instant collectibles.
"Collectibles are being made every hour," Apel said. "If you can figure out what's going to be hot in the future, you can collect a lot of recent stuff that will be valuable some day."
Even so, what history teaches Apel is that you never can be sure what will capture the attention of collectors. Who would have suspected, for instance, that two sets of paper doll cutouts featuring the Dionne quintuplets (that probably cost less than a dime in the 1930s) would, by the time they came into Apel's hands, be worth several hundred dollars?
Apel has been selling paper collectibles at flea markets in Lincoln for more than a dozen years. "I never go to a flea market that I don't learn something," he said. "People like to talk about this kind of stuff, and it opens my eyes to things I'd never thought about before, like looking for old Buck Rogers comic strips from Sunday comic sections, or finding out that somebody is interested in some specific area, like old hunting and fishing magazines, or calendars and other materials about the old Anarco Oil Company."
Apel is especially fond of maps, including old highway maps of the "teens and twenties" that show symbols that were tacked or painted onto telephone poles to mark highway routes. And he has numerous maps from World War II prepared for allied troops taking part in the Normandy landings and the subsequent push into the German homeland.
He has a copy of the very first Life magazine from 1936 but values it less than the magazines of the 1920s and 1930s that were lavishly illustrated by artists working with brush and pen rather than cameras. Thumbing through the advertisements and story illustrations in a Good Housekeeping magazine from the 1920s, Apel noted that "Life magazine, by using photographs instead of artists' illustrations, killed this kind of magazine."
That's why Apel is thrilled by finding a pile of magazines in somebody's basement or attic. Magazines or maps or advertising blotters or trade cards or books or comic books or brochures for tractors and old cars or railroad schedules or calendars or even old toys, match books, and pencils with advertisements on them are all treasures to Apel.
Apel is so certain that old magazines are as fascinating to other people as they are to him that he's thinking about "starting a service."
"For a lot of people, certain dates have a special meaning, whether it's a birthday, a wedding anniversary, or some other significant event in their lives. "People can contact me and I could provide a magazine from the week of the event to be commemorated, whether it be the year they graduated from high school, a golden wedding anniversary or some other event," he said.

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