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Reprinted from the Hoover Employee Newsletter, Ohio
Vickie Poland and Greg Brown were interviewed by personnel from the Hoover Employee Newsletter.
The Queen of M&M Candies
If your on a diet, avoid Vickie Poland's basement. That's because it is nearly impossible to merge from there without craving those sweet treats that melt in your mouth, not in your hand. Vickie has turned a side of her basement into what would be conservatively described as a high shrine to M&Ms. More than 600 M&M trinkets - items as diverse as clocks to dispensers to birdhouses to mousepads - are meticulously jammed into an area the size of a boxing ring. There's even a Waterford crystal with a grinning M&M cartoon character on its side. But here's the scary part: She and her boyfriend Greg Brown have collected all this stuff in less than two years. She agrees that her vigor for collecting anything with M&Ms on it verges on the maniacal. "When there's something I need to complete a set, that's all I focus on," she says. "I've got to get it. I won't do anything else." There are other signs of near obsession:
- Vickie and Greg refuse to visit Las Vegas because the city is the site of an M&M collectors' store. "We'd need a truck to get everything back home," she says to Greg without a hint of sarcasm. Greg nods knowingly.
- She is convinced that the UPS man deliberately waits until after 2 p.m. (when she's at work) to deliver her M&M stuff because she gets so excited and animated that it likely delays his progress.
- Vickie's going to get a tattoo of one of the M&M characters - a gift from her son - but she's held off because she doesn't know where to put it. "I want to be able to show people; I'm thinking about my toe."
Her collection started innocently enough. A lifelong aficionado of M&Ms, Vickie was looking at an M&M dispenser in her house when she began to wonder what other collectibles were out there. She visited a few flea markets, where she found a surprising array of items. She was hooked. Today she and Greg concentrate on getting the hard-to-find collectibles. "I don't like the stuff that everybody can get," she says. Hard to find usually means an item that was released in Europe but not in the United States. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of such items, including large sets of "toppers", or decorative caps for the candy-cane-like tubes of M&M candies sold in stores. Greg tends to focus his attention on the toppers, which he keeps in neat rows on shelves in the basement. Vickie and Greg belong to the M&M Collectors Club, and they track their keep in a catalog packed with all sorts of items that celebrate the candies. "They say that it's the collection that smiles back at you," she says while standing under a glowing sting of Christmas lights shaped in the pudgy silhouettes of the M&M characters. Even friends at Hoover have gotten swept up in Vickie's enthusiasm for her hobby. They often surprise her with items they found while out shopping. "It's unbelievable the stuff they've found for me," she says. But the best part of her hobby, Vickie says, is that she shares it with Greg. In fact, Vickie's relationship with Greg was cemented when early on, she discovered a one-pound bag of M&Ms in his lunch pail. "I knew that he was the one for me."
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