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Bob Schapiro explained how he arrived at his latest obsession two years ago.
“It was a day like today: hot,” said the 92-year-old. “I was walking down the street and I passed a cigar store.”
Bob doesn’t smoke — “Why take a poisonous plant and rub it on your lungs?” he said — but the store was nicely air-conditioned, a respite from the heat. Inside, Bob fell in love.
“They were so handsomely made,” he said, not of the cigars — the Cohibas and Montecristos — but of the boxes the cigars came in.
Some were glossily varnished, with dovetail joints and beautiful brass hinges. Others were slightly rough to the touch, their wood aromatic and infused with the spicy smell of tobacco. Some had the name of their contents stamped in gold, others had the name burned into the wood. They were like tiny reliquaries.
The boxes said hello to Bob.
“There are three rules of collecting,” said Bob, who owned a Long Island antique shop for decades and is thus qualified to list them. “Number one: Don’t buy it unless it says hello to you. Number two: Good stuff gets better. Garbage remains garbage forever. And number three: Buy it when you see it.”
Bob bought a few boxes. Then a few more. It was a process he’d first undergone as a child in Manhattan. “You start out as a kid living in New York, you collect marbles,” he said. “Marbles are one of the few games you can play in the street. Then you collect stamps and coins.”
When he got older, Bob graduated to books. “Limited-edition Bibles,” he said. “When that collection started to take over the house like the boxes here, I sold it. Did quite well.”
The cigar boxes — as many as 400 at one point, Bob estimates — haven’t quite taken over his one-bedroom apartment, but they have become a dominant part of its decor, stacked atop one another on shelves, leaning against the wall in his bedroom, crowding his nightstand. But they don’t look out of place.
“There’s no such thing as too much stuff,” Bob said. His walls are covered with paintings, the horizontal surfaces are adorned with clocks, plates, statues, bronzes. In his living room, the gaze from a Japanese Kabuki mask intersects that of a severe-looking bust, a reddish figure with a scowling face.
“That’s Tecumseh,” Bob said. “That I bought from a house in Sag Harbor. They bought it from a cigar store. People try to buy it, but I won’t sell it. He’s my friend.”
This year, Bob was out at lunch with a friend. On the way home, she said needed to make a stop. She had some Girl Scout cookies she wanted to drop off for the patients at Walter Reed. And that’s how Bob’s stock of cigar boxes began dropping. Every couple of weeks now he loads dozens of them into a folding shopping cart and heads to the Army hospital. He starts on the seventh floor and works his way down, stopping at any open hospital room door.
“I just hand them out,” he said. “It’s something they can keep by their bed.”
When Bob told the people at Georgetown Tobacco that he was donating boxes to injured soldiers, they gave them to him for free. When employees at the TD Bank down the street from the retirement home Bob lives in, Friendship Terrace, heard about what he does, they donated pens and playing cards for him to put in the boxes.
Does a wounded soldier need a cigar box, even a cigar box as beautiful as the ones Bob hands out? Maybe not, but maybe the box isn’t the point. Maybe the gesture is. “They’re very happy,” he said. “Here’s somebody they don’t know giving them something because they want to. When you get something out of the blue, it has a good effect on you.”
Poor vision kept Bob out of the Army at first during World War II, but he thinks he knows what the patients at Walter Reed are going through. He eventually joined the Army as a medic. The war ended before he shipped out to Japan, but he cared for many a patient stateside.
“The toughest part was riding the hospital trains,” he said, growing silent at the memory.
Then: “I can’t stop collecting. When I stop collecting, you’ll know I’m gone.”
source: washingtonpost.com