Horological Meandering

Collecting can cause madness or open our eyes to the world

Mar 08, 2021,13:13 PM

This post was prompted by the wall hanging post today...

More than a few years ago, I talked to Gordon Lankton for the first time, as we were perusing a selection of Russian Icons offered for sale on a sidewalk ...

Gordon had once had 600 Russian icons in his house, filling the walls, even stacked on the floor against the wall 6 deep in each room. When they got piled in the laundry room his wife insisted he buy a building! That turned into the Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton MA. As he was showing me around the museum his wife was saying to my wife "Dear, when they have the bug there is nothing you can do but support them."

So you see my 150~ watches and 100~ icons are nothing, really.

Nor the hundreds of watches and paintings owned by my friend Alec. Hi collecting philosophy appears below:

Sadly I just learned that Gordon passed away yesterday. The world has lost a REAL COLLECTOR and ADVENTURER! Some detail from his obituary reads:

“From his early days as a Boy Scout collecting pennies, Gordon was a studious and passionate collector. Whether it was icons, African sculpture, World War I & II posters, or die-cast model cars, Gordon pursued not only the objects, but also information about their origins and the artists who created them.

Gordon was born in Peoria, Illinois in 1931. He graduated from Cornell University with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1954. His first taste of global travel came as a delegate to an international student convention in Japan. He then served in the U.S. Army Military Intelligence in Frankfurt, Germany, from 1954 to 1956.

A 25-year-old Gordon spent part of 1956 & 1957 traveling overland from Germany to Japan on an NSU motorcycle, an adventure he described in his book, The Long Way Home! “

Can you imagine yourself at 25 riding a small motorcycle across the Europe and Asian continents today?

”During this trip, Gordon began to visualize the global corporation that he would one day build. In his book, he states that “If a single theme has come out of my nine-month experience, it was somehow I have to focus my life on minimizing the enormous disparity of living conditions in the world.” It was a philosophy that would inform his leadership throughout his career and life.

In 1962, Gordon placed an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal seeking a small custom plastics injection-molding company, which resulted in his investment and eventual ownership of Nylon Products, in Clinton, Massachusetts. In his years of leadership, Gordon oversaw immense change, innovation, and growth at Nypro Inc. True to his global vision, Nypro expanded to a multi-billion dollar enterprise, including 24 companies across the continental United States as well as operations in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Ireland, France, Hungary, Russia, Denmark, China, India, Singapore, Thailand, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan. Among their molded products were common items as the Zip-Tie, cell phone cases, etc. Consistent with his lifelong belief in the worth of every individual, Gordon converted Nypro into a 100% employee-owned company in 1998.”

Some of Gordon's model cars which he had put on public display.

Gordon's African Art collection ... about which he explained, "I just fell into it by buying another guy's collection, and then I went crazy."

Alec lived near Gordon, across the state line in Rhode Island. He went crazy on art too, and then on watches -- his desk on a clean day (looks like MIH on one wrist)