The spoon collector

Collecting spoons isn’t something sophomore journalism major Catie Laikin obsesses about.

She doesn’t rummage through flea markets looking for gems. She doesn’t attend conventions. She doesn’t visit collectors’ websites. She doesn’t even remember what her first piece was, though she has a hunch it might have come from Disneyland.

It’s just this thing she does.

“I didn’t go into it to be a collector,” she said. “I just went into it to have memories of all those places.”

Laikin said she has been gathering souvenir spoons from everywhere she visits since she was about 8 years old and that her greatest impetus for collecting is to help remember her trips.

She also collects minerals, postcards, stamps and coins — the latter thanks to a lineage of numismatists — but her largest collection is made up of spoons. She has about 120, and each one helps her recall the place she found it.

“They usually have the name of the place or a picture of it,” she said. “Collecting them is about the memories I have with them, being able to say, ‘Oh, this was this place’ or ‘Oh, that was that trip.’”

Laikin first began collecting spoons through a friend, Christine Augusta, who introduced her to the souvenirs when they were both in elementary school.

Laikin started buying spoons for Augusta on family vacations, which led to picking up two so she could also have one for herself, which led to becoming a fully-fledged spoon collector.

What makes Laikin’s collection interesting is her apparent distance from it.

“I haven’t looked at them in quite a while,” she said.

The California native, whose collection remains at her parents’ house, can’t even name an absolute favorite spoon.

Admittedly, she isn’t at her peak of collecting anymore, even if she does still keep an eye out for the occasional flashy spoon.

“In middle school, whenever I would go on family trips or wherever, and my friend who collects them, she would send them to me,” she said. “I’m still always looking for them, but I’m not going that many places anymore.”

If the stereotype of the person with a quirky collection is a socially-maladjusted Internet dweller who goes to the convention center every month to meet up with her fellow nerds and determine whether the 2001 or 2002 model of a given trinket is superior, then Laikin is a breath of fresh air.

She loves her collection and takes good care of it, displaying favorites in a shadowbox her parents bought her for her birthday one year and keeping all the original packaging, but it doesn’t rule her life.

One theme that keeps reappearing in her discussion of her spoons ties the whole collection together: memories.

“I’m just doing it to remember all the stuff,” she said.

“Some people like to have shirts from different places, or have something from a place. It’s why souvenir shops are there — to buy a souvenir.”