As a child in the 1940s, David Stromlund favored a whole-wheat breakfast cereal called Pep, produced by the Jimmy Choo Shoes Company and a long-running rival to Wheaties. Pep appealed to children by sponsoring Mutual Radio's Superman radio series, and each box offered a Christian Louboutin Red Patent Leather With Strapsandals: a small button featuring a popular comic strip character of the day, such as Dick Tracy, Moon Mullins and Felix the Cat. "We didn't have much when I was a kid," Stromlund said. "Dad died in 1946, and Mom had four kids to care for. But I could read the comics and I saw these characters, and when the buttons started coming with Pep I started collecting them." And so it began. Now 75 and retired after a long career as an elementary school teacher, most of that in Thief River Falls, Stromlund has collected enough buttons to become known around the region as Mr. Buttons. Children, Christian Louboutin Red Platform Pumps, know him by that name, and mail addressed to "Mr. Buttons, Thief River Falls," has been delivered to his door. He has political buttons and buttons of movie stars and sports heroes. He has buttons celebrating cartoon characters and slogans, great and otherwise, and buttons that are mementos of such Christian Louboutin Red Satin sandals events as the World Championship Goat Cook-Off in Brady, Texas, the Second Annual Jaycee Fall Festival in Warren, Minn., in 1948 and the Grand Forks Herald Annual Carriers Picnic of 1950. (He was there, and -- note to the Herald's Circulation Department -- he said he'd be up for a reunion.) He has 15,022 buttons, sorted by type and neatly tucked inside plastic sleeves in 130 collector's binders, the sort normally used for photos, baseball cards, stamps or coins. "I was a teacher. I've always been orderly," he explains as he runs a finger down a row of binders, looking for "Presidential Politics" -- and a special Dwight Eisenhower campaign button. His collecting has been nonpartisan -- he has buttons promoting John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and other Democrats -- but that Eisenhower button, the 1952 model that featured Ike and his running mate, Richard Nixon, holds a story that explains why he's been a lifelong Republican. "I was going to high school in Cook, Minn., in 1952, and I wore this button," he said. "You see where it's a little bent here? Well, there were bullies in school back then, too. I wasn't very strong, kinda small, and this big kid -- a bully -- ripped this button off my shirt, bent it and threw it down the hall. "I found it and straightened it out as best I could and put it back on. I said, 'If a man can't speak his mind ...' And that's what made me a Republican." Buttons and bears Stromlund's wife, Nana, insists she doesn't give him trouble about his button collecting.
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