Thanks for the compliment, Rick. But when it comes to story telling about lily history, Johan Mak takes the cake. Once he gets on the roll with lily history, his stories come through with excitement, even in writing. It makes me chuckle inside with enjoyment while my mind is so captivated, the whole world around me is vanished for a few moments in time and space. I've never mentioned much on the forum at least, about all the lily history junk I've collected over the last 25 and more years. Mainly, I guess, because most people don't really care about what the parents to that pretty lily they just bought were--or even how it came to be. I have a whole former bedroom piled high with boxes on top of boxes of old books, newspapers, trade papers, flower magazines and so on, even court documents--anything that had something to do with lilies is in there. For an idea, here's something that many on this forum can relate too; I have one full 'mint' set of NALS yearbooks and every quarterly NALS quarterly bulletin but three in there. But those yearbooks, while they are informative to an extent, they cannot tell all about what the real world of lily farming in North America was really like and how it worked as a livelihood for many farmers in the Northwest, not just the few well knowns that most people know of. And, most all the information I have is from old printed material before the days of the internet. Nowadays, if it happened after 1990, it's pretty easy to find anything.
Overtime, I've become acquianted with a lot of lily people and as time passes, you learn more and more about each of them and there's always more than just the common interest of growing lilies. Johan Mak also is very interested in lily history and has a much larger collection than I do--I would guess probably 3 to 5 times more. Luckily for us, we both have understanding wives who let us store all this old stuff in the same house they live in.
