Enigmatic Mr. Peanut Intrigues but He's a Tough Nut to Crack

By JIM WASHBURN

Jan. 31, 1995 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

TUSTIN — Mr. Peanut. You see him everywhere, but does anyone really know him? Just what is it the jaunty corporate trademark is always smiling about? Is his monocle necessary or an affectation? Where’s he going in that top hat?

Does he live in mortal dread of elephants and baseball fans? Does he just stand idly by, inscrutable, as his fellow nuts are being led off to the roaster? Is he really a refined country gentleman or a maniacal half-man, half-peanut monster, the Creature from the Snack Legume?

Mr. Peanut collector Rick Turner wonders about all this sometimes, as he pores over his collection of salt shakers, radios, peanut cans, beach blankets, pickle forks, advertisements and other sundry items made in the image of Mr. Peanut. “I really haven’t been able to find out much about him,” he said. “I tried writing to the company, but I never heard back. So I’m always trying to find out more.” One of his better sources of information has been a handful of 1950s Mr. Peanut “paint and color” books he’s picked up. One presents the Presidents of the United States, up to Dwight D. Eisenhower. Another is titled, “Seeing the USA with Mr. Peanut.”

“You know he drives,” Turner stated, showing an illustration of Mr. Peanut behind the wheel of a ‘50s roadster. “And there he is with his lid off. That’s rare. You don’t see him with his hat off very much.” In the book Mr. Peanut is waving to a group of kids, who shout back, “Goodby Mr Peanut! Thanks for taking us to the Peanut Farm and Planters Peanut Factory!”

Turner once tried to meet Mr. Peanut, after reading he’d be appearing at a local Save-On. They arrived late, though, and he was nowhere in sight.

“So one of our daughters made the manager go get the guy. But he didn’t have the right attire on, and he clearly wasn’t into it. It was very disappointing,” Turner said, showing me a photo of him and family members gathered around a man in a Mr. Peanut costume. Instead of stovepipe black arms and legs, he’s wearing a short-sleeved plaid shirt and slacks. No one looks very happy, especially Mr. Peanut.

And who says he has to be any happier than the rest of us? Maybe he is just Everyman, and, to some degree, perhaps we are all Mr. Peanut.

I know I am. Once an acquaintance in the grocery distribution business got me a gig working as Mr. Peanut at a supermarket grand re-opening. The world is a very different place when ensconced in a hefty plastic shell, your only view of the goings-on around you being through two screened eyeholes in the top hat that don’t quite line up with your eyes. Condensation collects, making the peanut-butter-colored interior walls clammy. The world sounds muffled, and you can hear your own heart beating.

You have no peripheral view and try to avoid knocking stacked products off the shelves. You wonder if you should say anything to the retired persons on a budget grabbing needy handfuls of the sample nut packs you’re handing out. You try to stay aright when school kids sneak up behind you and attempt to push you over.

Finally you snap, grabbing one kid roughly by the arm. You lean over him, his peanut target now a looming presence filling his vision, hissing, “Kid, you try that again and I’ll twist this arm right out of its socket!” You give him a gentle push, wondering if you are really projecting the correct product image.

“That’s the Mr. Peanut I know and love,” said Turner, laughing, when I told him of this experience. He’s joking, of course. The 48-year-old financial consultant prefers a kinder, gentler legume. But as serious a collector as he is, he and wife Carol like to approach the subject with a whimsical humor.

Turner has fond memories of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. “I was ecstatic. He was doing peanuts, and his brother was making beer: I was in hog heaven. I have a six-pack of Billy Beer that’s never been cracked, not that I’ve ever wanted to,” he said.

The Turners eat a lot of peanuts, buying only Planters. The shelves of their family room typically hold a portion of his collection, just enough to give their daughters’ boyfriends the creeps. With those two daughters (from Carol’s previous marriage) off in college, Turner now thinks he needs a whole room for the collection.

Carol said, “He’s trying to talk me into, ‘Let’s just make this the Mr. Peanut shrine room.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ ”

Since his introduction near the turn of the century, the salty character has graced any number of products and promotional items. Many, such as the Mr. Peanut charm bracelet and rag dolls, would be sent out in exchange for peanut wrappers. Turner has them, from toothbrushes to transistor radios. He could probably survive using nothing but Mr. Peanut items.

Through a relative in the grocery business, they sometimes get neat promotional items, such as a tyke-size wooden peanut wagon.

The couple spend a lot of time going through antique malls. They know there are other collectors, because someone snatches up the items they don’t buy.

“And I once met the broker for a lady who was selling her collection. He told me she wanted $4,000 cash, and I said I wanted to see it. But he said in order to see it she wants to make sure you’re serious and able to buy it, which at the time I wasn’t. It was appointment only, and I guess you had to have a bank draft to get through the threshold,” he said.

Turner has met only one other collector, a client for whom he was once doing a home loan. The client then turned him onto a Mr. Peanut fan club newsletter. But by the time Turner tried calling, the numbers in it were no longer valid. He did learn through it, though, that there are conventions of Mr. Peanut aficionados. “I guess they’re like Trekkies. They had something in Anaheim near Disneyland where they all met and traded and swapped lies and all that. I would have killed to have gone to that, but I didn’t know about it.”

The couple have talked about going back to a Mr. Peanut convention in Dayton, Ohio. Turner said, “I saw a picture of a past president of the Mr. Peanut club, wearing a Mr. Peanut tie. I would love to go to that. I think it would be a great time.”

“I don’t think I could keep a straight face through it,” Carol said.

“We’d have the best time.”

“But we’d be in tears probably.”

For all the fun they have collecting, Turner’s collection began with a cup, and it was one filled with sadness.

Not long after a son was born in 1975 in a previous marriage, Turner said he found his wife was seeing someone else, a close friend of his.

“There was a nasty divorce. We tried getting back together, and it didn’t work. Then in 1978, when my son was 3, she moved out of her house in the middle of the night, and I never saw him again,” he said.

He doesn’t hold himself blameless.

“I couldn’t deal with it. I couldn’t forgive her, so I didn’t. I’d always bring it up, and I was always suspicious. It just went from bad to real bad, to ugly. I was hard to be around for her, no question about it. Her distancing herself from me was probably the best thing she could have done. But to take him was out of the question, just cold and calculated,” he said.

One of the things left behind was a Mr. Peanut mug. Turner saved that, figuring his son would like to have it back when he saw him again, and began buying other Mr. Peanut items to go with it.

“I had private investigators, all kinds of people, looking,” he said. “Every penny I made, I was giving to people to try to find him. There were no organizations like there are today. Finally, about six or seven years on, enough time had passed that I didn’t look anymore.”

Eventually, a friend turned his ex-wife up in a computer credit check, and Turner thinks he knows where she is, in another state. He hasn’t tried to contact his son, though, believing it would only precipitate more disruption in his life.

“So I’ve just been waiting for him to find me. He may. He may not. I’ve learned to live without him, but I always think about him,” Turner said, displaying a photo of a smiling child on a tricycle. “His name’s Timothy. That’s what he looked like when I last saw him, and to me he still does, he’s still 3 years old. I can’t imagine what he looks like now, being as tall as I am.”

When he and Carol met, he’d been single for 12 years and she for 15.

“After that long you’ve pretty much kissed enough frogs to know who you’re going to be compatible with. It’s a great relationship,” he said.

If or when he does see his son, Turner doesn’t necessarily expect him to be impressed with his trove of old peanut cans and automatic pencils. Now he just collects them because he enjoys it. He also collects old shoe polish tins, Fuller Brush items and rubberband balls.

“To me now, collecting Mr. Peanut is just a hobby, something I do, and something Carol puts up with. More than anything I collect him because I kind of identify with him. He’s kind of skinny. My body looks like his, kinda,” he said.

On a couple of occasions he’s started to make a Mr. Peanut Halloween costume, with chicken wire and papier-mache , but never finished one. An authentic plastic costume is on sale in an Orange antique shop for $850, and that’s tempting him.

If there’s a Grail, it may be a commercial peanut roaster he saw for $8,000 in a shop in Hollywood. It was evidently designed for public display, because it had such non-essential parts as a life-size Mr. Peanut working a crank. “It was all brass and shiny and beautiful,” Turner enthused, with a gleam in his eye.

They’d probably need a larger home to house it. In the meantime, they have sufficient material to continue speculating on the enigmatic Mr. Peanut.

Turner said, “I see him as maybe English, very prim and proper, educated. If I could ask him anything, it might be, ‘Why do we never see Mrs. Peanut?’ ”

His private life is shrouded in mystery.

“He has no parents, no wife, no little peanuts,” noted Carol.

“He drives ,” offered Turner helpfully.

“He goes on trips, takes vacations, umm. . . and he knew Ike, evidently,” Carol said, concluding their list of peanut facts, as they both laughed.