Walt Cranford's antique store is crammed with old marbles, a Picasso lithograph and a Justin Timberlake action figure, but his PEZ dispenser collection requires its own room -- a closet-sized shrine so stuffed with kitschy candy it includes three different stages of Elvis: skinny, soldier and fat Las Vegas.
Newton Antiques & Collectibles holds roughly 8,000 of the cherished plastic devices for dispensing sugar tablets the size of aspirin, but if you count all five of Cranford's storage units, his PEZ treasury numbers more than 90,000 in all.
Any kid who walks in gets one for free.
He owns a Santa PEZ, a Black Santa PEZ, and a third Santa PEZ painted to look like Abe Lincoln. His collection includes both a standard E.T. and an E.T. wrapped in a red blanket. With a gleam in his eye, he can show off Lucy from Peanuts and an alternate "Psycho" Lucy with bulging white eyeballs.
Within the last few weeks, he bought a Bitcoin PEZ and a Marilyn Monroe, and he traveled to South Carolina just to buy every dispenser in the limited Energizer Bunny edition -- unavailable locally.
"I guess I'm just a big kid when it comes to PEZ," he said, he said from his store in downtown Newton, not far from Hickory. "I love 'em. I don't eat much candy, though."
To spend 30 minutes with Cranford is to rummage through the world's coolest basement, a tour lovingly curated by a proprietor who carves canes in his spare time, decorating the handles with lizards and spoonbills, and who can identify and date any marble you bring into his Catawba County shop.
He has gathered enough memorabilia from various World's Fairs, dating back to Chicago in 1893, that this collection also needs its own room. The bamboo parasol from Chicago 1933 takes up a whole corner.
Inside this mountain of forgotten things, he can identify the first PEZ dispenser he ever purchased -- a Pinocchio that cost $5 at a flea market in Morganton. When he found out its actual worth -- $150 -- his PEZ mania caught fire.
"I've been to 14 conventions, and I've been all over the world," he said. "I've bought $700 worth of PEZ over the phone."
Kids of any age remember their first pack of PEZ, devoured in seconds through the head of Bugs Bunny or Yosemite Sam as hungrily as an asthmatic with an inhaler.
The more avid fans maybe know that PEZ was developed in Austria as an alternative to smoking, and that its capitalized letters stand for a shortened version of the German word for peppermint: Pfefferminze.
But before meeting Cranford, who would know that PEZ has an official historian, whose book traces the candy holders to their origins, giving a value to each one? Who would guess that PEZ candy has a shelf life of roughly eight years?
"It won't hurt you," he says. "It just turns hard."
Amazingly, Cranford's collection isn't the world's largest. But it may be the most dearly loved.
Cranford keeps the rarest and most valuable PEZ models mounted on the wall: the "Eerie Series" of monsters from the 1960s, and the eyeball resting inside an outstretched hand.
"I got that in Tennessee and the man wouldn't take any less than $500 for it," he said. "I've never seen another one at a PEZ convention."
He still buys them weekly. There's a Game of Thrones series, an Orange County Choppers series, a Marvel Heroes series.
Cranford can hardly keep track.
"What's this little girl's name?" he asks, picking one from a pile. "Peppermint Patty?"
He points to his favorites. They sit too far away to grab, blocked by too many other Spidermen and Papa Smurfs, so Cranford gestures with his cane -- topped by a Mr. Bubble PEZ.
"There's a lady who found me," Cranford said, "and when I opened this door, she said, 'Can I take some of your babies home with me?' I said, 'Well, I'll have to think hard on that.'"
With this collection, Cranford celebrates the world's creative offerings, characters from Frankenstein to Tigger, all of them the product of inspired minds and displayed on a machine designed to make life sweeter -- one little piece at a time.