Anita, you hit the nail on the head.

There are FANS and then there are HOARDERS. The hoarders I have known personally or heard about from close associates of theirs, obsessively collect stuff and lock it away for bragging rights. They don't even enjoy what they have, or look at it or listen to it. They COLLECT. They store it away and deprive others of access to it.

How much of the famed Newberry collection has Mike Curb (who acquired it) ever surfaced? Beyond the pieces on display temporarily in Texas, the bulk of it has never been seen by the true fans of Jim's.

At least Jim's restored Cadillac could theoretically be seen by fans aside from the newly produced video regarding it, if one only knew what car show it might be taken to.

Multiple sources have told me that the Knoxville collector has vowed to destroy his collection and one can only view that as being out of spite.

Incidentally, I've lost track of the number of times this same guy -- or his flunky acolyte in Holland -- promised to share items with the fans AFTER my book got published, so as to not help my research. Yet my book has been out for several years and nothing of significance has been released from the Knoxville collection. So it was just one giant con game they were playing with the fans.

There is a psychological condition known as hoarding syndrome and you should Google it sometime. It's sad to realize that some of Jim's irreplaceable artifacts have fallen into the clutches of these psycho hoarders -- the very thing Mary spent her entire adult life trying to AVOID happening.

BTW, that's why they hate me so intensely. They despise anyone who shares stuff with the fans; they are jealous they missed grabbing onto it. The one consolation to all this is that I have managed to share so much previously unreleased material on Jim Reeves, despite the obsessive quest by the hoarders to get ahold of it first. They have failed time and time again and things slipped through their fingers and ended up in the hands of Jim's fans. And for that I am very happy to have played a part.