Here's an odd, long (but cool, I think) story which relates to the topic (be patient, though):
A couple of years ago, I received an email with the subject "Are you the Robert Lancaster who attended Cal State Fullerton" and the body of the email continued "...in the mid 1970s?"
I did indeed attend CSU Fullerton from around 1976-1978, but had not made any lasting nor meaningful friendships there. I could not remember the names of anyone I had met there, and would have been surprised if anyone I had met there remembered my name either, so I was very curious as to who might have sent the email.
When I replied that I had indeed attended back then, and asked if I knew the person who had sent the email, he replied that no, he did not know me. He had recently purchased an old edition of a Justice League of America comic book at a comic store and, when he opened it at home to read it, a CSUF report card for Robert Lancaster from 1976 fell out!
Intrigued, he had Googled my name, and found a page about me which showed him that I was about the right age, and had lived in Southern California in my youth, so he contacted me.
Another thing which absolutely confirmed (for me, anyway) that it was me: Justice League of America was the only comic I had ever collected with any consistency. I had collected it from grade school through my college years, and had every issue from around #12 through around #120 in a shoebox somewhere.
So how did my comic end up in a comic store near San Diego?
Well, I had recently spent nearly a year in various hospitals, after having suffered a massive stroke. I had spent about the first two months of that in a coma, and was not expected to live (my wife says that the docs told her that I should have died at least twice by that point).
Facing mounting medical bills and the likelihood of soon becoming a widow, Susan had, at the urging of my siblings, decided to try to sell off some of the fifty years' worth of junk I had accumulated (I'm a bit of a packrat), and my JLA collection had been a part of what she had asked my brother and his wife to sell off. Luckily, my mother, knowing how much my playing card collection meant to me, had convinced her not to sell THAT. (whew!)
I called my brother and found out that, while they had sold via eBay most of what Susan had given them, they had sold my JLA collection to a comic store near their home in San Diego.
The gentleman who had emailed me was kind enough to snailmail me the comic and the report card (holy crap I had bad grades!), and refused my offer to reimburse him for them.
So that's another thing I collected - JLA comics. Modi's post reminded me of that.
