The expectant mothers who visit Dr. Goodman Espy’s office in Marietta don’t seem to notice the presidents.
Documents with the handwriting of several of them, founding fathers included, adorn the obstetrician’s walls.
The doctor says the signatures of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and the other presidents are authentic. They are a drop in a sea of old things he has collected over a lifetime. His objects span the history of the United States. They spill from his office into the hallways and exam rooms, and flood his Atlanta home, where the whole basement is filled with the past.
Espy guesses he has collected more than 1,000 possessions, from Marilyn Monroe’s Louis Vuitton suitcase purchased at a Christie’s auction to the Muhammad Ali boxing shorts once owned by the Sands Casino.
He’s discovered fakes in his collection, but believes most of his finds are real. He says he doesn’t know how much he’s spent over the decades, or the value of the collection, which he protects with alarm systems.
Collecting has been one of Espy’s many interests. The 76-year-old Atlantan has fathered three daughters, helped thousands of women give birth and run scores of marathons. He struggles to explain his drive to collect so many objects — and experiences. His passion for more than a decade has been mission work abroad.
“I think it’s looking for something that I don’t know what I’m looking for,” he says, “but I know when I’ve found it.”
A number of treasures
He found a record player Elvis Presley gave to a friend. He collected Margaret Mitchell’s letters, Lou Gehrig’s wedding band, Joe Frazier’s corner robe, Joe Louis’ boxing permit and gloves, Jim Thorpe’s worn leather scrimmage shoe, Joe Namath’s jersey and Larry Bird’s too. He sleeps on Andrew Jackson’s bed and, at the landing of the stairway to his basement, he displays a wartime letter that Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote to the mother of the Sullivan brothers.
The five men died together when their ship went down in the Solomon Islands. “This is my favorite,” Espy says to a visitor. “Can you imagine the loss of five sons in one fell swoop?”
It’s not really his favorite, though.
How can it be, when he owns signatures of the Beatles, Buffalo Bill, Harry Houdini, Greta Garbo, Knute Rockne, Babe Ruth, George Custer and — this seems so unlikely — but there it is on the wall in a guest bedroom — Sitting Bull? The leader of the Lakota reportedly was illiterate but could write his own name.
Espy also has letters from Albert Einstein, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., John Belushi, Amelia Earhart, George Patton and, because he is a Southern boy from Alabama, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.
Patton and Lee, now those two and the things they touched, he says, are among his favorites.
Darrell O’Mary, a collector of sports memorabilia who has known Espy for a quarter century, said most collectors focus on a narrow category. But Espy is too eclectic for that.
“I’ve never known anybody whose tastes are as varied as his,” O’Mary said.
The doctor acknowledges he’s followed his whims, which have strayed from Depression-era Catalin radios, to antique padlocks, Spanish porcelain figurines called Lladro, old plumb-bobs, Nazi weapons and vintage cars. (A 1932 Chevy Roadster is in the garage.)
The juxtapositions can be jarring. Atop a glass case of German daggers stands a small photograph in a simple frame. It’s Espy, in blue surgical dress, cradling a newborn in each arm.
Goodman Basil Espy III came from a family of engineers. He studied mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, but decided to become a doctor and attended Tulane Medical School. He specialized in obstetrics and gynecology “because the outcome’s usually good. Most of the time, we end up with a very happy mother and father and a baby that later will be happy.”
Espy’s mother had an antique shop. He began collecting in childhood, when he gathered stamps and carpenters’ pencils. About 100 of the metal pencils are fastened in tidy columns to a board that leans against a wall next to a treadmill.
Espy was born on Jan. 8, 1935, two hours after Elvis Presley, which he said explains his Elvis collection. He was 10 when World War II ended and that, plus his father’s service as an Army combat engineer, led to his passion for military things. He says he’s run 75 marathons and jogged about 60,000 miles. He bungee-jumped the 442-foot plunge over New Zealand’s Nevis River two years ago and got an award for being the oldest guy to have done it. He had a heart attack in 2007, and his doctor told him not to run again.
“I was at a board meeting in Atlanta and I just keeled over,” Espy said. He ran a marathon a month later.
More than a collector
Now, with his passion for antiques fading, he likes to talk about this number: He has visited five continents on medical missions.
Espy helped refugees in Albania during the conflict in Kosovo. And in Haiti after the earthquake, Espy said he delivered twins with no instruments because someone had stolen them. Now he’s working with a Christian missionary to build a women’s health center in Iraq.
“Most 76-year-olds are looking to the golf course or looking to the sailboat, and he’s packing his bags to look for widows and orphans to help,” said Heather Mercer, who has led the effort to build the Freedom Center in Iraq. She saw his collection and was overwhelmed. She was also impressed when she saw him run the New York City Marathon. He’s got a “huge heart,” said Mercer, and likes a challenge. “Everything that Dr. Espy does he does to the max.”
Espy says he collected things that reminded him of a time when Americans toiled and sacrificed, and lived with dignity.
Back in his basement, he points to his real favorite item. It sits folded in a glass case in his sports room: the last Yankees jersey Gehrig ever wore.
Patton, Lee, Gehrig, “they were all winners, and gentlemen,” Espy says. But he says he likes Gehrig the most because of his graceful demeanor and the way he faced death brought by a disease that now bears his name.
Gehrig seems to remind Espy of his own family.
“I think a lot of my ambition came from watching my parents work so hard to give us relatively little,” he explains. “Most things that are worthwhile are gotten through sweat and toil.”
Finally, during an exhaustive tour of his home, Espy and a visitor come across something different: a pea green wooden wagon the size of a loaf of bread. The wood is roughhewn, cobbled together with nails.
There is an old note inside: “Made for Basil by Pa Pugh in 1938.”
Espy remembers back to when he was 3, sitting on a swing while his grandfather built the wagon for him.
He picks it up. This, he decides, is his most cherished possession.
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