UPI – A man from Oklahoma, United States received a Guinness World Record (GWR) surprise from his family for his 8,882-brick collection.
While Clem Reinkemeyer, 87, was out of town, his daughter Celia and son-in-law Dan Bisett organised friends to count and document the bricks in his Tulsa barn. Reinkemeyer returned home to find an official certificate for the world’s largest brick collection. “It was a big surprise, and I’m very happy to have this certificate,” he said.
Reinkemeyer’s collection, which he has been amassing for 40 years, includes a Roman brick from AD 100, but most date from the last few hundred years.
“The break tide for making the bricks was about maybe 1870 to 1910,” he said. “A special kind of brick like this has a certain clay that withstands heat, and everybody needed a fireplace.”
He said some of his most valuable bricks are those with misspellings, such as one that reads ‘Tulsa’ with a backward ‘s’.
“I think Oklahoma has a history for the most misspelled bricks,” he said. “I don’t know why.”
The collector said one of his favourites is a sidewalk brick made at a Washington facility located where the Pentagon now stands.
“There may be some of these under the Pentagon,” he said. “But I think that this is one of a kind.”
He said bricks interest him because of the history they hold. “What appealed to me about bricks is, they have names and you can trace them back historically to places, and that always intrigued me. Its unusual, but I like it,” he said.
