This 79-year-old hoped to start his own museum of oddities. Now, everything must go.

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Playland at the Beach, the now-defunct San Francisco seaside amusement park, was on its last legs when Willie Kremen worked as a Muni driver. 

It was at the end of his 38-Geary route. So when Playland closed in 1972, he scored a vintage bumper car and an array of pinball machines. 

He didn’t stop there. 

Today, Kremen’s musty, 2,000-square-foot storage unit in Bayview is a real-life “I Spy With My Little Eye” picture riddle. This one, though, isn’t meant for kids. 

Here, one might spy a bikini-clad Jane Mansfield water bottle and an aerosol can modeled after a skunk (the spray, naturally, comes out the rear). 

Chipped ceramics are balanced on top of dented vintage lunch boxes teetering on scratched vinyls. A saggy E.T. plush toy faces off with a taxidermied antelope head. A “talking hot-dog-condiment holder” sits beside a box of Batman macaroni and cheese. There’s an assembly of crochet flyswatter covers. 

Now, they’ve all got to go. 

The owner of the building where Kremen has stored his treasures since the mid-1980s has passed away. Kremen himself has fallen on hard times, financially. 

Last year, with the owner’s son asking for the basement back, Kremen hosted his first estate sale. He needed the money. 

“At this point in my life, I’m trying to mentally adjust to letting go,” said Kremen in his soft, meandering cadence. “Not too long ago, it was acquisition. Now, it’s deposition.”

A flooded estate 

Makeshift aisles snake between towers of cardboard boxes blooming with mold. As Kremen wanders through, his head of wiry hair bumps into lightbulbs hanging from the pipes, though he barely seems to notice. 

Kremen doesn’t play favorites. Shuffling through his nest of treasures, he pauses to pick up even the most unassuming of items, from matchbooks to individual playing cards. He unwraps old finds from newspaper with the wonder of a kid in a candy store.

His faint smile is less from nostalgia — Kremen often can’t remember where or when he acquired things — and more from a melancholic appreciation of the items themselves. This holds true even for his collection of phallic objects, including totem poles and rotary phones. 

Some of the few organized boxes have been labeled “muffy” by one of his ex-wives. They contain adult magazines. 

“Playboys have pretty good articles … Hustler actually was very political,” Kremen said. “I appreciated the duality of it all. I’ll show you a few … hopefully you can appreciate it too —” 

“She doesn’t need to see porn on a Monday,” Krystyl Baldwin interjected, protecting this reporter from the sight. 

For the last year, Baldwin, a local vintage dealer, and four volunteers have been helping Kremen clean out his storage unit before the bargain hunters descend.

Baldwin has removed trash and carved out the walkways. Still, she recommends wearing a mask; the place is yet to be scrubbed clean of its mildew musk. 

The biggest improvement is visible at the entrance. Baldwin pulls back the basement’s sliding door to reveal, in place of a former barricade of trash bags, folding tables topped with arrangements. A stack of board games lends a pop of color to the overwhelmingly brown interior of the unit’s depths, parts of which, Baldwin says, continue to pose a biohazard. 

A sign tells Kremen’s story in Baldwin’s cheery tone. Kremen, a tall gentleman with a shy yet effusive grin that softens his bushy eyebrows, isn’t one to advertise himself. 

While Baldwin wears a jacket with rainbow tiger on the back, Kremen is more comfortable with a worn flannel drawn around his hunched shoulders. By request, he’ll show you the wry T-shirt he usually wears underneath. On St. Patrick’s Day, it read, “So, an Irishman walks out of a pub … seriously … it can happen.” 

But Kremen is private, and prefers asking questions of others. Even at 79, he offers to squeeze into the cramped back seat of Baldwin’s car, yielding shotgun privileges.

Baldwin met Kremen at his first, and only, solo attempt at an estate sale. She arrived to find the basement flooded. Other collectors were haphazardly throwing things into boxes for purchase at a fraction of their value as Kremen helplessly looked on. 

“It pains me to go through there now and see all the water damage, all the breakage,” Kremen said. “I can’t allow myself to get too pulled back into it.”

Baldwin realized this wasn’t just an estate sale. This was Kremen’s life’s work.

A degree in counterculture

The son of Midwestern scientists, Kremen went to high school in Palo Alto and college at San Francisco State University. He has no simple answer when asked what he studied.

“Oh, I went all over the place,” he replied with a slight stutter. “Some math.” 

It was, admittedly, the ’60s and ’70s. Kremen partied with the Grateful Dead. He patronized Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park. He attended anti-war marches (Kremen himself was spared the draft because of a physical condition). Some casual collecting began. 

When his then-girlfriend was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1970, he picked up the night shift as a cable-car operator to support the two of them.

His superintendent was an ex-Marine who “believed in leather shoes with the spit polish.” Undeterred, the Beatnik-adjacent night shift crew wore long beards and sneakers, an act of defiance Kremen says cost him an eight-day suspension. 

He went on to work other odd jobs — mailman, bus driver, cab driver — before settling into real estate, which he “half-assed.” 

“That was a vocation, but not my avocation,” Kremen said. The time he valued was spent reading, going to movies, and “you know, being a person.” He’s still fond of Kurt Vonnegut and “Dr. Strangelove.”

With the real estate business came, for the first time, some disposable income. Kremen’s collecting took on a new zeal. He could easily drop a few hundred dollars in a weekend haunting flea markets and secondhand shops. 

‘Museum of oddities’

Kremen had a proclivity for items featuring pop-culture characters, gag gifts, and outdated “whatsits” — things from 50 years ago whose use no one remembers. 

His thematic interests are as eclectic as the things themselves: Art Deco of the ’20s and ’30s. Turn of the century kitsch. Advertising iconography; “there’s a whole slew of Coca-Cola things, with Santa and whatnot.” Frisbees with corporate advertising. Polyester T-shirts with political slogans. 

Kremen is particularly tickled by everyday products that have been anthropomorphized to connect with consumers: The Jolly Green Giant pitchman for frozen peas. Little Lulu’s run as a cartoon mascot for Kleenex. An actual Old Crow and its namesake whisky.   

Sometime in the mid-1980s, Kremen began renting the storage space in Bayview for $200 a month to house his dream: A museum of oddities. 

Displays, he envisioned, would be organized by types of item (lamps with figurine bases, for instance) or historical moment. 

The goal was to create a shoppable museum where similarly “detail conscious” people could “laugh a lot.” But it never came to be. 

Instead, everything kept piling up, until things could be tucked away no longer. 

Letting go

Kremen has altered his dream: “I hope that some of it gets distributed to some people who will appreciate things for what they are.” 

Several big-ticket items already have. 

The pinball machines are being restored for a car dealership waitroom in Sacramento. The Playland bumper car is being turned into an art car for Burning Man. 

A vintage peacock chair, damaged beyond repair by flooding, is going to a pay-as-you-go cafe in Berkeley owned by a snail farmer, one of the few in the country licensed to breed escargot. Kremen was visibly pleased when he was told of the buyer’s profession. 

“Did you ever find the cowboy plates?” Kremen asked Baldwin, interrupting his own reverie. The two began a back-and-forth about the plates, which, according to Kremen, were popular among chuck-wagon-themed restaurants in the early ’50s. 

“Are they wood?” Baldwin replied. 

“No, no, they’re ceramic. They’re plates, like, regular —”

“Are they frosted?” 

“No, no. they’re opaque. They’re beige … decorated with a branding iron motif and maybe a bucking bronco type thing… ” Kremen trailed off, distracted by another thought. 

As the basement clears out, Kremen continues to collect information. “Every day, I learn 50 new things,” he says. 

There always was a method to his curatorial madness: He wanted people to consider new ways of connecting the mundane objects that clutter their lives. That, he said, has made him feel less alone. 

“To the degree that you can clue people into stuff and broaden their horizons,” he smiled, “they become more tolerant and more appreciative and less judgmental.”

Those interested in Willie Kremen’s collection may contact Krystyl Baldwin to shop by appointment on Instagram @san.franciscovintage. Her email is treasurehunter@sanfranciscovintage.com. Profits, Baldwin said, will go primarily to Kremen, with some of the money used to pay for the cleaning expenses of her and her volunteers.