Remembering Jim Maguire

By Michael Weinfeld

To call Jim Maguire a collector would be an understatement.

A collector might fill a curio cabinet with a few dozen figurines. Maguire, who died last month at age 96, filled two barns covering 8,400 square feet with antiques he’d collected since the ‘80s. They include a couple of tuberculosis quarantine huts, a school outhouse, a hearse, a creepy talking prospector, and a sign that says, “Good Stuff.” Various antique farm equipment is also sprinkled about his 25-acre property.

He dubbed the barns Maguireville. He and Donna, his wife of 68 years who died in 2021, were the co-mayors. Asked in a 2019 interview which mayor made the decisions, Maguire told me, “depends on if it’s before supper or after.”

Maguire used to boast that Maguireville was crime-free thanks to the hangman’s noose and a working guillotine that are prominently displayed.

Maguire often teased about annexing the town of Monument into Maguireville, which he admitted made people “a little upset.”

Maguire’s passion for collecting didn’t start when he was a boy. His mother died when he was 5 and Maguire was raised by an aunt and uncle on a farm in northern Illinois where he became familiar with the farm equipment he would eventually display on his land in Monument (anyone driving east on 105 at Knollwood Road can spot some of the antiques).

Donna was the collector initially. When they were first married, living in Syracuse, N.Y. where he worked for the Overhead Door company, Maguire said there were “antiques coming out of your ears out there. We’d go for a ride on a Sunday, and she’d go ‘Oh, there’s an antique shop’ and I’d speed up. Over the years, I started to soften up.”

The first piece he bought was a 1901 wagon jack that was used to lift a wagon so the wheels could be greased. His collection now numbers in the thousands. How many items are there exactly? No one knows. There’s no accurate list of what’s in Maguireville. The Palmer Lake Historical Society spent five years cataloguing the inventory, but that project ended in 2009.

The piece of memorabilia he was most proud of is a money changing gadget that he says was used in department stores in the 1800s. He explained that a store would usually have only one cashier, so when customers would make a purchase, they’d give their money to a clerk who’d put it in a cup and pull a cord that would “shoot it up to the cashier” who’d catch the container, take out the money, and send any change back for the customer.

A lot of the memorabilia came from Waverly, Iowa. He said the town would have sales of farm-related antiques twice a year. He and Donna bought stuff there five or six times. Also, people would pass along their own possessions. They’d tell him, “I’ve got something downstairs in the basement nobody ever sees. It belonged to Uncle Charlie. Would you like that? And he’d say, “Yeah!”

Asked if there were any holes in his collection, Maguire said people would ask, “What are you looking for?” and he would tell them, “We won’t know ‘till we see it.”

Jim and Donna first arrived in Colorado Springs in 1969 to acquire the local Overhead Door distributorship. Maguire was former national sales manager for the Overhead Door Corp. headquartered in Dallas. He and his son, Kevin, became well known for their humorous TV ads.

In 1982, the Maguires moved to Monument. Their property was originally homesteaded for 160 acres in 1875. It was one of three original homesteads in the Monument area in the 1800s and came with the original certificate signed by Ulysses S. Grant. Kevin Maguire says preserving that piece of local history remains important to the family.

The land is populated with willow trees from Iowa, including a huge one in back of the house that came with a paper certifying it as a “Crack Willow.” “Nothing to do with marijuana,” Jim Maguire joked.

The Overhead Door truck became a staple in Monument’s Fourth of July parade. Maguire’s friend Joe Bohler would play the piano on the back of the truck. Maguire said he was able to convince Bohler to play in the hot sun because, “I had enough on him, so he had to say yes.”

As for the satisfaction he gets from collecting, Maguire said, “The thrill is when people come here and say, ‘Oh, my God, we didn’t know that this was out here!” Or “Oh, gosh! Look at that! I remember that at grandpa’s!” Or “We used one of these when I was a kid!”

Finally, I asked Maguire what would happen to his collection after he was gone. Maguire replied, “That’s a problem. We hope that this can be kept together and continue on.” It’s a problem yet to be solved. Kevin Maguire says it’s the “64-million-dollar question.” They have “several options,” including preserving “what we can.”