Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 13, 1992                   TAG: 9203130179
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: A-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By GREG SMITH
DATELINE: FAIRFIELD, IOWA                                LENGTH: Medium

GO AHEAD, CARD THIS GUY; HE'LL ADD IT TO HIS TAPESTRY

He'll want it for his collection, which already numbers at least 5 million. And if it's a good one, he'll display it next month at The Printing Exposition Show in Philadelphia.

Day, 42, isn't choosy. He collects whatever hundreds of printing companies and individuals send him.

He even has one from Manuel Noriega: It was lifted off Noriega's desk by a U.S. soldier during the invasion of Panama in December 1989, he said.

Care to contact the National Rainbow Coalition? He's got Jesse Jackson's card. Also on hand is one that belonged to Mad magazine's William M. Gaines, who calls himself "Publisher and Chief Bigot."

Day plans to take these and other "colorful, artistic, unique, humorous or downright-weird" cards to Philadelphia for the April 2-4 exposition.

The remainder will stay stacked in boxes and garbage bags at Day's 90-year-old house in southeastern Iowa. Of course, Day doesn't think of any of them as run-of-the-mill.

"You can follow a person's life in a funny sort of way by seeing all the business cards they've held during their life," he said. "It's an interesting tapestry of American life itself."

Day plans to catalog the cards and to write a book about them. Going on a lecture circuit appeals to him, too.

He'd point out that many famous, and infamous, people started out as regular working stiffs. For instance, he said, actor Kevin Costner was a marketing executive in 1978, and Al Capone handed out business cards in the 1920s describing himself as a used-furniture salesman.

"The notorious as well as the highly noble had business cards," Day said in an interview last week.

His own business card reads, "Business Card Archives . . . The World's Only Archives Preserving Business Cards for Posterity . . . Walter Day, Archivist."

Day remembers getting his first card in 1963. He didn't start collecting them seriously until about five years ago. He's gotten cards from all 50 states and from 50 countries.

Among his favorites are those from a man who lists himself as a "consultant-waiter" and another advertising a "pastor-watch repairman."

A card from Sugar Valley Farm in Sugarcreek, Ohio, reads "Suburban Swine," and lists its area of expertise - Vietnamese potbellied pigs, breeding stock and stud service.

Then there's Jack Ganje's Universal Semen Sales Inc. in Great Falls, Mont.

A card advertising Bob Devaney's Center Street Cemetery in Wallingford, Conn., has a drawing of a skeleton beside a cemetery wall and the message, "Keep Smoking. I can't wait."