This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

To search for the American Stories podcast, go to the IHeartRadio app or wherever you get your

podcast. There's an old saying that one man's garbage is another's treasure.

For Richard Laramore of Diamond, Missouri, that saying rings especially true.

What started as a favor for a brother-in-law morphed into something much, much bigger. The world's largest small electric

appliance museum. Here's Richard with his story. Well, it was, I thought, in my mind back then,

it was the last frontier.

My brother-in-law in California was collecting old black fans. You've seen those black, ugly fans.

Well, he called me up one day and said, Richard, he said, you know, you're out there in Missouri.

Why don't you start looking for these fans for me?

I said, okay.

So we like to travel because I don't drink or drive or smoke and any of that kind of stuff.

So we started looking and I got interested in the fans.

I had about a hundred of them.

But then again you see one black fan,

you've seen them all. And they were getting harder and harder to find, and when they were,

they were double what you started out paying. So I called Dennis, brother-in-law, and I asked

him, I said, Dennis, I said, when you're traveling and you can't find your fan, what do you collect?

Electric toasters.

I said, what electric toasters?

And I didn't realize he was trying to corner the market on the newer version toaster

...