http://www.sptimes.com/2004/11/22/Hillsborough/One_man_s_treasures.shtmlTAMPA - Rick Spitz gently cradles one of his proudest possessions, an ancient
human skull from South America with dents scarring the base.
"This guy was clubbed," he explains. "You can see he got an ax, too."
Inside Spitz's condo, under the mounted skin of a 15-foot Burmese python, is a
living room crowded with human bones, giant gator skulls, jawbones of extinct
rhinos and a collection of unclassifiable exotica.
"You ain't seen nothing yet," says Spitz, 58, eyes twinkling. "Let me show you
my beauty."
From a shelf beside his TV, Spitz removes what he explains is a 2,700-year-old
Peruvian human skull. It is tan and unnaturally elongated from ritual
skull-bands, with rotted-out teeth and black splotches where skin clings to
bone.
"You see the brain in there, through the eyehole?" Spitz asks. He shakes it;
something rattles inside like a walnut. "For a long time there were people who
believed these were aliens."
Spitz has been living among such bizarro bric-a-brac for about 20 years, since
he began bringing unusual items back from trips to Central and South America.
His walls teem with tribal masks and giant mounted heads of wildebeest and
kudo. On one couch lounges a human skeleton from the Civil War era, next to a
Ziploc bag of boar tusks and a replica of an extinct Florida beaver with hooked,
5-inch-long teeth. On another couch, he has a full-sized plastic human skeleton
that he plans to commission a cryptozoologist to turn into a "really ugly"
mermaid.
In the freezer, recently arrived shrunken heads from Peru share space with a
pint of Haagen-Dazs coffee ice cream. Though Spitz says he has a friend with a
genuine shrunken human head in a safe deposit box, the ones in the freezer are
fake - just goat hide stretched over a plaster mold.
"I probably have 30 heads in here," he says, explaining that cold kills
whatever bugs might have survived the journey from South America.
His collection began when he was traveling in Central America hunting for wood
to import.
He said he noticed how badly the indigenous population lacked medical supplies.
Then the owner of a Tampa medical supply company, Spitz started donating
batches of equipment - wheelchairs, defibrillators, prosthetics - to Guatemala
and Honduras.
"The people down there are very proud and they always want to give you
something for a service that you render," he said. "So I would ask them for
off-the-wall stuff in lieu of taking goats and chickens and stuff. As my travels
increased I ended up just getting oddball stuff."
He started selling the goods in the mid 1980s out of a S Howard Avenue shop
called Bare Bones, which also had more traditional imports such as drums and
rain sticks. About five years ago, he moved the business to a shopping plaza at
4556 S Manhattan Ave. and renamed it the Weird Shoppe.
This spring, a decision to move his shop to a second-floor location proved
disastrous. It was too difficult to haul much of his collection upstairs, and it
wasn't easily accessible to elderly customers.
The Weird Shoppe never opened at its upstairs location, and Spitz's collection
is now scattered throughout his condo, in storage and in friends' homes. He
hopes to reopen in Ybor City as a nonprofit venture early next year. He would
use the store's revenue to send medical equipment to South America and open a
23,960-square-foot orphanage outside Guatemala City.
