Terry Prone: Hoarding’s hidden issues begin to emerge from the background

Originally published in the Irish Examiner.

The chances are that you’ve never heard of the pair whose lives may illustrate one of the international crises consequent upon humans living longer. However, you will begin to hear of the Collyer brothers as the personification of an emerging public health threat.

The two brothers had a privileged background. 

Their father was a gynaecologist, their mother an opera singer, the family making claims to have arrived in America as far back as 1621. 

They lived in Manhattan and seem to have been bright lads — the elder, Homer, getting his first degree at exactly 20 years of age, having entered university at just 14. The younger brother, Langley, in addition to sterling academic work, was a concert pianist who played Carnegie Hall, although he gave up professional playing in the 1930s.

“Paderewski followed me,” Langley told a reporter. “He got better notices than I. What was the use of going on?”

Although he stopped playing publicly, he continued his connection with musical instruments, making a living as a piano dealer, while his brother practised law. 

After the deaths of their parents, the two, sharing the family’s Manhattan brownstone, tipped their hats to neighbours and lived respectable, quiet, but nonetheless social lives. In 1933, the lawyer was stricken with an eye problem which left him functionally blind and unable to work. His brother gave up his job to care for him. They had inherited enough money not to have to worry about finances, and they resided in a house with bookshelves stuffed to the rafters with volumes read and unread. 

Their neighbourhood, meanwhile, went downhill, with homes losing value and stories of break-ins and burglaries, which seem to have encouraged the brothers to live rather more reclusive lives.

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