Next of pin: Do you know who owned this N.L. municipal pin collection?

An Alberta man with a peculiar hobby may have found evidence of a kindred — or pin-dred — spirit somewhere, some time in Newfoundland and Labrador.

And he found it in a bin in his neighbourhood thrift store.

20-year-old Alex McPhee, a former Reach for the Top national finalist, has spent the last three years assembling a collection of lapel pins from every city and town in Alberta.

"I have about 300 different pins from all of the municipalities in this province, and a lot of them I had to get from actually visiting these places," he said.

He also writes to towns and asks for pins and he likes to dig through the ten-for-a-dollar pin bin at the County Clothes-Line store in Sherwood Park, a suburb of Edmonton.

Those digs occasionally turn up pins from other provinces, but at the end of the December he found something special: 67 pins from towns all over Newfoundland and Labrador, as well as a flag pin and a pin from the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Municipal Administrators.

He bought them, took them home and put them together as a new collection.

"It was clearly something that someone had tried to put together," he said. "And when it's ten for a dollar, that's not so prohibitive."

The find has now usurped the Atlantic Canadian food section at a grocery store in Vermilion, Alta., as his closest brush with Newfoundland and Labrador culture.

"It was just loaded up with Pineapple Crush, three dollars a can," he said.

Clues about the collector

McPhee said it'd be interesting to find out who owned the collection, and there are a few clues which could help pin it down.

For one, the association of municipal administrators re-branded in 2009 as the Professional Municipal Administrators, according to their executive director, Krista Parsons, who notes that McPhee has a great find on his hands.

There's a pin for the town of Seldom-Little Seldom, which amalgamated to become the town of Fogo Island in 2011.

And there's a pin for Ramea's 1999 Come Home Year and a one from the town of Paradise dated 2000.

"My going assumption is that these were all collected about the turn of the millennium," he said.

"Based on what I know about how easy it is to get a pin in Alberta — because there are a lot that you have to actually drive to the place and talk to someone at the desk to get — it looks like something that someone would have put together while working for a local government themselves, and attending all the relevant conferences and conventions."

McPhee said he developed his sharp eye for municipal pins studying for Reach for the Top.

"While I was memorizing all these facts about different places in Canada, it's always really fun to be able to actually send a letter in the mail with a real stamp on it and there's a very good chance that you'll get something interesting back for your effort."

He notes that though municipal pin collection is "a bit of a specialty" in the pin collecting community, Canada is unique in that its town produce their own pins. In the U.S., for example, he said you can only find pins for major cities.

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