Just over a year earlier, Reichwaldt, then 61 and a 40-year factory worker, was driving north from Milwaukee to his mobile home, two hours away in the village of St. Nazianz. Suddenly the muggy day turned strangely chilly. He'd heard from the postmaster that a bad storm was coming, and when he got home, he went to watch the Weather Channel with a neighbor who lives 50 feet west of him. It was then that the sky went pitch black and baseball-size hail started to pelt the trailer. Reichwaldt was standing 7 feet away from a window when the pane crashed inward. The bathroom sink from his mobile home nearby had slammed through the glass. "Tank Gods I had on my glasses," says Reichwaldt, who grew up on a Wisconsin farm speaking German until first grade. An ambulance rushed him and other park residents to a hospital, where he received 113 stitches.

The thunderstorm, which Reichwaldt calls a tornado, struck with winds of 110 miles per hour. It flattened his furniture, sent his refrigerator through a wall and blew away his electric stove, never to be found. Reichwaldt also owns about 10,000 Cracker Jack toys, which he kept primarily in metal cans in his mobile home. Miraculously, he lost only three tin dog bookmarks.

At the Cracker Jack convention, Reichwaldt -- without a single scar on his baby face -- handed out a special card to other convention-goers. It pictured him as Sailor Jack with his faithful dog Bingo clutching his leg as a funnel cloud looms behind them. The bottom of the card read: "Tornado Al: Cracker Jack Collector."

Everyone in the Cracker Jack Collectors Association knows the words to the 1908 song "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," but not for any love of baseball. It was the line "Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack" that made their beloved confection famous. All serious collectors have items numbering in the thousands. "The more you collect the more you want," they'll quip, a takeoff on the early C.J. slogan "The more you eat the more you want." Often surprisingly vague about how many pieces they have, members can list exactly what they're missing.

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Collectibles range in cost from less than a dollar for plastic toys or current paper prizes to more than $1,200 for a Joe Jackson baseball card from 1915. This huge price spread attracts a membership of diverse means. Alex Jaramillo Jr., one of the organization's unofficial historians, wonders, "Why were these paper prizes saved?" He compares them to pressed flowers, tucked away to preserve a memory.

Each year, a representative from Cracker Jack, a division of Frito-Lay since 1997, has given a presentation at the convention. Don Helms, fairly fresh out of graduate school with a couple of years' experience with Doritos under his belt, showed a chart of C.J.'s flat sales. One member complained, "There aren't enough peanuts in the package." Helms confessed that when he took over as associate product manager of the brand four months ago, his predecessor warned him, "You're going to hear this every day of your life," despite Frito-Lay's having increased the percentage of peanuts. And even though Frito-Lay reintroduced three-dimensional plastic prizes, which hadn't appeared for years, people still kvetch that "the prizes are lame."

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