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Monroe's Arthur Eilen doesn't settle for memorabilia with just one U.S. president's autograph.

For 30 years, Eilen built a collection of more than 100 autographed items from American and global dignitaries, with at least one from every president up until and including George H.W. Bush. But the collection's identity was truly forged when Eilen acquired a letter in which Harry Truman, responding to a constituent who called James Polk a nondescript president, praised Polk's success in the 1840s Mexican-American War.

"From then on I would look away from things until I could get things with two presidents mentioned," Eilen said in an interview at his home Oct. 1, with his artistically framed items lining the walls.

One day later, Eilen and his wife Tiby, members of the Jewish Congregation of Concordia and the Chabad Jewish Center of Monroe, hosted an open house to let the community see the collection for one last time. Arthur sold the items to a dealer, who picked them up on Sunday. Last Friday's open house also raised money for Hadassah.

The oldest document Eilen had was a 1501 letter signed by Queen Isabella. He had three letters written by a president directly to another, including one from Andrew Jackson to James Monroe, the namesake of the Eilens' town.

As opposed to collecting autographs from baseball players or movie stars, Eilen said he focused on presidents because of their name recognition, the important and interesting content of their letters, and the ability to see the contrast in the conditions between the documents of older and more recent presidents.

"Name value is especially good in this collection," Eilen said.

"Presidents to me seems like a lasting kind of situation," he added. "One-hundred years from now they will also be interesting."

Eilen said his favorite document was an excerpt from a draft of George Washington's inaugural address. Washington never gave the full 70-page speech that he wrote due to time constraints, Eilen explained.

Jared Sparks, the president of Harvard University in the 1850s, mailed cut up pieces of Washington's original draft to collectors. Eilen acquired six lines from page 21 and another six from page 22 in a two-sided document.

"My hand touched the same place that [Washington] touched," Eilen said glowingly.

In Eilen's letter from Woodrow Wilson, Wilson thanked a reader for pointing out a mistake that he made in his biography of Washington. The letter didn't specify the mistake, so Eilen read the book himself and confirmed with the head of the history department at Princeton University (where Wilson was once the president) that Wilson had erred by writing that writs of assistance came into being during the Revolutionary War, when in fact they existed beforehand during colonial times.

"[Wilson's] letter is important because he actually admitted a mistake he made," Eilen said.

Picking up a letter that Abraham Lincoln wrote to Salmon Chase, former secretary of the treasury, Eilen flashed his historical knowledge by asking, "Where do you think the name came from?" for Chase Manhattan Bank.

Indeed, Eilen's teacher at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn suggested that he pursue a career as a history teacher. Instead, Eilen wished to own a business, and did just that with his retail department store in the Great Neck portion of Long Island for 29 years. Eilen married Tiby nine years ago, and they have been living in Monroe ever since.

As he started off as a coin collector, Eilen's first wife suggested about 30 years ago that autographed letters were much more attractive to display than coins, which are often just stored away in small boxes and never looked at again. Then, after acquiring a letter in which Napoleon Bonaparte gave orders to a general, Eilen never looked back.

All of Eilen's items were purchased from auctions or reputable dealers, he said. At age 86, his only alternative to selling the collection was giving it to his daughter, who he doubted wanted the trouble of taking care of the pieces and removing everything else from her walls to accommodate them.

Plus, Eilen had already given autographed items to five of Tiby's 17 grandchildren for bar or bat mitzvah presents.

Eilen did choose to keep about five of his pieces, including a letter from Menachem Begin, former prime minister of Israel, which he gave to Tiby as a gift. Tiby lifted the framed Begin letter and said: "this is mine."

"I love his strength, I love his attitude that Jews need to be independent, brilliant people," Tiby said of Begin.

Regarding the price he sold the collection for, Eilen chose not to reveal the number because of exaggerations from people like one of his friends who thought he would get a million dollars.

"People put a bigger number [on the value of the collection] than I would, so why should I disappoint them?" Eilen said.