If an Appendage may be allowed an opinion, here is mine:

Given an era of less anxiety and more discretion, take away the Great Depression and two World Wars, and Ripley might have been your run of the mill suburban crackpot. A plastic bag sorter, hoarder of stoppers and snaps, jam jars, jawbreakers, broken ping pong paddles, push mowers, racially inspired lawn ornaments, waffle irons. He was simply a man at ease with bizarre objects, weird bibelots, fantastic freaks of nature who made him feel, by association, less odd. He would turn antsy, visibly peeved around “joes and janes,” the people, he complained, who lacked verve. He reddened and chafed under the constraints of circumstance and possessed a genius for malleability, a gumby-like elasticity always bending him in the direction of Fame, that disco ball of collective Yearning.

Watch the bashful ones. The stutterers, the stammerers, the timorous and whey-faced. The ones whose dreams (in this case, to be a world-class ball player,) collapse early on. Watch the prune-lipped wallflower, the school dropout, the amateur sketcher with a knack for cartooning upside down. Stand back for the homely ones! Mr. Ripley was no looker. Melon-headed, with no more hair than the tines on an oyster fork, bucktoothed, (his overbite part fang, part awning), he gained glorious ground wearing bat-winged polka dot ties, knickerbocker pants, argyle socks, two-toned spats, pith helmets and Panama hats, natty togs in lurid, eye-stabbing colors. At the pinnacle of his celebrity, he sported maroon silk Chinese robes and multi-tasseled monkey caps around BION*, his 28 room mansion in Mamaroneck, New York—retreating on occasion to his favorite “curioddity,” Mon-Lei, a Chinese junque fitted out with twin diesel engines at cross purposes with its billowing, painted sails, so that Ripley was often forced to bob around the harbor outside his home or just sort of spin in a lazy figure eight out there, sipping gin from a Buddhist monk’s yellowed brain pan, part of his human skull collection.

This was a kid from Santa Rosa, California who loathed himself early on, called himself freak-o, fats-o and dunce-o. Who feared being called fail-o. Deserting his first job as a tomb-polisher, he catapulted from San Francisco to New York, went from “Champs and Chumps” to “Believe it or Not,” from Leroy to Robert, from poverty to the gilt patronage of William Randolph Hearst who underwrote Ripley’s globe-trotting excursions in search of the fantastic, the grotesque, the terrifying. With each boiled Amazonian head he dangled like a key chain before his hungry public, each Nuremburg Iron Maiden he ghoulishly invited rubbernecks to step into the spiked embrace of, with each giant, man-eating clam he posed beside for snapshots, with such infinite stores of plundered oddities, Ripley grew whole, hale, greased with the oil of self-adulation. His obsessions were serenely democratic. They entertained, quasi-educated, helped people thrill to the world again. Ripley opened the spigot on the American penchant for useless ingenuity on a staggering scale. Ripley was Walt Whitman’s mud show.

* BION: acronym for Believe It or Not