Meet the modern Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde, Mike Teavee and Charlie Bucket.
Meet Jesus Arce, Jonathan Purser, Brandon Renken, Sean Wood and Karen Turner.
They are the five people who outbid everyone else on eBay to win a Willy Wonka-style tour of the ShoeZeum, a warehouse in San Diego's Old Town containing a private collection of 2,000 Nike sneakers, 200 Michael Jordan posters and a ton of sports memorabilia and baubles.
They collectively paid $1,060.80 for the privilege to peek inside the ShoeZeum last Saturday night and bring a single guest. The winning bids ranged from $170 to $255. Auction proceeds went to LIVESTRONG, the Lance Armstrong Foundation, a big Nike charity.
The ShoeZeum is the brain child of USD law and business school graduate Jordan Geller. It's the warehouse where he built a successful business buying new Nikes at discount and selling hundreds of them a day online. Now, it reeks of sneaker history that makes Nike executives board jets in Oregon to visit.
The tour for the Golden Ticket winners began at 7 p.m. and quickly exceeded expectations. Geller brought in Phil's BBQ for dinner, gave each person a pair of mounted black Nike Dunks and paint to personalize each set and stayed past 1 a.m. with the handful of people who couldn't bring themselves to leave.
"Going into it, I thought it was just going to be a little one-hour tour and then he'd send us on our merry way, but boy was a I wrong," Arce said.
Arce is a San Diego firefighter. He's 37 and probably has about 120 shoes himself. In the past five years, his collecting has slowed down. Now, he just buys shoes for his children, 4 and 2.
Purser, 27, works in information technology in the U.S. Navy and was the last person out the door at the end of the tour. He has several hundred pairs of shoes in his own collection and has his mounted Nike Dunks on his turtle tank.
"That way three times a day when I feed him I get to look back and remember that great night that I'll cherish for years to come," Purser said.
Renken, 30, is a lawyer from Houston who asked his fiancee to marry him via engraved tags on a pair of sneakers -- see it here to believe it. Renken, who may have 200 pairs of shoes but never counted, bid on the ShoeZeum tour when he realized he and his fiancee would be in San Diego that weekend anyway.
"The ShoeZeum just kind of reminded me that this hobby is not necessarily something stupid that I have to give up or grow out of," he said. "Everything about it is great."
Wood, 25, is a UCLA student who lives in Whittier outside Los Angeles and has somewhere over 300 pairs of shoes. He said the ShoeZeum "took my respect and love for shoes and innovation to another level."
Karen Turner was the lone woman to win a bid. She lives in Torrance and did it for her son Stephen, 24, who works for the Marriott Hotel and has been a huge fan of sneakers since he was 2 years old. Back then, he endured an allergy test involving more than 100 shots and afterward his mother said she'd take him to Toys "R" Us. He asked if he could get new shoes instead and wound up with Air Jordans.
"I had to charge the shoes, but I remember the smile on his face like it was yesterday," Turner said. "Pure joy."
Her son had to work the night of the ShoeZeum tour, so she gave the tickets to a friend instead.
That turned out to be the only misstep of the night.
