NOKOMIS — So another year has come to an end with the usual array of departures, arrivals, heroes, scoundrels, calamity, transcendence, beginnings, signoffs and no shortage of experts to tell us what it all meant.

But as the world closes the book on 2016 and all of its hyperbole, for 74-year-old Nokomis resident Steve Nowlin, there are no new plotlines, only minor variations in the wiring of human nature.

Nowlin belongs to a lucrative subculture that collects and deals in signatures and documents penned by the authors of immortal deeds. He doesn’t like to talk pricetags for the record, but his inventory is mind-boggling, and he manages to keep most of it confined to a single room.

Its walls are lined with floor-to-ceiling books, most of them for reference, many crammed with exemplars, or writing samples, for determining the authenticity of emerging material.

Anchoring one wall are four black filing cabinets stacked four feet high. Each drawer is packed with highly organized old-school manila folders containing exemplars and genuine signatures alike. The digital age may have rendered the print medium obsolete, but for Nowlin, no email, image, or text message can compete with the tactile sensation of inspecting a document once brushed by iconic hands.

“I like rubbing shoulders with famous people in the world; it’s kind of hard to explain,” says the Navy veteran and Indiana native. “It’s almost like you can feel the energy coming from it.”

Nowlin puts that contention to the test by presenting the oldest item in his possession. The document is dated Oct. 2, 1509, just months after Henry VIII was crowned King of England. In handwritten calligraphic script so baroque and squint-worthy it almost looks alien, the new monarch has signed off on a stipend for a knight who served his father well in battle.

This is, in fact, the actual signature — not a reproduction — of the wife-killing despot who altered the course of history by divorcing the Church of England from Catholicism. Which means that a document crafted by one of Western civilization’s titans has survived five centuries and crossed a great ocean to wind up inside a plastic sleeve now in custody of a commoner in a nation that didn’t exist in 1509.

This is a feast for the imagination.

Starting with coins

An economics major with a minor in history, Nowlin started out dealing exclusively in rare coins.

That changed during a collectors show in St. Louis some 30 years ago. He strolled over to a neighboring stamp show and saw what appeared to be the signature of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee encased in glass.

Nowlin was assured by the owner the autograph was authentic. Nowlin took a chance and made the buy. But he wanted verification. “The first thing I did,” he says, “was go to the library and read all 12 books they had about autographs. That was the beginning.”

In fact, Nowlin says, the spadework required to verify the provenance of signatures and related documents turned out to be just as compelling as acquiring said items themselves. “It opens up more questions and leads you to other characters,” he says. “You get a larger context. For me, the fun part of this whole thing is that discovery.”

Noting his son’s immersion into this rarefied world, Nowlin’s dad, an insurance salesman, warned him he couldn’t have it all. You can be a collector or a dealer, but not both, not really. So in the 1990s, in order to finance his time-traveling expeditions, Nowlin opened a shop in Indianapolis, called History Makers, and peddled his beloved artifacts in order to acquire more. He shuttered the operation before retiring to Nokomis in 2013.

It has been a remarkable journey, physically connecting with hosts of strange bedfellows, from Apollo moonwalkers to outlaws like Al Capone and the Dalton Gang. John Hancock, Adolf Hitler, Abraham Lincoln, George Gershwin, Walt Disney, JFK – all have passed through Nowlin's hands.

Lately, Nowlin is jazzed over a more contemporary character few readers will know — Army Air Force Gen. George Kenney. Kenney shot down two German planes in World War I, and he reconfigured fighter aircraft for wing-mounted machine-guns instead of belching stuttering fire from behind spinning propellers. Kenney was at Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s side when MacArthur famously waded ashore to fulfill his vow — “I shall return” — to The Philippines in 1944.

Nowlin recently acquired three handwritten letters from Kenney, two signed typewritten, double-spaced chapters the general wrote for his biography of MacArthur, plus five military ribbons and patches reflecting aspects of his military service.

“To me, you can’t get closer to the importance of who he was,” Nowlin says as he spreads Kenney’s material across a table. He presses his palms into the Kenney’s decorations. “This is a life.”

Nowlin also acknowledges that, had the Allies lost, Kenney might have found himself tried for war crimes. In 1943, the general ordered U.S. patrol boats to attack Japanese rescue vessels as well as the floundering survivors of stricken enemy ships. That order violated principles of the Hague Convention of 1907.

“Yeah,” Nowlin says. “They questioned Kenney about it at the time. And he said, 'Well, that’s what you did back then.'”

This conversation leads to another, about some of the darker records in Nowlin’s archives. He has court martial proceedings against an American soldier convicted of and executed for the murder of unarmed German troops. He has chain-of-command signatures from every authority who signed off on it.

“Some of these things,” he says, “are still sensitive today.”

Nowlin lives alone with a room full of ghosts. He finds himself wondering about the final words from the history-makers whose legacies he has touched. What were they thinking when the bells tolled? At least their names live on. Social psychologist Roy Baumeister once said no one truly dies until the last person who knew them passes on, an afterlife that stretches some 70 years beyond the grave. What would Steve Nowlin, a lifelong student of exclusive clubs, like to be remembered for?

“Well,” he says, half joking, “I wouldn’t be remembered for my business sense.” A pause. He aspires to an anonymous niche with numbers no one knows how to count. “I hope it’s kindness.” A nod and a smile. “I hope that’s it.”