Special Collections

Bam! Pow! Zowwie! The hero defeats the villain and saves the city from imminent destruction! What an entirely unexpected turn!

Despite the predictability of classic superhero cartoons, there is something really special about this fundamentally American form of storytelling. A big part of its charm are the toys - brightly colored plastic figures that have been bringing superheroes, Jedi, and aliens to life for decades. But in an increasingly digital world, what are the value of toys and action figures today? Perhaps the answer lies in a museum nestled in Paul’s Valley, Oklahoma - The Toy and Action Figure Museum. Join us as we visit with Kevin Stark, the museum curator and owner of most of the collection found in the museum. Introducing himself as Tony Stark’s richer and cooler older brother, Stark is also a toy designer, band member, and artist. 

Also in today’s episode, take a nostalgic trip into your childhood as we ask people on the street about toys they had and toys they wish they’d had growing up. And keep an open ear to learn about a few toys that ended up being more dangerous than fun - including a doll that literally ate children. 

And we start our episode looking into an age-old question: How do supervillains choose their villainous personas?

Few criminal duos are as infamous as Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. But what is the truth behind this outlaw couple? Were they really a pair of lawless criminals, robbing and murdering with abandon? Or were they misunderstood heroes, standing up to an unjust government? In today’s episode we delve deep into the real-life dramatic tale of Bonnie and Clyde with our guest Perry Carver, Bonnie and Clyde expert and the curator of the Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum in Gibsland, Louisiana. This museum has a plethora of artifacts from the couple’s escapades, and is located on the former site of Ma Canfield’s Café, where the lovers bought their final meal. 

Also in today’s episode, learn about Hollywood’s penchant for retelling the tales of infamous bad guys - sometimes with questionably realistic facts. And while you’re listening in on Bonnie and Clyde, keep an open ear for stories of other criminal lovers, such as the Lonely Hearts Club Killers. 

What drives people to commit crimes? For some people the answer is love.

The Burnt Food Museum

You might think the pancakes you burned or the truly spectacular failure of a turkey you tried to fry might be good for one thing: the trash bin. But at the Burnt Food Museum in Arlington, Massachusetts, you’ll get a different perspective on culinary disaster. With titles like “Thrice Baked Potato,” and “Sure, You Can Bake Quiche In The Microwave,” the authentically accidental charred remains of snacks and meals from across the US beg the question: is there a deeper, philosophical meaning behind the food we burn? Listen in on our conversation with museum curator and founder Deborah Henson-Conant to find out. Museum website: http://www.burntfoodmuseum.com/

Deborah's entertaining and enlightening TED talk can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/EOtEkRtk5IA

Learn more about Deborah's music here: https://www.hipharp.com

The Oz Museum

Although L. Frank Baum didn’t think his 1900 novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” would be a success, its persistent endurance over a century has proved him soundly wrong. “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” has spawned film adaptations, theater adaptations, prequels, sequels, and generations of little children waltzing around in glittering slippers. The Oz Museum, in Wamego, Kansas, pays homage to “all things Oz,” from the original novel to movies to plays to board games. Come with us as we stay very much in Kansas and talk to the Executive Director of the Oz Museum, Clint Steuve, about the history and contents of the museum and the story that inspired it. Museum website: https://ozmuseum.com/

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Pilgrim Hall

The Pilgrim Hall Museum is the nation's oldest continuously operating public museum. The Pilgrim Society, which runs the museum, cares for the artifacts and the stories of the Pilgrims and of the Wampanoag, the Native people who inhabited the Plymouth area long before the new settlers arrived. Museum website: www.pilgrimhall.org

National Museum of the American Indian

The National Museum of the American Indian has facilities in New York and in Washington, DC. The facilities present photos, artifacts, film, music, dance, visual arts, with the aim of advancing understanding of Native cultures. Museum website: www.nmai.si.edu

The CELL

After 9/11, terrorism has been on the minds of every American.  At the Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab— or C.E.L.L.—in Denver, Colorado, visitors learn not only about terrorism as an ongoing threat, but also learn what they can do to help prevent future terrorist attacks.  

In addition to educating visitors in its museum exhibits, C.E.L.L. also has a wide-reaching community education and involvement program.  They have even been invited to teach terrorism prevention across the country and train security professionals before such major events as the Super Bowl and World Series.  Museum website: www.thecell.org

SPYSCAPE

When most people hear or read about spying, they usually think of “Bond … James Bond” and they have mental images of fancy surveillance gadgets or sophisticated computer systems working to track down “Bourne … Jason Bourne.”

At SPYSCAPE in New York City, museum visitors are exposed to a much wider range of spy-related activities such as the history of espionage, famous spies, and even, yes, the gadgets which have actually been used by the spies of the past.  SPYSCAPE also presents spying as more of an everyday experience than most people realize: corporations use methods akin to spying to discover your book-buying preferences, for example.  SPYSCAPE will also test you to see what kind of spying you would be best at— so they shall spy on your abilities to spy. Museum website: www.spyscape.com

The National Museum of Roller Skating

In the year of our Lord 1720, the English inventor John Joseph Merlin arrived at a fancy British masquerade ball sporting his newest sartorial invention: a fancy pair of roller skates.  Having neglected to also invent brakes for his roller skates, Merlin forthwith crashed into a giant, expensive chandelier and was summarily ushered from the party.  Since that inauspicious commencement, many, many people have crashed while wearing roller skates, though generally not with implications for the nearby chandeliers.  But many more have proceeded to quickly learn the art of propelling themselves forward on four wheels and mastered the skill of rollerskating, thereby entering into a world of fitness, fun, romance, speed, and daring-do.  Roller-skating is making a huge comeback now from its last resurgence in the 1970s, as have in-line skating, roller hockey, heely’s, and that most elbow-wielding of all speedy sports: roller derby.  In the first half-hour of today’s Special Collections, we talk with the director of the National Museum of Rollerskating about all things rollerskating. Museum website: www.rollerskatingmuseum.com

Rotary Jail Museum

In Crawfordsville, Indiana, there is a kind of museum which you cannot see anywhere else in the world: a museum dedicated to the rotary jail, a building which turned with a crank in order to lock in the prisoners it held.  Once it was rotated properly, the rotary jail was absolutely escape-proof because each prisoner was enclosed in a cell with, believe it or not, not a single door!  The Crawfordsville rotary jail held the local drunkards and miscreants for an astounding 130 years and the director of the jail museum is here to tell us all about this most durable, quirky, inescapable, kinda fun to think about now jail. Museum website: www.rotaryjailmuseum.org

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Imagine you just happened to inherit 8 billion dollars.  What would you spend your new-found fortune on?  Would you get both a large popcorn and a large drink at the movie theater—a purchase that would normally bust the family budget?  Maybe a passel of fancy sports cars that go zoom-zoom fast for fun?  Maybe a mansion so big that you need a GPS and a Segway to find your way from one end of the house to the other?  Maybe a fleet of private jets to take you to your private island where your private chef and private scuba-diving instructor make sure you have an extraordinarily fun, private time?  With 8 billion dollars, all your wildest consumerist fantasies could become . . . reality.  Even the cinema snacks. 

Alice Walton, the heir to the Walmart fortune, used her largesse in a way that was much more meaningful than the ideas above.  She used her money to collect art.  Working with an art advisor for many years, she gradually acquired a collection of American art that was extraordinary, and then built the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art to share that collection with the public for free.  We’ll talk with a leader of the museum today to find out more about the art and the fabulous grounds at Crystal Bridges. Museum website: www.crystalbridges.org

The Museum of Bad Art

The second half of our show today deals with one of the unlikelyest museums found on this planet: The Museum of Bad Art in Boston.  Unlike all the other of the world’s art museums who strive to get good art, this museum defies tradition to do the opposite: acquire some of the worst art anywhere.  If you want funny-looking puppy paintings or a really bad take on Mona Lisa, this is your place.  And bad art is more difficult to find and curate than you’d think.  Our second-hour interview will show you how and why. Museum website: www.museumofbadart.org

Vent Haven Museum

When you hear a voice somewhere, it means there is a head somewhere also.  Unless, of course, the owner of said head is a ventriloquist.  Ventriloquism, or the art of projecting your voice so that it appears to come from somewhere else, is an art form that goes all the way back to Greek religious ceremonies. It enjoyed a revival in the 1800s, boomed in the mid-1900s, and still is an active part today of many different kinds of entertainment entertainment from traveling carnival shows to the TV show “America’s Got Talent.”  Today on Special Collections, we’ll visit the Vent Haven Museum in Kentucky, the one and only museum dedicated to ventriloquism. Museum website: www.venthaven.org

The Stoogeum

If we say the words Curly, Larry, and Moe, you will instantly know who those characters are—at least if you’re over 50: The Three Stooges.  Major players for decades in American comedy, The Three Stooges were constantly on television during their peak and had our country’s kids laughing hysterically at their physical comedy hijinks— at the same time their parents cringed at every eye poke, head butt, deliberate trip, and falling brick to the head.  Polite they were not.  The Stoogeum is a museum outside of Philadelphia that deals with all things Three Stooges.  We talk with the owner about his vast collection of Stoogeabilia and why the famous trio was so funny. Museum website: www.stoogeum.com

David J. Sencer CDC Museum

Let’s suppose that one day this month you come down with the ebola virus—perhaps from your pet bat named Ralph.  A day or so after you’re infected from some snuggling on the couch with Ralph, you begin to experience some rather unpleasant symptoms: fever, severe headache, muscle pain, weakness, fatigue, diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain, blood gushing from every opening in your entire body, and oh yeah, hiccups. In a health crisis like this, who you gonna call?  Ebola-busters!  Actually, there are no ebola-busters in an official sense, but there is a highly-organized, efficient organization that lives for challenges like this: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, or CDC.  The CDC is the governmental organization tasked in part with researching, preventing, and solving outbreaks of ebola and other awful viruses that can not only kill you, but also give you hiccups.  We’ll talk today with someone from the David J. Sencer CDC Museum which educates the public on what the CDC does. Website: www.cdc.gov/museum

Winchester Mystery House

Grief can cause people to react in different ways: some cry and get everything out of their system quickly, some fixate on the person or thing they lost but gradually come to some resolution, and others, well, kind of go nuts.  And if you happen to be a billionaire with a penchant for grief, the possibilities of creatively expressing your grief are almost endless.  

Sarah Winchester was a griever of the last category.  Heiress to the vast Winchester Rifle fortune, she suffered the pain of losing both her young daughter and her husband. To somehow find relief, she headed west to San Jose, California where she bought a huge parcel of land and then—on the advice of a spiritualist who advised her—began to build a massive, sprawling, bizarre house with the idea that her workers needed to be working around the clock on that house to put off the ghosts of the many people whom the Winchester rifle had killed.  The huge Winchester Mystery House

Grammy Museum

We bridge widely varying worlds in today’s Special Collections.  First, we visit the amazing Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, California, a museum that deals with the fame and big money of today’s popular music.  Everybody knows the televised spectacle that is the Grammy Awards: high fashion, hip-hop performances, Taylor Swift and Beyonce belting out their ballads.  It’s only a week or two before the Super Bowl and shares much of the hoopla and hype.  The Grammy Museum covers the awards ceremony but does much more as well.  It also displays recording technology, teaches visitors about country music’s roots, and gives kids a hands-on experience making and mixing their own karaoke hits. For all things having to do with today’s modern music, the Grammy Museum will teach you all you ever wanted to listen to and know. Website: www.grammymuseum.org

The Telephone Museum

Our second segment is worlds away from the glamour and glitz of L.A. pop music.  The Telephone Museum is located in a beautiful barn in rural Maine, deals with aspects of phone technology that have mostly faded away, and incorporates a kind of sentimental but highly informed affection for the landlines of about 30 years ago.  Though today’s cellphones involve satellites in space, the landlines of a few decades back were also incredibly complex in their own way.  Switching boxes, intricate routers, fiber cables, actual phonebooks— all were part of a widespread communications system as amazing and complicated as anything we have today.  The Telephone Museum tells the story of all the crucial, fascinating innovations that went into all the talk, talk, talk that connected the world a few years back. Website: www.thetelephonemuseum.org