Read this article, win free bling!

As this blog's title indicates, this is stuff I wrote because various editors told me to. First up is the very first article I ever submitted for publication in a newspaper, which also contains the very first interview the subject of the piece had ever done for a newspaper. So without further adieu, our mutual deflowering...

THE NOMADIC PROFESSOR AND HER FRIENDS THE HONDURAN CURLY TARANTULA, THE HAMMER-SHAPED CHECK CANCELLER, AND THE PIECE OF TILE FROM EVA BRAUN’S BATHROOM
By David O’Connell
(originally appeared under a more mundane title in The York Dispatch on May 22, 2003)
Have you ever wanted to view a collection of Iranian ram heads? Brush up on 6,000 years of grain-related history? Delve into the fine art of Moravian pottery and tile craft?

If so, then you are a mighty strange beast and just the sort of kindred spirit Therese Boyd is looking for. Her excellent new book, The Best You've Never Seen: Pennsylvania's Small Museums--A Traveler's Guide (Penn State University Press, 224 pp. $18.95), rounds up 42 of the more bizarre and obscure tourist traps to be found in the Keystone State, including the Toy Robot Museum in Adamstown and Mr. Ed's Elephant Museum in Ortanna.

Some are located along major thoroughfares, others accessible only by gravel roads. One thing they all have in common, however, is a mission to preserve the arcane elements of our culture overlooked by the larger, better endowed historical landmarks.

Over a two-year period, Boyd visited hundreds of museums, including a few uncovered purely by chance. In the process, she petted a Honduran curly tarantula, submitted to a theological interrogation at the hands of a Bible-thumping curator, and played with an old-fashioned hammer-shaped check canceller, all while jotting down notes for what would become her first published book.

A notable (if reluctant) co-star in this travelogue is Annie, Boyd’s 11-year-old niece. Poor Annie’s life is turned upside down by her wicked aunt, who tries to indoctrinate her into the anachronistic world of doo-wop music by subjecting her to brutal four-part harmony torture at the National Vocal Groups Hall of Fame & Museum.

Bravely, she resists this onslaught of good-time oldies, but Boyd exacts revenge on the plucky Platters-proof preadolescent with her backup plan: a trip to the dreaded Insectarium, forcing the arachnophobic Annie to confront her eight-legged archenemies.

At a stop at the Horseshoe Curve in Altoona, Annie sidles up to a Norfolk Southern freight train, no doubt preparing to signal the engineers and workmen for assistance in fleeing her bookwormish captor, but Boyd’s watchful eye ensures that no rail-riding escape is made. The book leaves Annie’s ultimate fate up in the air, but one thing’s for sure: those barbershop quartet scars will never heal.

Part diary, part history lesson, part coolest travel brochure you’ll ever come across, this book does what a good travel guide is supposed to do: make you forget that you’re reading a travel guide. Therese Boyd has succeeded in assembling a volume that could very well make more than a few readers want to cast aside their domestic chores and embark on that road trip they’ve been planning in their minds for years. I, for one, am looking forward to being raked over the ecumenical coals, frontier-style, at the Tom Mix Museum, a shrine to the great Hollywood cowboy of the ‘50s.

And yet the question remains: how did a mild-mannered book reviewer (and one-time Dispatch contributor) wind up leading a double life as an Americana-seeking part-time nomad? A reawakened sense of wanderlust, perhaps? Maybe a profound disillusionment with traditional museum culture?

The truth is far more mundane. “The idea came from a friend of mine,” explains Boyd, 45. “She works for Penn State Press and thinks up ideas for good regional-themed books. One day she came to me and said, ‘Hey, you know what would be good for you to write about?’ and suggested a guidebook of small museums. She was right. It was a good idea. It was little me, a little my publisher, a little discussion with my friends and family---totally a cooperative effort of many people.”

And so began this odyssey that would take her through 28 different counties and introduce to her such unlikely historical figures as Christian Sanderson, a packrat of world-class proportions.

“He’s just got the most unbelievable collection of stuff that is supposed to be connected to history, whether it's his or somebody else’s,” she says of the deceased schoolteacher whose namesake museum showcases, among other obscurities, a piece of tile from Eva Braun’s bathroom and the shoestrings Sanderson wore to Harry Truman’s inauguration.

A love of the obscure is indeed helpful, though not a prerequisite for those interested in these peripheral landmarks. Boyd separated the book-worthy museums from the also-rans not according the hipster notion of ‘the more esoteric, the better’, but by a far simpler barometer.

“I had to like it,” she explains. “There had to be something that grabbed me personally. I was totally selfish. If there was something there that I thought was interesting, or something I thought people weren’t going to know about without reading my book, then I put it in.”

One museum in particular that grabbed Boyd’s attention was the Music Box Museum in Ephrata. “That one really surprised me. I expected a bunch of little music boxes, and what I got instead were these enormous, gorgeous pieces of art that just happened to be music boxes,” she marvels.

Along the way, Boyd also learned a few things about the proprietors of these unorthodox tourist stops. “People feel very strongly about the places they’ve built,” she explains. “Every single one of these museums is a labor of love, whether it’s just one person who started it or a whole group of people.”

Although Boyd currently has a full plate of activities on her itinerary, ranging from various book and magazine editing duties to a regular gig teaching elderly Penn State students how to write their memoirs, she still hasn’t quite shed those off-the-beaten path road trip inclinations.

“Since I wrote the book, I’ve been ‘collecting’ other little museums,” she admits. “I’ll find out about them and think, ‘Oh, you know, I have to go in that one and that one’ or say to someone, ‘What do you think is in there?’ In fact, I have a similarly themed book under consideration for Maryland.”

The ultimate goal, both with this book and any future spin-offs, is to encourage people to cast off their doubts and explore the unknown. “When I was looking for one of the museums, I stopped somewhere, and asked this stranger for directions,” recalls Boyd. "He said ‘Oh, I drive past that place every day’, so I asked him if he had ever been inside. He replied, ‘No, you don’t want to go in there.’ He had never set foot inside, but kept insisting it was nothing.

“So here was this guy judging this place and he had never been inside, didn’t know what it was, and yet he was telling me it wasn’t any good. I’m hoping my book makes fewer people say that.”

Boyd’s book, due out in May, will be available in local bookstores, including Border’s Books & Music, where she will be signing books on June 13. It can also be ordered online at Amazon.com or through the publisher at http://www.psupress.org/.

-Dave O'Connell