Nostalgic for Nostalgia: Wild Bill’s Nostalgia Center

August 18, 2014 — Wild Bill’s Nostalgia Center in Middleton, Connecticut, is a shop that really wears its heart on its shingles. Every square inch of its exterior is painted with musicians, monsters, clowns, animals, Native American symbols, and other things, all against a trippy, hippie rainbow backdrop. The whole thing looks like the garage where you park all those painted vans that I’m not even sure people have anymore…but should.

The heart belongs to “Wild” Bill Ziegler, who is represented on the façade in a long gray beard, round-lensed spectacles, and an Uncle Sam hat throwing up peace signs above am image of Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots and an actual VW bug placed over the entrance.

But what if I told you that, when we pulled into the parking lot, this bright, psychedelic building wasn’t even the first thing that pulled our eyeballs from our heads. That would be the adjacent brick silo with the giant clown head atop it that reminded me of that scene near the end of The Muppet Movie where the head of a giant Animal hopped up on insta-grow pills bursts through the top of a building. Billed as the world’s largest jack-in-the-box (since the head retracts into the silo), it’s actually more notable for its connection to Captain Kangaroo, the children show host of yore.

The giant clown head is modeled after Clarabell the Clown, a sidekick of Howdy Doody on the Howdy Doody Show from the 1950s. It was built for one of the guys who played Clarabell, Bob Keeshan, who would later go on to don the red jacket and Romulan haircut of Captain Kangaroo. Ziegler got his hands on it and decided to stick it atop a tower, because giant clown heads should be shared.

On the far side of Clarabell was another amazing sight: a massive carnival-style haunted house. It’s not open to the public yet, and it’s been under construction for years, but according to the website, they’re aiming to make it the world’s longest walk-through funhouse in the world, thus solving my biggest problem with haunts…too short. I want them to go so long that despair settles into my soul. That’s always my bar for success in anything.

Eventually, we remembered that we weren’t supposed to just gawp at the wonders in the parking lot and entered Wild Bill’s itself. The inside of the place definitely matches the outside. The space is sizeable, but has been shrunken like an artery full of cholesterol into narrow paths crammed on both sides and above with a range of things that I can only assume are pieces of Ziegler’s soul.

We saw Ziegler immediately, manning the cash register as he has for 30 years, half of which at a previous location before he bought this ex-nightclub in 1999 and hippified it. His gray beard and matching hair were much longer than the caricature of him out front, he was a bit thinner, and he wasn’t wearing an Uncle Sam hat. We didn’t talk to him on entering, as he was busy with other customers, so we took off into the belly of the store.

Now, when he calls this a nostalgia center, he mean everybody’s nostalgia.

I saw VHS tapes, vinyl records, posters, toys, animal bones, jewelry, clothes and pop culture relics of all sorts from all decades jumbled on top of jumbles and dangling from the ceiling with no real theme other than “Bill bought it.” Most of it was for sale, and the stuff he obviously didn’t want to part with was priced exorbitantly.

The best part about the store was the feel of it. It felt authentic. In a day and age where eBay has it all and you can buy replicas of anything online and everything has been reissued and mass marketed in new forms to the point where nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, this felt like the artifacts of a man’s life who experienced most of the decades represented and has the proof in piles around him…even if he bought most of it in bulk.

While we were standing there, a tall, older guy with close-cropped, faded blond hair and an extremely confident stance walked in, He talked to Ziegler for a bit, and then just kind of hung out surveying the place. I know he did all this because I was staring at him. There was something familiar about him to me, but he left before I could figure out why.

Later, when we were checking out (because of course we bought stuff), we spent some time talking to Ziegler, or at least my four-year-old did, as the two really hit it off. Ziegler mentioned to me that the guy that had attracted my attention was Bob Backlund, the professional wrestler, a friend of his that lives nearby and drops by every so often. That’s where I’d seen him, on the WWF back when it was called the WWF during one if its runs (like right now I think) where it seeped into pop culture deep enough that you didn’t have to watch it to know about it. I didn’t recognize him because he wasn’t naked and angry or, alternatively, wearing his Pee-Wee Herman outfit.

There was, however, Pee-Wee Herman's bike.

As you can see, I only took a few pictures of the shop, but had I been less self-restrained, it could easily have turned into me doing photo inventory of the place for Ziegler.

If you’re ever in the area, it’s well worth a stop, well worth hanging out, well worth talking to Ziegler, well worth throwing some money down, and—if they ever open the funhouse—well worth sneaking in and setting up a hidden living space somewhere on the property.

Every other photo in this piece has a clown in it. Counting the first one.

Scientific, Spooky, Stinking Rich: Return to Hammond Castle

August 10, 2014 — A few weeks ago I visited Hammond Castle for the second time in my life. The first time was for The New England Grimpendium five years (!!) ago. I don’t want to rehash what I wrote in the book, as that would involve me cringing through something I wrote five years ago, so here’s the synopsis in a single, gigantic sentence, the way I wish people would let me write:

Hammond Castle was built in the late 1920s by John Hammond, Jr., a wealthy inventor who pioneered remote control technology and used the wealth gleaned from his 400 patents to build a Gothic castle on an ocean cliff in Gloucester, Massachusetts made out of European tombstones, French building facades, and other materials dating back to the 1500s, where he would walk around in black robes surrounded by cats, holding séances and conducting experiments on mediums and psychics by placing them in Faraday cages and surrounding them with enough gigawattage to send Marty McFly back to Hill Valley circa the Cretaceous period.

I can ignore the wealth of today’s celebrities, but it’s the lives of people like Hammond that make me ache for the fact I’ll never be rich.

You thought I was joking about the black robe.

Anyway, that’s the history, and the ambiance of the place keeps up. It feels just like walking through a medieval castle, with its great room and giant organ and spiraling tower staircases and drawbridge and suits of armor and gift shop and parking lot.

Here are a few items that I don’t feel like artfully weaving throughout this post:

• Bewitched filmed here during its Salem Saga episodes. 
• Among many other things of interest from Hammonds personal collection, on exhibit is a crumbling skull bought by Hammond that’s supposed to have been the skeleton topper of one of Christopher Columbus’ crewman.
• Hammond Castle turns into a haunted attraction there every October. 
• Tesla once accused Hammond of stealing patents.
• Hammond himself is buried on the property.
• Ghost Hunters did their usual “make a green-tinted show about slight sounds” here a couple years back.

You’d think being so close to something so strange and wonderful, that I’d visit it more often and not just when I have family in town who have never been to New England before (This is one of the first places I took them...I wanted them to think the area was called New England for literal reasons), but I never claimed to be a perfect person. Except for when such claims get me out of the doctor’s office faster.

Reading this back over, I probably should have just reprinted The New England Grimpendium entry.

The Great Room, where the Farady cage was set up
and in which you can see...

...said skull of one of Columbus' crewman.

Hammond built this castle on science.

The facades of a 16th-century French village transported
 and turned into a...actually, I don't know what rich people
call this type of room.

See those white blocks? Ancient tombstones. They're everywhere in the castle.

The first time I visited Hammond Castle, Hammond's grave was unmarked.

Elizabeth Montgomery stood here.

From Giant Stained-Glass Crabs to Dead Things in Boxes: OTIS Miscellany IV

August 8, 2014 — Somehow, this is only my fourth OTIS Miscellany post in the history of the site. I’m pretty sure that were I to comb through my archives of photos (tens of thousands of images strong/stupid), I’d find fodder for five times as many. I guess I’m too lazy to do that.

But just like the first OTIS Miscellany, just like the second OTIS Miscellany, and just like the third OTIS Miscellany, here are ten oddities I’ve visited but don’t want to make a big, full-post deal out of. It’s not that they’re not way cool. They are. It’s just that their “way cool” is more obvious. I don’t need 1,000 words and eight images to convince you of the merits of each item in this list. Plus, if the Internet’s taught me anything (questionable), it’s that lists get way more hits than articles. So hit this:

Stained-Glass Crab, Baltimore, MD: Airports are great places to find oddity. They’re high-stress, purgatory-like places, so the least they can do is install something interesting to look at to combat the soul-dullness of security gates and waiting terminals and cattle-car flights. Like this stained-glass crab the size of a large riding lawnmower that has hung out at Baltimore Washington International Airport since 1984, give or take some storage time.

Technically, it’s called Callinectes Douglassi, but it’s Stained-Glass Crab for reals. I’m from Maryland, so anything crab-shaped makes me happy, I love to eat them. Love to chase them on beaches. Love to watch them exploit naïve yellow sponges for cheap labor. And I definitely love them when they’re made of 500 pounds of colored glass.

Hassell Massacre Marker, Nashua, NH: This oddity is here solely to illustrate a squishy moral about seeing the world outside our front doors. This plaque on a stone is literally a mile from my house, tucked away on a tiny blank plot of grass between two neighborhoods. Once upon a time, the spot was something more: The homestead of the Hassell family, who were killed and scalped by Native Americans in 1691 during a terrible, terrible time in our history that inspired a lot of sports mascots. The buried remains of the family lie somewhere on the site, and a nearby brook is named after them.

Metamorphosis, Charlotte, North Carolina: Giant things are mesmerizing and mirrored things are mesmerizing and moving things are mesmerizing, so a giant, mirrored head with individual slices that rotate will hypnotize you into walking like an Egyptian while clucking your eternal love for Susanna Hoffs in a Swedish accent. Created by Czech artist David Černý and installed in a large office park, the giant, shiny head is also a fountain. On my visit, it was spitting water into the pool that surrounded it, but the sections weren’t rotating. I still love you, though, Susanna Hoffs.

Bicentennial Moon Tree, Indianapolis, Indiana: I had to look at every tree on the grounds of the Indiana Statehouse to find this guy and then make a guess based on the fact that its bark kind of looked like sycamore bark according to the tiny Google image I’d hastily pulled up on my phone in the full glare of noon. Later, indoor leisure Googling proved me right.

It would have been easier if the thing was marked. It does have a plaque, but it’s around the corner with a bunch of other plaques that are nowhere near the trees they identify. So why was I looking for this sycamore in the first place? Because it was grown from a seed that was taken to the moon in 1971 on Apollo 14. Oh.

Cheesman Park, Denver, Colorado: This bland-seeming little park on the edge of the city has a view of both the city high-rises and the Rockies. But it was once a graveyard. Still is, if you define graveyard as “a place where bodies are buried.” It’s not an unusual story for a city park, as many across the country started out as graveyards and then were transformed into parks by moving the headstones only and leaving the remains as a foundation for outdoor fun.

The graveyard that predated Cheesman Park was instituted in 1858, but when the city wanted what was becoming valuable land, it gave families the opportunity to move their loved ones. Since many in the cemetery were paupers and criminals, thousands of bodies went unclaimed, where they calmly repose today beneath the feet of joggers and dog walkers, except for every once in a while when park upkeep inadvertently unearths a skeleton here or there. The beautiful thing about this park is that it’s not ashamed of its past. An informational placard near the playground calls out the story like a mark of historical pride. As it should be.

Jurassic Subs, Bremen, Georgia: A dinosaur-themed sub shop? Wait. A dinosaur-movie-themed sub shop? Why not? Unless it’s junk food, eating has always been boring to me, so if you can surrounded me with dinosaur murals and name your sandwiches after hard-to-pronounce dinosaur nomenclature, good for you. I’ll admit, it confused my daughter when we ordered a platecarpus and an anchiceratops and were handed long pieces of bread stuffed with sliced animal flesh. “We’re the only one in the world,” the girl who made our sandwiches told us. “That’s because the world sucks,” is how I didn’t but should have responded.

Cosa Ruins, Tuscany, Italy: We had just visited the Leaning Tower of Pisa that morning and were driving the west coast of Italy back to Rome. We wanted to stop and get something to eat and would eventually find a strange eatery on a cliff in the middle of a residential neighborhood that I’m pretty sure only existed on that one day. I ate cuttlefish. After lunch, we randomly pulled into some nearby ruins that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise and which were all that was left of a city that had been founded in 273 BC. The place gets zero press in the tour brochures. That’s life in an ancient country: an embarrassing wealth of ruins.

Giant Abe Lincoln Bust, Laramie, Wyoming: Originally built to overlook a now-defunct highway named after him, Lincoln now glowers over a section of I-80 between Cheyenne and Laramie, where you can pull off at a visitor center to see him up close. Apparently the ashes of the artist who made it are interred somewhere inside it. Anyway, Lincoln looks like a gigantic robot golem, imprisoned in stone, ready to be released at the merest hint of trouble. “Emancipation Mode: Go.”

The Children of the World Dream of Peace Mural, Denver, Colorado: I told you airports are great places to find oddity, and Denver International Airport is notorious for its weirdness, like this mural by Leo Tanguma that’s supposed to be anti-hate and anti-violence, but comes off as a glory shot of an awesome villain in a comic spread. What I neglected to take a picture of, for some reason, is why the gas masked monster has been defeated in the second half of the mural…it’s by the children of the world getting over their ethnic and geographical differences and beating their swords into ploughshares. But if you ever see it in person, you’ll only remember the monster.

Decomposition Box, Birmingham, Alabama: So there I was, taking my family through the McWane Science Center, letting my kid jump into hurricane booths and make giant soap bubbles and learn how cartoons are made, when we suddenly came upon a dead bunny in a glass case decaying in its own fetid soup. Whatever its educational purposes, it’s going to stick with me for a long, long time. I can still taste it when I eat meat.

Sorry. That's a terrible way to end this post.