Allow me to introduce you to the Deke Slayton Memorial Space and Bike Museum, located in picturesque Sparta, WI. Saw a highway sign for it on the way home from yesterday’s Minneapolis spring Dopefest.
It’s too bad I didn’t have time to visit. Note the exciting Calendar of Events.
I can’t find any earthly OR extraterrestrial reason to conjoin two such museums. Perhaps the Dekester did ride a bike as a child, but I haven’t found a reference to it on the website.
Ok, who else has some incongruous slapped together museum of unrelated subjects onder one roof?
The small town of Aguadulce in Panama is in the center of the sugar cane raising district, and also has an industry extracting sea salt in evaporation ponds. So they have a small Museum of Salt and Sugar, possibly the most boring museum I have ever seen.
When I was in Israel, we visited a museum dedicated to Clandestine Immigration and Naval History.
It’s not acually as bizarre as it sounds at first blush–the museum focuses on the struggle for the right to immigrate from 1934-1948, while the British Mandate was in force. Some of the questionably sea-worthy (even when not overcrowded) ships had been used as naval vessels before they were used to transport human cargo to Israel, and were then used as naval vessels during the Israel war of indepence.
It’s actually kind of a neat museum–although kind of sad. I mean, not to diminish the Holocaust, but some of the choices made by the British government (and others) in the name of “doing the right thing” were not exactly kind and compassionate.
But God was on the side of the Israeli Navy, and they won some improbably battles, and now it’s all ok. Er, sort of.
Although it has an excellent collection of automobiles (or at least it did when I visited around 1976), Bellm’s Cars and Music of Yesterday fills the bill. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say “filled” said bill, as it has rebranded itself as the Sarasota Classic Car Museum and has apparently downsized the accumulation of musical memorabilia.
They’re not exactly museums, but a pair of antique shops in Indiana share billboard (and apparently adjoining physical) space. Their names are something like “Harold’s Military Collectibles” and “Carol’s Fashions of Yesteryear”. I’ve come to the reasonable conclusion that the proprietors are a husband-wife tandem, each spending the day devoted to his or her respective interest.
On the West Loop 820 in Fort Worth, there is a Civil War Museum that shares a building with a Victorian Dress Museum. Since the building is painted grey, I can hazard a guess as to which side of the Civil War the museum focuses on.
In addition to having a full arcade’s worth of classic video games and old timey quarter-operated motion games. At least it was a full arcade’s worth when I was there, they could have downsized that too, but when I went there it was a three-fer!
The Gilbert White Museum, in the naturalist’s old house in Selbourne in Hampshire, also houses the Oates Museum. About the Oates family in general, but concentrating on the life of Captain Lawrence “I may be some time” Oates.
The latter family had absolutely no connection with White, Selbourne or even Hampshire and there’s no really close link between 18th century natural history and early 20th century polar exploration. The only reason for housing them together is that back in 1955 the White museum in the house was struggling for money at a time when one of Oates’s relatives was looking for somewhere to house their collection. Thus creating an otherwise completely random juxtaposition.
Personally thought the Oates half was more interesting.
In Cleveland, we have the Crawford Auto and Aviation Museum, featuring cars and airplanes. That’s a bit of an odd juxtaposition, but they’re at least both vehicles. But that’s ajoined to the Western Reserve Historical Society, which is all about Cleveland history, with an emphasis on Millionaires’ Row.
Nobody who’s seen the movie Exodus could doubt the connection between these topics in Israeli history. Great movie, by the way, and one of the films that marked the end of the Hollywood Blacklist: Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted screenwriter, was given full screen credit as opposed to laboring under a pseudonym. Kirk Douglas deserves credit for that.
In Easton, PA the Crayola ‘factory’ is in the same building as the Canal Museum. The factory is more of a museum though, with exhibits about the history of Crayola and hands-on exhibits for the kids as well. You can buy one ticket that covers admission to both fo some reason.
And it’s really cool. If you haven’t taken your kids there, you should. My kids loved it (both parts of the museum.)