The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [88]
I went inside and discovered without surprise that the entrance charge was steep: $15 for adults and $7.50 for children. Americans are clearly prepared to fork out large sums for their pleasures. Grudgingly I paid the admission charge and went in. But almost from the moment I passed through the portals I was enthralled. For one thing, the scale of it is almost breathtaking. You find yourself in a great hangar of a building covering twelve acres of ground and filled with the most indescribable assortment of stuff – machinery, railway trains, refrigerators, Abraham Lincoln’s rocking-chair, the limousine in which John F. Kennedy was killed (nope, no bits of brain on the floor), George Washington’s campaign chest, General Tom Thumb’s ornate miniature billiard-table, a bottle containing Thomas Edison’s last breath. I found this last item particularly captivating. Apart from being ridiculously morbid and sentimental, how did they know which breath was going to be Edison’s last one? I pictured Henry Ford standing at the death-bed shoving a bottle in his face over and over and saying, ‘Is that it?’
This was the way the Smithsonian once was and still should be – a cross between an attic and a junk shop. It was as if some scavenging genius had sifted through all the nation’s collective memories and brought to this one place everything from American life that was splendid and fine and deserving fondness. It was possible here to find every single item from my youth – old comic books, lunch pails, bubble gum cards, Dick and Jane reading books, a Hot-point stove just like the one my mom used to have, a soda pop dispenser like the one that used to stand in front of the pool hall in Winfield.
There were even a collection of milk bottles exactly like those that Mr Morrisey, the deaf milkman, used to bring to our house every morning. Mr Morrisey was the noisiest milkman in America. He was about sixty years old and wore a large hearing-aid. He always travelled with his faithful dog Skipper. They would arrive like clockwork just before dawn. Milk had to be delivered early, you see, because in the Midwest it spoiled quickly once the sun came up. You always knew when it was 5.30 because Mr Morrisey would arrive, whistling for all he was worth, waking all the dogs for blocks around, which would get Skipper very excited and set him to barking. Being deaf, Mr Morrisey tended not to notice his own voice and you could hear him clinking around on your back porch with his rack of milk bottles and saying to Skipper, ‘WELL, I WONDER WHAT THE BRYSONS WANT TODAY! LET’S SEE . . . FOUR QUARTS OF SKIMMED AND SOME COTTAGE CHEESE. WELL, SKIPPER, WOULD YOU FUCKING BELIEVE IT, I LEFT THE COTTAGE CHEESE ON THE GOD DAMN TRUCK!’ And then you would look out the window to see Skipper urinating on your bicycle and lights coming on in houses all over the neighbourhood. Nobody wanted to get Mr Morrisey fired, on account of his unfortunate disability, but when Flynn Dairies discontinued home deliveries in about 1960 on economic grounds ours was one of the few neighbourhoods in the city from which there was no outcry.
I walked through the museum in a state of sudden, deep admiration for Henry Ford and his acquisitive instincts. He may have been a bully and an anti-Semite, but he sure could build a nifty museum. I could happily have spent hours picking around among the memorabilia. But the hangar is only a fractional part of it. Outside there is a whole village – a little town – containing eighty homes of famous Americans. These are the actual homes, not replicas. Ford criss-crossed the country acquiring the