WILD BILL AND HIS SIXTH STREET CIRCUS

       It's Gainesville's best kept secret, the new attraction on NW 6th Street. The "Theatre of Memory Museum" has something for everyone. 

 

       

The home-grown collection includes all sorts of things... music memorabilia, seashells, ancient scrolls and so much more. If one oddity does not intrigue you the next one will. 

     Bill Hutchison and his wife, Jennifer Johnson, bought the historic cottage to share their treasures with the world. It's just a mile from downtown Gainesville. 

    

  

    I spent hours there Saturday trying to take it all in. The director (Bill)  gave me a tour.

      This house of curiosities is a result of a lifetime of collecting. You enter the 1903 cottage in the first of twelve rooms, "The Wheelhouse". Bill has a thing for all relics round

 

 

 

 

and,

 

 for the Beatles. The next room revealed his extensive Fab Four collection.

 

   

    This curiosity cabinet was chock full of items from Liverpool's finest, from a pair of John Lennon's glasses to Russian Beatle Dolls.

 

 

The center room is devoted to Bill's love of music. He and his wife have already hosted small concerts there.

 

FEEL FREE TO BANG A GONG, TRY TUBULAR BELLS OR MAKE THE BOWLS SING

     Bill is a Viet Nam Vet. He shipped out in '68 and served in both the infantry and in the Army's entertainment division.

    Jennifer and Bill's shoe collection is nonpareil.  Where else in Florida can you see so many amazing ways to adorn your feet feet?

 

 

 

 

 

 

These crusty clown shoes sparked my interest. The previous owner probably wore them to keep people laughing for years.

   An east wall was adorned with "scholar stones" collected from the far East. They are the rare ones

resembling natural landscapes. 

 

 

Most come from China, Korea, India, and Japan. I know of at least one dug up in the United States.

 

 

CORAL ROCK FROM COCONUT GROVE

 

 It's in my back yard.

 

 

 

 

 

    In the Writing Room I saw fragile books, ancient scrolls and 4000 year-old stones inscribed with words. They were carved in cuneiform, the first known written language from Mesopotamia.  

The one on the right is a tax bill for grain produced.

I thought it was  weird that someone saved a tax bill for four centuries. Mine are quickly deposited in my "circular file".

 

      These horse hair calligraphy brushes were hanging nearby. While I could not decipher the words on the plaque above they seemed to be say,

 

 "Borrow these and paint a masterpiece on the SW 34 Street's Graffiti Wall."

(I can't decipher what the kids paint there either).

I might do that next week.

      

    Bill let me hold  thousand year-old spear points collected in North Florida. Some were still as sharp as steel.

 

 

    

LONG BRANCH SALON

    Being allowed to touch -or hold- many of the artifacts was one of things that endear me to Jen and Bill's theatre.
   

SHELL ROOM

    
  

TEA ROOM

       It's places like this that make cities special. Who would ever visit Portland without a stop at the original Voodoo Donut Shop? 

       The Theatre a perfect compliment to the Harn and our amazing natural history museum on the UF campus. Yes, there's the cool Tool Museum on East University but the door is usually locked.  Satchel's Pizza? It's a museum too.  I tell visitors it's like having lunch at Pee Wee's Playhouse. 

   We've got the Matheson and Cotton Club museums too. Big museums and small, They tell the world who we are and make us proud to live here.

     There you have it, twelve rooms for discovery on NW Sixth. Make plans to visit soon. The director (and collector), effervescent Bill, will probably be there to greet you. 

 

     Admission is free but donations are graciously accepted. Parking is easy. Head down the driveway and tie up your horse (or car or bike) in the back pasture. Heck I'll probably be there enjoying my 17th visit.

-Glenn

Theatre of Memory Museum

1705 NW 6th St., Gainesville, FL, 32609

Open Wednesday through Sunday. 

 10-30 - 4:30 p.m.

 website: www.theatreofmemory.org

FACING A BRUTAL PAST

           I've always avoided Alabama. Visions of Bull Connor and his attack

dogs were enough to keep me away. Then I learned about a new  museum in Montgomery honoring the millions Americans enslaved and the protesters Connor's dogs were tearing into.

     A friend who had visited told my wife and I, "It's a powerful gut-wrenching experience, you really should go". So last week we went taking two neighbors with us.

 

 

     We spent two days touring the National Lynching Memorial and the Legacy Museum. Both were incredible. We hope you can go there as well.

     They opened in 2018 to share slavery's 400-year-old story. The Legacy Museum uses high-end technology to tell how twelve million Africans were kidnapped to provide free labor for Americans. That led to  eras of mass lynchings, racial segregation, and mass incarceration. We saw how these evil pieces fit in our nation's history as never before.

 

     In the museum you visit the enslaved imprisoned, view numerous films, and get face-to-face with the incarcerated. Taking it all in took many quiet hours. No one was staring at their cell phones.

    

 

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice (often referred to as "The Lynching Memorial") is dedicated to the thousands of racial terror lynchings that took place between 1877 and 1950.

Memorials nearby honors victims from before and after that time period.

     

     At the site's center hang over 800 steel monuments, one for every county in our country where documented lynchings took place. They reminded me of rusting coffins.

    The names of over 4000 African American men, women, and children are carved

into their surfaces. I grew up in Miami-Dade County where four lynchings took place. 

There were 18 listed in my current home, Alachua County. Of Florida's 67 county's, 42 had documented racial terror lynchings.

  

 

   The term, "lynching", is used to designate anyone who was hung, shot, burned, choked ( "George Floyd")  or drowned because they were black. The killings needed no reasons. If you were black you could die because you voted, said "Yes" instead of "Yes sir" or if you failed to tip your hat.

    Emmett Till, fourteen, was tortured and killed in 1955 because he whistled at a white woman.

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     The memorial is a quiet, sacred space to experience the truth of our past,

a place to reflect on racial terror in America and its legacy.

     

    It was created by the Equal Justice Initiative, a Montgomery-based non-profit that is committed to challenging racial and economic injustice. It was founded in 1989 by attorney Bryan Stevenson. Their website has a wealth of information, https://eji.org .

         We spoke with one of the helpful docents at the memorial. He reminded us that the 4000+ remembered there are only the documented lynchings, the "names that are known". 

    "There's got to be 100,000 more", he told us. "My father's six brothers disappeared after WWll. It's not documented, they're just gone."

    He pointed out that Alabama is still fighting the Civil War. Although he works in the state's second most visited tourist site, the governor -whose office is just five blocks away- has not taken the time to visit. "She says she'll never come", he added. 

 

     

   At the bottom of the memorial's hill is a grouping of markers. They designate the lynching counties that have made

significant progress in recognizing past transgressions and are engaged in the long reconciliation process. My county, "Alachua", is the only one in Florida that has taken this step.

 

     On the third day we headed home. 

Traveling south the four of us shared the lessons learned in Montgomery. Hopefully they will make us better people and more prepared to help rectify the wrongs of the past.

 

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-Link to 4-minute museum video: 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEXTR5rOpDI

-Link to lynching memorial video:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PxAcnfrMow

______________________________________

GETTING THERE

    Montgomery is a 6-hour drive from Gainesville. We stayed at an Air BnB in the historic Cottage Hill neighborhood.
Our location allowed us to easily walk to the memorial, museum and restaurants. 

    After driving three hours south we went underground in Florida Caverns State Park. That's another story.

____________________________________________

 

 

YESTERDAY'S KING MANGO STRUT

   41 years ago my buddy Bill and I started a parade. Yesterday the King Mango Strut marched again and it seems everyone had a jammin' good time.

  

Miami's history museum described our event (yesterday, on Facebook) pretty well,

What began as a spoof of the annual King Orange Jamboree Parade in 1982 has become of the most anticipated events in South Florida, and it's taking place today in after a two-year hiatus! 

 

The King Mango Strut was started in 1982 by Grove residents Glenn Terry and Bill Dobson. After Terry's group, the Mango Marching Band, was denied entry into the King Orange Jamboree Parade due to their unusual instruments, kazoos, conch shells, and garbage cans. They decided to have their own parade in the streets of Coconut Grove. 

 

Today, the festival draws over 12,000 spectators and participants, all joining in to celebrate "what’s weird and wonderful about Miami and the year that was". King Mango Strut includes everything from people dressed as politicians to funny takes on the year's biggest headlines.

    I live in Gainesville now and did not attend.Friends told me it was terrific and sent photos. Here are a bunch of them with comments from me, the former "Top Banana of the King Mango Strut"

2022'S KING MANGO STRUT

(which took place in '23, which is just  another odd aspect of this annual procession).

     The parade always starts with two guys carrying a banner.

 

followed by a truckload of waving young girls. They are the ones participating in the Little Miss Mango Competition.

   Since the parade's beginning, all have tied for first place, each getting to be "Little Miss Mango" for a day.  Beauty pageants may not be politically correct but -who cares?- that's what the Strut is all about.

If you look hard enough you may see a few small children

    Twenty years ago the truck began getting crowded with waving parents and grown women bearing "Former Little Miss Mango" signs. 

MANGOHEADS

     The core of our parade is "the mangoheads" the marching elite who have been with us from the start.

Gina McFall creates incredible costumes (red-haired, below).

 

Her group this year, "Las Cucarachas" pointed out that when humans "end the world as we know it", roaches will still be dancing in the streets. 

Peer Everett was the Big Guy with a big personality.  Every year he'd be a crazed evangelical preacher, a loud, leering wrestler, or in '83, "Cosmic Claus". He moved on to the Strut in the Sky last month so we honored him with a "Peer-amid" covered with photos of him in his many disguises.

Bobby Deresz has been in it since the beginning too. For thirty years he was the memorable white clown. He'd carry a shovel and a garbage can at the parade's end to clean up non-existent trash.

This year Bob morphed into "Mr. Money" one of

many developers tearing down the Old Grove to build big white boxes for the rich. 

Behind him was Mr.  Box letting folks know he would sell his latest creation for a paltry $5 million. 

 And. of course, you can't build McMansions without tearing them down first.

That's why Janice and Allyn Pruitt brought their Dino Demolitionator and their "Team of Extinction" to Main Highway. These two and their Irvington Avenue

 

neighbors are hard-core mangoheads. They gleefully leveled 16 historic buildings along the parade route without breaking a smile.

 

 

 

 

From the start we wanted our parade to be different.  The bands had to play rock n' roll, salsa, or the blues from flatbed trucks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

   In 95' a group of runners filled out an application saying, "We are The Running of the Bullshitters".

They ran our parade route backwards -three times- during the course of our event. We loved it.

    The guy in the photo above?  I saw a video of him running between legs of the orange dude on stilts. If you're nuts this is the parade for you!

Our motto has always been, "Let's Put the Nut Back in Coconut Grove".

 

We always had fun coming up with mango art for our events, here are a few examples...

            (compiled by HistoryMiami)

   Jeremy, a neophyte strutter, came as the King himself. Why he was pulling a casket, I don't know.  

 


  Local civic groups want to join the fun but have a hard time being funny. Instead, they wear funny clothes and carry signs that say things like "Rotary Loves Kids". If you dress bright, smile, and dance in the road, you'll do.

Often a good sign and a funny hat is all you need.

 

 

SilverMan is a professional artist who wanted to make a statement about AI art. Yesterday he was a fabulous artist robot who drew all the parade characters -while in the parade on the side of a moving truck.

   That's strutting!

 

 

AND FINALLY THE FREDS

   The Marching Freds were a big deal in the 80's and 90's but... who names their kids "Fred" anymore?  This year there

were three and two, were only relatives...

As they say, "Better Fred than dead".

 

 

    Again, I couldn't be there but many of you sent me your photos. Thanks. I'm glad King Mango "22 (in '23) turned out to be such a grand affair.  

   It took many mangoheads -from the past and present- to make it happen. I thank them for their hard work, colorful costumes, and for making thousands of people laugh.

The king's best friend,

Glenn