SUMMER FUN- PART ONE

     Our camper van was spending too much time in the driveway. Last month we took it north to enjoy friends, family and cool mountain air.  Our first stop was the faux-alpine village of Helen, Georgia.

It was like Micky Mouse in lederhosen. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What was even stranger was the red gypsy wagon we rented nearby.

With no campsites available we reserved what seemed to be something more spacious than our Toyota van. We soon learned it was smaller, had torn sheets, and smelled like dirty laundry.  The van suited us just fine that night.

     

 

Camping in North Carolina's Cataloochee Valley is always extraordinary. Since elk were re-introduced a few years ago, it is not uncommon to have these 600-pounders lumbering past the campground.

     

 Stranger than Germanic Mickeyland was the Jeff Mathews Museum in Galax, Va. This is a personal project, a life-long collection of one man and his friends. 

They started with arrowheads and when they had too many, they began turning them into weird "Indian art". 

 

 There might have been 20 cases of these sharpened stones

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clovis Jackson and his award-winning arrowhead mosaic

 

 

"Eclectic" does not go far enough to describe  a museum that displays the tonsillectomy chair where, for years, Dr. J. Glenn Cox scraped those bothersome lymph nodes out of his patient's throats, 

next to,

 

     

 

a display of assembled plastic movie monsters.

   

 

Nearby was what was said to be the city's first electric hair curler machine.

 

 

 

 

 

And not far from that,

 

 

 

a "complete dental office" which took me back to tortured times of my youth. 

 

 

The museum founders took great pride in the killing exotic animals for display.

"One of the world's largest mounted Kodiak bears" the sign said.

 

 

Their forebears took great pride in killing Yankees in an effort to preserve slavery during the conflict known as the Civil War. 

 

Many people donated photos of their ancestors to the musuem's Civil War display

"1861- One Confederate is Equal Of Ten Yankees".    

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While there were over 500,000 enslaved people living in Virginia at

the time of the Civil War (and the black population is three times that now) there is no mention of them in the Jeff Mathews Museum. The closest thing to it are two carvings of Congolese warriors purchased on an African hunting trip.

     Many Virginians have fought in wars since then. One of them, World War II, came to an end when an American B-29 dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima.

     You can see the bombing that won the war in the lower level on the Jeff Mathews Museum.

   

 

 

     Less momentous is the dashing black car that won the city's

soap box derby back in 1952. 

  

 

 

 

 

History was made again 27 years later when Galax's Kylene Barker was crowned Miss America.

 

 

 

 

This corner is devoted to her remarkable achievement.

 

I met her dad once, the only person who has ever told me, "Y'know, my daughter was Miss America".

I was impressed and being single at the time, asked if she was too.

Dad let me know she was married to some fella she'd met in Nassau. 

    A little bragging goes a long way in Galax, Va.  The legend of Talmadge Jones may go on forever just because he donated his little green wagon to the Jeff Mathews Museum.

 

           You can visit this marvelous collection Wednesdays through Saturdays, 11 and 4 p.m. Admission is free and donations, happily accepted.

         After visiting Jeff's museum we headed home with visions of Miss America, painful tonsillectomies, and Johnny Reb ("ten times tougher than any Yankee") dancing in our heads..

Thankfully, they did not dance long,  I started thinking of creating my own museum.  Would you come to it, "Glenn's Incredible Driftwood Collection"?

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