Only a few days after I told you about the Museum of Animated Carvings, we’re already back in Kansas. In the town of Lawrence, wanna-be blues musician “Honey Boy” (more like “White Boy”) Walker has filled the first floor of his home with such weird collections, including over 500 sock monkeys and six cow hairballs, that he calls it “The Museum of the Odd”. His love for the iconic toy began in 1980, but he is probably the only person in the world who collects cow hairballs, which vary in size but are mostly round and smooth. And what is that, you ask? It’s the hair that gathers up in one of the stomachs of a cow and is removed during the slaughtering process. Unlike cats and other animals, cows can’t cough up the hairball. The more you know.
Amongst random Elvis Presley artifacts (his hair, a toe nail and a piece of bed sheet he slept on) are antique circus freak trading cards, animal limb ashtrays, post-mortem photography (one of the first things he collected as a young child), a hunk of elephant dung painted and shaped to resemble Adolf Hitler, stuffed frogs from Tijuana, toothbrushes used by singer Ray Charles and television game show host Bob Barker, and Tom Thumb’s glove (but not O.J. Simpson’s).
For a dollar, “Honey Boy” will personally guide you around his so-called museum, because he doesn’t want you to miss anything of importance of course. In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy famously said, “We’re not in Kansas anymore”, which is definitely true of whomever steps inside the Museum of the Odd. Oh, and by the way, “Honey Boy” likes to sleep with his monkeys (see this picture) just like the Wicked Witch of the West. I wonder if he’s written a blues song about them yet?
