Episode 5 - Postcards from Museums, “Conspiracies, Curiosities and Coffins!”
Museums are important. They’re places where we can explore our heritage, and learn about culture, history and ideas in environments that foster conversations. Say the word and palaces of civilization like The Met, Prado or Louvre come to mind. In this episode, however, we’ll visit a few you’ve probably never heard of. Sites featured include The Billy The Kid Museum in Hico, The Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemarata in Austin, and Houston’s National Museum of Funeral History.
The Billy The Kid Museum, Hico-
The Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemarata-
National Museum of Funeral History-
TRANSCRIPT
(As this transcript was obtained via a computerized service, please forgive any typos and grammatical errors)
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Evan (00:02):
Museums are important. They're places where we can explore our heritage and learn about cultures, history, and ideas in ways that foster conversations. Say the word, and I immediately think of palaces of civilization like The Met in New York city, but it deserves mentioning that Texas has no shortage of great ones. Houston, for instance, has an entire museum district that boasts the world-class Menil collection and Rothko Chapel. Today, though We're going to crisscross the state and visit a few I'll bet you've never heard of. I'm Evan stern. And this is Vanishing Postcards.
Evan (01:07):
Few landscapes in the world have inspired greater mythology than that of the American West. It's provided canvases for authors like Louis L'Amour, Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy. And of course, film historians have waxed poetic for years praising the parables in films like High noon and The Searchers. But beyond this, let's admit it- Cowboys and outlaws are just plain fun. And walking the streets of Hico, Texas, even I, a full-grown adult, have to resist the temptation to pose for photo with my hands gestured like finger guns
Sue Land (01:42):
Hico is a rural North Central Texas cow town. It's small. It's been here since, uh, the 1800s. Some of the buildings have been here since the 1800s. Uh, we had, uh, Hico had always been prosperous as far as shipping grain and cotton. Out of this depot, we shipped more cotton and grain out of this depot than any depot in the state of Texas.
Evan (02:06):
Perched at the Northern edge of the Hill country. Hico sits roughly an hour and 15 minutes West of Waco, and not much further from Fort Worth. Famous for its six man football team and motto "where everybody is somebody" few towns have charmed me more than this community of 1,500 surrounded by rugged vistas and big skies. Walking the downtown's quiet main street of handsome territorial brick and limestone buildings, I feel like I've been transported to the set of an old Howard Hawks movie. And I'm told the struggles this town has endured in its less than 150 year history have been no less epic.
Sue Land (02:46):
Hico has gone through many disasters. They had several fires that burned half of the- West side of town one time. And the next was East side of town. They've had all kinds of floods. So it is, it was a wild wide open old West town. Had more bordellos here than we did anything else. Uh, had, uh, we had outlaws we had just about anything. It was an old wild West town and it is calmed down and become a nice quiet town. Too many disasters- boll weevils killing the crops, floods, fires, you know, depression, wars. Everybody here has been in every war that's ever been. I think. But they keep fighting and keep coming back.
Evan (03:27):
Things have calmed down here considerably, though. Day trippers and weekend ranchers now come to shop for antiques, sample chocolates and even sip Syrah at the Silver Spur Winery. But next door to Flaca's Fitness and Brews, a yoga studio/bar and restaurant, you'll find a place that's doing its part to maintain Hico's desperado image.
Sue Land (03:50):
Welcome to Billy, the kid museum, where y'all from? Well thank you for coming in here today. We appreciate it very much. Now our history starts right there at the cadet. If you sign my gues log I'd appreciate it. And all we ask us a donation. Now, if y'all have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. Okay.?
Evan (04:07):
Ah, Billy The Kid. Few names are more synonymous with the Wild West than that young, renegade gunslinger who fought in New Mexico's infamous Lincoln County War, killed eight men and escaped and eluded the law until meeting his end at the hands of Sheriff Pat Garrett... Or did he?
Robert Dean (04:26):
Pat Garrett buried the body, uh, that night. He's supposed to have been killed around 12 to one o'clock in the morning. And he was in the ground covered up before daylight the next morning. You didn't do that with a famous outlaw. You just didn't do that. You put them on display. You take them and put them on display. Well, the state of New Mexico also refused to give him the reward because he couldn't prove who he killed much less Billy The Kid 'cause he buried the body.
Evan (04:53):
Robert Dean introduces himself to me as the president of the museum. And within two sentences, it becomes pretty evident that the story told here is different from the one we've maybe come to know.
Robert Dean (05:04):
So no, we do not believe he was ever kid killed. A lot of historians do not believe he was ever killed, but it'll never be proven because there is no way to do DNA. Cause he had no children or anything. Nobody do it with. New Mexico says they've got his mother. I'm not sure they even know for sure where she's buried, but that was not his mother. That was a sister that took him to New Mexico. He, his mother died when he was two years old in Buffalo Gap, Texas.
Evan (05:32):
Okay. This yarn is complex. So I'll try my best to sum this up as succinctly as possible. Robert says that Pat Garrett didn't kill Billy The Kid. Someone else was shot in a case of mistaken identity, but was buried quickly in order to keep this hidden. The Kid fled first to Mexico, then Texas, where he eventually settled in Hico, living a quiet life and adopting the name of "Brushy" Bill Roberts. Nearly 70 years later, seeking peace, he unbuttoned his shirt to show a journalist the bullet wounds he sustained in his skirmishes with the law and then traveled to New Mexico in fall of 1950 to seek a pardon from then governor Maybry, which he wasn't granted.
Robert Dean (06:15):
Like I said, uh, he never said when he was here in Hico, he never said he was Billy The Kid. Now he told wild stories to the kids and stuff and all the people around Hico would just say, "Stay away from that old man. He's crazy." He told the wild stories, but he used to say "I was somebody. I was somebody." But he wouldn't say who he was. He'd just tell these wild stories about out in New Mexico and stuff, but nobody ever thought about Billy The Kid. That's basically what he did. We totally believe it. Uh, I don't believe New Mexico believes it and they probably won't because it's a big tourist attraction in New Mexico compared to us, you know,
Evan (06:53):
As it happened, I arrived around the time of a shift change and Robert turned the reins over to volunteer Sue Land to give me a tour of the museum. White haired and sweet natured, she graciously takes me back and walks me around the space, which actually seems to have more war relics than Western keepsakes.
Sue Land (07:10):
The history just starts right here with this cadet and we have world war II history. We have a lot of that Nazi memorabilia. Uh, our, some of our Civil Wars is here. These are
Evan (07:21):
A modest room, which could easily fit inside my parents' townhome, large captioned panels telling the story of Brushy Bill and The Legend of Billy The Kid hang on the walls, while an episode of Bill O' Reilly's "Legends and Lies" supporting this theory plays in a loop on a TV in the background. All told, Sue's walkthrough doesn't take long as they only have two items, belonging to Brushy Bill on display.
Sue Land (07:46):
Now the only thing we actually have of Billy's was this old trunk because when, when everybody determined that he was somebody, everything disappeared out of the whole house where he lived. We got the old trunk here and we have one of these old quilts down here was his. But other than that, that's all we actually have that belonged to Billy.
Evan (08:07):
Sue, however, takes the space's intimate nature in stride,
Sue Land (08:11):
Mom and Pop. Bargain basement. We're not no big fancy museum. We're just a small museum in a small cow town that is, uh, been very fortunate and blessed with a lot of tourists in the last few years.
Evan (08:24):
And when I asked her what her beliefs are surrounding this theory, she's no less firm than Robert.
Sue Land (08:29):
Never prove it. But if you take everything, you said ninety years old, wanted for murder in New Mexico. And won't tell you this. So you can have me. I can be thrown in the jail because murder has no statute of limitation on murder? And then, so then you have him that he has worked and done everything he said he did. Everything he said he did. It proved that they couldn't find any lie in any of it. So yeah, I believe he was, you know. Police don't like eye witnesses. You've got more than one eye witness, you usually have a mess. Cause you got more than one description or what happened or how- "what did he look like?" "Well, he had black hair-" "No he didn't!" You know? So it's, it's the same thing with Billy The Kid. We believe he was Billy The Kid. New Mexico does not. So it was, but that's okay. It's there tourist attraction, too! They've had it longer than we did.
Evan (09:17):
Even so, while my knowledge of matters Billy The Kid is to be kind, limited, I have to ask at least one tough question. "But wasn't Billy The Kid from New York City?"
Sue Land (09:28):
That was Pat Garrett's story. When he co-wrote a book about Billy. And he later even recanted that. He said, Billy never told him anything. So he didn't know where he was from, but the guy that was co-writing it said "well, we need to know something personal about The Kid in order for the people to feel better since he was such a young man that you killed." So he made that up. No, he was not from New York.
Evan (09:49):
Impressed by her passion and dedication to a job she stresses is all volunteer and no pay, I ask how she came to work here.
Sue Land (09:56):
My husband passed away in 2003 and I lived in Houston. And everybody kept saying, you need a puppy. So I got me a puppy, a three month old German shepherd. She was absolutely beautiful. She was the smartest thing in the world. And then she turned protective. By the time she went after the third person, I figured I'd better get her out of the city. So I moved up here where we had property and land and was building us a house before my husband died. So I moved up here and that was in 2007. Well one day out there on the hill watching my dog, chase a Jack rabbit, me encouraging, saying "run, Sam run!" Knowing she was never going to catch that rabbit. I realized, "Gee, I'm going nuts. I gotta get outta here. I gotta do something." So this is what I found. This occupies me. And I've done so many fun and interesting things because of it. I love meeting people. I love talking. It's not obvious. I'm sure, but uh, I don't have a problem with any of that
Evan (10:47):
One person she proudly tells me she's met is Emilio Estevez, a Brushy Bill fan who actually played the role in the 1990 movie, Young Guns II, and spent a weekend here a few months ago doing research. But I assume not all guests are quite so receptive and ask if she's ever encountered anyone hostile to this theory.
Sue Land (11:07):
We don't argue. If we're asked a question, we give the answers and we're very, uh, uh, enthused about what we believe. But if they don't, we stop it. It's their belief and that's okay. Everybody's entitled. So no, we do not argue. And if they become hostile, we definitely don't talk because it's not worth it. You know, everybody's entitled to what they think. So that's what we feel.
Evan (11:33):
So what do I think, you might ask? I think this is all a pretty tall tale. But tall tales can be fun. And while some conspiracies can be damaging, I don't see the harm here. After all, what would life be without stories? That's something that Scott and Jen Webel seem to agree with.
Scott (11:57):
Wow. Um, I think they make sense of the world. They, they help us to relate to things that otherwise we can't relate to or conceive of. Yeah.
Jen (12:12):
And they can make us laugh. They can make us think they can make us feel, um, just like art. They have a variety of functions.
Evan (12:24):
I'm talking to them in the backyard of their home in Austin, by a water fountain fashioned out of two overflowing bathtubs. A pair of hens roam freely about the grounds near a vegetable garden, fenced in by posts decorated with the heads of children's dolls. The place is a surrealists dream. And standing here, I'm almost reminded of the feeling I had walking through the courtyard of Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico City. But things are about to get even stranger.
Jen (12:56):
So welcome to the museum of ephemerata, where you had been all along.
Ginger (12:59):
Step right up.. Step right up... Step right up...
Evan (13:14):
It's Saturday and their daughter, Ginger is inviting myself and today's three other guests to step right up inside a tiny shed to tour The Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemerata. What is ephemerata you might ask? I posed that question to our curators.
Scott (13:31):
Anything with a lifetime or fleetingness. Um, a cut flower or snowflake are great examples,
Jen (13:39):
Or even us. It's a history of collecting across time. Uh, many objects are small, some are even invisible and it's an experiential tour. Um, without the tour, it's just junk on the wall.
Evan (14:00):
Coming here is definitely an experience. First of all, you have to know about it. Being one of the few in-home museums in this country, Scott and Jen don't advertise and they only open their doors once a week. Yet when you walk through this door, you're entering a true cabinet of curiosities. Vintage orchestrations from the twenties play in the background, framed objects and images abound alongside a mounted jackalope and lovingly arranged display cases. But without missing a beat, Jen kicks things off by talking about some of this, as she says, "junk on the wall."
Jen (14:40):
We call this "the celebrity collection" because in the 15th century, people would go on pilgrimages to see things like the finger bone of a Saint. We think of celebrities as modern day saints. So we have favorites like Marilyn Monroe's last smoked cigarette with the tell-tale red lipstick. Also, Elvis hair on loan from Graceland and even a lost leaf found under the Bodhi tree where Buddha attained enlightenment.
Evan (15:13):
She goes on to point out a strand of Willie Nelson's hair. Used tissue from Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips. And my favorite,
Jen (15:23):
We have Chairman Mao's acupuncture pins.
Evan (15:26):
They also have a narwhal tooth, stuffed pygmy kangaroo, and plenty of items, belonging to individuals who are less than famous,
Jen (15:34):
A human horn grown by an unfortunate miss Bydecker of New Jersey, New Jersey. It is a horn that grows, um, in her case from her forehead, uh, it spiraled out in a counter-clockwise spiral. She actually grew two, but the other was lost. Hmm.
Evan (15:54):
They even have a vial of red rain from India and what they believe to be a glass shard from New York's famed and long vanished Crystal Palace.
Scott (16:02):
It was in 1853 and they planned to take it all apart. And each state Capitol would get like a little greenhouse built out of it, but it burned down before that could happen. And it took just 21 minutes to just kind of all melt down. And this is a piece of glass we found at the former site. We used a metal detector in Central Park and found this because it had a nail in it.
Evan (16:25):
This raises my preposterous meter a bit as I've always heard that The Crystal Palace was actually located near the site of what's now Bryant Park on 42nd street. But Scott and Jen stress that whether or not these objects are authentic is beside the point as it's all about the feelings, thoughts, and again, stories they inspire. Part of the charm they argue is in the tension between truth and falsehood. Still, while I am of a firm mind that one should never read the comments, I'm curious to hear their reaction to something, a troll wrote in response to a video, one visitor posted on YouTube. "Ephemerata means random crap we found or have stolen to show off. How does that make you feel and how would you respond to something like that?"
Scott (17:13):
Well, it's kind of true. I mean, a lot of things in our collection are deteriorating, right? So, I mean, he has point.
Evan (17:22):
I have to respect how they fully and unapologetically embrace the idiosyncrasy of all of this. But if you are a purist and are skeptical that the cigarette butt they have on display really was Marilyn Monroe's, believe it or not, if you drive about two hours and 40 minutes East, you can see the genuine lipstick kissed facade of Miss Norma Jean's crypt here.
Rob Parker (17:50):
We have Marilyn Monroe's gravestone. She's full casket, but above ground, not in the ground. So that's why that's so big. Every year they have to replace the face plate with a new one. So we have one of the ones that they removed. Every January they put a new one on that's pure white marble. All white. That is because they've tried to wash off the lipstick and it gets in the pores of the stone -
Evan (18:10):
I'm at Houston's National Museum of Funeral History where docent Rob Parker, an enthusiastic retired ex serviceman and railroad worker is leading me on an in-depth guided two hour tour of this large elaborate and impressively detailed space.
Rob Parker (18:26):
Well, if you're dying for something interesting, got to put that in somewhere now, but anyway, uh, this place, you're not going to be looking at cadavers. You're not going to see bodies. This is mostly about the, the trappings, I guess you might say, of funerals, the caskets, the coffins, the hearses, the great antique vehicles here. Uh, it's more about the history of funerals as opposed to getting into, or should I say digging into what a funeral is?
Evan (18:54):
The hearses alone are worthy of a visit alone. They have Buick dating to 1916, wooden horse drawn carriages from the 1800s, and even the Mercedes that drove Princess Grace to her cathedral crypt. There's an entire multi-room gallery dedicated to Papal funerals featuring a replica of John Paul II's tomb, as well as a walk-in recreation of the first crematorium in the United States. Established in 1992 by Walter Waltrip, a Houston native and owner of funeral home conglomerate SEI, there's surprisingly little macabre or ghoulish about this place. Standing before a wicker coffin, Rob gives me a mini lesson in civil war history,
Rob Parker (19:39):
Cheap labor. These liberated slaves and free material. Bingo. You can make these Wicker coffins and put, send the bodies North in that. And the air circulation around the body helped keep the temperature down because bodies temperatures rise when you die. So it helped preserve the body going back North.
Evan (19:56):
Additionally, he tells me that battlefield surgeons used these woven coffins for storing amputated body parts prior to disposal.
Rob Parker (20:03):
So that's why to this very day, if somebody around you is losing it, if they're falling to pieces, aren't they a basket case? The origin of the basket case. So that's cool.
Evan (20:15):
Rob first visited the museum in 2010 and has volunteered here for eight years where he makes himself available to visitors most Thursdays. After all this time, he still remains utterly taken with this place so much so that he and his wife held a party celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary in the area dedicated to Dia de Los Muertos. At the end of our walkthrough, I ask if working here has shaped his attitude towards life.
Rob Parker (20:43):
I've never, I, ever since Vietnam, I was over there- I really haven't feared death. I know it's inevitable. You're going to die. So don't run away from it, embrace it and love life, which I do and just enjoy it and live it to its fullest. And when you go, you can say, I can at least turn to myself in the mirror and say, well done and pass away. So that's all. It didn't, I didn't learn it from here, but anybody who comes here, I advise them
Evan (21:11):
If there's a common thread to be found in any of these museums, it's that all of the people I've spoken with who dedicate their time to these interests seem to share this attitude and appear to be doing pretty well. Sure. You could maybe call these subjects obtuse or off-beat, but isn't that the beauty of it? Plus just so you know, they'll all cost you less than a matinee ticket at the movies. And who knows? As Jen suggests you just might someday open up a museum of your own, too-
Jen (21:47):
I would like to conversely propose that everybody has a museum in their home. You know, do you have a drawer of plastic bags that you reuse? Well, that's your museum of plastic bags.
