Minor weirdness at the museum

I spent a couple hours yesterday at the museum. A brief moment of brilliance flared about a week ago that led to the secretary/treasurer/museum manager (aka yours truly) ordering a paper towel dispenser for the rest room. Since the day the museum opened almost 30 years ago, the paper towel dispenser has been the same type common in most people's kitchens, a simple rack on the wall that holds a roll of Scott or Bounty or whatever happens to be on sale. You know, you got to rip one sheet off at a time, assuming the towels tore evenly. Or, more likely, you got to curse quietly when the roll pulled loose from the holder and bounced across the floor and then you rolled it back up, stuck it back on the holder, and hoped the noise from the rest room fan masked the sound of your profanities. 

Anyway, it occurred to me that this particular dispenser wasn't the most sanitary piece of equipment to be using right now in the  time of cholera  middle of a pandemic. It didn't occur to me until I'd been flipping through the Uline catalog looking for something else when the towel dispensers caught my eye, but at least it did occur.  The cost was surprising low. Even the cost for the rolls for filling the thing didn't seem particularly costly considering how few people use the rest room annually. I'm actually a little surprised it took me 8 years of being the person who orders supplies for it to sink in that the rest room could use an update, but better late than not at all. 

I will confess the idea of ordering anything from Uline does not bring me joy. The company is based in Wisconsin and owned by people who thought Scott Walker was God's gift to the state and who no doubt are handing over wheel barrow loads of money to Ron Johnson's Senate campaign even as I type. Johnson had promised to serve only two terms, but oddly enough totally forgot that promise when the prospect of going back into anonymity in Wisconsin became imminent. In any case, right wing asshats is an understatement. On the other hand, they do supply an amazing range of equipment useful for almost any commercial venture, everything from dust mops to floor mats to caution tape. And a dozen different kinds of paper towel dispensers, which they promised to deliver in under 48 hours. (A promise they kept. It was ordered late Wednesday afternoon; UPS delivered it Friday.)

I opted for the Junior model of this particular type of dispenser. It doesn't take up much space and was relatively easy to mount. I didn't do the mounting, of course. I drafted the S.O. Anything that involves power tools, even if it's just a cordless drill being used to put in two screws, tends to get done by the S.O. The hardest part from my perspective was simply getting the first towel to emerge from the hole at the bottom. It's not as easy as they claim to get that first tail to drop down. 

While I was at the museum waiting for the S.O. to do the dispenser installation, I did a little more cataloging. L'Anse Township recently donated some drum and bugle corps uniform pieces -- pants, jacket, a feathered plume that once sat on a hat -- that were found stashed mysteriously in the Township Hall. The local drum and bugle corps, the Golden Eagles, were quite good in their day, even won a state championship 60 years ago, but faded away sometime in (I think) the mid-to-late 1970s. No doubt they faded for the same reason a lot of groups do: the original founders and members aged out (or got burnt out), no one replaced them, and that was that. The uniform donation reminded me that it has been 60 years so this summer the museum will do a temporary exhibit commemorating that anniversary. 

The uniform does present a bit of a mystery in itself. The jacket is small, really small (the corps was a junior corps so some of the kids in it were still in junior high and petite) but the pants have a 48 waist and legs that look long enough to have been worn by an NBA player. Two mismatched uniform pieces and a plume without a hat. Intriguing.

Fortunately, the museum has a lot more than just those three pieces for the planned exhibit. There are a couple bugles, multiple uniform pieces (both musicians and color guard), a snare drum, the heads off a bass drum, a couple color guard flags, and a lot of small memorabilia. The volunteer curator should have no trouble putting together a nice display. 

Photo was lifted from a Golden Eagles Facebook page that has unfortunately seen zero activity in almost ten years. Someone set it up before the corps did a 50-year reunion in 2012 and no one has apparently gone near it since. I'm going to do multiple press releases in the next couple of months hoping to scare more photos out of the woodwork. There must be people locally who took pictures at parades even if they didn't have kids in the corps. Wish me luck.