(male announcer) Production costs for Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations have been paid for in part by: Generous supporters of Kansas City Public Television.

And by: Thank you.

(man) ♪ Welcome to a show about things you can see ♪ ♪ without going far, and a lot of them are free.

♪ ♪ If you thought there was nothing ♪ ♪ in the old heartland, ♪ ♪ you ought to hit the blacktop ♪ ♪ with these fools in a van.

♪ ♪ Look out, they're driving hard, ♪ ♪ checking out art in their own backyard.

♪ ♪ Randy does the steering so he won't hurl.

♪ ♪ Mike's got the map, such a man of the world.

♪ ♪ That's Don with the camera, ♪ ♪ kind of heavy on his shoulder.

♪ ♪ And that giant ball of tape, it's a world record holder.

♪ ♪ Look out, they're driving hard, ♪ ♪ checking out art in their own backyard.

♪ ♪ Look out, they're driving hard, ♪ ♪ checking out the world in their own backyard, ♪ ♪ checking out the world in their own backyard.

♪ I see some kind of-- This is kind of the circus center of the world, right?

Yep, Gibtown.

(Don) Dear TV Mailbag, who's clowning who?

Hi, Don the camera guy here, tramping around this south Tampa burg known for its unusually high concentration of circus workers.

(Mike) Th is place is kind of famous, ri ght?

(Don) Indeed it is, and surely someone inside it can direct us to the object of our quest, the genuine Giant's Boot at the trailer park which bears his name.

(Mike) Ra ndy joins the circus.

That way.

It's in here.

This is it.

It's come to this.

We're driving around Florida trailer camps.

(Don) Make that walking.

Seems these two producers have sniffed their prey.

And, sure enough, right here by another of the big guy's business ventures, the boot has been bagged.

(Randy) Gibtown was where circus freaks felt comfortable.

They had-- like, at the post office, there was a little counter for little people.

Well, there was actually a murder.

Lobster Boy killed somebody here, and that kind of shook the town up.

But they were among their own.

Kind of got into hot water, didn't he?

(Don) The giant's long gone, and his boot's way worse for wear, but the diner he built is still going strong.

I think one giant deserves another, don't you?

(Don) So why not some breakfast, the large-portion, small-cost kind public TV crews can afford.

World's largest ball of videotape, come to sit next to the giant's shoe.

(Don) And that is how, in almost no time at all, we found ourselves engaged in a short-order showdown.

Jalapeno poppers.

They're hot.

Whoo!

Bite into that now.

Let me see if you're like the giant.

[woman chuckling] (Randy) What are you laughing about?

You're a real man, believe it or not.

(Don) So, feeling stuffed and kind of tough, we left the giant's lair with our manhood intact, pushing towards Tampa, the part of town where Busch Gardens lies.

But Taft Richardson's yard is a theme park all its own, where kids can make art to find hope while Taft picks a few bones of his own.

(Taft) I'd say about 26, 27 years ago, I started this work.

I was eating some beef ribs.

And as I was eating the ribs, I was laying the bones on the side of my plate.

And when I finished eating, it was a giraffe.

It was a gift.

It was a blessing from God that he had given me a talent that I didn't know I had.

It was a mental thing at first.

I'm thinking I'm losing my mind, because I'm picking up bones off the street.

And then about five years later, I began to show it to my family.

And I'm just thankful to God, and I give all praises and honor and glory to God, because I feel like I'm just an instrument being used to spread a message.

And my message is love, peace, understanding, unity, strength.

The wings on the butterfly are fish bones.

This is turtle shell.

You can see almost the texture.

There were teeth in here from a fish called a drum.

This piece is called Stepping Out on Truth.

You must be born again.

And this piece is called Watch and Pray.

If you look into the eyes of the lizard, he's watching you.

And most of my pieces come from the bayou.

(Don) And how do you find the bones?

(Taft) Well, the best way for me, I like to find the animal.

Like, if an animal is hit in the street or something, I pick the animal up.

I found out that a turtle will clean it without eating the bone.

So I use turtles, and I use ants, any kind of way that I can clean the bone.

And then I bleach the bone, and I fuse it together.

I don't cut the bone; I try not to.

And what I do, I take bone and crush it up and make my own epoxy by using crushed bone and Elmer's Glue.

I used a shark's jaw here with the wing, turtle shell.

And I used a crab, fish bone.

(Don) What do you call this one?

(Taft) This is called Let Not Man Deceive You.

This piece is called Glory, Hallelujah.

I have the bird in a shouting position, praising God.

And then this piece is called Saving Grace.

(Don) It's just amazing.

(Taft) And it's all, like I said, just bones.

(Don) We re you an art student at some point in your life?

I've never--never had art training.

That's why I can-- I give all the glory to God.

Because if I had a teacher who taught me this, it would be different.

But I didn't have a teacher.

And so all of my inspiration comes from the creative source, and we can call it whatever we want to.

I got to the point where I can make almost anything just by praying and just looking into the pile of bones.

(Don) Those aren't turtles cleaning it back there that I hear, is it?

Oh, no, well, that's my music over here.

Every morning, they wake me up at 5:30 with the machine that makes the bricks.

But it's all part of it.

This is all industrial, commercial, so I fit right in with the children.

Only difference, this is the children's workshop.

This is my studio, but I invited the community.

(Don) So you were just kind of meant to do this stuff?

Seems like it, because I grew up on this street as a child, and it's like a blessing.

60 years later, I'm doing this that I enjoy doing.

And it keeps me young.

It keeps me active.

It keeps me wanting to do something in the community.

(Don) Now, Taft says that being a bone man means no more eating meat, with which this herbivore can agree.

He's making things like we've never seen before, and with us out of the way, he'll no doubt keep making more.

And our way is now the causeway, taking us to Safety Harbor, where things seem quite serene: gently lapping waves, a canopy of green, and one oak in particular that we all agree is, well, huge.

Man, it's huge.

(Don) Think of this as setting the scene so that tomorrow, when we actually do something, you'll know where it's being done.

Tree-mendous.

[chuckles] [air whooshing] boink!

(Don) We're pretty sure this is it: Safety Harbor's house o' whimsy, once a plain brown box with a few trees in the yard that's been ever evolving since its husband-and-wife owners moved in some 18 years back.

(Todd) We've been together since the seventh grade.

Our parents built houses, like, three houses down from each other.

Boy and girl next door-- doesn't it just get you?

And then we had seventh grade art class together in Safety Harbor Middle School.

And then we started going, you know, hanging with all the kids in the subdivision.

(Kiarlinda) So I think it's their fault, the art class's fault that this happened.

I always wanted to live in a gingerbread house.

And so that's our version of a gingerbread house.

The gingerbread was, like, one of the first things we added, and then it was tame color-wise.

And then the more we traveled and the more we saw, the more vibrant the house got.

It didn't get called "Whimsy" till after the multiple paint job, I think.

(Todd) Yeah.

(Kiarlinda) We had a big fish swimming out of the chimney at one point, and all the bowling balls, so people nicknamed it "the fish bowl house."

But then once we painted it all different colors, we decided it needed to be Whimsy.

I guess I've never seen a house that every single surface is painted a different color, but it's here, right now, yeah.

So, I mean, when you live in a house like this, you can't be sad.

And all you see is people that drive past and honking and waving and smiling.

And it's great.

(Todd) It's about multiples.

(Kiarlinda) All about multiples, definitely, rows of things.

And I don't know why, but it just seems orderly to me.

(Randy) Are we walking through a particular path?

(Todd) Oh, no, there's no-- [laughs] It's a free-for-all.

(Mike) And this is going to be across the street?

Yeah, Casa Loco.

(Todd) It 's Casa Loco now.

We collect a lot of Mexican folk art that's inside there.

That's our guest house.

(Todd) That's going to be our next project.

We did about--how many different art cars have we had?

About ten different things we've done.

(Kiarlinda) This was all about Y2K.

(Todd) Th is one we hooked up to a laptop computer, so we asked people to type in, like, millennium thoughts.

But a friend that's a musician did its own soundtrack.

[alarm sirens wailing] You want to drive it?

(Don) Looks like lead foot Mike Murphy's making up for lost time in the passenger seat.

And just to put a finer point on it, check out the backing.

But before we leave, there's still one part of the Whimsy compound that needs to be seen.

(Todd) Since we had all the bowling balls out on the yard and everything, we started asking friends that we knew or just artists that we came across when we travel if they would do something with a bowling ball.

The only requirement was that you start with a bowling ball, and you can do anything to it.

So some people cut them apart.

There's a big clacker out there, you know, like the metal ones you used to have on your office desk.

That's out there.

(Kiarlinda) And the waffle iron, waffle iron ball.

(Todd) So I think, to date, we've had 112 artists do balls for it.

We started photographing celebrities holding this one gold ball that we travel with all the time.

So we've had about 800 different people hold it so far.

We kind of--it's gone around the world two times.

And then since 9/11, it's almost impossible.

I used to carry it onto the plane, and they don't let me do it anymore, so we-- [laughs] (Don) You know where this is going.

Whenever balls are displayed, ours can't help but be seen.

We suspected these two would appreciate it, and appreciate it they did, like almost no one ever has.

So, fueled by that appreciation, we resumed the driving portion of this show up Route 19 past Tarpon Springs and its sponge museum, past Weeki Wachee and its famed mermaid show, keeping our eyes peeled for the kind of roadside attraction that might also meet our fueling needs.

(Mike) There it is.

Can't get gas there anymore.

Why not?

'Cause it's not a gas station.

(Don) Looks like bad research strikes again.

Harold, it seems, would be ready if your radiator needs repair.

But, these days at least, your basic fill-up has to happens somewhere else, which eventually ours did, somewhere along the way to Gainesville, home of a man whose masks have made him visible in the world of grassroots art.

And Jerry Coker's no slouch when it comes to making music either.

[bluesy piano music] ♪ ♪ (Jerry) I am a painter and a sculptor.

And I'm considered to be, you know, an outsider sculptor, which means I'm self-taught.

My first body of work which was of any interest to anyone was what's referred to now as the identity masks of Jerry Coker.

And these were-- this was a body of work of approximately 150 individuals that I remembered from my childhood in central Arkansas.

Then after that body of work, I began further enhancing the body of identity masks by commemorating people that I met around the country.

♪ ♪ I've always made art all my life.

And, you know, I painted, and I've done sculpture.

And the way you get heavily involved in arts is, like, you make a piece of art, and somebody gives you a significant chunk of money for it, you know?

And so then I got significantly involved in it.

I said, "Now, wait a minute; let's see.

"I've got to work all day for $40, "or I can work, you know, an hour for $40.

Which do I want to do?"

This is really choice material.

I'm very lucky to find this.

This came out of an old lumberyard that burned down.

And I enjoyed spilling a lot of paint on here.

It gave me a feeling of freedom and, you know, ecstasy.

So you use muffin tins?

These are eye tins.

These are eyes.

I use a lot of different types of materials, but primarily, most of my sculpture is reprocessed oxidized metals.

Now, what does that mean?

It means that I find rusted tin and do a lot of elbow grease with it, and then I work with hammers and tools and everything to form the character of the face.

But basically, what I would like for you to remember in my work is just that I am a wonderful person and a wonderful artist, so I want you to think of me in those lights, and modest.

[gentle piano music] ♪ ♪ First of all, I've got to straighten out these concave lines and make them convex.

[pounding] ♪ ♪ This is the way I make a nose.

It gives me a feeling of political power and supremacy.

I can think of-- even hegemony.

[pounding] ♪ ♪ (Don) Di d you say "hegemony"?

Hegemony, yeah.

You are the first person ev er on our show to say "hegemony," co ngratulations.

Well, thank you, sir.

I feel that I did the right thing, you know?

♪ ♪ What I produce and offer to the world is what I am.

You know, it's my art.

I hope people like it.

I would make less of it if I were not appreciated.

I mean, if people said, "Would you please stop doing that?"

I guess I would.

They will let you know whether they do or not.

That's for sure.

[engine humming] (Don) And action.

Now, over the years, we've endured some pretty scary accommodations.

Yet somehow, in the midst of graduation weekend, we've snagged the last three rooms in town, and they're pretty swanky.

So pardon us while we soak in style, after which we emerged, passing through the ranks of the ungraduated on our way to Tallahassee.

But just outside it, the urge for catch has once again overcome us with this giant Johnny Doughnut-seed to cheer us on.

(Mike) It's the BP outfit.

You've heard of BP before-- batting practice.

Bull pen.

You know, he could be an alien.

He's got no feet.

He's a man with no feet.

(Mike) But look, he's an old gummer.

He's about to spill the coffee on himself, kind of like Randy.

Is this pepper?

Getting close.

(Don) Okay, it's a small field, and the scoreboard's on the blink, but we left the grounds loose and rejuiced, humming like a well-oiled machine, many more of which await us just a few miles away here at Mark Miller's workshop-- don't call it a studio.

Mark's been making all things kinetic since lost in space tripped his eight-year-old trigger.

(Mark) Well, my own robots, machines, go-karts, you name it, anything-- Anything I saw and I wanted, I could figure out how to build it.

And, you know, I still build, occasionally, a few things out of wood, not a whole lot anymore.

And now I work in cast aluminum.

I have my own foundry, machine shop.

I can make anything I want out of anything that I want, and I usually do.

I decided a long time ago that everything kinetic needs a power source.

It needs a motor to run it.

And instead of trying to use gasoline engines, which are toxic, and they are hot, and they stink, and they're hard to start and stop, I decided I'm going to create my own engine, my own power source, and I'm going to use it in everything from this day forward.

So I came up with this.

And there's no hidden little areas.

There's no little motors underneath there.

There's nothing fake about it.

What you see is what you get.

(Mike) Now, this is all wood?

Yeah, the housing of it is wood.

All the guts and everything that are inside are metal.

And, of course, the propeller is metal.

And if we want to start this up, you push the starter button and get it cranking over.

Then you flip the ignition on.

[motors chugging] I'm not going to let it wind up too much, though.

We don't want an y accidents.

It runs like it's gasoline.

It kind of has the noise.

It kind of has, you know, the movement.

And it kind of has the sound.

[motor chugging] [chain rattling] (Randy) Is it the racket that you like?

(Mark) Well, it's kind of hard to describe.

But I like to give my audience the presence of the piece instead of just having them look at something.

And you'll notice it's-- you know, it's an electric en gine system in there, but I still have to have all the amenities.

You know, it's still got to have the carburetor.

(Randy) I noticed that it opened too.

An engine has to have a carburetor.

When I set these things up in museums and galleries an d stuff, you know, the kids come in, and they like to have something, you know, they can feel like they're a part of the display.

This one has a fancy gearshift-- oop, no, that's broke.

That was actually a brand-new radiator that I found in the junkyard and I cut up into a million pieces.

Most of this stuff here was built from '95 to 2000.

And it was built with the sole purpose of creating a large city environment.

I wanted to build my own 1/6 scale city.

Like, it had an engine building factory.

You know, it had machine shops.

You know, I like to have people go in and play with the stuff.

I think it's fun, because that way, they remember you.

Because if you go in and you drag through, you know, a gallery full of a bunch of dead paintings that, you know, are meaningless to me, I get bored really quick.

But if you go in there and you play with the controls and the knobs and the lights and the buttons, you take something back with you.

And that was--that's my plan.

That's what I'm all about.

I kind of got in the mind-set that if I was going back and going to re-create some of the great technological inventions of the early turn of the century, this is how I would go about doing it, and this is what the stuff would look like.

Of course, we got to have moving pictures.

We got to have television, so that's what this is.

[tinny rock music] (Randy) At any given time, lots of projects are under way?

(Mark) Normally I start something or finish something every day.

And everything you've seen here today, if you came back a month later, it might all be gone, and there'll be something else there.

I mean, I won't throw it all away.

I'll dismantle and get what I need back from it to move on with.

I always say you never know what you're going to be doing when you get up in the morning, and it's true.

Did you play any pro ball?

No, did you play any miniature golf?

[laughs] That wasn't on camera was it?

Oh, God, it's still on.

Sorry about that.

I apologize for that.

(Don) No apology needed when you're talking to a TV weasel.

We're just sorry that Mark's wizardry with wires hasn't brought him riches and fame--yet.

Dr. Smith, eat your heart out.

(Mark) Wa it for it.

Wa it for it.

There it goes, mo uth opening.

[water dripping] (Don) No doubt about it, we like to watch.

But flicker vision will have to wait, since very dark clouds are now rolling in, the kind that could bring this show to a premature end.

We need a miracle, and Mary Proctor's pretty much had one.

Ten years ago, her sprawling folk art museum sprung up on the edge of town following a fire that took the lives of three family members, her beloved grandma among them.

(Mary) I got devastated and, you know, coming out here crying and, you know, don't know what to do.

The Lord spoke to my spirit and lived within a year and said, "Paint."

And I'd never painted before.

I wanted to remember my grandmama by placing her on a door and the stuff she told me.

So that got me into the art world, because I wanted to remember Grandmama on a door.

And I started painting all around the yard, and somebody came along from New York and said, "This is folk art."

What I decided to do was, all this pain that I got going on in my life, let me find something good to do.

And I started doing something good for the negative stuff that was hitting at me.

Instead of painting the pain, the hurt, I paint rejoicing, happiness.

And, by the way, I am the Virgin.

[laughs] I'm the Virgin Mary.

Virgin--in the spirit, in the spirit.

(Don) I'd stay away from Mike here, then.

(Mary) Ye s, ha-ha.

This here was one of my first pieces, because I don't throw away nothing, so I used this here-- somebody donated a lot of doors, and I used this here.

This was my-- I call it my flower.

And this is Sojourner Truth.

She was a powerful woman speaker for helping black people.

And this is Bethune Cookman.

She founded Bethune Cookman College down in Daytona Beach.

Zora Neale Hurston, she's a poet.

(Randy) So you like the big, vertical door?

(Mary) I like big doors, because each one of these people here, these women, had to come through a door, hard times, doors they had to go through.

(Randy) But you say you really do kind of talk to these?

(Mary) Yes, I do talk to my paintings out here, because look at them.

Why don't you walk to them and say, "Hey, how y'all doing?"

They've been out here since 1998.

How y'all doing?

I see the beautiful faces.

Sometimes I don't need friends, because I got the art.

They be talking to me.

I've probably done accumulated probably a good-- maybe right out here, it could be-- it could be up to 10,000, 15,000 pieces of art or more.

What I'd like to do is place this stuff inside a big old building and plant herb gardens all around it.

(Don) Oh, that'd be beautiful.

Now, that's a Bethune Cookman thought.

(Randy) How much stuff is inside there, Mary?

Well, probably a good maybe 3,000, 4,000, 5,000.

My daughter came home from school.

She wanted to know about the president.

And I told her, I said, "I don't know nothing about the president, "so I'll tell you what.

Let me go with you and get a book."

And we went, and I was sitting outside, and somebody had brought me a lot of Coca-Cola cans, plus I drink Coke.

And all of a sudden, a vision came to me.

"Why don't I say something good they did that could help us today?"

What did Millard Fillmore say?

He says, "All is gone but honor."

Isn't it almost the truth?

"All is gone but honor."

Zachary Taylor said, "Take those guns, and, by God, keep them."

This is the other one I was telling you about, which you can't see, but you're welcome to.

Right in here, the beginning, from 1995, is right there.

And can't nobody-- there's some collectors that got stuck up in there.

[laughs] Watch y'all steps, now.

I mean, I don't want to have to come and pick one of y'all up even though y'all would love that.

[laughs] Give you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

[laughs] (Don) Now, that laugh of Mary's is like a tonic and may have kept the rain at bay too, long enough, at least, for us to finish our mission and for me to say this is Don the camera guy signing off.

(Mike) Bye-bye, Mary.

Bye-bye, baby.

Y'all take care, you hear?

(female announcer) To learn more about the sights on this show and how to find them, visit us on the web at: DVDs, tapes, and a companion book to this series are available by calling: Captioning and audio description provided by the U.S. Department of Education.

Captioning and audio description byCaptionMax www.captionmax.com He's really good.

(Mike) I' m not in your way, am I?

I'm not in the way of the shot?

(Don) No, not a bit.

I think the car's working great.

And as long as I don't check the fluids, I won't know otherwise.

It's just regular tape?

(Don) That's what I mean.

[grumbles] I never seen such a thing.

(male announcer) Production costs for Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations have been paid for in part by: Generous supporters of Kansas City Public Television.

And by: Thank you.