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 are in their own backyard Randy does the steering so he won't hurl Mike's got the maps such a man of the world that's Don with the camera and a kinda heavy on the 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 the their own backyard so next stop buster brown it's kind of scary I think well healed dear TV mail bag is that what they mean by a tease I don the cameraman here and if we ever get out of his motel parking lot we will start looking for more unusual art and offbeat attractions I just take the pictures and they take the credit those old producers I guess they're doing okay with polaroid gee it looks just like the last one this is Siketon where we'd spent the night after gorging ourselves at home of throwed rolls we're back at the balls requests for a commemorative photo in the Lamberts parking lot and on the way out of town couldn't help but notice more of what we'd like to think of as local color proceeding into the south we experienced the part in Missouri that none of us had ever actually seen before you might say we blew through steel and escaped the lures of Hollywood our destination down here corners ville is not exactly a big place in fact it's claim to fame is that someone small is buried here don't feel bad if the name major raid doesn't ring a bell but you've seen his face on many a box of buster brown Laura Ford was so impressed by the love between the major and his equally diminutive wife that she's written a novel about them during the nineteen like early nineteen hundreds they had retired and Jimmy retired from the circus and opened a grocery store and he sold buster brown shoes and so the the retailer from brown group would come down to deliver his shoes and he'd sell them out of the store so one day he came by and Tige and major were sitting next to a pot bellied stove and the guy came in and just looked and said my lord said buster brown and Tige and that's where the idea came about to use little people how tall was buster brown or major ray I guess major ray was thirty seven inches tall he was considered a pituitary dwarf because the pituitary gland gland didn't kick in until he began work with brown group and he grew seven inches it's practically growing out of your occupation changed shoe shoe sizes yes he did and Tige did tricks oh well I didn't know that I thought he was just an accomplice now Tige did tricks in fact he would take the shoes of from people's feets he would untie the shoes if they didn't have brown shoes on nah now come on they met in Kansas city major and jennie did she died in nineteen fifteen And when she died he sent a picture of her along with her measurements to a sculptor in Italy and that man sculpted as her an angel and sent the monument back and it was rumored that it costs fifteen thousand dollars in nineteen fifteen we've had people from California come out just to see this monument and especially now I'm getting a lot of calls from people all over the country they want to know exactly where it's at well now maybe it was the touching tenderness of that love story caught in stone for the pastoral beauty of the countryside but right there Mike blurted out a startling confession I never had never had buster brown shoes you never had buster brown shoes I'm feeling alittle left out the thing is when you're in the hornersville you're just a serious spit away from Arkansas but that might be against some law so we decided to save our saliva and head back to the north moving up the boot heel to what I like to think of is the Achilles tendon which as we all know home ruptured pretty big back in eighteen eleven near a little town called new New Madrid in nineteen ninety the media was all over this place looking for it to happen again but on this April day in ninety six we had it pretty much to ourselves what's in your museum well a whole lot more than there used to be turns out they finance their expansion by selling T. shirts for something that it did not occur okay so now I'm sitting in my own home of comfortable everything's good on sand yeah and all of a sudden earthquake happens and there you go wow just like that okay so we could look a fact or we could look at the seismograph but not today not today because its parts are missing it is not working so if there was an earthquake we wouldn't know no not today you wouldn't it's about Richter scales this is a museum where you can actually learn something which is kind of yeah we usually stay away from did it really run backwards for a while the river did Mike want to know where's the water go when the river runs backwards i don't know I can't explain that well we have a a sophisticated Indian exhibit village that they uncovered with a thousand year old these people probably move because there was an earthquake well it was settled by Spanish and then they kind of gave up and went back to spying I've never kmown it to be New Madrid but I'm sure when the Spanish came that's what he was gonna you know form New Madrid and we have a real good exhibit of the civil war and see we did have a battle siege of new madrid whose hog chain that was one big hog I think that's for a boat mike give me a big hug talk about your rear visions what with this and that thing this morning about the shoes I'm starting to wonder if too much travel might be getting the Mister Murphy frankly what he needs is a break from all this navigaten and in researchen what better time than this long haul up the eastern side of the state most relaxing at least till we realize that another tactical era may have been committed arcadia okay it says Arcadia eighteen ninety eight another one of those beautiful round barn what we found in Kansas on Arcadia's just down the road right yeah I think so Arcadia Missouri well apparently not yes this ia going to problem because the Arcadia Oklahoma doesn't appear to be on this map now I figured no harm no foul but Randy says it's going on his permanent record on the upside they did give us a chance to drive through the heart of the world's largest lead district and to pretty much keep on driving when we hit the mighty mo we had another decision to make Daniel Boone or Elvis we chose the latter and still almost went wrong in right city seems the Elvis is alive museum was already closed however there were signs of the king at the very next exit well now this is good but we hear that museum is the whole daily donuts rest assured we'll return now if you're keeping score at home you may have noticed that so far the shows have less art and more attractions but that's about to change in a big way here in the big city if we ever make it through this Saint Louis trap we're headed for Ken and Kate Anderson's place it's not a gallery just where these two artists live and work in keep adding to their collection of grass roots outsider visionary naive whatever you wanna call it art the kind of stuff that's made by people who haven't been to school for it but obviously have something to say what you're seeing is just sort of a Hodge podge of all the different objects in the house filled up and so it was like what you know we can't stop so we just fill things out and and you know it used to be the old idea with like less is more well I don't know we've gotten to the point we think more is more this is a collection that was discovered in ninety two in in reinbeck Iowa kind of came to light at a farm auction and the significance of it is that there are literally hundreds of pieces that the woolsies Grace and Clarence Woolsies produced in the forties fifties and sixties they were bored to death with cold Iowa winter they started by getting some bottlecaps and making the first thing they made with a little mailbox I think the figures are probably the most outstanding part of what they they did they would have kids all around the neighborhood riding their bikes from filling stations is to store collecting soda bottle caps and all of a sudden it blossomed and filled their their their farmhouse one of things we found very consistently is that people retire they want then they want to do something when you talk to what happens is they retire they decide they want to start making something they go to their garages they see what's around them they start putting things together and actually in a relatively short period of time does the arc fit into that too arc fits into that really easily I think it's produce maybe about four of them now and he's eighty eight years old it's probably is eighty nine now and all of a sudden he just he's his wife talks so everyone visited him she said only he gets on one of these arcs and then I just don't see him for months he's just gone So he's in the basement day and night working on these things and they're just amazing in terms of the the expression that he gets out of all these different animals there are bats monkeys possum one of things I I would like to set the lobsters are red so they're cooked the way he puts things together a little examples like like for instance the moose with the strange kinds of horns made out of I guess nails a little pieces of wood up the paint surface the paint marks and things are just has a kind of almost abstract expressionist kind of feeling about it in this person is totally untrained totally in terms of of artistic he does what he wants to do and he just gets a kick out of doing it should there be one of the museum and should you guys be the instagators of such a thing I fully believe we were we've talked about this the twenty or thirty years ago was very little in African art museums or wings or whatever now our own museum has a huge wing used to be a little room it's my firm belief that folk art is going in that same direction there already is an American visionary museum of folk art whatever that whatever that they're they're real name is in Baltimore has opened up lots of museums now are collecting folk art it's just a matter of time we will be taking over the world had best watch out because as you can see Kate does walk softly and carry a big baton anyway as a parting gift the Andersons helped us ornament our hood and sent further into Forest park to look for the museum of quackery heard about some time ago I'm sorry however to say that research again may have gone awry the woman in the box was none too friendly we just thought that the museum of quackery would be worth stepping into so if you're not open anymore I guess we can't yeah we're not open you have to go to the science center what kind of stuff is over there now scientific stuff but what kind of stuff was here that they took over there medical instruments like from the pan things that didn't work is that why they were over here no that's not it quackery I thought it was stuff that was supposed to work and didn't no it's not a quakery if you want quakery go to the park and look get the stuff no not exactly the kind of welcome that makes you want to stick around and check out the art the zoo or the train station or those silly Clydesdales so we drove right on out of Missouri in the Alton Illinois to find one of those guys Ken told us about making the most of his retirement years John North what I saw in a magazine have something similar that I said I think I can do that so these are made up from scrap like over throw away venetian blind coat hangers lumber and I just rigged it up myself you know went in to motion with it somebody should make me some boxers so some guys duking it's Noahs Ark all the other animals are already on there these last ones going on he started putting these up he said it's for the grandkids I mean I think it's more for John than his grandkids but that's that's his idea that he's going to you know they like to look at him the lady asked me can one you make me one lady playing a piano I mean I said sure so there's the piano player all this couple not getting along too good a lot of times they're very innovative in terms of you know they wanna figure out things and how things work so in this example you know it's like it's you you know this he's got all eight reindeers with all their feet going you have up on a fence or something they just run like crazy the wind does a great job and he does a great job at keeping everything kind of in balance and and works well when I was smaller I used to make a lot of kites rural like butterflies different things so I went to school night school when I was working I was taking arts in general like ceramics leather craft interior decorating oil painting all that so I just put them all together and make something out of it I don't advertise they advertise themselves I I don't put no sign out or anything seeing so much in John's ingenuity worly gigging away up there on the fence inspired us to see what he thought of our own ingenuity or the lack thereof this is all video tapes got any tips for us yes wind and start a tiny little ball it's kind of heavy it certainly is oh my goodness what do you think are we on something here or you're sure there's nothing underneath that no as Randy says it may be stupid but it's got no cerial filler speaking of Paul all in all we continued our quest to play catch in every state we visit here on the site where Lincoln and Douglas did debate it was back across St Louis still no arch heading for a southern suburb called Eureka where I was assured we would find the shrine of the black Madonna I go to these things with an open mind yeah and it only stays up until about six so we've got about forty minutes no it's not connected to that rock singer in fact the name comes from a famous painting that got darkened in a famous fire and obviously our lady of chestofhova truly did inspire one brother bronaslos to some major heights it's unbievable what this man did.

All this himself for a period twenty three years I guess they cut the trees down mixed his own cement used dynamite to get the the roots of the trunks of the trees out of the ground then he would get rocks jewelry seashells different sea seashells coral these little birds that people donated used everything people gave him didn't make any difference these flowers are chandeliers somebody donated they're just turned upside down and the pillars are made out a coffee cans filled with cement and then covered with cement in the stone these flowers appear are made out of cupcake molds and the arch way you've got marbles and sea shells jewelry I mean he did all this by hand but with out any real artistic background and his we have no knowledge of brother Bronaslas in any artistic background because when he was in Poland in the Franciscan monastery he was the cook now this is the Saint Joseph the ground to Saint Joseph and you can see the jewelry and the sea shells people donated grad can be very very simple to just be a small cave but bronaslas enhanced it and try to make it as beautiful as he possibly could this I mean is so I mean unbelievable if you look in the other spaces you'll see red vigil lights and bases there's blue up there and green here and when the sun gets at a certain level when you're in the chapel you can see the greens in the Reds and blues come through where the statue of Our Lady of Fatimah is was to be a grotto to our lady of fadama and yet it all in his mind what he was going to do and shown his superior his plans and he was so enthused about starting that grotto that he didn't bother wait for the cool weather and cutting down trees and he suffered a heat stroke and he left his tools in the trees he cut down and he went up to the corner grotto which is to our lady of perpetual help and that's really collapsed and died the brothers found his body when he didn't return to the monastery that night and I'm sure if he lived he would have done a whole lot more these last few days they've given us much to reflect upon and flying down I-70 back towards Wright City we began to encounter some more icons of the road I mean what the heck are walnut bowls can't reflect too long though because here comes that place we missed the other night open in all its daytime splendor better like this to tell you truth no that's his side burns to get out of the nose turns out the man to thank for all this is one bill beeny a local real estate guy who dreamed up the idea of a rest stop for true believers and curiosity seekers we have pillows we have Elvis quilts we have stand ups we have the plaster Paris bus of Elvis we have a clocks we are distinct and different and that we got three thousand pictures that does a as far as we know no one else has but we are very distinct and that we are the only restaurant in the world with a museum that says Elvis Presley is alive we start here with a a voice of Elvis that has been authenticated by three voice experts ah many people stand here and listen to thirty minutes of this vocal voice people are in a hurry yeah but we have Elvis here we duplicated in the casket people says well the Elvis you've got in the casket does look like Elvis and our answer to that is the Elvis that was in the casket on August the seventeenth when he allegedly died didn't look like Elvis either because it was a wax figure with the wedding chapel here we've performed a lot of weddings here because we had a special room for it this was a a sweater that belonged to Elvis this was a tie this was one of his rings my only thought here for second bill does this make people hungry well it really it really isn't incompatible with food and we have off centered this to where they're not eating their Elvis burger and looking at him in the casket the next page we have our pizza hunka hunka burning love pizza we have our hound dog hot dog and then perhaps the favorite of all is the famous fried peanut butter and banana sandwich which was course one of Elvis's favorite and with that we give a full color photo of Elvis how can there be profit in that if you get a picture of Elvis on top of the sandwich well we actually lose money on it but it gives us such joy to see the smile on their face no fried bananas here just your basic American grub which we gobbled making sure on the way out we still had time to sit in the car that Elvis rode in well sort of which pretty sums up the whole place back on the highway here comes another of those walnut bowl signs the last we'll see for a while now that getting off the interstate taking the scenic route along the river starting here in Herman known for its friendly folks teutonic roots and then ongoing love affair with the great I can't believe the ball once a glass of wine hoping it justs stop at a glass you know how he gets I'm afraid I do and I've seen what happens when you drink and roll now if you're looking for the quickest way across the state this would not be it but like the guy right now he says it's full of visual panache and did eventually put us in the general vicinity of fulton most likely the only town in America with the statue of Winston Churchill standing right next to a big old chunk of the Berlin Wall to us it's a side of what used to be known as sore head hill where Jesse Howard the granddaddy of Missouri folk artist constantly built this yard with signs telling everybody what he thought about everything I started to make a showplace 20 years ago I've never had one ounce of corroboration from nobody anybody preachers lawyers doctors anybody He didn't like the bunch at the courthouse he called that the concentration camp yeah he didn't like that bunch over that at all In Howard's art which is really interesting is that it it's mostly done in it's it's simply words and so but what makes it art and different from just reading a book for instance the work is the way he spaces and places and arrnges doesn't almost matter what it says for me it's how the letters arrange within the rectangle within the sign what the pacing is and he's clearly consciously putting in those shifts and changes but I don't know why I asked some of them one time I said but why is that that they don't get arrest him where well I would have to talk slower and they'll run into legal grounds and one thing another and they said well as you know since he's got something about the Bible in purt near all them signs I said yeah so there's really good you can do nothing with them just kind of grown up in weeds hasn't it that's one of the problems with these things as you know taking care of them after the artist's passing along the just like the Anderson said the paintings by themselves the they're not they don't mean that much but but when you put them all together in the site and the location you know yet the whole is definitely greater than the parts I guess we're just lucky they save some now maybe it's just me but seems like there's a great deal of irony at work here after all those years of fighting with the city they went and named the street after him wait a minute I'm having a vision this is camera guy signing off walnut bowls all my life I wanted to stop here I've never gotten to stop here dad can't wait no my parents would never get off the interstate for anything yeah but cross double cross double crossed bowls walnut bowls big moment this is what we've been waiting for just a second we're low on tape Don be careful oh boy oh boy oh no oh no I'm getting a oh no