(male announcer) Production funding for Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations has been provided by: (female announcer) YRC Worldwide and public TV are natural partners.

We share the very important goal of connecting people, places, and information.

In this big world, that's a big job.

YRC Worldwide and public TV can handle it.

YRC Worldwide: honored to support the communities we serve.

(male announcer) The DeBruce Companies, proud to serve agricultural communities throughout the Midwest with high-speed grain-handling facilities, fertilizer, and feed ingredient distribution terminals.

(male announcer) And by Fred & Lou Hartwig, generous supporters of KCPT and public television, urging you to become a member today.

(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.

♪ (Randy) Is that San Francisco?

(Mike) No, I don't think so.

(Don) Dear TV Mailbag, which way to the bay?

Hi, Don the camera guy here, far, far from my own backyard, as always, in search of the odd and amazing wherever they may be.

That's Randy and Mike, producing away up front with me and the world's largest ball of videotape bringing up the rear, rolling on in our Ford Freestar in the lovely Port Costa and up to the gargoyle-guarded home and studio of one Clayton G. Bailey, justly renowned for his work in ceramics and metal robots, pop guns and jaw harps, and, shall we say, pseudoscience.

(Clayton) That's Marilyn Monroebot there.

These robots I have made out of scrap metal and appliances and car parts, bicycle parts that I've collected at flea markets or the scrap metal yard in Oakland.

I always think of them as, you know, their past lives of all their parts are, you know, kind of like a soul in there, you know, coffee-maker parts and bicycle parts and lawn chair parts.

You know, and they have some light effects, you know?

Like there's a bubble tube like you would find in a jukebox, or there's a lava lamp built into it.

I don't want to make them walk around your house and, you know, like, tip over your china cabinet or anything, so they just stand there and look pretty.

The whole robot idea started as a promotional idea for a weird museum, mad doctor's museum, and I made a robot suit so I could go out in the street, tell people to go to see the museum.

(Don) Was it your museum or someone else's museum?

(Clayton) The weird museum was my museum of ceramic wonders that I had been making.

It was like a mad doctor's laboratory.

(Randy) "Kaolithic Museum."

(Clayton) Kaolism is the study, a scientific study of mud that has been somehow thermally metamorphosed in hard-to-interpret forms, and I'm a specialist in interpreting, and I built special machines like this fossil tester to verify the kaolithic.

So this room represents a collection of things, 40 years' period of time.

Here's Dr. Gladstone.

He's my leader, here.

Gargoyles and monsters, I guess that's a type of thing that I've done in various incarnations, and I always thought, you know, I'd decorate my fence with friendly gargoyles to keep away evil spirits.

(Randy) Weasels.

(Clayton) Like you guys.

[laughter] (Randy) Ho w's that working?

Well, you know, I've discovered it's like-- kind of like putting on a bait.

[laughing] Now, see, this is the pre-credulous area.

It's an unnatural historical site.

(Randy) We ren't there bubbling tar pits and stuff during then?

(Clayton) It was even before that.

It was before-- it was a period of time when people would believe anything.

So a cyclops would be an example of a pre-credulous giant.

This one actually has the eyeball included with it.

(Randy) Preserved all those years.

And then Bigfoot was actually the first kaolithic animal that I found, and here's my artist's conception of what a bigfoot would look like.

You have ceramic, and you have metal.

With ceramic, there's a whole different process of working, because the clay is drying out, and you got to work on it at certain times, and then it's done, and you can't work on it anymore, whereas metal, you could drag on the process for years if you wanted to.

I'm trying the internet as a substitute for having an art gallery, and day by day, I take pictures of what I'm working on, which I hope people get interested in, you know, and it's a hook to get them to come back.

But the trouble I have right now is that the people who like outsider art like my work, but I'm overqualified to be an outsider.

I mean, I'm trying to prove myself.

You know, I stay home all the time.

I don't go to the art shows.

I don't read the art magazines.

All I can do is just try to stay contented and do something that gives me contentment.

Sometimes somebody wants to buy a jaw harp, for example, and then I get fired up.

"Oh, whoa, whoa, I'd better make some jaw harps."

[boinging] Oh, yeah, yeah, actually, I make those--all those tools-- into pop guns.

This was a paint sprayer at one time.

pop!

(Mike) Hey.

pop!

There we go.

Now turn around, Randy, and I'll show you it doesn't even hurt.

Whoa!

(Don) I hardly need to say this, but the doc is a real crack shot.

This being weasel season, things could've gotten ugly.

but we bargained our way out with rare ware for the family and proceeded on, crossing the bridge that says we are here.

And really, who'd have thunk it?

Over the years, we've had our angels, and one of them works here.

Tipster John Turner is taking a break from the news to say hi in person and offer more counsel.

His pal Sheryl is fascinated with our rambling wreckage and, next thing you know, has grabbed a guest glove.

And some impromptu catch is breaking out on the streets of San Francisco, but not for long, since there's still something to see, and it's back here somewhere behind the yacht club and down this teeny, tiny road that seems to end here.

You know what's out there, don't you, Donnie?

Three rooms for tonight.

(Don) Alcatraz you know and that good old Golden Gate, but forget the scenery.

We're here for the tunes-- if we can find them-- pumped out by what's purported to be the world's only wave organ.

The trick is to arrive at high tide, and what tide is it?

(Randy) Tied in the bottom of the sixth, isn't it?

The trick is to arrive at high tide, sit down, and shut up.

I think we're going to have to fake that in post.

Yeah, this is more like a wurlitzer or--what was it, the Jenkins G?

(Randy) See the pipes that go out?

So some of them are short pipes.

Like, they're right there.

The water has to be up in the pipe to make the sound.

This is, like, the second science thing of the day.

First we had Clayton, who taught us about mud.

Now we're talking about water, waves, and sound.

(Don) This is a peaceful place to sit down here.

Why don't you guys just sit down and shut up.

Okay, tomorrow we're going to go in, and we're going to take this town by storm.

You know-- This is just the calm before the storm.

Calm before the storm.

[yawning] Works for me.

(Randy) You're yawning.

(Mike) I'm tired.

(Randy) Like one of them Sharper Image wave-making machines.

I'm ready to be in bed.

[laughing] (Don) Now, just for the record, lest there be any confusion, that stuff last night was all in fun.

Now we can resume the serious portion of our show, seriously driving in circles, that is, trying to find the Fulton Street Teepee Tower somewhere here near Alamo Square, and this would have to be it.

But wouldn't you know?

It turns out that the tower maker has some heartland history himself.

In fact, Ron Henggeler high-schooled just a few miles west of this camera guy.

Since hitting here 30 some years back, Ron's fallen hard for this lovely town and its storied past, which he's chosen to document in his own special way.

(Ron) You know, if you know the history, we have areas now where all you have to do is, you know, take up the street a little bit or dig down a little bit, and you're finding, you know, the debris from the 1906 earthquake and fire, or, you know, in the other areas, you're finding gold rush period and, in some areas, like the Presidio, stuff from the Spanish days when the Spanish were here.

You know, I've got a keen sense of what's kind of going on, and I'll race to a site and jump a cyclone fence in the middle of the night to dig through the dumpsters.

That's some of the marble from the Portal of the Past.

And so, you know, and this is some of the foundation, foundation brick from the Portal of the Past.

I have nine-gallon glass jars filled with mud and clay and sand from Yerba Buena Cove.

It never saw the light of day until last month, when they dug this big hole in the ground down in the-- it's a half a block away from the Transamerica Pyramid.

Right underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, at Ford Point-- this is where Kim Novak, in Vertigo, you know, the famous scene-- she's standing by this chain, and I have two strips of it that, you know, each strip is, like, 300 pounds.

I had to snake it up in, you know, like, three links at a time.

It's so heavy.

The only reason I have the tower is because we moved into this house.

There's five of us, and we had ended up renting an entire apartment building.

I had two apartments on the second floor, so I had ten rooms.

I had, actually, more floor space that I have here.

I mean, it took every day for over a year to move into this place, and a lot of it was reinstalled upstairs, but because of the high ceilings there, it wasn't fitting here.

Most of it came into the backyard, and because the sunlight changes, starting about now, It turns into, like, a swampland back here.

So in order to save it and give it a little bit longer life, I brought it all into the front yard and put it up into the sunlight.

And so I actually used the old wooden tower as my scaffolding, and I started building, from the inside out, the metal tower, and it was also a way of getting away with it without building permits and the city stopping me.

(Don) Tell me about the jars.

(Ron) I've worked as a waiter for 32 years.

No matter where I've ever worked, the first thing I establish is that the bartender saves me the gallon glass jars that maraschino cherries and olives-- martini olives come in, and there's over 1,000 of these jars now.

For all of these years, I've called these jars my kachinas, because they're my spirits, the spirits of things.

They're the stories.

They're time capsules.

They're memories.

They're histories, and they're also just ways of storing building material.

I don't throw anything away.

If a pen runs out of ink, it goes into a jar, and you know, it's like this stuff here.

If you save it long enough, it becomes something.

Let's see, like, that-- it 's just rusted nails, but, you know, don't ask--yeah, don't ask me to explain, but that's a story.

This is some of the jars.

Ow.

(Don) Oh, my God.

The black headdresses, these are 30 years old now, and it's, you know, just everything imaginable, lots of buffalo.

Buffalo are my theme.

You know, there isn't a single thing in all of this that is finished.

It'll never be finished.

When I'm dead, then it's done.

You know, that's it.

But it's a work in progress on a massive scale.

Like, at some point, I want to give that, you know, some finesse and paint that black or add some fur or feathers or something but really embellish and take it one more layer, you know, one more step up.

This is pretty good.

Wow.

This is jaw-dropping.

[laughing] (Ron) The whole game up here has been very different from the way I usually work.

I mean, the jars back there, I don't even know what they look like.

I don't know what the contents looks like.

But it's like section by section, I've gone through this place.

There isn't a day that goes by that I'm not adding something to a jar or finding something that becomes the next headdress or the foundation for a next headdress, but you know, it's like washing dishes and doing cat boxes.

It's just part of my daily thing.

I work my 5 1/2 to 7 hours in the restaurant.

I throw it all away by the time I leave the building, and I wake up in the morning, and I've got, you know, 15 different major things that I could be preoccupying myself with.

(Don) By the way, the restaurant where Ron serves meals and tidbits of history is called the Big Four, and it's well out of our public TV price range, so these jars will be as close as we ever come.

In fact, we're headed now for the park, not the famed "wear flowers in your hair" one, but another green space that's much smaller and harder to find, Cayuga Park, where a park and recs worker named Demi Braceros worked for almost 20 years as if there were no tomorrow.

Even retiring has not derailed his one-man beautification train.

(Demetrio) When my supervisor brought me here, it's really disgusting, because the park was not properly taken care of.

I decided to start carving these fallen trees, and then, little by little, the park shines, and the people are already admiring what we did.

(Mike) These are amazing.

There's animals.

There's people.

There's baseball players.

I guess baseball players are people.

Do you just carve what you feel?

(Demetrio) What I did is that-- those wonderful people that set themselves as an example-- there's already one that I'm trying to build to encourage the young ones to learn something and improve their lives more than we do.

(Mike) Those are the trains going by, in case anyone wondered.

(Randy) That's what you're hearing.

(Mike) I love that you've put all these little surprises up there.

Like, I saw the snakes in the trees.

[laughing] I mean, I'm walking along, and there's snakes.

That's one of the kids' attractions.

(Randy) I love these handrails.

(Demetrio) Yeah, these are all the remnants of the trees that fell down, so it's nice to put them, because they are natural.

There is beauty everywhere that you-- from the time you focus your eyes to certain place, there is beauty, so that is what we usually do.

(Randy) Now, are these your tools?

Is this what you carve with?

Is that what you-- I got a chain saw.

I got the chain saw.

(Mike) Ch ain saw, yes.

I got a chain saw.

So usually, I get with the chain saw followed by chisel for the detailing, yeah.

(Randy) Are you from the Philippines?

Yes, sir, yes, sir.

Is this like the Philippines?

It's just my own idea.

I'm hoping that everyone loves it, and people loves it, so there's no problem.

[laughing] I'm just happy that everyone is happy.

This is my gift, so I must have to--before I die, I must have to give it away.

(Don) We're happy too.

Cayuga Park is amazing, but here's something equally astounding.

The guy who usually loses keys has found some and pretty much saved Demi's day.

They fell out.

We did something that Yule Hauser didn't.

(Don) I say we quit while we're ahead.

Now, is it just me, or have I entered some kind of strange parallel universe where dogs are doing this show?

(Mike) Hey, who's got the map?

Which one of you guys got the map?

(Don) If they've got a big ball of anything, we are in trouble.

Speaking of which, I do know this: a large orb is waiting for us at the day's first destination, and that would be the mission district's Pride Superette, a small corner store with something huge hidden inside.

(Randy) What do you got in here?

I got a big rubber-band ball.

It's a weight about 3,500 pounds.

Come on down.

(Randy) Whoa!

Whoa.

(Nabil) That's rubber band.

This is its secret location.

[laughter] (Randy) How did you get it so round?

That's the engineer, me, you know?

It's got to be progression.

My brother, Samir, the cranky one, he worked very hard, you know, to make, you know, this, you know, to connect it every-- but me, I just add.

(Randy) So how big around-- what's the diameter?

(Nabil) Oh, the diameter is about 15 feet and height: 5 feet.

High five?

Yeah, high five.

(Don) You can probably guess where this is going.

With a generous assist from one of San Francisco's finest, before you can say "détente," a full-fledged big-ball summit is under way on aisle three.

Nabil and I talk technique for a while, and then we were gone, bidding the city adieu and making our way south to Millbrae, drawn by the call of hot slot-car action in Stephen Powers' basement.

Stephen's a Bay Area boy who's come back to care for his aging folks and pursue his own brand of futuristic folk art.

(Stephen) Daly City, California, is where I grew up, which is next to San Francisco on the west side.

So I could go, also, to the city a lot and take the streetcars and buses and, you know, go to Chinatown and buy firecrackers and lots of fun bad things.

It was saturation of great toys from the 1960s and TV shows and cartoons, and then art came along because my mom sent one of my drawings, when I was age four, to the San Francisco Chronicle, and I won Today's Junior Art Champion.

So I kind of, you know, went back and forth with it, and then I got into drama and then into college, a theater school in Santa Maria, California.

And along the way, though, I started painting in high school with oil paints and really went back to it years later after I was married and started painting again.

I am wired for multiple circuits.

(Randy) Go!

This hyper-lift building works on the principle that during an attack-- in this case, it happens to be giant spiders-- it is able to let out its helium balloons.

I painted a lot of paintings with skyscrapers with a means to escape.

And in most cases, these parts of the buildings are hidden from the public, and it's in case of disaster that the building owners or people who live there then can go into the rocket in case of doomsday and escape to outer space, and that comes from way back, feelings from when I was a kid and even older and, you know, just feeling like there were times I needed to escape.

(Randy) Three, two, one.

(Stephen) The idea there is just that, these poles lift up on one side.

You have a hook on your car, and it's a lot cheaper than building a huge bridge, and so you slide across the canyon, and it sets you down easily.

If you want to come back to the other side, the pole lifts up on that side.

Some people look at my paintings, and they say, "Well, you know, it's all kind of funny."

And I admit, "Yeah, it's kind of funny, and the colors are bright and all," but, really, I think about these things, and I would like to see them built.

I thought the future would be what it was sold to be when I was a kid.

(Randy) Wh oa, lookit.

He's driving like a madman, oh!

(Stephen) I am the puzzle man, and I felt this way when I first started painting and I was working in a blue-collar job with some guys who weren't too nice, and I just did not fit in with them and all their talk of, you know, football and hunting and this and that, things that I didn't do.

As I started to paint-- and then I found out that there were other self-taught artists-- I thought to myself, "I know where I fit."

I fit in to art shows, whereas I really didn't fit in in other things in my life.

There's a brotherhood with male and female self-taught artists, and I relate to them, even if we're going in completely different directions and what they're building is not what I would build, but I understand their passion and their dream to see it.

(Mike) Uh-oh.

(Randy) Get him long.

(Stephen) Well, what if our society really was taken over in the 1940s or '50s by aliens, and what if they really loved our culture and all the fun that we're having down here on Earth, and so they just kind of got into our bodies and slowly and we didn't know it?

So these are now their records.

They are the people in the bands.

They're Shriners.

They're on the TV shows.

(Randy) I like the Spielberg hangar.

(Stephen) Well, you know, Spielberg is one of my favorite directors, and I have Spielberg coming out of the hangar there, and I'm handing him a box of lost films, because I understood, at one point, he was missing some of his home movies, super-eight epics.

If I found those in a thrift store or a, you know-- and then I could just go and present it to Steven, and we would be friends, and he'd give me a job, and you know, so-- (Mike) He 'd race cars with you.

He might come over, yeah.

There isn't anyone, you know, Bill Gates to Spielberg, who wouldn't enjoy racing cars.

If I were them, in my mansion, I would have something like this.

(Don) And we would be there.

You kids, get out of the way.

(Don) Especially Mike, who's making up for lost time behind the wheel with speed and some precision.

And I am Don the camera guy, signing off.

(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: (Mike) It's Mike and Randy.

Captioning byCaptionMax www.captionmax.com (Don) I'm in the back there.

(Randy) The old white-haired guy?

(Mike) Yeah.

[boinging] Barry Bonds.

Why is the oil down there?

That's where--the oil?

Because we oil it all the time.

No, no-- Nabil, you're pulling my leg now.

You don't oil the ball.

(male announcer) Production funding for Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations has been provided by: (female announcer) YRC Worldwide and public TV are natural partners.

We share the very important goal of connecting people, places, and information.

In this big world, that's a big job.

YRC Worldwide and public TV can handle it.

YRC Worldwide: honored to support the communities we serve.

(male announcer) The DeBruce Companies, with facilities providing customers with market information and marketing opportunities for domestic and international grain, fertilizer, and feed ingredient businesses.

(male announcer) And by Fred & Lou Hartwig, generous supporters of KCPT and public television, urging you to become a member today.