Marsh’s Free Museum sits just off the main drag in Long Beach, Washington, across the street from what’s purported to be the world’s largest frying pan. Inside you’ll find testament to the collectible soul of oddity, curiosity, knick-knackery, and good-old-American gimcrackery.
Marsh’s most famous denizen is Jake the Alligator Man, currently mummified and encased in glass. Jake was featured in the Weekly World News, with the headline: “Half-human, half-alligator discovered in Florida Swamp.” According to later reports in the now-defunct tabloid, Jake not only escaped captivity, but he also murdered a man from Miami and gave birth. To what, I’m not sure.
I’ve been visiting Marsh’s since I was a child, and Jake has not been the only draw. Near Jake stands a Seaburg H Model Solo Orchestrion, which is essentially a souped-up player piano. High on the walls, you’ll find a variety of taxidermied animals, including a two-headed calf, an eight-legged lamb, and Morris the Cat, who was named after the feline from the TV commercials and now appears to be in a permanently catatonic state. There are fortune-telling machines; a strength testing machine that spouts off every few minutes in a voice that sounds like Owen Wilson playing the cook on a cattle drive (“Take the True Grip Challenge, right here!); a vintage, coin-operated game of baseball; kinetoscope peepshows such as Back to Nature: The Nudist Colony; and a dancing, singing, rather unsettling marionette clown named Bimbo. There’s also a game featuring a back-lit castle entrance, The Execution, in which “upon the solemn tolling of the bell . . . [t]he full drama of a modern execution is enacted for you”—which begs a very serious question: Just how “modern” can a castle execution be?
These and other items compose the museum part of Marsh’s Free Museum (although they are not all necessarily free). But as with most museums, there’s a gift shop, which amounts to most of the square footage in the building. From Jake the Alligator Man T-shirts to seashells and toys that might not make it past the end of your vacation, Marsh’s would not exist without offering unnecessary things to buy.
When I was a child, the item I coveted most from Marsh’s was a Greek fisherman’s cap. Never mind the salt-water taffy, popguns, or glass floats readily available. I’m not sure whether I told my parents about this desire for the hat, but it seemed to be the missing piece that would establish my sartorial splendor as I entered the second grade. Perhaps I’d envisioned myself sailing the Aegean Sea and casting a net into azure waters, but I doubt I knew what the Aegean Sea was back then, nor did I know the word azure.
We don’t always know what attracts us to the objects we desire—or the objects we find interesting. Which brings me to the thumb wart—or, more specifically, Abdul [sic] Nasser’s thumb wart. I wouldn’t have noticed it if not for a friend saying, “Hey, did you see the wart in the window?” Intrigued, I stepped a short distance from The Execution to an office window in the back of the shop. And there, taped in the lower right of the window, not too far from Bimbo the Clown, was a small piece of paper with the word WART at the top, beneath which was placed a dark tumescence of a thing, approximately an eighth of an inch in diameter. Under the wart was this statement: “BELIEVED TO BE STOLEN FROM ABDUL NASSAR’S THUMB BY AN ITINERANT MALAY MERCENARY, IN RANGOON, MARCH 17, 1954.” And below that was a parenthetical aside: “(NOTE BLOODY ROOTS).” The price was $15.
Now, there’s a lot to unpack from this easily missed piece of paper, which is one of many items taped to the windows in the back of Marsh’s Free Museum. Who, for instance, was Abdul Nasser? And how, pray tell, could the itinerant Malay mercenary have stolen his thumb wart? And why $15? Was that the going rate for black-market thumb warts at the time? Is that in 1954 dollars or 1974 dollars? And isn’t it curious that the note is so specific about the date, yet the wart is only “believed” to have been stolen? Finally, there are those bloody roots, those bloody, bloody roots—because if you were still skeptical about the rest of it, surely the bloody roots might be the clincher.
The name Abdul Nasser vaguely rang a bell, perhaps as someone who had been in the news when I was a kid. Turns out, Gamal Abdel Nasser was the second president of Egypt, serving from 1956 until his death in 1970. Interestingly enough, Nasser was targeted in an assassination attempt in 1954, but perhaps it was only the thumb wart that the attacker could successfully remove.
I don’t know, and I don’t know if it matters anymore. For we now seem to be living in an age in which warts of all kinds (whether real or fake) are readily on display.
Perhaps we should take a closer look at those bloody roots.