By Jackie Sheckler Finch
Joe Santulli plops down on a plush sofa, picks up a video game controller and begins playing Frogger on a console television.
An avocado green rotary phone rests on a side table. A black velvet bullfight scene hangs on a wall. And an artificial ficus tree sits in a corner.
Sound like you’re back in the 1980s? That’s the idea.
“For some, it’s nostalgia,” said Sean Kelly, co-founder of the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas. “It’s something that brings you back to a certain part of your life. It’s fun when you have different generations coming in here and enjoying something together.”
For baby boomers and other folks looking to reconnect with a bygone era, museums with once-everyday items are a popular draw. Old video games, lunch boxes, pencil sharpeners and movie cars are now in museums featuring things that were once a part of daily life.
“People get so excited when they come in here and see a lunch box they had as a kid,” said Allen Woodall, owner of the Lunch Box Museum in Columbus, Ga. “Some of them even cry… It’s like a time capsule.”
Try a sure-fire tour theme with these oldie-but-goodie time travel stops.
National Videogame Museum
Opened in April 2016, the National Videogame Museum is the brainchild of three guys—John Hardie, Sean Kelly and Joe Santulli—who fell in love with gaming when they were kids and have been collecting videogames and related paraphernalia for decades.
The museum features thousands of items located in 18 different stations. Three of the most popular exhibits are the 1980s-living room and bedroom and the 1980s-style arcade room called Pixels.
The arcade rings with the gobbling sound of Pac-Man, plus Donkey Kong Jr., Space Invader, Mortal Kombat, Asteroids Deluxe and much more. And visitors are welcome to play many of the games.
But where’s the PB&J?
Allen Woodall started collecting lunch boxes back in the 1980s. Opening a Lone Ranger lunch box, Woodall took a happy sniff and smiled: “You can still smell the peanut butter and bananas that were in here years ago.”
From 1950 to 1990, nearly every school kid in America toted a lunch box, Woodall said, pointing out lunch boxes for The Addams Family, “Welcome Back, Kotter, Mickey Mouse Club, Happy Days and many more TV shows.
Among the most valuable are the 1954 Superman lunch boxes. “There are only about twenty-five or thirty in existence,” Woodall said. “Not long ago, one sold for $10,000.”
Except for the most valuable lunch boxes that are safely behind glass, visitors are welcome to hold one of Woodall’s collection and reminisce. “It depends on the person’s age as to which lunch boxes are the most popular,” he said. “If it’s one you had as a child, then that’s the one you like best.”
A museum of pencil sharpeners
When Paul Johnson retired in 1988, his wife Charlotte gave him two pencil sharpeners shaped like little metal cars. “She didn’t know what she was starting,” Karen Raymore said with a laugh.
Over more than two decades, the retired minister collected about 3,450 pencil sharpeners. “And no two are alike,” added Raymore, executive director of the Hocking Hills Tourism Association in Ohio. “When Paul died in 2010, his wife let us move his collection to our welcome center.”
Lighted shelves are organized by categories – food, animals, history, sports, holidays, transportation and many others. Sharpeners are shaped like the Eiffel Tower, Cinderella’s carriage, Santa Claus, a violin, U.S. presidents, Batman, a Remington typewriter and much more.
A book in the Paul Johnson Pencil Sharpener Museum tells how to sharpen a pencil. That might come in handy for children today who seem to use computers and technology more than old-fashioned pencils and the creatively shaped sharpeners.
Movie cars—and TV
Growing up in the 1980s, Rusty Robinson says he was as enamored of the vehicles roaring across movie screens as other viewers might have been of the actors. “The car was as big a part of the show to me,” he said. “I think a lot of other people feel the same way.”
Robinson must be right. The TV and movie car museum he opened in 2010 in Jackson, Tenn., draws people from around the world. “People from other countries love David Hasselhoff,” he said. “They always want to see Kitt, the car David Hasselhoff drove in Knight Rider.”
Robinson has about 30 vehicles in his museum and he usually serves as the guide, sharing little tidbits about each car. Celebrity cars (or replicas) include a red ’69 Dodge Charger from The Dukes of Hazard, the Ghostbusters ambulance, the Blues Brothers Bluesmobile, the Batman Batcycle, Herbie the Love Bug, Scooby Doo’s Mystery Machine, Back to the Future and the 1976 AMC Pacer from Wayne’s World.
For his “dream” vehicle, Robinson yearns for the 1967 Shelby Mustang GT500 gunned by Nicholas Cage in the movie Gone in 60 Seconds.
“That one sold for half a million the last time it sold so I know it is out of my price range,” Robinson said. “But I can watch the movie and dream about it.”
