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Offbeat Fun
Saul Rubin's new book about museums
promises interesting travel fun.
JILL DAVIDSON SKLAR
Special to The Jewish News
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arry Finley has what polite
folks would call an interest
and others might label a
bizarre obsession.
In the basement of this 54-year-old
Maryland bachelor — who by day is a
graphic designer for the U.S. Defense
Department — is a museum he
has built with his own hands, a
shrine to his infatuation. He has
devoted his spare hours to pro-
ducing a newsletter and Web site
to the same topic.
His interest? Finley is the cura-
tor of the nation's only Museum
of Menstruation.
"I shouldn't be interested in
this, really," Finley said. "But I'm
54 years old.. In 20 years I'll be
dead, and my feeling was, what
the hell. Just go ahead and do it."
The museum is one of 50 odd
and interesting public and private
collections listed in Offbeat
Museums: The Collections and
Curators of America's Most Unusual
Museums (Santa Monica Press;
$17.95) by Saul Rubin.
Rubin, a former newspaper
reporter living in California,
began researching the book by
contacting the tourist information
bureaus of every state in the United
States. He added to his database by
pumping friends, relatives and col-
leagues for their ideas and contacting
museum associations for tips on odd-
ball sites.
He was surprised at what he found.
Almost 600 museums made the list —
though none are in Michigan — while
hundreds of other collections were cut
because they were deemed tourist sites
and not museums.
Consider the Shrine of the Pine in
Baldwin, Mich. A place dedicated to
the white pine tree, it is seen more as a
tourist destination and therefore was
cut from the final take.
"It was just a bunch of stuff about
the tree, not a museum per se," Rubin
said.
But even whittling the list of those
that made the definition down to the
required 50 was no small task,
explains Rubin.
"We found there was really no defi-
nition as to what was offbeat. There
were lots of medical museums, fruit
and vegetable museums, animal muse-
urns. So it was hard to choose which
was more exotic," he said, offering a
potato museum and one dedicated to
the banana as an example. "We would
sit there and weigh which was more
interesting, the banana museum or the
potato museum.
"We went with the banana."
Rubin then began writing short
informational stories about each muse-
urn on the final list. Some he visited.
For others, he contacted the curators
and interviewed them at length.
"We didn't have the travel budget
to visit each one," he said.
The result is a hilarious collection
in itself, a compilation of bizarre char-
acters and their strange collections
woven together.with well written tales
of interest ranainc, from the mild to
obsession. It is also a guidebook for
those who like to pair traveling to a
different city with offbeat fun.
"These are sort of underreported
places," Rubin said. "It seems to strike
a chord with a lot of people who are
looking for unusual places to go and