Walton: When does a basement become a museum?

Live long enough and you accumulate stuff. Lots of stuff. Most of it probably should have been tossed out years ago but for some reason you just can’t bring yourself to do it.

You should tour my basement. It looks like a museum. It smells like one too. Musty. Old. Like me.

I have a machine down there that my grandchildren wouldn’t recognize. It’s about 8 inches square. Cords come out the back. Attached to the front is a wheel with numbers. The wheel spins when you poke your finger in and twirl. For them it’s a fun toy. But when I was a kid this was cutting edge stuff, especially when the wheel was added. An earlier version had no wheel at all. You had to pick up the handle and wait for help. The upgrade to a wheel was like going from black and white TV to color. Mine impressed the judges a few years ago at the Wood County Fair. It won a blue ribbon.

Kids, what can I tell you? It was a telephone. Unlike your cellphone, it was too big and bulky to carry everywhere a person went. Guess what happened. A walk in the park was actually a walk in the park, not a talk in the park. There were trees. There were flowers. Squirrels here and there. Maybe a small lake. So much to see and sniff and appreciate. There was a time when we were advised to “take only pictures, leave only footprints.” Now it’s “take only selfies, leave unfulfilled.”

I also found a suitcase down in the basement that is so old — believe it or not — that it had no wheels. It’s brown with a soft outer shell made of heavy woven fabric. It looks like something out of a 1940s romantic movie. Picture Greta Garbo boarding a train. Nobody would want to haul that thing around today because you’d actually have to haul it. You couldn’t roll it. I hope whoever came up with the idea of equipping suitcases with wheels got a big raise, or at least a hearty handshake at the company picnic.

My in-house museum yielded some other gems during my sentimental walk-through. Old games, for example. One called Skee Cups. Another called Uncle Wiggly. I have no memory of ever playing them, but everything prior to age 8 is pretty much a fog.

A toddler sized wooden Coca Cola wagon. Old rusted coffee cans — one for Vienna Coffee, another for Monterey Coffee, apparently acquired during my years in California. How about a bottle of Wholly Toledo water, produced, I think, during the first Carty Finkbeiner administration. The label describes it as the Champagne of the Great Lakes. I’m afraid to open it and confirm or deny.

Similarly I will never open a can of Billy Beer I found down there. It was a souvenir of the Jimmy Carter years because the President’s brother was a huge fan of the golden hops, but cracking it open today would probably be a threat to public safety. Stashed in the same box was a can of beer called Moose Drool from a brewery in Montana. This is a bizarre coincidence, not a hobby. I swear.

I should mention that my basement is more than a museum. It’s a record store, even though nothing is for sale. I have about a hundred record albums, all 33-⅓, dating back decades. Frank Sinatra. Elvis. Early Beach Boys. An organ player named Lenny Dee. Maynard Ferguson. Harry Belafonte. Herb Alpert. Even the United States Air Force Band. (Long story short: the Block Communications newspaper I once worked for in California sponsored the band’s concert there. A crowd much larger than the venue could hold had a wonderful evening. So did the fire marshal. Good thing he was a veteran.)

The basement could also serve as a friendly neighborhood tavern. I’ve got about a dozen neon beer signs down there. When all are lit, it’s a beautiful thing. Now all I need are barstools, a liquor license, and rezoning, and I’ll have an underground speakeasy.

While digging around, I found something that is probably of considerable value. It’s a vintage music box. A little research informs me the thing is at least a century old. The hand crank doesn’t engage the gears any more, although I can still play it by turning the cylinder by hand. It occurs to me that this could be the original stereo, although there is no woofer and no tweeter, just the sound of metal tabs plinking other tabs.

But my favorite find in the basement was an old lamp made from a bugle. What fun it would be to wake up the dogs some morning with a crude version of “Reveille.”

Many more wonderful discoveries have been unearthed in the basement. An empty and never used bag of Tiedtke’s Coffee. A framed bag of Ballreich’s Potato Chips (my mother was a Ballreich in Tiffin, where my great uncles founded the company.) This was back in the day when the chips came in waxy paper bags. They definitely tasted better then.

You probably have stuff like this in your basement. But good luck getting your kids to take it. If they’re like mine, they don’t want it. I suppose there is another option: I could just put all of it in the front yard and watch it slowly disappear as word got around.

Thomas Walton is the retired Editor and Vice President of The Blade. His column appears every other Sunday. His radio commentary, “Life As We Know It,” can be heard on WGTE public radio every Monday at 5:44 p.m. during “All Things Considered.” Contact him at twalton@theblade.com.