"Beautiful Girls That Live Like Fish!"

In this post, Vintage Roadside’s first for “Off the Wall”, we’d like to introduce ourselves by touching on our motivation for launching our preservation-themed business followed by a brief review of a symposium we presented this past summer on Aquarama, a wonderful 1960s mermaid attraction once found on Lake of the Ozarks in Osage Beach, Missouri.

From one perspective, Vintage Roadside is a t-shirt company featuring original advertising graphics and history of mom and pop businesses operating from the 1930s through the 1960s.

From another perspective, Vintage Roadside may also be considered non-traditional (or, what we call when we’re feeling feisty, “guerilla”) historians working to communicate the stories and history behind mom and pop places travelers could have visited on a road trip undertaken anytime from America’s boom in road construction and automobile travel to the decade following the introduction of the Interstate System.

Over the past five years, the questions we’re most frequently asked relate to why we think roadside culture of the 1930s – 1960s is important. Is it the kitsch factor? Is it nostalgia for a sentimentalized past? Do we secretly long for ducktail haircuts and pedal pushers?

The best way we can answer those questions is to talk about our experience road tripping through small towns across the country. Drawn by our nature to roadside architecture, we often stopped at historical societies, museums, and local businesses to ask questions about an abandoned motel or a dilapidated neon sign advertising the best hamburgers in town.

Although we met many kindred spirits who shared a love of roadside architecture and knew the places we were referring to, we had a difficult time uncovering specifics about who ran the business, when it operated, or why it closed.

We also talked with a number of people who enjoyed roadside remnants in their community, but did not immediately connect defunct roadside attractions or bowling alleys with “historic preservation.”

From our perspective, we saw the defunct mom and pops as much more than failed businesses. For us, the history of mom and pops was the gateway to relating a community’s past with its present.

In addition to providing interesting family and community history, the story behind each mom and pop also had the potential to touch on a fascinating variety of subjects including the evolution of motor courts and motels in America, the changing nature of travel and entertainment post-WWII, the neon and sign painting industry in the 1950s, the cultural impact of technological innovations such as air conditioning and television, even the flamboyant individuality of roadside entrepreneurs before the prevalence of corporate chains.

Our feeling that the histories of defunct roadside mom and pops were not particularly valued as a subject of preservation while their records, buildings, and stories seemed to be disappearing prompted us to found Vintage Roadside.

In our own way, we view our t-shirts, packaged with their brief history hang tags and extended histories available on our website, as a way to support and contribute to the ranks of those working to document roadside America of the 1930s – 1960s.

We often hear from our customers that they enjoy wearing our t-shirts because they have the potential to start a conversation – whether it be about the place featured on the t-shirt or a favorite memory of a mom and pop back in the day. Two particular questions also seem to come up time and again: where have all the mom and pops gone and what, if anything, should be done to preserve those that are still around?

In addition to acting as conversation starters, we see our t-shirts as a fun way to talk about the relevance of historic preservation to the recent past and, through the support of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, are able to offer those customers who’d like to learn a little more about the preservation movement a free one-year membership to the NTHP.


This past August, we expanded our role as t-shirt toting roadside historians by presenting a symposium based on Aquarama, a 1960s mermaid attraction on Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks.

The venue for our first presentation of “Beautiful Girls That Live Like Fish!” might be considered fairly non-traditional in the public history field: Tiki Oasis, a fantastic four-day tiki convention in San Diego, CA.

As our PowerPoint presentation started with lowered lights, we invited the audience to travel back in time with us to 1964 and imagine themselves sitting front row at Aquarama’s underwater show. To help set the mood, we played the opening sequence of Aquarama’s original voice-over narration and music obtained from Marc Johl, the son of Aquarama’s founders.

The opening soundtrack was followed by a history of the Johl family and Aquarama illustrated through vintage 8 mm film clips, photographs of beautifully preserved costumes used in Aquarama routines from 1964 – 1968, vintage advertising ephemera, and invaluable first person interviews with Marc Johl and past Aquarama employees.


We also we brought in Marina the Fire Eating Mermaid, a professional aquatic performer and friend, for a lively Q & A about aquatic entertainment, then and now.

Although the Q & A had the potential to veer into a discussion of pop culture and kitsch, we were pleased that the questions asked by our wonderful audience were both thoughtful and fun and indicated that we were successful in communicating our goals for the presentation – to celebrate the history of a unique roadside mom and pop while opening up a larger discussion about the changing experience of automobile travel over the past 50 years and the impact of the Interstate system and corporate chains on independently owned mom and pops.

Questions brought up during the Q & A also touched on broader questions relating to historic preservation such as who decides what is to be preserved, whether historic preservation is inherently anti-development, and the value of preserving roadside history – exactly the discussion that we hoped to spark with the founding of Vintage Roadside.

On a technical note, we thought the addition of a soundtrack to the 30–60 second film clips spaced throughout the presentation would have created more of an impact on the audience. We’ll be making this improvement for future presentations.

Through our use of archival materials, corroborated oral history, and passion for the subject, we’d like to think that our symposium about a nearly forgotten 1960s mermaid attraction both entertained and engaged people in a broader discussion of the value of preserving roadside culture and place history while helping to push the boundaries of what might be considered as public history display.

~ Kelly Burg and Jeff Kunkle

History museums in a wiki world

This January Wikipedia will be celebrating its ten year anniversary, and it’s safe to say that in the past decade the editable encyclopedia has challenged the academic and cultural sectors in a number of ways. A recent post on Off the Wall has already discussed the shifting role that Wikipedia plays in academia, specifically noting its potential for historiography. For a while now I have been interested in digital history, having studied history and social studies education at the home of the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University.  But it wasn’t until I shifted my focus to museum studies and collections management that I fell into the world of Wikipedia. I haven’t looked back.

In the fall of 2009, Jennifer Geigel Mikulay, assistant professor at IUPUI, and Richard McCoy, associate conservator of objects at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, integrated an experimental Wikipedia project into the museum studies course “Collections Care and Management.” Inspired by the nationwide “Save Outdoor Sculpture!” project of the 1990’s, Mikulay and McCoy hoped to remedy the lack of coverage of public art within Wikipedia by bringing the SOS! database into the 21st century. Wikipedia Saves Public Art, now called WikiProject Public Art (that's its logo above), began by documenting the artworks on the IUPUI campus. Within the semester, students researched and wrote forty-two public art articles and the IUPUI Public Art Collection was organized and documented for the first time in its history. The resources of the project have continued to be used to document other public art collections in cities, college campuses, and public spaces such as the Indiana State House.   

What I find to be most encouraging about WikiProject Public Art is the model it provides for sharing information about objects that are otherwise ignored, forgotten, or misunderstood. Now Wikipedia can be combined with the technology of smart phones to find and share information from anywhere at any time. For example, a visitor on the campus of IUPUI can pull up Google Earth and see a slew of “W” icons denoting Wikipedia articles about the artworks surrounding them. You can stand in front of John Torreano’s Mega-Gem and, in spite of its lack of label, learn about the artwork, its provenance, and the artist, all by accessing the Wikipedia article on your smart phone.

Museum exhibits are beginning to utilize this technology by implementing it in a number of ways such as in-gallery computers or iPads, QR codes,and simple labels prompting visitors to search for Wikipedia articles on their phone. The Brooklyn Museum’s Seductive Subversion exhibit is a recent example of Wikipedia and iPad integration. Staff updated and created Wikipedia articles on women artists in the Pop Art movement which visitors can now access oniPads in the gallery. Historical institutions have yet to tap into Wikipedia’s potential for on-site interpretation. Likewise, historians are only beginning to see Wikipedia as a viable community for sharing research. As the late Roy Rosenzweig, the founder of the Center for History and New Media, has said, "If Wikipedia is becoming the family encyclopedia for the twenty-first century, historians probably have a professional obligation to make it as good as possible." The Wikimedia Foundation is currently funding an effort to train Campus Ambassadors who will assist professors in integrating Wikipedia into their curriculums. The first focus has been on United States Public Policy, which will help alleviate the backlog of updates that these particular articles require. While this is a start, museums and cultural institutions can certainly help fill the gap in the broader scope of historical topics in Wikipedia.

Other than the perks of interactive technology experiences, there are other implications for the integration of Wikipedia in historical exhibit spaces. Access to Wikipedia articles can help alleviate the museum educator and curator’s struggle over the depth of content to include on labels, providing a variety of levels of information for a range of audiences. Likewise, Wikipedia is a means for sharing the abundance of research that goes into preparing exhibits, much of which never reaches the public. This research can be taken out of the filing cabinets and shared with a much wider audience. By contributing new information to Wikipedia articles, cultural institutions are not only providing new content through in-exhibit technology, but are also increasing the accessibility to their collections with a global audience on the most widely used online encyclopedia. More practically speaking, at a time when museum budgets are continuing to tighten, Wikipedia is a valuable free resource, the only cost being the time it takes to update articles.

The process of contributing to Wikipedia articles will remain an important concern for museum staff. As a freely editable encyclopedia, Wikipedia is only as good as its contributors. For Wikipedia, cultural institutions are a largely untappedsource of expertise in the field. I’m now interested in ways that museum staff can efficiently share their expertise and collections information on Wikipedia. GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) is a global initiative that is considering ways to streamline the collaboration between Wikipedia and the cultural sector. Some pilot projects have included individual Wikipedian-in-Residence programs, such as the British Museum’s project in May-June 2010 (shown above), and E-Volunteer programs like the one recently launched at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

It is my hope that museums, schools, and other cultural institutions will take a fresh look at Wikipedia as a tool for furthering their missions.  By contributing to Wikipedia and integrating it into exhibit spaces, museums can combine technology and accessibility for a wide range of audiences. Each museum has unique information to share and should be considering ways that Wikipedia can be used to make it more accessible to their audiences, both in and out of exhibit spaces. There’s little doubt in my mind that Wikipedia will become increasingly relevant within cultural institutions as a tool for expanding accessibility to broader audiences.

~ Lori Byrd Phillips

Guest reviewer Lori Byrd Phillips is a museum studies graduate student at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), a project leader for Wikipedia Saves Public Art, and the current Wikipedian-in-Residence at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis