The Plastic Menagerie

The remaining details of our New Zealand ski trip are awfully slow in coming, true, but I'll have to put those off just a little bit longer to document the recent arrival of a couple of important packages. The first showed up a few weeks ago, mailed to me by my friend Norm Bolotin-- a writer and historian in Woodinville, Washington, and owner of The History Bank. The second arrived yesterday, while I was out. It required a signature, and so I've just now retrieved it from the local newsagent. This package was sent by another friend, Diane Carlson, VP of Guest Services and Theater Programs at Pacific Science Center, in Seattle. Both boxes-- plain, brown and scuffed-- were filled with Mold-A-Ramas for my collection. Outstanding.

I'd gotten to know both Norm and Diane in the course of my research for my story about Mold-A-Ramas for Seattle Metropolitan. Though I don't name him in the article, Norm was the guy who recalled visiting the Seattle World's Fair as a ten-year-old boy, and riding around the fairgrounds with his father in a Cushman utility truck. He was great to talk with. Norm presides over an impressive collection of Century 21 memorabilia, including a large number of MARs, which he's slowly paring back to manageable numbers. Recognising a kindred spirit, he kindly offered to give some to me: kangaroo with joey, sea turtle (from the Lowry Park Zoo), Model T (Henry Ford Museum), rhinoceros (Milwaukee County Zoo), lion (Brookfield Zoo) and Santa Claus (unlabelled). 

I'll take good care of them, Norm.

Diane's institutional knowledge was also invaluable to me, and she felt it was appropriate that Pac Sci's set of the six MARs originally vended at the fair come to live with me. These include the Space Needle, monorail, Hotei, three wise monkeys, the symbol of the Pavilion of Electric Power, and the Century 21 logo. As a super bonus, she included some MARs currently available at her facility: a butterfly, space robot, tyrannosauraus rex, the Yamasaki-designed arches of the former US Science Pavilion (now Pacific Science Center), and the extraordinary naked mole rats. 

Thank you, Diane. They're in good hands!