The last time that we visited Barney Smith, he had created 627 toilet seats for his Toilet Seat Art Museum (which is actually his garage). Now Barney is up to 811, and although he turns 86 in May, he has no intention of slowing down.

"I thought about it, several times, to pray to the good Lord to make it a 48-hour day," Barney told us. "Just think how much work I could do!" Barney, a retired plumber who creates all of the museum's toilet seats himself, told us that he routinely works until two in the morning (or later), then wakes up at 7:30 when his clock radio goes off. That translates to a 19-hour work day, although Barney admits that he sometimes lies in bed until 8:30.

Barney Smith became the sole master of his craft when John Kostopoulus, the self-proclaimed King of Toilet Seat Arts, passed away in Boron, California in 1996. Barney modestly refuses to assume such a title, and views his toilet seats merely as an unique form of scrapbooking, with each seat preserving either a significant event from his own life, or from the life of whoever brings him the raw material.

This latter category, frankly, is getting a little out of hand. Barney, always willing to please, works up a custom seat whenever yet another two-bit DJ or TV show wants to interview him. He rattles off the names of venues -- NBC Later Today, TBS Ripley's Believe It Or Not, The View, Montel Williams, Country Fried Home Video -- and dismisses any suggestion that this bottom-feeder media might be taking advantage of his good nature. "I want the world to remember what I've done."

We asked Barney if any of his new seats was a particular favorite. He insisted that "I'm proud of them all," but also excitedly told us about how a retired navy commander had recently stopped by to bring him a souvenir from Baghdad, "a piece of the toilet out of the Green Zone!" It turns out to be the center of a smashed toilet tank from a Saddam-era bunker, and Barney mounted it on a toilet seat along with the commander's letter of authenticity.

Barney is also enthusiastic about a project that will probably end up as around #820: a toilet seat commemorating his wife's recent hip replacement surgery. "I've already got the x-ray of that titanium or whatever it is that they made the joint out of," he told us, running down the list in his mind, "I have the x-rays of her hip, I have the IVs that they gave her in the hospital and the syringe that they gave her medication in. I have the blood sugar lancets -- I saved a lot of those. I'm gonna put a great old big red drop on the toilet seat, and then I'm gonna put these lancets all the way around that blood drop."

Barney added: "I've got a seat for her gallstone surgery, but I don't have any gallstones on it. People ask me, 'Didn't she have any?' and I say, 'Yeah, she had 'em, but she's got 'em hid from me.'"

Does Barney plan to do anything special when he reaches toilet seat #1,000? "If I hit that before I die," he answered, "I'll look up this Guinness Book of World records application that they sent me a few years ago. I just have never stopped long enough to fill it out."

[04/24/2007]