Thanks to a campaign led by Wanda Gregory, the mayor of Angier, North Carolina, the contents of the late Marvin Johnson's Gourd Museum have been saved. The new home of the gourds is a dozen glass-fronted display cases along the walls of Angier's municipal building meeting room.

Marvin Johnson had collected gourds and gourd art since the early 1960s, and displayed them in a small museum on his farm just outside of Angier. He died several years ago, age 93, and turned the museum over to his nephew. But the nephew was also no spring chicken, and after a year the museum was padlocked and the property was sold to a real estate developer.

"Nobody'd been in the place for 5-6 years," recalled town commissioner Joe Pleasant, who helped to move the gourds. "The facility was in right bad shape. We probably threw away a five-gallon bucket of gourd seeds that people had sent him, back as far as the 1970s."

"We don't know what happened to a lot of his stuff, but I'd say we saved 95 percent of the gourds."

Many of Johnson's favorite gourds were rescued, including Popeye the Sailor Man and the Spirit of '76 Bicentennial gourd. Joe Pleasant could not recall if Johnson's most famous gourd, with a painting of Mr. Johnson feeding a hot dog to his pet alligator, had survived. However, Joe did volunteer that he had seen Marvin feed the alligator a hot dog in real life. "He was a rather amazing man; a super nice fellah."

Johnson collected thousands of gourds ("Gracious, there's no telling how many he had.") and many remain in storage. The town hopes to someday build a museum of which half will be local history, and the other half will be gourds. "As long as we want the gourds," said Mr. Pleasant, "we got the gourds."

The meeting room is occasionally locked, but if you ask anyone in the town library, which is in the same building, they'll open it for you.

[04/14/2006]