The "Brooms Around the World" display makes it clear: everyone wants to be clean.

Museum of Clean

Pocatello, Idaho

The Museum of Clean is the passion project of the late Don Aslett (1935-2024), who spent most of his long life trying, as he frequently said, "to raise the image and teach the value of clean."

Don Aslett in the feather duster gallery: Swiffer Me!

Kid Planet encourages tykes to use the "Vacuum Me" machine.

Don got into the janitorial business in 1953. Over time he became a janitor-multimillionaire, and told anyone within in earshot that the cleaning profession was the most important in the world, as well as the most under-appreciated. He became an evangelist for cleanliness, and knew the value of humor and a good visual prop. Don designed his personal suitcase to resemble a toilet, and carried it on his business trips proudly.

The idea for the Museum of Clean, Don told us, came to him in 1984, when he noticed an old hand-pumped vacuum cleaner at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. "You know," Don said, "there are cow museums and hammer museums and button museums, but what's more important on the face of the earth than clean?" Inspired, Don started collecting antique carpet sweepers, vacuums, brooms, and washing machines, eventually amassing over 7,000 artifacts.

Big Don the Janitor: a one-of-a-kind Muffler Man.

But Don wanted his museum to be more than a relic display. It was, he told us, "designed to sell the value of clean," which he felt had long been portrayed as unpleasant. "We punish our kids by making them clean their room," he said. "We tell them, 'You'd better study, or you'll grow up to be a janitor'" -- a view that Don found professionally offensive.

Don had the Museum of Clean built inside a five-story 75,000-square-foot warehouse in Pocatello, only a few blocks from his company headquarters. He poured more than $6 million of his own money into the project. It took nearly 30 years before the museum opened to the public in 2012, a delay that Don admitted was partly due to his own fussiness and constant flow of new ideas. The 90-year-old building was transformed into a state-of-the-art "green" facility, winner of the "2013 Pollution Prevention Champion Award" because, according to Don, conservation and recycling for a clean environment are part of being clean, too.

In the "Orchestra of Clean," Teddy Roosevelt and Napoleon play cleaning equipment.

Artifacts in the Museum of Clean run the gamut, including a trash compactor from a Space Shuttle, a dog-powered washing machine, and an "explosion proof vacuum" used in nuclear plants. One display examines the "Largest Landfill in the World" (a.k.a. the Pacific Ocean); another, titled "Vacuum Me," is a kid-size cutout connected to a powerful motor in the basement. It removes dirt from children with the flick of a switch. "That thing'll suck the braces right out of your teeth," said Don with a laugh.

Organ with old hand-pump vacuums for pipes.

A gallery of Cleaning Art, which incudes Van Gogh's "Starry Night" painted on a toilet seat, conveys Don's belief that "clean is the most beautiful thing on the earth." Other artwork scattered around the museum includes medieval knights made from metal garbage cans, a totem pole made from mop buckets, a "General Clutter" statue assembled from household junk, and the "Orchestra of Clean," created by Don's brother Larry, which includes two space aliens tooting on vacuum cleaner pipes and Louis Armstrong as the archangel Gabriel, playing a trumpet muted by a toilet plunger.

Elvis holds a squeegee, John Wayne a broom. Elsewhere, Darth Vader wields a mop.

Don's sense of showmanship led, perhaps inevitably, to his purchase of a Muffler Man, which he had customized into "Big Don: the World's Largest Janitor." Big Don stands next to the museum's indoor Noah's Ark (whose exhibits stress the importance of water in cleaning) and the Garden of Clean (where plants clean the air), and holds a rotating selection of oversized brooms, mops, and squeegees.

Don "The Toilet Man" Aslett (1936-2024).

Weird, overly engineered devices on display show the complicated early days of cleaning technology, such as the world's first powered vacuum cleaner, run by a propane motor (which still works) and hauled around on a horse-drawn wagon because it was so heavy. The Toilet Zone exhibit has a prop model of the Ty-D-Bol Man (and his boat), one of Don's toilet suitcases (he had several), and a well-used railroad commode that you'd have to be desperate to sit on. There are displays on mouth cleaning, shoe cleaning, brooms, dustpans, fly swatters, soap powder, and bathtubs. Visitors on the third floor of the museum are invited to toss sponges through hoops made from toilet seats.

Man-friendly cleaning tools include this saw-handle iron.

A giant walk-thru "Waste Station" garbage bin visually conveys the 1,620 pounds of trash that the typical American throws away every year. Next to it is an Adopt-a-Highway sign that has had the word "Highway" replaced with "Habit" by Don. "Adopt-a-Highway is the stupidest thing we've ever done," said Don, who also felt that high schools should be cleaned by their own students. "If you clean up after people, you reinforce bad behavior," he said. "The most important thing you can teach someone is to be responsible for their own mess."

Museum exhibits extol the benefits of learning to sweep, clean windows, clean out clutter, and clean ourselves. Don said that we're lucky to live in a time when it's easy to be clean, but cautioned that the purpose of the museum isn't to teach visitors how to be clean, but to want to be clean.

Don was so devoted to his vision that he lived in an apartment in the Museum of Clean, which is where he died, age 89, in August 2024. He was still giving tours until a few weeks before his death. We were assured by those currently overseeing the museum that it will carry on without him, maintaining Don's creativity and spark. He is now in the afterlife, and wherever that is, Don no doubt has it spotless.