Public Displays of Affection

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For Russ Manoog's father, it was a length of pipe that served as a conduit between his once and future avocations. To commemorate the founder's retirement, in 1979, someone presented him with a section of a 300-year-old wooden water main that had been excavated during the commercial development of Boston's historic Faneuil Hall. Soon the retiree began soliciting friends in the trade for any rare or curious fixtures they might have squirreled away. His collection took shape modestly, in the company's showroom; it's now housed in a 3,000-square-foot space that his son Russ designed in 1988, the year before his father died. Russ actually enlisted an architect friend to design some of the exhibits, which include a high-tanked toilet that once welcomed the bottoms of Philadelphia gentry, boxes of 150-year-old boudoir paper, and a vintage copper-lined steel bathtub with oak trim. In the museum's lower level, an iron toilet bowl designed in 1896 for jail-cell use (there's no seat for prisoners to detach and wield as a weapon) shares pride of place with an assortment of plumbers' tools so vast and miscellaneous it looks as if a Home Depot exploded.

That's how it looks to an outsider, anyway. Plumbers who stroll through the exhibits, Manoog says, invariably discover obscure and exciting facts that revivify their connection to their craft. "I want them to know how important they are and have always been," Manoog says. Bettejane "B. J." Manoog, Russ's wife of 36 years and the museum's administrative director, originally agreed to give guided tours on a short-term basis. That was 12 years ago, and she's still at it. "I give it as much time as I can," she says. "I love it here."

Kazoos are "a piece of Americana," says David Berghash, whose company produces 1.5 million kazoos a year.

In the early 1990s, while rooting around in corporate closets as part of his research for a book, consultant Jim Collins made a historic discovery. What he found was that most companies -- including the pretty good ones -- had no archives at all. Great companies, by contrast, kept everything.

"I still have Xeroxed copies of David Packard's initial draft of The H-P Way, typed on his own typewriter with his handwritten notes in the margins," says Collins, who coauthored Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, a seminal study of exceptional companies. "I have copies of George Merck's thoughts from the 1930s on how he was going to build his pharmaceuticals company." (No slouch in the historical-perspective department, Collins established his research lab in his former first-grade classroom.)

It stands to reason: CEOs with the impulse to preserve are more likely to build something worth preserving. (For those seeking to nurture that impulse, see "Past Company,"below.) "A company that builds one of these museums -- that pulls this stuff together for people to see and touch and reflect upon -- is saying that, in some way, it's more substantial than the norm," explains Collins, who is based in Boulder, Colo. "If you looked at other aspects of their business, you'd probably see a similar degree of care. It's their fundamental approach to life: it means they give a damn about what they do."

Not that museums like the American Sanitary Plumbing Museum exist to showcase the accomplishments of their founders. Although financed by a nonprofit family foundation and operated by the Manoogs, that museum has no overt association with Charles Manoog Inc. Indeed, Russ Manoog is adamant about asserting that his collection -- which is appreciated by some 400 visitors a year -- is a paean to an entire industry, not just one company. "We don't make anything, so we're not trying to represent our products, and we don't want people to view this as something to enhance our business," he says.

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Leigh Buchanan

Leigh Buchanan is an editor at large for Inc. Magazine. A former editor at Harvard Business Review and founding editor of WebMaster magazine, she writes regular columns on leadership and workplace culture, and she contributes Inc.'s capsule book reviews, "A Skimmer's Guide to the Latest Business Books."

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