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.
That sets the Manoogs' museum apart from the familiar breed of company museums that have long served as tourist bait, providing visitors with a mix of education (marketing), entertainment (marketing), and the chance to achieve unprecedented intimacy with cherished brands (marketing). Oral-hygiene enthusiasts passing through Fort Collins, Colo., can do obeisance at a shrine to the Teledyne Water Pik. Streetlights in the shape of lighters flank the road leading up to Zippo Manufacturing Co.'s museum, in Bradford, Pa. However illuminating they may turn out to be, such storehouses start life as brand-building extensions of a company's headquarters and could be located anywhere.
But the kazoo museum couldn't exist anywhere but in Eden, N.Y., a largely agricultural town near Buffalo. Or so David Berghash learned back in 1986, when he first got the notion of creating a museum around the small, submarine-shaped musical instrument. That was a year after the 75-employee family business of which he is president, Brimms Inc., acquired the Original American Kazoo Co., the first (and still the only) company to make the metal kazoo -- which Berghash likes to call the sole musical instrument born in the United States. (The Smithsonian begs to differ, citing the competing claims of the banjo and the electric guitar.) When he discovered the kazoo's distinctive American heritage, "I thought it was the coolest thing in the world," says Berghash, who must get tired of hearing that he looks like actor Nathan Lane. "It changed the whole dynamic for me."
What he's referring to is his own attitudinal about-face regarding the kazoo company, which he eventually agreed to run for his father after trying a couple of ventures of his own. Now an ardent kazoo crusader, Berghash traces his conversion to a 1985 pilgrimage during which he accompanied his kazoos to the New York Toy Fair. With no hot new product to sell, Berghash had expected to weather the event in relative anonymity. Instead he found himself spotlighted by the glow of other attendees' nostalgia. "People kept coming up to me and saying, 'Do you know what you have here? It's an American icon!' " says Berghash, whose company produces 1.5 million kazoos a year. "I realized that we had accepted responsibility for a piece of Americana. We could either document it, or we could just let the story disappear."
