Public Displays of Affection

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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."

After that, he divided his time between coming up with new kazoo lines and trying to learn about the instrument's older incarnations. On the latter subject Original American Kazoo's records were no help, so he turned to the Smithsonian and to the author of the only published treatise on kazoos. He got some answers to questions about the history of the company -- When did it switch from being a metal-parts plant to a kazoo manufacturer? What were some of the earliest instruments it produced? -- from employees and from some of the 7,000 or so residents of Eden who stopped by the company to reminisce. "Someone would say, 'Oh, my mom used to work here. Now she's over at the nursing home. Let me ask her,' " recalls Berghash. "We called it the Talmud -- the oral tradition. It was all we had to go on."

Along with their stories, the town's residents also brought him their old kazoos, which he soon turned into museum exhibits. They contributed wooden kazoos, model-airplane kazoos, kazoos with foghorn-shaped amplifiers, kazoos disguised as liquor bottles (commemorating the end of Prohibition), and large kazoos made to look like saxophones, clarinets, and other musical instruments. "We couldn't figure out what those were for, but then we interviewed some people in their seventies who said they were popular at parties back in the 1920s," says Berghash. "It was their version of karaoke." The liquor-bottle models, he imagines, are the most valuable, but he hasn't a clue about how much any of it is worth. "I keep hoping Antiques Roadshow will come through here so I can find out," he says, referring to the public-television show.

As the collection grew, Berghash turned over the chore of building glass display cases to his 16 employees. Meanwhile, he labored with his in-house copywriter to create an illustrated time line. Among other items, the two hunted down photos of the company's early owners, 19th-century Sears & Roebuck catalogs featuring kazoos, and a 1928 letter from a lawyer requesting $21 to process a patent for "an improvement in musical toys or instruments." Where no artifacts existed, they fudged: a comb, a blade of grass, and a Chiclets packet represent primitive kazoos. Several aging photos of unidentified people (presumably former employees) performing unidentified activities (presumably related to the manufacturing of kazoos) were unearthed from the company's antediluvian file cabinets. "The copywriter would think of something," notes Berghash, referring to the captions that now accompany the photos.

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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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