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From the Producer |
| "From the Producer" is the weekly column of North Texas Explorer Producer Todd Kent. Kent discusses everything from the outdoors to television production or whatever happens to be on his mind at the time. |
| From the Week of
1/20/03 "Roach Trap" |
| All over the country, in the eclectic array of museums that punctuate the highways and the back roads, exhibit pieces range from the oldest dinosaur fossil to the most stunning work of art. Age and/or beauty are often the requirements that are necessary for an item to sit on a shelf or to hang on the wall in a traditional museum. If you own one unique item, you have an interesting piece. If you own several interesting pieces you then have a collection. If you have several collections and you begin to sell T-shirts, you then have a museum. |  |
| Museums get a bad rap for
being stuffy or pretentious. Granted, some certainly are but the good ones
steer clear of that trap by not taking themselves too seriously. These are
the museums that happened by accident. One of the most famous Texas
roadside icon museums happened just like that. And like other great
museums, visitors leave with more questions than answers.
"Cockroaches have been around for 350 millions years," Michael Bohdan says, "and maybe we can learn from them.." Bohdan instills an unusual sense of reassurance considering he wears a hat with dead bugs on it. But when it comes to cockroaches he definitely knows his stuff. After all, not only has he been killing them for several years, he’s also the proprietor of the Cockroach Hall of Fame Museum in Plano, TX. The Cockroach Hall of Fame Museum is one of those smaller museums. In fact the entire exhibit resides inside a glass case at the front of the "Pest Shop," a Plano pest control firm. Bohdan, the self proclaimed "Cockroach Dundee," owns the shop and may just be the most famous exterminator ever. An innocent contest to find the biggest Cockroach in Dallas led to his appearance on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and from there it was a short trip to cockroach fame. After several TV appearances, magazine articles, a book (What’s Bugging You?: Michael Bohdan’s Guide to Home Pest Control) and years of traveling the world, Bohdan’s Cockroach Hall of Fame continues to bring in curious travelers from all over. Those visitors get an eyeful of exhibits like "Liberoachie," "Marilyn Monroach" and "Ross Peroach." These six legged celebrity impersonators are refugees from Combat Roach Control sponsored "Best Dressed Cockroach" contest which Bohdan spent years judging all over the country. Sadly the roach celebrities are, of course, deceased but a place like the Hall of Fame won’t let you walk away without getting a gander at some live specimens. Huge Madagascar Hissing Roaches have come all the way from Africa to be the other stars of the museum. They creep. They crawl. They hiss. What more could you want from your cockroach experience? Ask nicely and maybe Bohdan will let you touch one. Ask even nicer and maybe you won’t have to touch one. |
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It’s places like these that help the overall reputation of museums stay a little more grounded and a little less stuffy. "Cockroaches are small so the museum’s going to be small," says Bohdan. Maybe it’s time other museums decided to "think small." |
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