On the front steps of the Dan Quayle museum in Huntington, Indiana, John Herrenden, a straw-haired 10-year-old in a Notre Dame baseball cap, is practicing the free-market entrepreneurialism once preached by the 44th Vice President of the United States: he's selling cups of Kool-Aid at 10 cents a pop. The flavor? "I think it's red," he says. "R-e-d," he adds, slowly and seriously.
But the boy, who attends the elementary school where young Danny Quayle learned to spell, was not the first person outside the museum when it opened last week in Huntington, a tidy, cheerful town of 18,000 located on a bend of the Wabash River. That honor went to the NBC satellite truck that came here before 6 a.m. for an interview with Marj Hiner, the local lady who was the leading force behind the museum.
"The interview was supposed to be on the Today show at 6:35," says Marj, a spunky woman who says she has known the Quayles for "only" 23 years, "but the generator blew, and they had to frantically call New York. Luckily, my husband Homer was waiting on me, and he hot-wired the truck and we went on at 7:08." And the interview? "Well, Katie ((Couric)) didn't ask any of the questions they told me she would ask."
The national press turned out in full, sardonic force for the opening of the Quayle museum, a sweet, rinky-dink exhibit on the ground floor of an 80- year-old neoclassical building on Warren Street, catty-corner to Dan's old school. The networks, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker -- the very doyens of the cultural elite that Quayle infamously criticized -- had come to give Danny one last kick. A local woman, who had brought her four-year-old to see the exhibit, fled when she was surrounded by reporters pushily quizzing a real, live person on why she had come to the museum.
But in fact the place is not so much a museum as a kind of genial time capsule about a small-town boy who made good. A snapshot of two-year-old Danny clutching a toy football, a small boy's grimace of determination on his face. A letter he wrote to his uncle when he was 12 explaining why he lost a nine- hole Jaycee golf tournament ("A 14-year-old kid who shot a 49 he ((sic)) beat me on the 17th"). A photo of an awestruck Dan as a college student shaking hands with Ronald Reagan (not unlike the now famous picture of earnest young Bill Clinton shaking hands with J.F.K.).
None of the images explain why a not-very-exceptional fellow ascended to the second highest office in the nation. Thomas Mehl, the museum's curator -- who is actually a graduate student at Eastern Illinois University ("I'll be getting six credits for this," he says) -- notes shyly that the museum is history. "Sure, this isn't the Revolution or the Civil War. But it's still history. He has a story to tell. Hell, I have a story to tell. You have a story to tell." It's a modest ode to a common man -- a man lifted by circumstance from an ordinary stage to an extraordinary one. No museum can explain luck.