I just got the word that my collection of banks shaped like strawberries is on display at – yes – Strawbery Banke Museum. It’s there during stroll in a wooden and glass case in the Tyco Center. I’ve been waiting two years for this momentous event. It is my first museum display. Sure, it’s ktischy junk, but that’s why I love it. There are about 30 items in the collection. All have a strawbrry theme, and all are coin banks. It is the world’s largest collection of strawberry banks, the result of two or three years of intense searching through the cobwebby basement of eBay. Now finally, you can bask in the glory of this magnificent obsession. (Continued below)

See collection at CANDLELIGHT STROLL this weekend

The story of the World’s Largest Strawberry Bank Collection is a short one. When I started writing the history of the museum in 2004, I knew almost nothing about this 10-acre historic house museum. So each day, after studying all the books and letters and manuscripts and photos I could find, I typed the phrase "strawbery banke" into eBay. The results were disappointingly the same.

The museum has not had a stellar publishing career. There is the museum guidebook, published in many editions. There is one detailed book by Barbara Ward about the Abbott Store. There are a few postcards. There are a couple of articles including an issue of the NH Archeology Society, a reprint from Antiques magazine. Mostly I got souvenirs – old buttons, ticket stubs, things purhased at the old Dunnaway Country Store.

The problem, I thought at first, might be spelling. The museum has a funny "ye olde" spelling with an "r" missing from the first word and an added "e" on the second. It is an affected spelling created in the colonial revival era by the first museum president Dorothy Vaughan. Strawberry Bank was the original name for Portsmouth, NH, but in my research I never found a single example of it spelled that way, at least not until the 1930s. That’s when historian Ralph May wrote his book n the early history of Portsmouth.

CLICK TO SEE PART OF MY CRAZY BANK COLLECTION    

Because there were so many different spellings of the word in colonial documents, he standardized the spelling. Vaughan was working on a historic map of Portsmouth back then (there is a copy of it in the back endpaper of my book) and she adopted May’s spelling, at least that’s what I think happened. When Strawbery Banke Inc. was created in 1958, it was apparently Vaughan and May who created the name and used their invented spelling. I won’t go into the origin of the name itself here. That’s all in the book and way too controversial a topic for a holiday blog.

Anyway, when you type "strawberry, bank" into eBay, you naturally get banks shaped like strawberries. I ignored them for a while, but they kept coming up day after day as I dutifully typed in the phrase, hoping that something new about the museum would surface online during my research.

Early on I bumped into a note from Muriel Howells, the other key woman in the creation of the museum. Howells sketched a strawberry with a slot in the top and suggested in a memo to someone that the museum should order coin banks shaped like strawberries for sale by the museum guilt, a separate nonprofit agency that raised money for the museum.

No one ever did it. They sold strawberry soda, strawberry shortcake, strawberry jam and ice cream, strawberry shaped hats and emdless items with a strawberry theme. I thought it was wonderfully odd that the idea, though never employed by the museum, had been fulfilled by so many other people – none of whom had any connection to the Portsmouth, New Hampshre or to the museum itslelf. None of these banks were manufactured because of a colonial town where wild strawberries once grew (maybe) along the banks of the river.

So I bought one. And then I bought another. And as the years of research and writing continued, I bought more and more banks with a strawberry theme. I never spent more than $40 and I bought only banks that were different from ones I already had. I ended up with items from around the world – China, New Zealand, Russia, Japan, Germany – wherever good junk is made. Some of the banks were actually shaped like strawberry houses. Some were strawberry people. I extended the definition to inglude piggy banks imprinted with strawberries. In one case I bought a teapot-shaped bank that supposedly was painted with strawberries, but they turned out to be cherries.

I won’t say I was obsessed, but I did get a little overly happy now and then. When each new item arrived in its bubblewrap, there was a momentary rush of accomplishment. That rush over balanced the dark, depressive side of writing a book for years on end in a room all by one’s self. My history of the museum, some 400 pages with 400 pictures, was a distant thing at the time. But the colorful red banks lined across one wall of my office were tangible, silly and joyous proof of my progress toward that goal.

When people came into my writing office, which did not happen often, I would point to the collection and say – "What do you see?" Most people just stared, unable to find the connection between the items. The smarter and more intellectual the visitor, it seemed, the less likely he or she was to make the leap. Kids, however, usually got the gist.

"I see strawberries and I see banks," they’d say with ease.

"Yes, yes," I urged. "So they are all … what?"

"Strawberry banks?"

"Yes, you got it," I said in triumph. Here the lights often went out, even for the few adults who got this far. I could count as high as 10 before they would say – "Oh, Strawbery Banke Museum?"

The problem, of course, is that there is no real connection. The link is associative, like OJ Simpson and Orange Juice, which he used to sell. It is simply a pun, and not much of a pun at that. It is wordplay. But I am an English major and wordplay is what I do.

When the book was done and out in 2008 my wife politely suggested that I stop collecting banks shaped like fruit. It wasn’t easy. Then she less politely suggested that I at least stop talking about them. Then she pretty much demanded that I find another home for the collection, which I eventually catalogued, photographed, enclosed in bubblewrap and donated the Strawbery Banke Museum.

It is my hope that after they go off display in the Tyco Center, that they will become part of a permanent touchable exhibit for kids in the discovery area at the museum. I imagine an activity for kids who can describe and catalog and display them. We all begin as junior curators. My brothers and I collected coins, stamps, baseball cards, napkins, animal skeletons, Matchbox cars, comic books, fireflies, arrowheads and more. Our brains are organizing organs, even when we don’t want them to be. There has to be lessons to learn here, and I hope the museum educators will find ways to make this wacky collection useful.

It is also fun. Call it whimsy for whimsy sake. Among my conclusions after years of working around Strawbery Banke is that museum people often take themselves and their collections way too seriously. Historians get that way a lot. I’m working with historians on a new book who will argue until the break of dawn whether a clipper ship is really a pilot built schooner. In English literature, professors fight over phrases and words in fictional novels. They would, if they were brave enough, fight duels over details, while missing the boat on meaning.

I love history. I love collecting. I work my butt off tracking down the tiniest detail for the most obscure footnote. But ultimately, if you step back a few inches, it’s all pretty funny stuff because it’s all about human beings, who are pretty funny creatures. That’s what this exhibit is about. It’s the worlds biggest aggregation of items, when taken collectively, form a phrase that is a homynym for the name of a museum in New Hampshire.

I hope you will go and see them and that they will bring you and your children a ridiculous moment of joy. And my thanks to curator Kimberly and director Larry for giving me the chance to make pun of their museum.

© 2009 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.