No to outdo Colin with his "New Z" thread, but.... I picked this up a few years ago at Wild Bill's Nostalgia Center's during its closing sale. It's about time I share!

May Gawd rest Wild Bill. He was the funnest, whackiest guy I ever knew in CT.
Scary that he worked with his hand on one of the ThermoNuke buttons during the Vietnam war...Air Force in Thailand. I drove up there to visit the Emporium again one year and found it closed. Even his pop-up silo clown was sad.
I had hoped to include the Emporium in a FunRun someday, but Bill died without checking with me first. Just goes to show we shouldn't hesitate when we have a fun idea for the Club.

Nice score on the magazine. I found/bought a few copies of my old teenage favorites, SPORTS CAR GRAPHIC and Clymer's CYCLE. I wonder who got his Whale jaw and his bear traps?

Frank T

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1970 240Z

Sorry I missed out on seeing that place . I remember when you were trying to set up that fun run.

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John Kish
1971 240Z - original owner

There's hardly any way to describe Wild Bill's Nostalia Emporium in Middletown. It was a conglomeration of every memory you ever had from childhood. Bill invested 1/4 million dollars on a spook house which was only Staffed and open ON HALLOWEEN night each year. He had "the world's largest Jack-in-the-Box", which rose from an old grain silo in his side yard, and old psychadelic cars strewn around the lawn. You can't find very many photos of the interior because, once you passed thru the main entry, everything was jumbled on top of everything else; it was packed so tightly, you couldn't get enough focal distance for a good picture. Entry was free and you could browse as long as you wished. Real hippies from Haight-Asbury thought they had died and found Mecca. Or Nirvana. or Valhalla. Or wherever old Hippies go when their shelf life expires.

Literally, every single piece of nostalgia inside the Emporium brought a flashback
memory of every Baby-Boomer's childhood and adolescence. It was freaky and wonderful at the same time. A real Sperm Whale jaw hung from the overhead. Bear traps and metal dinosaurs and bears lined the back wall. A stuffed black bear, Superman, and Captain America greeted you in the front entry. Stacks of old car magazines lined the front counter. Buttons, badges, old electronic games, old bicycles, washing machines, typewriters, dial phones, hippie clothes, first generation computers, hand-cranked calculators and wall phones, bobbleheads of everybody you ever heard of. Bill was always there, usually wearing open toe sandals, Hodaddy surfer shorts and Hawai'ian shirts.

Of interest was that the whole front wall of the Emporium separated an entirely unseen storeroom full of more stuff; there simply wasn't enough room to show it all inside. Bill opened it one day and let me peek inside; the first glance into Tutankhamen's grave came to mind..."Wonderful Things!", but all packed together so tightly there was no way to enter and explore. Everything our families threw away in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, ended up at Wild Bill's.

There's no way to gauge the loss to our generation, and to the education of later generations. I'm grateful to have got my own kid in there a few times. It would have been a great and long-remembered visit for the Club.

https://youtu.be/-ach1CzVOiY

Frank T

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1970 240Z