Whipped Cream Difficulties

The man woman they call Jayne Ida!

When I was younger, my family lived within reasonable driving distance of Canton, Ohio. As I’ve noted in the past, I still have relatives in the area.

For some odd reason, we never visited the Pro Football Hall of Fame (or, as we called it:

“TheWorldFamousProFootballHallOfFameInCantonOhio”

all one word). I did visit it much later in life, and it’s an okay museum, if possibly a little overpriced.

Canton is about a 30-minute drive from Akron, if you’re planning a family vacation. However, the National Inventors Hall of Fame was closed last time I was in the area, and has since moved to Alexandria, VA. And, sadly, Goodyear has closed the World of Rubber museum.

So what to do to occupy yourself in the greater Akron/Canton area? Especially if you don’t like football?

How about the National First Ladies Historic Site and Library? They even have a gift shop: would you like some Ida McKinley china?

We learn of this fine tourist attraction by way of this column by Drew Johnson, who is among the guest bloggers at Balko’s site. You see, the federal government spent $1,021,000 to run the site last year…and it got 8,254 visitors.

In other words, taxpayers paid $124 in subsidies to the First Ladies National Historic Site for every single man, woman and child who walked through the door last year.

Why does this exist? Because of the hard work of (now retired) congressman Ralph Regula, who spent 36 years representing Canton and the surrounding area, and who set up the deals that acquired Ida Saxton McKinley’s childhood home (now the museum) and a former bank (now the library).

Shortly before he retired in 2009, Regula managed to snag one final $124,000 earmark…The pork handout was used by the National First Ladies’ Library to catalogue every book purchased by First Lady Abigail Fillmore for the White House during Millard’s presidency, and then buy duplicates of those books for the library’s collection.

Not the original books. Duplicates.

And here’s the best part. Would you like to know who the founder of the National First Ladies Library was? Go on, guess.

Would you like to know who else works for the Library? Go on, guess.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2012 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Politics, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.