![]() Queen Victoria's crown seems entirely too small for her noggin.Ī lengthy showcase of famous heads suggests the resources at Potter's disposal: Sandra Bullock, Moses, the cast of Seinfeld, a two-faced Dr. In the "Famous Authors" exhibit, Mark Twain is bookended by the disembodied heads of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Hitler, hidden for years because his dummy kept being attacked, is again on display, but without regalia or swastikas. Unlike most modern-day wax museums, Potter's still relies heavily on historical figures.Ī hall of Tudors and Elizabethans retains the old International Hall of Fame elegance a hall of World War II heroes and villains sticks Josef Stalin with the bad guys. Herman Munster, George Washington, and Jack "Machine Gun" McGurn are the dummies that first greet visitors, conveying the smorgasbord of celebrity and history that lies within. The results suggest a brighter future for George Potter's wax progeny. It was moved into another attraction, the Authentic Old Drug Store, with more space and its own art director. But the core of the collection had been saved. The place had the aesthetic of a warehouse - dummies crammed together in mass displays - far from the elegant period tableaus of Potter's International Hall of Fame. New figures were added, two or three a year, mostly celebrities. But his sympathetic curator, Dottie White, bought 150 of the dummies and reopened the museum in a much smaller, three-room space, calling it Potter's House of Wax. That should have been the end of George's attraction. His son, freed from his father's obsession, started selling the dummies. It was the second largest wax museum in the world. He expected his tour guides - he called them "historians" - to know every fact about every dummy (He would show up unannounced from Indiana for spot inspections).īy the end of the 1970s George had several hundred dummies on display in an impressive two-story building. George wrote a 400-page guidebook detailing the history of every dummy in his Hall of Fame, and wrote letters-to-the-editor demanding the abolishment of unions and income taxes. ![]() Scenes from the 1953 Vincent Price film House of Wax were reportedly filmed at Potter's. Press clippings from the time report that George flew dummies across the Atlantic in airline seats (There are also stories that he warehoused them in the mansion garage in Lafayette). He ordered hundreds of top-of-the-line custom-made wax dummies from London, had them dressed in the finest outfits by costumers of the Royal Theatre, and in 1948 opened his dream attraction, Potter's International Hall of Fame, in St. George, who was generally thought to be a skinflint, decided to indulge his fantasy. But then George's dad, mom, and wife all died within a few years of each other. Augustine, the self-proclaimed "Oldest City in America." According to local lore, he was also smitten when he traveled to England and toured Madame Tussauds Wax Museum.ĭad never trusted George with money. ![]() He was fascinated by history, and especially St. George's family had a vacation home in Florida.
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