Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, June 13, 1993                   TAG: 9306140025
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: HUNTINGTON, IND.                                LENGTH: Medium

QUAYLE UNDER GLASS: AT MUSEUM, DAN'S A HOMETOWN HERO

And that history is about to find a home. On Thursday, the family-values-preaching, Murphy Brown-bashing, malaprop-uttering 44th vice president of the United States will get his own museum.

This, townsfolk say, is not a joke.

"Quayle was well-respected except for the funny boys," says Mayor Gene Snowden. "They made him look like a little imp . . . Dan has lots of excellent qualities that were never realized."

The Dan Quayle Center and Museum will offer testament to those qualities, but curator Thomas Mehl says it will offer much, much more.

"This man has a story to tell and what better way to tell it?" he asked. "We're not here to propagandize his life. We're not here to brush all these jokes and these . . . cartoons aside and say, `Here's the real Dan Quayle.' It's for people who tour the museum to interpret that themselves."

Huntington, about 100 miles northeast of Indianapolis, already has paid tribute to its No. 1 son with a Quayle Run, Quayle subdivision, Quayle burger (at Nick's Kitchen, his favorite diner) and Quayle trail, a 10-stop tour of former Quayle homes and haunts marked with plaques featuring a quail.

When an exhibit of Quayle memorabilia in the public library drew more than 16,500 people over two years - some of them from as far as Israel and Kenya - the idea of a museum took root. Some call it a weed.

"I suppose it would be a little more interesting than an Ed McMahon museum," jokes Harrison Ullmann, editor and columnist at NUVO, an alternative newsweekly in Indianapolis. "If it were a commercial venture, I don't think I'd invest in it."

But Huntington librarian Kathy Holst insists Quayle's Everyman appeal will draw people who "come to see somebody who is very much like they are. They'll bring their kids and say, `Look, Johnny, if you work hard, you can become vice president. This person came from a small town just like you did.' "

Though James Danforth Quayle was born into a world of privilege - his maternal grandfather, Eugene C. Pulliam, was a self-made millionaire who founded a publishing dynasty that included the Indianapolis Star and Indianapolis News - his family homes in Huntington were quite modest.

Photos of those homes, the family and letters along with other memorabilia depict a conventional, middle-class, Babbitt-like world of Jaycees and YMCAs.

Among the Quayle-under-glass mementos: a 100-year-old family Bible that Quayle used to take his vice presidential oath and an assortment of Happy Days-era, circa 1960s souvenirs: a dreamy-eyed yearbook photo, a high school letter sweater for golf (an ever-present passion) and an adolescent's poem to his dad.

"Sometimes he acts as if he has been disturbed,

But other times he is as cheerful as a bird . . . "

There's more: a law diploma partially chewed by Barnaby, the dog; a picture of said offender, a black Labrador; a Quayle & Quayle, husband-and-wife law shingle; the chair he stood on at Nick's to announce his first congressional candidacy; the flotsam and jetsam - bumper stickers, buttons, tickets - of a 16-year political career, videos of speeches, and home movies.