Offbeat museums like San Francisco's Musee Mechanique add to America's cultural history. (Johnny Eck Museum)

Just outside Baltimore, in an area that's sprouting colossal new developments all over old farmland, there's an old farmhouse that was built in the 1880s. Jeff Gordon, a tall man with a bushy beard, lives there with his wife and their young daughter. Surrounded by several acres with horses, Gordon's farmhouse is filled with fresh pears from their neighbor's yard, art that Gordon and his friends have made, as well as everything anyone can find that was owned or made or used by Baltimore's Johnny Eck, a sideshow performer who was born with virtually no body below his ribcage.

Earlier this year, Gordon got Johnny Eck's rowhouse, which he owns, declared a Baltimore city historic landmark. Gordon, who works as a prop-person on films and TV shows and sometimes as an actor, writer, or producer, put up an online Johnny Eck Museum in February 2005 and curates Johnny Eck exhibits at other museums.

There are about 17,500 museums in the United States, according to the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, many of them with collections as offbeat as Gordon's: The Museum of Bad Art in Dedham, Mass., San Francisco's Musee Mechanique, the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisc., and the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, which houses the thorax of John Wilkes Booth, for example.

1920 photo of "The Half Boy" (Johnny Eck Museum)

Unsung Hero

Johnny Eck, born John Eckhardt, Jr. in Baltimore in 1911, had no legs or feet and grew to be only 18 inches tall. Eck had enormous upper-body strength: He got around by walking on his hands, and there are remarkable, almost unbelievable photographs of him wearing half of a tuxedo, holding his unusual body off of a bench. Gordon owns some of the benches Johnny Eck posed on, as well as Eck's top hat.

Eck became a performer when he was 12, performing in magic shows, carnivals, circuses, and freak shows; he was one of the stars of Tod Browning's 1932 movie Freaks, about a troupe of carnival sideshow performers. Eck juggled, did acrobatics, performed magic tricks and played music onstage, usually alongside his twin brother, the anatomically normal Robert. They performed through the 1940s, until the country lost interest in sideshows and the two were too tired to stay on the road.

Eck was also a photographer and one of Baltimore's first screen painters. (Screen painting is indigenous Baltimorean folk art; people paint their window screens with scenes of lakes and woods so that passersby see the paintings rather than the inside of the house.) Eck was an actor in Tarzan movies, an artist, and a wood carver who created detailed miniature wooden circuses, a musician with his own band. He was a trapeze artist and a train conductor and a Punch and Judy puppet operator (he carved his own puppets, of course). Eck even built his own street-legal racecar, operated entirely by hand, and restored churches.

"He was half a man," says Gordon, "But he accomplished more than almost anybody could hope for."

Amassing a Collection

In 1995, Gordon was well into an art project involving images of sideshow performers, including Eck, when someone said to him, "Hey, did you hear that Johnny Eck just died? Some antique store has all his stuff."

This was before the resurgence of interest in sideshows (before a new sideshow museum-performance space opened in Washington D.C., for example), and Gordon thought there was a good chance still that Eck's stuff wouldn't have been sold right away. Gordon sifted through all the antique stores in Baltimore's Fells Point. In the last store he found a shoebox of letters and postcards to Johnny Eck, his twin brother, Robert, and their parents. Gordon bought the box and brought them home.

Eck's steel-reinforced rowhouse is not open to the public. (Johnny Eck Museum)

Gordon read all the letters and postcards, then returned to the shop. The shop owner showed him a trunk that had "Robert Alexander" painted on it ? Eck's brother's name ? and Gordon bought it. Gordon began visiting the shop every Saturday, and every Saturday the shop owner would tell Gordon he'd sold the last of his Johnny Eck pieces. Then the two men would drink coffee and smoke cigars and talk, and after a couple of hours the shop owner would say, "Oh, I might have one more thing," and come back with Eck's carved circus, or his top hat, or another of his paintings.

"I became known as the Johnny Eck guy," Gordon says. "People started getting in touch." Over 15 years, Gordon amassed the most comprehensive collection of Johnny Eck's art, screens, possessions, carvings, props, and memorabilia that exists, including a black-and-white swimsuit that Gordon now has framed and hanging on the wall of his house's Johnny Eck room.

In 1999 he was driving past Eck's house, saw a "for sale" sign, and bought it for $5,000. "The house was as he left it. A dump," Gordon says. Johnny Eck and his brother lived in squalor in their last years, as recluses, after a break-in in 1988 that nearly killed Johnny and terrified both brothers.

"They had about $100,000 in the bank, but they wouldn't spend any money," Gordon says.

And yet the house was marvelous; in the back of the house were colorful swaths of paint, going up about three feet up on the walls. "He used to test the paints there before painting his screens," Gordon says.

Eck's train (Johnny Eck Museum)

Finding a Home

Now Gordon wants to open a permanent Johnny Eck museum in the Baltimore home where Eck was born, died, and lived with Robert, with every room decorated for a different period of Johnny Eck's life, and facsimiles of Eck's artwork around the house.

Gordon hopes he can establish another Johnny Eck museum in an old barn on his farmhouse property; he'll restore and set up Eck's beloved miniature train there, too.

"When Johnny died in 1991, the train he so loved had been abandoned on a friend's farm in west Baltimore," Gordon says. "For 15-plus years, trees and brush had swallowed up the train. Completely engulfing it. It has since been rescued and is in the process of being restored by the Johnny Eck Museum. It still runs!"

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