EP83: A Museum Full of Umbrella Covers, Dungeons and Dragons as a Therapy Tool and How a Fake Doctor Ran Carnival Sideshows and Saved Thousands of Infants and Changed Medical History
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 28 September 2021
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, Nancy 3. Hoffman shares the story of how she came to open such a specific museum, what her museum is like, and most importantly, how her museum has taught her to find joy in the most mundane aspects of life; Adam Davis and Adam Johns met in grad school at Antioch University, and they've been using table-top games as a tool to encourage personal growth, teamwork, and problem solving; and Dawn Raffel tells the story of how Dr. Martin Couney carried a secret with him, but the results are unimpeachable.
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Time Codes:
00:00 - A Museum Full of Umbrella Covers
08:00 - Dungeons and Dragons as a Therapy Tool
27:30 - How a Fake Doctor Ran Carnival Sideshows and Saved Thousands of Infants and Changed Medical History
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your story. |
| 0:17.1 | Send them to our American Stories.com for some of our favorites. |
| 0:22.3 | And now a story about a lady who curates a very specific kind of museum. Nancy Three Hoffman. Yes, her middle name is the |
| 0:29.1 | numeral three, not the word three, the numeral. And she lives in Maine and is the founder and |
| 0:34.2 | curator of the world's only umbrella cover museum. |
| 0:42.4 | Here is Nancy's story on how she came to open such a unique place. |
| 0:47.3 | Hi, I'm Nancy Three Hoffman. I am the founder, director, and curator of the world's only umbrella cover museum. Now we're just talking about the sleeves, |
| 0:57.0 | the sheaths that come on umbrellas when you buy a new umbrella because they fascinate me. |
| 1:05.6 | So what happens to most umbrella covers when they're first purchased? |
| 1:12.6 | That's the big question. |
| 1:14.6 | The answer I have found over many years of doing the umbrella cover museum is that most people |
| 1:20.0 | don't know what to do with them. |
| 1:22.1 | So they put them in the closet, drop them in the car, stick them in a pocket, lose them. And it's that particular |
| 1:29.8 | phenomenon that they are underappreciated and sort of enigmatic that fascinated me. |
| 1:40.6 | So one day I was cleaning out my house. I found a few umbrella covers. I looked at them and said, |
| 1:46.0 | hmm, why did I keep these? And what do other people do with them? So I started asking people. |
| 1:52.9 | And right away, they gave me their umbrella covers. Not only that, but they would tell me the story. |
| 1:58.8 | Like the first one I collected was from an umbrella my friend Becky had. |
| 2:03.9 | She used to have a duck-handled umbrella because she's an Audubon bird fanatic. |
| 2:09.0 | So she said, well, I took this umbrella with me to NASA. |
| 2:13.8 | I left the cover at home and then I forgot the duck at the dock, and the cover was still at home. |
| 2:20.1 | So here it is, you can have it. |
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