From dust jacket flap: "This book is a tribute to some of America's greatest characters, people holding on to unique ways of life at all costs."

When I recently put up a post about Harvey Wang, it reminded me that in my whole life in New York City, I have only been the victim of theft one time and the stolen item was an excellent 1996 book called Holding On: Dreamers, Visionaries, Eccentrics and Other American Heroes, which Wang co-created with David Isay. I believe my house painter nicked it several years back when I left him alone in the apartment for a couple of hours.

The book, about eccentric Americans (snake handlers, coon-dog graveyard caretakers, hat blockers, burlesque museum curators, etc.) who aren’t willing to be swallowed whole by a homogenized culture, is definitely worth stealing, though I paid a few bucks for a replacement copy. An excerpt from the chapter, “Donald Bean, Proprietor, Dinosaur Gardens, Moscow Texas”:

“‘I Thought I Saw a Dinosaur’ reads the welcome sign to Moscow, Texas, an unincorporated hamlet ninety miles north of Houston. There isn’t much more to the place. Indeed, the number of dinosaurs residing in Moscow rivals the town’s population, all thanks to the retired carpenter named Donald Bean.

‘I try to keep this as much as I can like it would have been back then, you know,’ Bean explains as we begin our tour through the roadside attraction. Canned dinosaur sound effects erupt from small speakers hidden in trees. We round the corner and come upon the theme park’s first dinosaur–Elasmosaurus, a twenty-foot-long flippered beast residing in a murky bog of water, surrounded by a ring of pond scum. ‘If you cleaned it out,’ Bean explained, ‘it wouldn’t be a swamp.’

All told, Donald Bean’s roadside attraction consists of exactly eleven worn fiberglass dinosaurs laid out along a winding trail cut into the woods behind his home. Bean opened up Dinosaur Gardens in 1981–the culmination of a lifelong fascination with these prehistoric creatures. ‘I always liked dinosaurs. They’re large…they’re big, and they ruled the world for years…Thousands of years…Well, millions of years!’ Donald Bean came up with the idea for the theme park in the late 1950s when he happened upon a similar roadside attraction in Oregon while vacationing with his wife, Yvonne. ‘Soon as I saw that I said, ‘That’s what I want to do!’ So I did it’

It took Bean twenty years of planning and saving before he was finally ready to build his own theme park. ‘My wife wasn’t too for the idea right off the jump go, because we spent our life savings on it.’ The park cost the Beans $100,000 to build, and when Dinosaur Gardens opened it was met with just about the level of enthusiasm one might anticipate for a dinosaur theme park in the heart of Moscow, Texas. The masses did not seem to share Bean’s fervor for creatures prehistoric. There were no lines at the ticket office. It kind of disappointed me,’ Bean says, wiping a spider web from Struthiomimus‘s mouth. ‘I don’t know how many people I thought would come, but I thought there’d be quite a few.'”