February 2, 2012

Brothers Will Auction Incredible Museum

Estimated At $40 Million In Value

By Matt Sedensky

Boca Raton, Florida (AP) - Say goodbye to the twirling carousel, the rows of perfectly shined classic cars, the player pianos and jukeboxes. They're selling all the neon signs, the slot machines, the antique guns, the Tiffany lamps, the hulking chandeliers. There will be no more rare organs or vintage gas pumps or the Army airplane gliding overhead, none of this out-of-this-world collection that took a lifetime to amass.

It will all be gone soon, before most people ever knew it existed.

Two Florida brothers, Bob and Paul Milhous, are liquidating their one-of-a-kind private museum after spending decades scouring the world to find its gems. The Milhous Collection, as the items have become known, head to the auction block next month, estimated to fetch around $40 million.

An elephant on the Milhous brothers’ carousel

“Our time's kind of up with them,'' said Bob Milhous, who at 75 is the elder brother. ``It's time to move on.''

The men first started picking up collectible cars and rare automated musical instruments a half-century ago, but they never knew it would grow into this. They bought so furiously their collections outgrew their homes, then spilled into a succession of three increasingly larger spaces, until they built a new museum, within a suburban corporate park, in a nondescript building that gives no hint of its holdings.

“Our wives say, `Most people go to the museum and buy a postcard,''' recalled Paul Milhous, 73, “You go to the museum and buy the museum.”

What they have built is part carnival, part sparkling car showroom. It has both Vegas glitz and the refrained elegance of a Prohibition-era speakeasy. You find yourself in a room of thick red drapes, a massive crystal chandelier and a variety of musical instruments that line the walls then, moments later, in the glow of neon, surrounded by the chrome and steel of collector cars.

“People come here and they leave amazed, and then they try to explain it to somebody what they saw and it just doesn't work,'' Paul Milhous said.

The brothers are distant cousins of President Richard Milhous Nixon. They made their fortune in the printing business, making circulars and comic strip inserts for newspapers. They sold that business in the 1990s and have liquidated other businesses in their holdings as they plan their estates. Giving up all their prized collectibles is part of it.

Antique sideshow banner

“Don't leave this burden to us,” Paul Milhous recalled his and his brother's wives saying.

And, so, on Feb. 24 and 25, it will all be sold. Two auction houses, RM Auctions and Sotheby's, have divided it into more than 550 lots, each to be sold to the highest bidder.

There is the whimsical: Dozens of vintage toy cars, giant toy soldiers that once stood at FAO Schwarz in New York, funhouse mirrors and carnival sideshow banners. There is artwork, fine furniture and the contents of a turn-of-the-20th century barbershop.

But the real highlights are in the Milhouse collections of classic cars, the mechanical musical instruments and the carousel that is the centerpiece of their museum.

There are 29 cars, 5 motorcycles, 2 tractors, a motorbike, a popcorn and peanut wagon and a PT-22 airplane. Among the cars is the only known surviving 1912 Oldsmobile Limited, which is estimated to bring bids around $1.5 million.

The instruments include music boxes, player pianos, band organs and orchestrions, which are made to simulate the sound of an orchestra all in one piece. There are dozens of theater, fair and dance organs. At least eight of the instruments have price estimates that exceed $1 million each. Many are elaborately decorated with oil paintings, stained glass, gold leaf and moving figurines.

Still, nothing in this eclectic palace draws the eye more than the carousel. The brothers searched for years for precisely what they wanted. When nothing turned up, they had one built, with 42 animals hand-carved from basswood and a Wurlitzer band organ. Its estimated price is $1 million to $1.5 million.

The museum has been kept so private over the years the idea of opening it to the public for an auction makes the brothers a bit uneasy. It has played host to many charity events, but whenever they've opened it up, it has been to limited audiences, with off-duty police officers hired to stand guard over their prized possessions. Now, anyone who buys a $120 auction catalog will be able to come to the preview.

For now, they're preparing to bid farewell to it all, and enjoying their final moments with it. On a recent tour, they recalled their first purchases and remembered all the places they've driven their many cars. And as they walk into a dimly lit second-floor room of the museum, its walls lined with all types of instruments, only one question comes from Paul Milhous' lips.

“What do we want to play?'' he asks.

Tribes Join Together To Save Petroglyph Site Called

Tutuveni — Newspaper Rock

By Pauline Arrillaga

Tuba City, Arizona (AP) - In the far reaches of northern Arizona, where city sprawl gives way to majestic canyons and a holy place is defined not by steeple and cross but rather by earth and sky, lies a monument to a people's past and a symbol of the promise of peace between two long-warring Indian nations.

The Hopi people call it Tutuveni, meaning ``newspaper rock,'' and from a distance this place is just that, a collection of sandstone boulders set on a deserted swath of rust-stained land outside of Tuba City, some 80 miles (130 kilometers) from the Grand Canyon and a four-hour drive north of Phoenix.

It is only when you step closer that you begin to understand what Tutuveni really is: a history of the Hopi Indian tribe carved into stone.

The site contains some 5,000 petroglyphs of Hopi clan symbols, the largest known collection of such symbols in the American Southwest. According to researchers with the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, the many etchings on the boulders of Tutuveni date as far back as far back as A.D. 1200.

On the dark desert varnish of the boulders are rows of bear paws, corn stalks, spiders, coyotes, kachinas, clouds, cranes. Some of the symbols represent various aspects of Hopi cultural life, but most are the markings of the Hopi clans, or family systems, which are usually named for animals or other natural objects.

The Hopi made these engravings during ceremonial pilgrimages from their land to the Grand Canyon to mark the passage into adulthood for Hopi young men.

``They would stop at Tutuveni and camp there, and they would peck their clan symbols on those rocks to mark their participation in that pilgrimage. And they did this for four or five centuries at least,'' said Wes Bernardini, an archaeologist and professor at the University of Redlands who has been studying Tutuveni for years. ``When people from the same clan would visit the site, they would put their symbols next to the previous symbol that somebody had left earlier. There's no other site that we know of like that, that shows these repeated visits.

``It's a very important place.''

It is also a place threatened by modern-day vandals who view Tutuveni not as the sacred site and archaeological treasure that it is, but rather a canvas for their own graffiti.

Scattered among the many ancient impressions are the markings of lovers, history buffs and random visitors looking to leave their mark with etchings such as: ``Aaron Myrianna 07,'' ``The Victor 10-20-85,'' ``Van.B,'' ``Ramon Albert,'' ``Ariz. Hy. Dept.'' Even: ``1969-Man Land on Moon.''

On one rock is a carved image of the two World Trade Center towers, with a plane heading for them. Elsewhere, clan symbols have been chiseled away or spray-painted over.

The Hopi had long known that what they considered a religious place had become, instead, a gathering spot to drink beer and act out. There was talk over the years of erecting a fence or building berms to help keep out vehicle traffic.

But the question of how to protect Tutuveni was complicated by its mere location: The site, while recognized as a Hopi traditional cultural property, actually sits on land now owned by the Navajo Indians, the result of a decades-old dispute that saw these neighboring tribes fighting over land each considered its own. The conflict was finally resolved in 2006 with much of the disputed 1.5 million acres (600,000 hectares) going to the Navajos, but bitterness lingers still.

It might have been easy for Tutuveni to get caught up in all of that, and its needs overlooked, but for the small group of researchers, archeologists and preservationists from both tribes and beyond who came together in common cause: to save this important cultural resource.

``It's something that's really unique and very special to the Hopi,'' said Ron Maldonado, supervisory archaeologist for the Navajo Nation. ``In my mind, it didn't matter who it belonged to. It needed to be protected, and that was it.''

Maldonado talked with Jon Shumaker, a fellow archaeologist at electric utility Arizona Public Service, to see if the company might contribute some funding for fencing materials. APS came up with some $13,000.

Meanwhile Bernardini, in collaboration with the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, nominated Tutuveni for inclusion on the World Monuments Fund 2008 ``watch list'' of endangered cultural sites around the world. Among the treasures listed in years past: the Great Wall of China, India's Taj Mahal and ancient Pompeii, Italy. The fund pitched in some $100,000 toward a protective fence and surveillance cameras, but also a laser-scanning project that captured many of the petroglyphs for an educational website that was launched this past December.

Today, a chain-link fence stretches around the rock site, with only a narrow opening to allow for visitors on foot. Hidden cameras capture the movement of people and animals. Some beer bottles still litter the ground, but far fewer than what once was found at Tutuveni.

On a recent visit, Lee Wayne Lomayestewa of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, and Patrick Secakuku, who works with the Hopi schools, walked slowly among the boulders, stopping to run their fingers over the clan symbols and talk about their significance to their people. It was Secakuku's first visit to Tutuveni, and he stared in awe as he discovered just how many engravings represented his own ancestry in the bear strap clan.

``I'm really amazed. I didn't realize there were this many,'' he said. ``This tells you a lot of history about our tribe, our Hopi people, and for people to desecrate, vandalize ... you're losing a lot of rich culture, history. It's sad. But how do you control it? You just wish that out of respect they'd leave them alone.''

Lomayestewa comes out to the site regularly to check that the surveillance cameras are still working and to document any new vandalism with his digital camera. The fence, completed in 2010, has helped, he said. But educating both outsiders and the Navajo and Hopi people who live near Tutuveni about the importance of the site is the only real way to help preserve the place, and allow the past to live on.

``I wish we could have protected it before all this happened,'' Lomayestewa said, as he sought to explain just what Tutuveni means to the Hopi. ``White people don't understand that we have these places where we pray. Their way of thinking is that you have to pray in a church.

``Ours is out here,'' he said, standing on the earth where his ancestors walked so long ago, on the soil that is his sanctuary.