DETROIT _ Here's to the crazies. The oddballs. The kooks. Some would describe Marvin Yagoda that way. He thought like a kid. He acted like a kid. He spoke in rambling sentences and trivial facts, as likely to tell you about the inner workings of an airplane as he was to explain the tic-tac-toe chicken robot in his museum.
Oh, yes. He had a museum. Why? Don't you? His was unique. For one thing, it was free and open all year. For another, you brought quarters to enjoy it. Also, to be honest, it was born from a need to clean out his house.
"Our den growing up had five player pianos in it, and two self-playing violins, Nickelodeons, a feeder-band organ, and a couple of claw and digger machines," recalls his son, Jeremy Yagoda, 43. "There was nowhere to sit. My mother always said to him, 'Why don't you get a place for all this stuff and get it out of our house?' "
In 1980, he began, moving a single machine (a chicken laying eggs "prizes" machine) into the old Tally Hall food court on Orchard Lake Road near 14 Mile Road. Eventually, he took more and more space there, and by 1990, the entire 5,500-square-foot building was his, filled with several hundred fun machines, including antique arcade attractions (like the fortune teller in the movie "Big"), skee-ball, claw diggers, automatons, a children's carousel, pinball, photo booths, and the most unique collection of old coin-operated oddities, like "the Brain," or "Dr. Kill-r-watt" or "The Great Chopandof," where you stick your hand into a machine and a sinister dummy slams a fake blade down.
To visit Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum in Farmington Hills is to go back in time, to squeeze the 20th century of amusements into one wild, colorful, bell-clanging space. Places like this don't just happen. They need visionaries.
Crazy visionaries.
