[amusing percussive music]
*
There's something a bit odd going on in Oshkosh.
- Mel Schettl: When I first started out,
we used to go looking for a lot of it.
He came from a theme park.
That's all I know.
- Mel Schettl's business is a menagerie
of strange and peculiar things.
- We try to collect a little bit of everything.
We have quite a few unusual things.
[chuckles]
This here is the redneck motor home.
- Mel's eccentric collection
grew from his curiosity and imagination as a designer.
- [Mel laughs] You could live in it.
You could.
The type of work I was doing
was mainly stores, bars, restaurant--
commercial-type interior,
and that included interior décor.
And I was always researching
and trying to find the unusual oddities.
We do have items that we've had over the years
from some of the different movies.
The visual impact is mainly what we were after.
We realized a long time ago
that being a small family-owned business,
we're never gonna compete against all the big boxes,
so we kind of went off in our own little world.
- In that world, there's one common question
people always ask.
- Well...
"Where do we get all this stuff?"
- That question soon became his slogan.
- We started using that just because we heard it so much
from our customers.
"Where do you get all this stuff?"
[laughs]
- The answer?
Every place you can imagine.
- This piece over here has got a little bit of history.
I was told it came off of, uh,
one of the health clubs in Chicago.
I had about six of 'em originally.
I got two left right now.
This cow head was one of my first original pieces.
I was told it was Borden's Elsie.
Came off of one of their milk factories
over in Manitowoc.
- These replica Remington statues
are some of Mel's favorites.
- I've got some huge ones that are--
they're bigger than life.
They're maybe nine or ten foot tall.
And it's a reproduction,
copied off the original bronze Remingtons,
which are only probably two or three feet high.
They're nice; they're just nice pieces.
- Mel's hodgepodge has expanded
into more than five acres of quirky, head-turning décor.
- We call it a oddity park,
where we've got a little bit of everything out there
for sale and/or waitin' to be reproduced.
I don't know if I ever really envisioned anything.
It just kept growing and growing
and became what it became.
It's not that we exactly started out to do that,
but it's kind of how it ended up.
And we're always lookin'.
We get a few calls a week
where somebody's got something weird
they might wanna sell.
- This unique collection
has even become a tourist attraction.
- We get a lot of families that come out with kids
and they spend the day out here looking around.
I do get people that come from quite a ways away.
New York, Canada, Alaska.
And they're happy they came.
- When visitors ask if Mel actually sells
a lot of the zany items he buys,
Mel has a humorous and offbeat kind of answer.
- I say, "No, I don't really sell too much of it,
"but the guy that sells it to me,
man, he sells a lot of it."
And they look at me just baffled.
- Some visitors might be baffled
by the scope of this oddity park,
but Mel puts it all into perspective.
- Everybody likes something different.
I mean, there's some things that I think are cool,
and nobody else pays any attention to 'em.
Well, that's kinda--
the beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.
*