By Marty Basch

John Fawcett loves toys. His  passion for the art behind American pop culture grew during his 32 years as a University of Connecticut art professor and collector. Now part of his Waldoboro home is a museum.

Fawcett opened Fawcett’s Maine Antique Toy and Art Museum in his early 1800s Federal-style home on Route 1 to showcase his impressive collection.

"This is not about nostalgia," says the bespectacled Fawcett sporting a bushy goatee and mustache. "This is about aesthetics. If I like it, it's in here."

Toys abound

Fawcett likes a lot, packing two floors wall-to-wall-to-ceiling-to-staircase with an astounding collection of comic and cowboy art, games and toys from 1930s Disney favorites like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to Looney Tune legends Bugs Bunny and Porky the Pig.

"I don't look at Micky Mouse as a mouse, but as art," he says. "He is made up of a series of circular forms."

Dick Tracy and more

Posters, comic books, and animation cells fill walls and ceilings from yesterday's popular characters like Dick Tracy, Popeye, Lil' Abner, Krazy Kat, Betty Boop and Charlie McCarthy. He also includes toys from other pop icons like The Beatles,  "Star Wars" action figures and memorabilia from the movie "Alien."

There's a piece of the Old West in the midcoast Maine museum. Gene Autry's rodeo saddle, cowboy boots and shirt won by Lone Ranger radio voice actor Brace Beemer and the 1948 radio giveaway Frontiertown are all on display along holsters, dolls and other toys.

The museum, which also has a retail shop and art gallery,  is a land of decoder rings and badges, cereal box premiums, baseball cards, toy soldiers and World War II paper toys and home foundry sets.

Maine connections

Among the treasures are nuggets of Maine pop history. A "Wizard of Oz" plate depicts the Wicked Witch of the West played by Margaret Hamilton from Boothbay Harbor.  The sweet-faced Disney deer Bambi is based on white-tailed deer seen in Baxter State Park as drawn by Damariscotta artist Jake Day in the 1930s. Hopalong Cassidy author Clarence Mulford left New York for Fryeburg in the mid 1920s for Fryeburg where he wrote his fictional Westerns.

Along with a collection of Mr. Potato Head dolls, the first toy advertised on TV (1952),  is the first television celebrity, a 1924 Felix the Cat doll. The doll could withstand the hot lights of early television better than people and Fawcett has the doll used in a series of experimental broadcasts used by NBC in 1928 to transmit between New York and Kansas.

For a stroll down memory lane, this is the place.

One Tank Away

Waldoboro is:

*109 miles from Fryeburg

*28 miles from Boothbay Harbor

*10 miles from Damariscotta