Museum Item #1: Boxing Kangaroo Watch Caddy

In my previous entry, I wrote about the museum I created when I was seven years old. I noted that I’d follow up with details on individual items. Here is the first of those entries, on the kangaroo watch caddy that belonged to my grandfather, Joe Wilhelm.

There are certain things I know about Grandpap Wilhelm:

• He was born in 1917 and was seven years younger than my grandmother, who told me that his sisters thought she was robbing the cradle.

• Like many men his age, Grandpap was in World War II. For years, I thought he was in Europe, but he was in the Pacific.

• He was a talented musician who could play by ear. He played banjo and organ, as far as I know. We have recordings of him jamming with some friends sometime back in the 1960s.

• I thought I remembered him playing organ at St. Patrick’s church in Mt. Savage, but my mom told me she had no memory of him doing that.

• He was kind of a quiet man, though I remember him scaring the hell out of my, screaming “Happy New Year!!” right in my face just after midnight one year.

• Grandpap and Grandma saw Johnny Cash live, in a prison.

• He worked at a Kelly tire factory, which is where he had a fatal heart attack in early July 1974. He was 57 years old.

Mostly though, I remember the kangaroo watch caddy, which sat on Grandpap’s dresser throughout my childhood, even — I think — after Grandpap died.

The kangaroo was an enigma to me. It just sat there and I didn’t know why or what it was used for. I know now that it’s a place to put your watch, but I don’t remember watches ever hanging from the kanagroo’s tail. This doesn’t mean there weren’t watches. I just don’t remember them.

While this might not be exactly true, I have a feeling that, based on the placement of the kangaroo’s boxing gloves, my kid-mind may have thought that it was a lady kangaroo.

Grandpap’s kangaroo loomed large in my imagination, even before it came into my possession, which was either after my grandmother died in 1998 or after my dad’s passing in 2003. That’s why I must have taken notice of the kangaroo, when it popped up in a pivotal scene in Pulp Fiction in 1994. In fact, most of the eBay listings (approximately $60 to $100) for the kangaroo mention the Pulp Fiction connection and note that the kangaroos were manufactured in 1956. This fits nicely into Grandpap’s timeline.

One final note: when I was a toddler we owned a cat that was named Kangaroo. The name was apparently my idea. Did I name the cat after Grandpap’s kangaroo, which I may have already noticed as a two-year-old? Sadly, I’ll never know if the caddy inspired my cat-naming thought process — only my dad and mom could have verified this — but it is within the realm of possibility.