COLLECTIONS
All of the clown dolls that are part of the display were given to the museum by a wide range of people. Some have come from other countries. Some were made for klown doll contests in Plainview. Others were clown dolls that residents owned, or saw in their travels, and purchased and gave to the museum.
More are being given regularly, and all gifts of clown dolls are welcome and much appreciated. They are numbered and a registry is available which tells who donated each doll.
The first major contributor to the collection was Mattie Vanderpool, a resident of Yankton, S.D., and a professional clown. She had collected clown dolls over the years with nearly all of them given to her as gifts. Her tally came to over 1,500 clown dolls in a wide variety of styles and shapes and colors and sizes. She had visited Plainview many times and decided that when she could no longer take care of her collection, the Plainview Klown Doll Museum should be the home for her collection, with the stipulation that they be made available for others to enjoy at a very nominal fee. That nominal fee ended up being ”free.” Mattie passed away in 2002 and her collection is now in the “Mattie Vanderpool Room.”
The dolls kept coming, including several collections of 200 or over, and the museum was getting crowded.
There was a clown doll collector from the western part of the state who had her collection in a separate room, designed as a circus tent, adjacent to their grocery store near Lake McConaughy. Their store was sold and while she was being treated for cancer she felt the need to enter the ministry, took theological courses and began serving a Methodist congregation in western Nebraska. The Rev. Jeri Soens didn’t feel her collection was doing anyone any good in a spare room of the parsonage, and having visited Plainview several times and being a friend of Mattie Vanderpool, decided the Plainview Klown Doll Museum should be the home of her collection.
Well, there was “no room in the inn” and the dolls were in storage for nearly a year while a group of Plainview High School alumni came to the rescue with donations, along with local donations and many volunteer hours to provide an addition which doubled the size of the Museum. That was dedicated in 2007 when Gov. Dave Heineman came to cut the ribbon and also declare Plainview as the Klown Kapital of Nebraska.
Soen’s collection is displayed in a designated area of the addition. Also any individual or family that donated 15 or more dolls has their donations displayed together as a “family” on shelves in the addition.
Collections of over 200 clown dolls have been made by Marvetta Robinson, Pat Langhorst, David and Teri Headley and Margaret Johnson and are located in the new addition.
Red Skelton Paintings
A recent addition is a set of five large framed pictures, reproductions of the original painted by Red Skelton. They have Certificates of Authenticity signed by Skelton himself authenticated by his thumb print. Three of the pictures are on loan for display in businesses elsewhere in Plainview.
