Friday, November 12, 2021
Meet the Jewish Founder of the World’s Only Bobblehead Museum, and His Chanukah Bobbles
A crochet museum in Joshua Tree, California features countless crochet animals that appear in airport ads worldwide. The National Mustard Museum in Wisconsin was founded by a Jewish condiment aficionado.
In February 2019, another niche museum opened around 90 miles east of the mustard mecca: the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum, located in Milwaukee.
Co-founded by Phil Sklar, a Jewish Illinois native, and his friend Brad Novak, the institution is the world's only museum dedicated to bobbleheads. Its collection holds 7,000 unique bobbleheads, including some manufactured by Sklar and Novak.
Bobbleheads date back to the late 1700s, Sklar explained in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. A famous painting of Queen Charlotte — a replica of which hangs in the bobblehead museum — shows two figurines behind the monarch, with heads that bobble.
Fast forward to 2021, when the museum has unveiled its first-ever Chanukah items: a Bobble Menorah that features nine bobbling "flames" (sans real fire, of course) and comes in three color patterns, and a Bobble Dreidel on a gelt-shaped base.
"Having the candles with the flame bobbling and the dreidel on a spring, we thought was pretty unique," said Sklar. "It was something that was tasteful and that people would enjoy displaying on Chanukah, or with their Judaica collection."
We spoke to Sklar about how a unique collection turned into a one-of-a-kind museum, how he uses bobbleheads for a good cause and, of course, which famous Jews have their own bobbleheads.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
JTA: With any collection like this, the first question has to be: How did you get into bobbleheads?
Sklar: My dad collected baseball cards, and he got me into collecting when I was growing up. Brad was working for a minor league baseball team in the early 2000s, and they gave away a bobblehead for the first time in 2003. We decided the bobblehead was sort of cool, and the [Milwaukee] Brewers and Bucks and local soccer and hockey teams were giving out bobbleheads. So we started to circle the bobblehead dates on the calendar, since we were already going to several games a year anyway as big sports fans. The collection sort of grew from that.
How did this interest turn into the world's only bobblehead museum?
The collection grew out of traveling. We went on a journey to try to go to all the Major League Baseball stadiums, and as we traveled we'd go to different museums in local places. Several times we'd either go to the stores in the area of the stadium, or antique malls, and just pick up some bobbleheads from the area to bring back.
Before we knew it, we were doing some buying, trading and selling on eBay, in our free time. Then in 2013 we set out to produce a bobblehead for the first time, of a friend of ours who was a manager for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee sports teams, and also a Special Olympian. We thought it would be a cool way to honor him. During that process we realized there was a need in the market, an opportunity to produce bobbleheads — people or things that otherwise haven't had bobbleheads produced — and market them.
At the time, our collection was numbering in the 3,000 range. I don't even know how we got that many. We were running out of room for them. It's a lot easier to store 3,000 baseball cards — you can get one box and store them. But 3,000 bobbleheads take up a lot more room. We started brainstorming, and realized, hey, there's no museum in the world dedicated to bobbleheads. There's museums dedicated to mustard and spam, and a bunch of other random things. So we started to do market research on the museum side, and in November 2014 was when we announced the idea for the museum.
Tell me about the collection. How many bobbleheads do you have now, and what are some of the highlights?
We have 7,000 unique bobbleheads on display in the museum. The collection itself is now numbering in the 10,000-11,000 range. We're getting in new bobbleheads pretty much daily. There are teams sending them in, organizations, people across the country. It's really everything from sports to pop culture, politics, music, movies, TV, comics. Really anything and everything that can be turned into a bobblehead, including the menorah and the dreidel.
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