They spent their days in small boats, trolling for clams with special river-bottom-dragging implements called "crowfoots"-which were, of course, designed by the original Zilo Badde. Summers brought hordes of hearty young men and women from all over the Lower Mississippi Valley to camp along the river. The Button Boom of the early twentieth century had been a mirthful, prosperous time in this town. Lucky for us, the town elders had the foresight to enlist the high-school football team in stowing a few button machines in the basement of the town hall, which is why they're here in the museum today. All things associated with pearl buttons were sad reminders to Muscatinites of a time that passed as quickly as it came.
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But he couldn't even give away the polishing tumblers, grinding wheels, or classifying instruments. Zilo II had thought he could sell his family's button-making equipment, machines his father had designed and built himself. One of his employees, a shell accountant, waxed enthusiastic about Arizona, how everyone there was rich, living off copper-mining money in new stucco homes with peanut-shaped swimming pools they could use nine months out of the year. And besides, three consecutive seasons of skitter-worm plague had rendered half the mussels in the Mississippi rubbery, stinky flaps of floating, gray tissue-useless for button making. When the Japanese started to mass-produce plastic buttons in 1956, his family's pearl button company began to lose money rapidly. In 1965, Zilo Badde II was forced to move his family-his wife, Georgia, his sister-in-law, Trudie, and his three children: Zilo III, Susan, and Sandra-from here in Muscatine, Iowa, over a thousand miles west to southern Arizona. No part of the Badde history after the Great Button Crash in the 1950s is presented on the wall.īut the docent, who wears dark glasses, will recount post-Crash Badde Family history to any visitor who'll listen. That year's Miss Pearl Button stands alongside them, grins strenuously, tosses button samples into the crowd. One photo shows dapper brothers Thomas and Zilo Badde hosting the variety show at the Button Days Festival in 1947. Faded black-and-white photographs feature the Baddes among their factory workers, hunched over trays of finished buttons, or sorting shells from a conveyer belt. The west wall of the museum is devoted to the Badde Family, once known as the Royal Family of Pearl Button Making.
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The hands-on area allows museum visitors to handle shells and identify mussel species from the Mississippi: Wabash pig-toes, creek heel-splitters, monkey-faces, winged maple-leafs, pimple-backs. The three-foot mucket larva encysting itself on the gill of a salamander is bathed in a lurid red light that accentuates its underdeveloped excurrent siphon-a short tube that's curved into a grin, lips and all, but as guests read on the plaque below, actually functions like an anus.
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Visitors first see a series of large-scale ceramic structures that detail the biology of freshwater mussels.