So he saved his money and bought a sprawling 1940s nightclub on the outskirts of town, which in its heyday was popular with The Mob. "I wanted it so that you'd have to drive to get here, or take a bus," he said. Bill doesn't like stores (other than his own) and he doesn't like crowds. "I put a price on it so it wouldn't sell."Īt one time Wild Bill ran his business from a store in the downtown shopping district of Middletown. "I found it in the woods in Bethel," he recalled. We noticed a rusty old milk bucket from Yasgur's Farm, the site of Woodstock. "Sometimes when kids come in they freak out, because the place is kind of scary," Bill said. There's alcohol-free wine fermented by the Grateful Dead ("I'm down to less than a hundred cases," said Bill), and a box of Michael Jackson-style beaded gloves ("I've had a couple hundred of these since 1984," said Bill), and a life-size man made of bear traps. Inside, the place is geared for scavenging: stacks of used paperbacks, towering racks of vinyl LPs, shelves jammed with board games and puzzles promoting everything from American Bandstand to The Bionic Woman. It's his own personal slice of heaven and a surprising sight in the often staid scenery of Connecticut. "Wild Bill," as he likes to be called, is the hippie senior citizen who operates Wild Bill's Nostalgia Center. "He filled my truck up and said, 'Give me x amount of dollars.' And I said, 'Okay.'" "A guy had all these whale parts in his barn," Bill recalled. A brief inventory of the items hanging from his ceiling includes an ox yoke, a 15-foot-long snake skin, "Mini-Me" inside a biohazard suit, and a rib from a 65-ton whale. "High ceilings are the key to success when you've got a lot of junk," says Bill Ziegler. Wild Bill's Nostalgia Center (Closed)Īfter this Field Review was written, "Wild Bill" Ziegler passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack on April 11, 2017.
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