In Hometown, Quayle Is Not Just a Hero, but a Living Legend : Indiana: A lock of baby hair, a Little League uniform, a poem to Dad, a 5th-grade report card are included in museum dedicated to the former vice president.

In the town where he spent much of his wonder years, Dan Quayle is not just a hero, he’s history.

And that history has found a home. Last month, the family-values-preaching, Murphy Brown-bashing, malaprop-uttering 44th vice president of the United States got his own museum.

This, townsfolk say, is not a joke.

“Quayle was well-respected except for the funny boys,” said Huntington Mayor Gene Snowden. “They made him look like a little imp. . . . Dan has lots of excellent qualities that were never realized.”

The Dan Quayle Center and Museum offers testament to those qualities, but curator Thomas Mehl said it offers much, much more.

“This man has a story to tell, and what better way to tell it?” he asked. “We’re not here to propagandize his life. We’re not here to brush all these jokes and these . . . cartoons aside and say, ‘Here’s the real Dan Quayle.’ It’s for people who tour the museum to interpret that themselves.”

Huntington, about 100 miles northeast of Indianapolis, also has paid tribute to its No. 1 son with a Quayle Run, a Quayle subdivision, a Quayle burger (at Nick’s Kitchen, his favorite diner) and a Quayle trail, a 10-stop tour of former Quayle homes and haunts marked with plaques featuring a quail.

When an exhibit of Quayle memorabilia in the public library drew more than 16,500 people over two years--some of them from as far away as Israel and Kenya--the idea of a museum took root. Some call it a weed.

“I suppose it would be a little more interesting than an Ed McMahon museum,” joked Harrison Ullmann, editor and columnist at NUVO, an alternative newsweekly in Indianapolis. “If it were a commercial venture, I don’t think I’d invest in it.”

But Huntington librarian Kathy Holst insists Quayle’s Everyman appeal will draw people who “come to see somebody who is very much like they are. They’ll bring their kids and say, ‘Look, Johnny, if you work hard, you can become vice president. This person came from a small town just like you did.’ ”

“It’s the little man theory,” she said. “It’s the same reason (Harry S.) Truman is extremely popular now. They don’t come from the Eastern Establishment, they aren’t extremely wealthy. This is a common man of the Midwest who was vice president.”

Although James Danforth Quayle was born into a world of privilege--his maternal grandfather, Eugene C. Pulliam, was a self-made millionaire who founded a publishing dynasty that included the Indianapolis Star and Indianapolis News--his family homes in Huntington were quite modest.

Photos of those homes, along with pictures of the family, letters and other memorabilia depict a conventional, middle-class, Babbitt-like world of Jaycees and YMCAs.

Among the mementos: a 100-year-old family Bible that Quayle used to take his vice presidential oath, and an assortment of Happy Days-era, circa 1960s souvenirs: a yearbook photo, a high school letter sweater for golf (an ever-present passion) and an adolescent’s poem to his dad:

Sometimes he acts as if he has been disturbed,

But other times he is as cheerful as a bird . . .

There’s more: a law diploma partially chewed by Barnaby, the dog; a picture of said offender, a black Labrador; a Quayle & Quayle, husband-and-wife law shingle; the chair he stood on at Nick’s to announce his first congressional candidacy; the flotsam and jetsam--bumper stickers, buttons, tickets--of a 16-year political career; videos of speeches and home movies.

The collection of thousands of items is drawn from donations from Quayle himself, as well as family members and others, and from the National Archives.

It has been ensconced in a former Christian Science building at the corner of Warren and Tipton, across the way from the Presbyterian Church that his family attended and the elementary school where young Danny first learned to spell potato. Potatoe. Whatever.

The Dan Quayle Commemorative Foundation, according to president David Brewer, raised about $100,000 in private donations and $75,000 in services and materials to establish the museum.

In addition to the exhibits, organizers hope to offer symposiums on such subjects as political humor and the role of conservativism.

It will be dedicated in the fall, and organizers hope the Hoosier vice president will be there to dedicate it. He and his wife, Marilyn Tucker Quayle, a partner in an Indianapolis law firm, have purchased a home in Carmel, Ind.

Quayle is chairman of the new Competitiveness Center at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. He’s also made a seven-figure deal for his memoirs. He has ruled out seeking any office except the presidency.

A Quayle presidency. To critics, such a prospect may be laughable. But certainly not here.

“I don’t like that demeaning him,” said Mayor Snowden. Then he offered his idea of real humor--a joke deriding President Clinton as a draft-dodger. He paused. “That, to me, is funny.”

Quayle’s “handling with grace the ribbing of the detractors impressed many, many people,” said Jean Nelson, the foundation’s executive director. “And many people are impressed with his family values.”

Ah, yes, family values.

The debate that raged after Quayle chastised TV’s fictional newswoman-single mother Murphy Brown for sending the wrong moral message may find its way into an exhibit, said Mehl, the curator.

“That says something about Dan Quayle right there . . . the producers of that show felt they had to write an entire show . . . to fire back at his remarks,” Mehl said. “I think the majority of American people agreed with Dan Quayle on that matter.”

Mehl, a graduate student, concedes some classmates chuckled when they heard about his new job. He said the museum pokes fun at itself too.

It acquired a Doonesbury cartoon showing Quayle, personified as a talking feather, saying, “I know, I’m history,” as he introduces the “Dan Quayle Center and Liberry.”

“If someone comes through and doesn’t see this, they’ll say, ‘You’re just trying to make him look good,’ ” Mehl said. “You’re not going to put that past people. It’s part of history.”

Besides, executive director Jean Nelson said, the goal isn’t to sway minds. The museum just wants to tell Dan Quayle’s story.

“His part in history is already assured,” she said. “We want to keep that history in Huntington. This is about a local boy who made good.”