AMERICAN ALBUM : Public Enemy is No. 1 attraction in quiet town : Legacy of gangster John Dillinger lives in wax. Museum includes his shoes, his pants and his pals.

Doors often go unlocked in this peaceful hamlet--the kind of place where police officers are more likely chatting with townspeople than arresting dangerous criminals.

It’s an unlikely place to honor one of America’s most notorious gangsters.

But here, tucked among the arts-and-crafts shops, stands the John Dillinger Historical Wax Museum. It is one of the most incongruous things in Nashville, along with the old log cabin jail and a stuffed animal known as the “two-headed calf of Brown County.”

The museum houses the world’s largest display of Dillinger memorabilia, from his baseball shoes to the pants, now stained with blood, that he wore on the day he was shot to death by a G-man.

In his 32 years, Dillinger, who lived in the nearby town of Mooresville, robbed 11 banks, looted police stations for ammunition and managed a carefully planned escape from a jail using a fake gun made of wood.

Accused of one murder during his career, Dillinger became the focal point of then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s attempt to increase the agency’s visibility during the Depression. The gangster was listed as Public Enemy No. 1 before being shot and killed by an FBI agent while leaving a Chicago movie theater with his girlfriend and Anna Sage, the “Lady in Red” who helped the agency in its manhunt.

The museum was started in 1975 by Joe Pinkston and Bart Hahn, two men with a lifelong interest in Dillinger and his effect on the U.S. crime scene.

Pinkston was 3 when Dillinger died, but his fascination grew as he listened to stories told by his uncle, a reporter who knew the gangster as a teen-ager and later covered his exploits as a journalist.

The stories--particularly one about Dillinger shooting pool in the nearby town of Martinsville and promptly leaving whenever he lost a dollar--stuck with Pinkston, a former detective and co-author of the book “Dillinger: A Short and Violent Life.” He had collected a number of Dillinger’s belongings after concluding research on the book, and a small showing of the items convinced the men that a museum could be a success.

The museum’s 22 wax figures, created in Long Beach, Calif., at Alvarez Wax Models, chronicle the pivotal moments in Dillinger’s career, as well as other key players of the Depression-era crime scene.

There is the Lady in Red. Bonnie and Clyde are posed among repeater paper-shot shells, an old Texas map and hand grenades. Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson are there too.

Also behind the glass, a plump, elderly woman in a pink dress and Sunday hat stands primly, clutching a semiautomatic weapon. It’s Ma Barker, America’s most feared gangster grandmother.

In another display, a pallid Dillinger lies on a slab in the morgue, a bloody sheet covering most of his body.

The three-room museum draws several thousand visitors a year from around the world, Pinkston said.

“I suppose it’s probably old-fashioned thinking, but the guys who come here don’t surprise me,” the 62-year-old Pinkston said. “They’re into things like guns. But the girls that come along--I don’t know if they would have liked to have been gun molls or what, but they really get into it.”

Paul Yonover of New York has journeyed to the museum several times.

“John Dillinger was just a cool guy.” he said. “The clothes, the women, the whole mystique. This is just about the only place you can see all this real, traditional crime stuff.”

Other Dillinger belongings in the museum include his lucky rabbit’s foot and the Colt .35 pistol that FBI agent Charles Winstead used to kill him. Even the plaster “death mask” made by mortuary students after Dillinger’s death is there.

Nashville gained popularity in the early 1960s as a retreat for Indiana University art students who wanted to live a simple existence honing their crafts.

Some here have expressed concern that the museum is not in keeping with the town’s image. Pinkston is quick to disagree. “It’s history. It isn’t only about Dillinger. It’s about guns, it’s about cars, it’s about banks and the FBI. It’s American history.”

While doing research for an upcoming book, Pinkston discovered transcripts from state police wiretaps that provide evidence that Dillinger was paid by bank executives to commit robberies in order to save institutions suffering during the Depression.

Pinkston said he believes that Dillinger would have his own take on crime in today’s world: “He would probably be appalled at some of what goes on today--the mindless violence.”