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The man behind all of it is Bill Larkin. He’s a tall, older
gentleman with large dark glasses, gray hair, a wide grin, and a loud,
infectious laugh. Wearing a turquoise shirt, orange, baggy shorts, long black
socks, and tennis shoes, he’s like the little bit crazy uncle you wish you had.
One who happens to paint birdhouses.
Every day he welcomes visitors at just about all hours,
which is why when I called a few days before he told me to come on by as if I
were a neighbor from down the street. So when I pull into the gravel driveway
and come to the door it’s already open and he welcomes me in.
The living room is coated in birdhouses. They hang from the ceiling and the walls along with string lights. They are also on a couch, the floor, and tables. But this is just the beginning. The backyard is a kaleidoscope of color. In addition to the birdhouses, Bill has painted rocks and created animals and faces on trees. The birdhouses sit on fences and logs with other garden ornaments. Most of the yard is shaded by huge trees, and Larkin has added bridges to some of the shallow ravines throughout. It is indeed a paradise – for birds, for kids, kids-at-heart, and fans of roadside attractions.
Thoroughly impressed, I’m happy to sit down with Bill in his
living room. We each sit in an armchair, and he brings out the foot rest and
leans back.
“I wish my body was in better shape,” he says. “But you get
in your seventies and things go downhill.”
He’s got a Band-Aid on his forehead and frequently complains
about non-cooperative legs. But he takes it all in good humor. Recently a local
Amish man and his two children came over to help tidy up the yard.
“They mowed, and he blew some of the leaves away because I
can’t do that. He was having more fun blowing leaves!”
Larkin worked at a naval base, called Crane, nearby. “The
Navy wanted a place they could make bombs that neither Japanese nor German
planes could reach. When I hired in the mid-60’s it had become kind of an
engineering center. Although the bombs are still up there in storage and during
Vietnam, they surely did ship a bunch of bombs out of there. I just did
computer work.” (He retired in 2003).
When Larkin moved into his current home in 1996, he built a
series of flowerboxes and planted flowers, renewing a practice he’d had in his
previous home. Once retired, he augmented his flower displays with more boxes,
and with shelves that had hanging baskets attached. But as he says, with
nothing on the top shelf they looked “stupid,” and he bought birdhouses to go
on top but they deteriorated.
“So I went to the lumber company and said ‘Do you have any
birdhouses?’ They said ‘No, but we got lots of lumber you can build birdhouses
out of.’ So I decided to build a few and oh my God, I was awful at it.”
At around 2011, Larkin decided that quantity might improve
quality. Or maybe, it was because he was done with flowers because of a
drought. In any case, he built a thousand that winter, and by Spring was
painting rocks.
“I never had an art class in college or anything,” he says.
“It’s just something that just came along. I just sit around here and people
come here. The first group was Connecticut, they were working on phone lines.
They wanted birdhouses for their grandkids.”
Now, he estimates the number of birdhouses to be well over
6,000, but admits “I ain’t countin’ them, that don’t interest me.”
Tourists flock to Larkin’s home, thanks in part to
roadsideamerica.com and various other media sources, as well as by word of
mouth.
“People put me on Facebook to their friends or whatever…I
was on a few TV stations, and that was really kind of nice.”
He credits one station from Indianapolis in particular for
increasing foot traffic, for a show called Around
Indiana. After it aired the Wednesday before Labor Day, he says with a
laugh, “Labor Day weekend I had so many cars here I didn’t know what I was
going to do.”
He’s also appeared in National Geographic and in a book called
Oddball Indiana, the latter of which
derived from his entry on Roadside America.
“I have people here all the time that say we’re doin’
something or whatever. I don’t pay any attention, I say you come, you look, you
do whatever you want to do.”
“A lot of people from around here wouldn’t stop if I gave
them money,” he says.
But on the flip side is all the interesting people he’s met
as a result of his passion.
“Two people from the East Coast…wanted to drive across this
country on Highway 50 only,” he remarks. “They were using Roadside America. And
they both found this place which blew my mind because I didn’t know anybody was
doing that. One group was in a camper and they had trouble trying to park here
because they wanted to park over there and there’s such a slant they were
afraid it was going to tip over.”
Larkin doesn’t travel much himself. He has grandkids in
Kansas (as well as Indianapolis), but he’s not a fan of flying. About once a
week he goes 50 minutes north to Bloomington for supplies. “But that is an old,
curvy little road, oh my God. I don’t know if it saves all that much time but
it’s just so frustrating. All these cars pulling in and out.
“I went to Mardi Gras twice in the 60’s when it was fun and
not so dangerous. I couldn’t believe what went on, with all the parades and oh
God. People like mad. I met people from Milwaukee which I went up and visited
and they showed me around Milwaukee. But they were going from…I think the
Houston dome was just built, and they were going from Mardi Gras to there. They
brought a car for their people and a car for their beer (laughs). It’s hard to
miss people carrying a case of beer in New Orleans, you know the streets. You
know you can’t carry a beer around Indiana in town for anything, you can get
arrested or reprimanded, but down there, oh gosh.”
Nowadays, Larkin laughs about his adventures right at home.
“I go to the grocery store and sometimes there’s paint all
over me and one day last year I was going through radiation on my face and the
guy who took me back there said ‘You know you got green paint all over your
face’. Well I was paintin’ before I came over here, I wasn’t paying attention,
I never look at my face (laughs).”
He entertains some 5,000 visitors a year, he guesses. His son,
who “won’t allow (him) to go up a ladder,” had arranged to bring his Boy Scout
troop down to help along with their parents.
“He mentioned some money [a donation] and I said I don’t
care, I can’t do it, so it’s either that or try to get some Amish (laughs).
They’re selling popcorn this year, and the Boy Scouts are raising the popcorn
to $22 and he said, ‘No one wants to buy popcorn for $22, Dad.’ And I said, ‘It
doesn’t bother me if you can come down here and get somethin’ done, that’d be
great.’”
He again mentions his replaced knee and yearning to do more
work outside. He recalls years ago raking leaves for a neighbor after she’d fed
the birds for him.
The house has a backstory all its own.
It is a dome home that came in a kit, invented, he says, by
acclaimed architect Buckminster Fuller.
“It’s a puzzle to
put together because all the triangles are kinda different. They’ve got to go
in a certain place.”
Two families had lived in it before him, but when he bought
it in ’96 it had been vacant for some time.
“I got the windows downstairs replaced because they were a
mess. Finally replaced this front door. Got the house re-sided and everything
else.”
It features a narrow, twisting staircase from the main floor
– which consists of a living room and a kitchen – to the ground floor – which has
about three bedrooms. He's added a deck.
Larkin is just as friendly to me as to the two couples who
come by during my visit. Like me, they are offered a free birdhouse as well as
any photos from a stack of them on a table. According to Roadside America, all
he’ll take in compensation is cheap beer. I offer an apology for not
remembering this token.
“Oh I don’t care,” he says. “They sell beer at IGA [a
grocery store] so cheap…people spend more on a 6-pack than I do on a 30-pack,
so I think it’s kind of silly.”
We talk more about my cross-country adventure, which started in California and by that point had encompassed 13 states. Recently, he’d met another man doing a cross-country trip, only in the other direction.
“Well you have the best adventure of your life, okay? People
don’t understand, there’s so many things in this country to look at. You don’t
have to go abroad to see things. I watch Rick Steve’s Europe, or one of those other
travel shows and that’s about all I want to do.”
I come away with parting gifts – a little birdhouse, a photo of the yard, and a couple of Florida license plates for my collection. (He’d received them from a guest with the notion of making them into birdhouses, but he doesn’t make those much anymore). And the best gift of all – an unforgettable stop on my road trip, and a great conversation with a man who is friend to many in this world: family, neighbors, tourists, and birds alike.
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