LOG JAM
A Route 66 roadside attraction, the former Dean Eldredge Museum and Taxidermist once featured 30,000 specimens in the “world’s largest log cabin.”
It’s Roberts’ first time playing The Museum Club in
Flagstaff — a monumental occasion for this Arizona native who got his start playing Prescott’s Whiskey Row at 17. In the late ’60s, Roberts’ older brother bought the Rod Hart & The Hustlers album Live At Don Scott’s Museum Club. “We didn’t have that many albums, so we listened to that record about a thousand times,” he says. “The Museum Club became legendary in our minds.” Hunkered down on historic Route 66, The Museum
Club really is legendary. Equal parts music venue, bar and tourist trap, the Flagstaff club has provided a country-western oasis to college students, natives and travelers alike for decades. But the massive log cabin isn’t just a rowdy refuge.
The Museum Club is Flagstaff, according to Martin Zanzucchi, who owned the club from 1978 to 2003. The retired Flagstaff native still owns the property. “It really represents Flagstaff’s history on Route 66,” he says of the building, which he listed on both the Arizona and National Registers of Historic Places in 1994. “You have to think about Route 66 back then; business owners
needed attention-getting devices to lure travelers into these places.”
Built in 1931, The Museum Club was originally the Dean Eldredge Museum and Taxidermist, and Arizona’s own version of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Eldredge — “a collector of fine and unusual objects” who was covered in tattoos, as Zanzucchi describes him — packed the museum with more than 30,000 eccen- tric specimens, including a two-headed calf, countless Indian curios and a six-legged lamb. It’s unsurprising that visitors quickly dubbed the museum “The Zoo.” Two stuffed mountain lions prowled atop the build- ing, which Eldredge billed as the largest log cabin in the world. (He would later tout it as the biggest in the country, then state.) Eldredge died of cancer, and the end of Prohibition brought a new owner, saddle maker Doc Williams, and a new purpose: nightclub. It was a success, to say the least, but it wasn’t until 1963 when The Museum Club truly came into its own. “Don Scott is really the fella that put the club on the
JULY/AUGUST 2015 • DORADO 31
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