Day Trips

Photo By Gerald E. McLeod

The Cockroach Hall of Fame Museum enshrines the most famous insects that you have never heard of. The bug gallery in Plano displays the happy remains of Liberochie and Elvis Roachly and Norman Roachwell. There are also displays of creepy crawlers who never made it to celebrity status.

"People are always bringing me bugs to identify," Michael Bohdan explains of his collection of bugs sandwiched between sheets of glass. After more than 30 years in the extermination business he has bugs of all sizes and shapes, and he still gets a kick talking about it.

The museum is actually the retail area of his small office in a strip center off of U.S. 75 on the northern edge of Dallas. As he starts to talk about his specimen, he dons his safari hat with two-inch cockroaches around the hat band and slips into character. "Australia has Crocodile Dundee," he says with a mischievous grin, "and Texas has Cockroach Dundee, and that's me."

The first item in the collection to come off the wall during the short show-and-tell is the cockroach he paid $1,000 for in 1986. In a blatant attempt to garner publicity for his extermination business, Bohdan offered $1,000 to the person that brought him the largest cockroach.

The winner was an inch-and-a-half ordinary water bug. The specimen was big, but hardly in the same league as the beetle-like cockroaches on his hat band. "It was just the biggest to be turned in that day," Bohdan says with a laugh. Three women from the telephone company had caught it. "Goes to show you that the telephone company really does have bugs," he says. The local media loved it, and he appeared on local TV stations and the newspaper showing off the $1,000 cockroach.

The prize money that came out of his pocket resulted in 10 job offers and a $5,000 trip to be on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. In the last 20 years he has been on more television shows that he can remember. On the wall behind the showcase are pictures of him with Rosie O'Donnell, Joan Rivers, Donny & Marie, and many others. The panelists on To Tell the Truth had to guess that he ran a cockroach museum.

"Cockroaches have been very good to me," Bohdan says with a laugh. As a spokesman for an insecticide manufacturer, he traveled around the world holding contests to see who could make the most outlandish diorama using the remains of a cockroach. "They were going to throw them away, so I kept them," he says. The pieces are folk art at its silliest.

Bohdan is the first to admit that his micromuseum is a side trip, not a destination. Recently a grandmother stopped into the Cockroach Museum with her three grandchildren. She was disappointed in the small amount of materials displayed. "The kids were having a great time looking at all the bugs, but granny expected more," he says. "We're just a small operation, but we're having a lot of fun."

He says about 6,000 people a year stop in to see his collection of bugs among the bottles of Red Fox Urine (used to discourage squirrels) and live animal traps. Bohdan has a degree in zoology with a minor in entomology. As a kid he always loved discovering new bugs in the back yard. Where he got his natural talent for showmanship is anyone's guess.

Right now Bohdan is living two lives. In the mornings he is a mild-mannered exterminator attacking bugs wherever they may hide in Dallas-area homes. In the afternoons he becomes a tour guide to the world of cockroaches and bugs.

The Cockroach Hall of Fame Museum is at 2231-B W. 15th St. in Plano near the intersection of 15th and Custer streets. It doesn't take long to see that the displays and Bohdan are as entertaining as the bugs under glass. He dispenses pest control advice and shows his bug collection and bug identification at no charge, but his informative book on pests and do-it-yourself pest control, What's Buggin' You? is $12.95. The museum opens Monday through Friday from noon to 5pm and on Sunday from noon to 3pm. For more information, call 972/519-0355 or go to www.pestshop.com.

778th in a series. Day Trips, Vol. 2, a book of Day Trips 101-200, is available for $8.95, plus $3.05 for shipping, handling, and tax. Mail to: Day Trips, P.O. Box 33284, South Austin, TX 78704.