A Gift for a Museum: All, or Nothing at All

Some people read history, or write it. Others make it. John Hanssen lives with it. And he’d rather not, thank you.

Hanssen, real-estate broker and part-time teacher, is great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Daniel Carroll II, a Maryland aristocrat who signed the U.S. Constitution, as well as great-great-great-great-great-grandnephew of Benjamin Franklin. For at least 201 years, the illustrious family has accumulated an amazing--and valuable--clutter, a miniature history of the United States.

Eventually, the collection fetched up at Hanssen’s grandmother’s Pasadena house, whence Hanssen had it moved--three vans’ worth--to his crowded ranch house in Costa Mesa.

He is still sorting through the trunks and boxes, and for a decade he has been trying to offer the collection to a museum, free. Just one catch. “I want the collection to remain intact,” says Hanssen. “A lot of prestigious historians and prominent museums have offered to take these portraits, those pieces of furniture, these documents, that set of silverware--but never the whole thing. The collection’s strength is its diversity. I don’t want to dismember it. It would be like selling off the doors of a classic car.”

Ideally, says Hanssen, the collection would be housed locally “in a historic old house that’s been restored, in a place where people--kids--could easily see it. . . . I was teaching an eighth-grade class the other day. They’d been studying the Constitution. I told them, ‘Grab your history book and I’ll show you a picture of Grandpa, signing the document.’ They bolted right out of their seats. Suddenly, it was alive.

“What I worry about most is, what if I were to be killed in an accident? I have no heirs. I surely wish somebody would take this collection. Intact.”

It’s All in the Cardz

“I was sitting at home one night,” says Hannah Cannon, 11, “and the idea just popped into my mind: ‘Why don’t we have letters on playing cards instead of numbers?’ Play regular card games, like poker and gin rummy, but instead of numbers, you spell words and get lots of points, like Scrabble.

“I told my Dad, and he said, ‘Hannah, it’s probably already been done,’ and I said, ‘Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t.’

“I didn’t think he’d, you know, go into it. I just thought it was another one of my ideas and I’d tell my Dad and he’d say, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ But it happened. It really did!”

Thus was born Cardz, a tidy box of seven games--”or you can invent your own,” says Hannah--with letters for numbers, colors for suits, ingenious in its simplicity and fun enough to occupy the anchors of “Good Morning America” for a good half-hour after Hannah’s recent appearance.

Hannah, a seventh-grader at Westlake School who lives in Hollywood, dogged proud papa Bill, a screenwriter, through all the steps of manufacturing and marketing a new game, “and she got her two cents in everywhere,” says Bill. “I don’t think it’s genius; I think it’s just that a child has an open-enough mind to come up with the sort of simple, classic idea that an adult’s mind is too cluttered to conceive.”

And to explain. One or two of the game rules are slightly muddled, and Hannah explains why: “Dad wrote them, and they’re pretty dorky,” she says. “I’ve written my own--that haven’t come out yet--called ‘Hannah’s Sensible Rules.’ ”

It figures.

Cheers to the Bartender, His Concoction Is ‘M-Adorable’

The spirit was willing, but the mesh was weak. For 18 years, Jack Sherwood had entered his original concoctions in the annual Southern California Bartenders Assn. cocktail competition. “I’d won a lot of heats,” he says. “I’d finished fourth, third, second, but I’d never hit the big one.” On Monday night in Long Beach, Sherwood, winner of the $1,500 first prize, was packing for San Juan, Puerto Rico, to vie for the national title with his No. 1 medley, “M-Adorable.”

For purists, the prize-winning potation consists of one ounce of Midori (a melon liqueur), 3/4 oz. creme de banane, oz. lime juice, 1 oz. sweet-and-sour mix and a dash of Frothy, “a creaming agent that fuzzes things up, gives it a head.”

“It was trial and error,” Sherwood concedes, “trying to come up with something new that was palatable, trying to stay simple, using ingredients that any bar has on hand. The liqueur blends well, and has a nice color, like a grasshopper. No mystique, and you can make a dollar with it.”

Sherwood, 57, who tends bar at La Brique Inn in Huntington Beach, is less sanguine about the name of his drink. “It’s a play on words,” he says. “Kinda dumb. Somebody sitting at the bar suggested it.” Somebody tipsy? “Believe it,” says the bartender, who nevertheless had sold a torrent of M-Adorables by noon the day after the event.

That good? “Hard to say,” says Sherwood. “I don’t drink the stuff myself.”