The headlines that morning in Pocatello, Idaho, were grim for a town of 57,000 people. I read them in the local paper at Elmer’s Restaurant while enjoying the house specialty, a “German pancake” with a crisp, raised rim that held the syrup and butter in a neat pool. A 27-year-old man had been sentenced to life in prison for murdering his mother, the director of a Humane Society chapter. Another man, 39, had been arrested after a high-speed chase for stealing a car with a “juvenile” inside — a baby or a teenager, it didn’t say. And over in Boise, the state capital, the legislature had passed a bill to permit the death penalty for “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel” acts of “lewdness” against minors under 12. The story mentioned that during its previous session, the legislature had passed another bill allowing for executions by firing squads “if lethal injection chemicals can’t be obtained.”

But to me, eating pancakes and preparing for my day, the most upsetting article was the obituary of a woman in her 60s who had died of ALS, the disease that had killed my father four years earlier. The obituary was written in the first-person — the only time I’d ever seen this done — and began with the Dickensian “I was born” before going on in a chipper, confiding manner to summarize the life of the deceased. I supposed the woman had written the obit herself, or dictated it to someone at her bedside, as who would presume to speak for her from the grave and fantasize as follows: “Maybe I’ll be hanging out with Waylon, Prince, Princess Di, Tom Petty, and Darwin (my dog and Charles if he’s game.) I do know I will be saving seats at my after party. I love you all.”

The idea of the dead saving seats for the still-living in an afterworld populated with ghostly rock stars caused me to set the paper on the counter and call for the check with my breakfast still unfinished. I had planned a cheerful day — a visit to a local attraction whose name had jumped out at me from a billboard, the Museum of Clean — and the last thing I wanted to think of was my late father. He too, at the end, had spoken of seats in Heaven. Zonked on narcotics, his lower body paralyzed, reclining in a plush green La-Z-Boy, he fell into a reverie one night while staring at the ceiling of his Montana cabin. I sat nearby and tracked his moving eyes, the last of his body parts under his control, other than his mouth and tongue. “What are you seeing up there, Dad?” I asked him. “They’re rearranging the chairs,” he said.

The Museum of Clean was a few blocks from the diner in a barren industrial district cut by railroad tracks. Pocatello, which locals call “Pokey,” is a glum place. I visited it first in the mid 1970s when I was 14, the year my father had a nervous breakdown, impulsively converted to Mormonism, and dragged our family around the mountain west as he searched for a new job and a new path. One week he stashed our family in a motel there, while he interviewed at local companies. I saw my first streetwalking hooker from its balcony and breathed the fumes from a giant phosphate plant. Years later I learned that my depressing impressions were shared by the residents themselves. In 1949, during an especially gloomy winter, the city passed a half-facetious ordinance making it compulsory to smile. 

The museum’s building was enormous, a brick warehouse with a modern façade and an empty parking lot. There wasn’t much around it of note; it was one of those idealistic renovations fueled by a solitary, eccentric vision. The person behind the museum, I knew from research, was an elderly Mormon fellow named Don Aslett who’d made his fortune in janitorial services. He’d started small as an ambitious college student, cleaning houses, then commercial structures, before expanding his business nationwide. Handsome and gregarious, Aslett parlayed his firm’s success into a supplementary career as a writer and public speaker, expounding on his philosophy of “clean” in 40 books. He carried a toilet-shaped briefcase to his roadshows and preached a gospel of dignity and order. “Being clean is a state of unsolicited reverence,” he solemnized in a pamphlet for the museum. “In fact, our degree of clean regulates our self-worth, self-confidence, and surely the quality of our communication with our Creator.”

I started my tour in the basement of the museum — if you could even call it a museum, because its exhibits were that prosaic. (Though maybe this made it the purest of museums, an example of a museum as such.) I contemplated a group of rotary floor buffers, or “gutbusters” as they call them in the trade. Arrayed on a low platform and lit from above, shorn of context, they possessed a kind of lonesome dignity, more creaturely than mechanical. I felt terrible for them; they seemed to miss their operators, the men who had given them energy and purpose. They were like horses whose riders had died. I moved along to dustpans, then to brooms — brooms through the ages, brooms of many cultures. I learned that the broom has not evolved much, less so, perhaps, than any human tool other than the toothpick. There was one of those too in the museum, from ancient Rome. It was naillike, made of bronze. 

A niche devoted to chimney sweeps, my next stop, reminded me that the history of clean is also the history of exploitation. I knew from watching Mary Poppins (that spooky-catchy “Chim Chim Cher-ee” song was playing on a speaker) that scrawny Victorian-era street urchins worked inside of chimneys, but I didn’t know about the geese. After tying a rope around a goose’s neck, the sweep would lower the bird into a chimney and let the frantic flapping of its wings knock loose the creosote and soot. The image was a vivid metaphor for something — engineered panic as a tool — that could use a vivid metaphor. During Covid, we were chimney geese for pharma. 

Next up, the peculiar figure of Mr. Clean, the longtime mascot of an all-purpose cleanser produced by Procter & Gamble. Muscle-bound, bald, and vaguely piratical, with a chunky hoop earring in one ear and a white t-shirt stretched across his pecs, he gazed out from a 1960 print ad. Behind him was a housewife with a mop, which she wielded in her dirty kitchen while wearing a fetching skirt and black high heels. Where was the man of the house? At work, presumably, perhaps at a Procter & Gamble–like corporation. Did he know what was going on back home? The subliminally adulterous ad recalled an incident from my childhood when, in the middle of a weekday, while my father toiled in his office at 3M (maker of the Scotch-Brite abrasive cleaning pad and other aids to modern housekeeping), I surprised my mother in her housedress earnestly filling out a contest form at the kitchen counter. The contest was sponsored by some consumer product, and the first prize was a trip to New York City to meet “Broadway” Joe Namath, the rakish bachelor quarterback. “Let’s keep this to ourselves,” my mother said.

One floor up, in a darkened little theater, a video played of one of Aslett’s seminars, “Life After Housework.” It aired in the 1980s on KSL, the Salt Lake City TV station, and was billed as “Family Inspiration” and “Entertainment Unsurpassed!” In the studio audience, women with big, sprayed hairdos hooted and clapped as Aslett, in a blue suit, joked about inspecting neighbors’ toilet bowls by holding a small mirror under their rims. This was a pure example of Mormon humor, rooted in middle-class embarrassment. I found another example in a nook devoted to oral hygiene. Among the dental equipment and ads for toothpaste was a list of sanitized curse words, suitable for Sunday use. Bull Spit. Geese and Mice. Don’t be a Button Hole. And this one, which took me a moment to decode: Cod Ham Son of a Peach.

Certain exhibits jarred me, disrupting the light mood of the museum. There was a horrid “Civil War surgery station” consisting of a sink on spindly legs equipped with a profusion of nickel spigots and a pair of battered tin water tanks. I heard the groans of mutilated soldiers insufficiently anesthetized and pictured hasty amputations. Near a strange old contraption used for cleaning currency was a series of framed pages: “How Clean Is Your Money?” The answer was terrifying. “Many recent studies have shown that most bills contain roughly 3,000 types of bacteria, including bacteria linked to gastric ulcers, pneumonia, food poisoning, staph infections, flu, and acne. Some bills even contain anthrax and diphtheria.” An even more shocking statistic was the number of “living organisms” discovered in a single gram of dust from a nineteenth-century British stately home: 355,500,000!

The Creator so dear to Aslett’s heart and to my fellow Mormons as a child, had mired his noble spawn in depths of grime. Prodigious grime, which squirmed and reproduced, degrading and consuming our very substance. We could never be rid of it, or even part of it. Yet our tireless campaign against its onslaughts had inspired marvels of ingenuity, which it would be inhuman to dismiss. For example, the squeegee. The not-so-humble modern squeegee was fathered by Ettore Steccone, an Italian immigrant to the US who patented the ageless gadget in 1936. On the museum’s wall of fame honoring the immortals of sanitation, Steccone came fourth. He followed Moses at third (“Deuteronomy 23:14 No unclean things”), Adam at second (“Genesis 2:15 And the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and keep it”), and the Roman god Janus, the god of doorways, from whose name the word “janitor” is derived.

I was told by the gal at the front desk not to miss the hallmark exhibit on the third floor — a massive collection of historic vacuum cleaners — even though a sign inside the elevator would warn me the third floor was closed. The sign, she explained, was meant for families with children, not for “responsible adults.” An unsupervised child had plugged in one of the vacuums and left it running, its rotating beater creating frictions that eventually filled the room with smoke and might have turned the museum into a pyre. 

Hearing this grave story, I feigned alarm. But part of me relished the irony of a temple of order ruined by petty mischief. One curious kid, one small, flipped switch, and civilization goes up in flames — that’s what we’re up against, and always will be. The “living organisms” will have their day, and back into the teeming mulch we’ll go.

In the meantime, we have the vacuum cleaner. There were hundreds of them displayed on the third floor. It stunned me to see them all, like a race of people, some of them on their bellies, some standing tall, some fat, some thin. How silent they were, how ominously still. When my depressed father lost his mind in 1976, converting our family to a new religion in the hope of preventing our full disintegration, I stopped going to school for several weeks, so chaotic was our home life. If not for the reassuring drone of my mother’s stalwart Hoover upright, which she ran for an hour or so every afternoon, I might have harmed myself or run away. It stabilized my soul, that sound of suction. To dust we would return — but not quite yet.

When you have a chance to inspect a healthy sample of the last hundred years’ worth of a certain appliance, you see that the process of technical improvement runs into many blind alleys along the way. One tank-style vacuum cleaner, the Filter Queen, included an attachment that blew air into a puffy vinyl bag, which could be placed on the head to dry your hair. Another line of units called the Rainbow trapped its sweepings in water. Because I was all alone on the third floor, the impish child in me emerged and lifted a few of the units to feel their weight — careful not to slip and turn them on. 

Mid-century vacuums were heavy-metal beasts, the Ladies’ Home Journal equivalents of classic Packards and Oldsmobiles. The Kirby line was sturdier than most, so simple and durable in its designs that parts from models produced decades apart could be swapped for one another. Kirbys were sold door to door, to housebound wives who had only Mr. Clean for daytime company. (I imagine a few Kirby offspring still live among us, relics of our lost high-trust society.) 

The most pleasing and perfect of these home-cleaning units were those manufactured by Electrolux, a company whose name is also wonderful. To honor the elegance of these machines, with their distinctive horizontal tanks, retractable cords, and nifty little wheels, Aslett had mounted them on an off-white wall, which showed off their pastel enamel coatings. Now and then in its long and dirty history, humanity has gotten some things right, and Electrolux vacuums from the 1930s to the 1980s are the work of true industrial heroes.

I left Mr. Aslett’s museum on this high note and walked for an hour through the grim, gray streets of central Pocatello. I searched for the shabby motel my poor late father — frightened, unemployed, and newly religious — had cooped us up in while he looked for work, which he wouldn’t find for several months. Mormonism is a practical faith founded on ambition and self-improvement. It teaches that steps we take in this world can lead to exaltation in the next, to actual personal divinity. In the words of Lorenzo Smith, the fifth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: “As man now is, God once was. As God now is, man may be.” This creed helped my father recover from his hard times, gather his wits, and resume the chores of life. The chores, unending, can’t be set aside until one day we can’t do them anymore, and all comes to ruin, just like we knew it would.