“Oh man, oh man, Erector Sets made me who I am!” Mullen tells the Smithsonian curators who invited him to Washington, DC, to explore their collections. “When I was a kid I had a double-decker bed, and I had this whole idea of using pulleys to get everything up to me on the top. And so the way I had it, I had strings going all over the place, controlling the light switches and everything through a command center, and I did all that with Erector Sets. My parents, they would leave me dinner on a tray so I wouldn't have to stop building...”
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Photo: J Grant Brittain