Baker's Junction: Battling 'communism,' Bloomington zoning

Every morning when Beverly Deckard looked out her kitchen window, she was greeted with two signs of affection from her neighbors across the street.\nThe first, a giant middle finger fashioned out of rusted sheet metal. The second, a huge billboard with the endearing love note: "Kiss my ass you commey-planning zoning. We have the right zoning and permits. I am not closing or moving, you commey-bastard neighbors can move."\nTheir property was not always home to such neighborly messages. John Baker bought it insult-free 25 years ago for the bank-breaking amount of $1. Two years after the purchase, he met his future wife, Cheryl, at a bar and she moved in with him 24 hours later. Over the next 23 years, the couple would spend their time accumulating an impressive amount of beautiful junk.\nThey bought cabooses, boxcars, cemetery headstones, water tanks and two hearses as a mode of decoration and transportation. These toys were funded by John's income working miscellaneous home improvement tasks and from the haunted house they host every Halloween.\nGhoulish leftovers from the event are still scattered across their property -- plastic doll parts strewn across the bottom of a giant metal tub, spider webs stretched across doorways, a plastic guillotine, hanging skeletons and gravestones with names such as "Massengil" and "Cheatham."\nThe Bakers were well on their way to an unusual happily-ever-after until four years ago when Beverly Deckard arrived on the scene and became, what they consider, a massive thorn in their sides and pocketbooks.\nWhy anyone would purposely pick a fight with the Bakers still remains to be seen. Mr. Baker is a huge, bearded man who looms at a daunting 6-foot-5, and Mrs. Baker is a live wire who doesn't hesitate to speak her mind.\nThe Bakers said Deckard didn't have any problem expressing herself, either, when she set up camp on the prize piece of property directly across the street from them, then proceeded to complain about how the Junction was an eyesore -- even though there are several trees blocking the view -- and murder on local property value.\nThe Bakers said she went door-to-door trying to get people to sign a petition to get the Junction shut down, but only one person signed it. \n"It's pathetic what she was trying to do, and no one was behind her," Mrs. Baker said. "She was knocked way off her pedestal."\nDeckard then went to Bloomington's Planning and Zoning Committee, thus beginning the four-year battle of Bakers v. "Commies." \nMrs. Baker is more than willing to regale visitors with tales of antics that ensued, because she's had more visitors at the Junction than she cares to count. Many students from IU and other parts of the country have come to do photography, art and broadcast projects because the property has an abundance of photo and tetanus opportunities. \nTheir daughter, Crystal, said she and her friends love to play on the property and that many use it as a distraction while waiting for the bus to arrive. \nMrs. Baker nurses a cigarette and an iced tea in the shade of her station house as her dog, Smokey, hides under the porch to stay out of a heat so sweltering, one could remain motionless and still ooze sweat.\nShe goes into how she and her husband took out a second mortgage, cashed in their life insurance, asked for donations and eventually filed for bankruptcy to finance the extra permits, legal fees and whatever else zoning threw at them.\nThe Bakers recently sent out a 20-year anniversary newsletter to members of the local community with the words, "commey pinhead" appearing prominently throughout. They provided just a sampling of all they battled the past four years, claiming that $50,000 in tax dollars was wasted on trying to get their property destroyed. \nThey said they received a lot of community support and money from people they didn't even know, with the obvious exception of "Bev the Witch" as they call her, who has since moved from her property and could not be reached for comment.\nIn an interview with the Bloomington Voice, Deckard had said "if (Mr. Baker) had spent that money on his place, he'd have a nice place. His outline plan looks great on paper. If it looked like that for real, I'd have no complaints."\nWhat irks the Bakers most is those improvements and renovations they had planned for the railroad museum could already have been enacted if so much of their time and expenditures hadn't been wasted in court.\nThe Bakers have posted several American flags around their property, as a symbol of their martyrdom in the fight against people they said are encroaching on their Constitutional right to have bad taste and a creative assortment of junk.\nThey still remain defiant against those who would make another attempt to put them out of business, as they clearly stated in the last line of their newsletter: "… I hope you like Baker's Junction RxR (railroad) museum, because if you don't you can kiss my butt. We are here to stay so get used to it"