Purple Memory Keeper

At 72, Alan page has collected objects of importance to him. None are NFL trophies.

- Steve Rushin

SHE WAS white and he was black—except on Sundays, when he was purple and his Afro steamed on the Vikings’ sideline. In 1973 the couple built a contemporary house surrounded by old homes and hung in it Warhols—Mao and Marilyn Monroe. “I got the sense of, Who does he think he is moving into this neighborhood?” Diane Page says of her husband, Alan, linchpin of the Purple People Eaters and MVP of the NFL in 1971. “Plus, Chairman Mao was above the fireplace. I think the mailman thought we were communists.”

Shag carpet ran wall-to-wall. “Everything,” says Alan, “was burnt orange.”

By 1988 the Pages had four children living in that house and a visiting friend asked, “Why don’t you have black art on the walls? Where’s the African-American culture for your children?”

“And the lightbulb went on,” says Diane, who began filling the house not just with art but also hundreds of artifacts reflecting the African- American experience. Paintings, poetry and literature were joined by colored only signs from Jim Crow diners. A slave collar. A branding iron. The canvas banner a family held as Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train passed by. One side says, uncle abe we will never forget you. The other side, after 153 years, still reads like a wish: our country shall be one country.