On his way to argue a case bell fore the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987, Barry Levenson spotted a jar of mustard on a tray in the hallway of his hotel. He had to have it. "I looked to my left. I looked to my right," he says. "I took it."

Levenson, then an assistant attorney general in Wisconsin, was in the grip of an obsession. "I was a lawyer by day, a mustard aficionado by night," he says. In the years since, mustard mania has taken over his life. His collection now occupies the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum, where as many as 20,000 visitors a month ogle 3,600 varieties and a collection of mustardiana. "I like that someone would be so obsessed they'd create this," says visitor Lynn Harmet.

Levenson, 52, came to his calling the night the Red Sox lost the 1986 World Series. "I was so depressed," he says. "I decided I needed a hobby." In the condiment aisle of a 24-hour market, his passion for baseball—and ballpark hot dogs—triggered an epiphany. There and then, Levenson bought a dozen kinds of mustard, and a collection was born. Married since 1998 to third wife Patti, 46, Levenson, who gave up lawyering in 1991, makes his living selling mustards in the museum's gift shop and via catalog. Life now, he says, is sort of like, well, mustard. "Sometimes," he says, "it's sweet, sometimes it's hot, sometimes it's smooth, and sometimes it's rough." And always something to relish.

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