Our tandem Van de Graaff accelerator has reached a milestone! This year is the 60th anniversary of the “big purple tank” being delivered to the UW Nuclear Physics Laboratory.  To mark the occasion, I will give an “Eras Tour” of the accelerator, and our building which was built for it — a retrospective with many recently digitized images of operators and equipment, in an effort to convey a sense of the accelerator technolgies which drove nuclear physics research for decades in the 20th century.  We have a new team working on the accelerator today, and I will describe our efforts to understand, preserve and run this old beast — enabling a new generation of cutting-edge experiments.