Victrolas and Cotton and Shelves, oh my!

I could not have picked three things less similar. Except of course that they all have something to do with the Cherokee County Historical Museum. So yesterday we said goodbye to Amanda. A rather sad good bye too. Still, she got quite a bit accomplished in her few months at the museum.

For example, thanks to Amanda, we now have a clothes making exhibit downstairs. The cotton exhibit (as I call it) is so nice that it really makes the downstairs look like a giant mess everywhere else. Which is okay, cause I'm working on unmessy-ing it.

Actually, currently we're working on measuring all the plows and eventually putting them into the system. (I should say I'm working on it and forcing anyone who will write for me to help.) Its been slow going because the plows are really heavy and difficult to move around, plus they're packed tighter than a can of sardines. (Yes I did just say that.) We've had a few people who've visited the museum, know a thing or two about plows, and have given us rough estimates of what they're worth. The last guy who gave us an estimate, and it was a fairly nice estimate, had only seen half of the plows. (The rest of them are hidden behind a wagon that I eventually will look to see what it might be worth.)

But onto other things. Though I'm writing the rest of this in July, I had some of it written and planned to post in June but time was not on my side, quite a few things happened in the second half of June. One of them being my birthday, which I actually had to spend at work in the library. (Truthfully I enjoyed it which just shows that I am a bit of a workaholic.) No but really good things happened in the museum. Like, we got the Victrola upstairs to work! I've been working on our library, mentioned in the last post I made, and found a bunch of 78 records (78 refers to the type of record.) upon two of the shelves. (I have to remove the others to upstairs, I just haven't gotten around to it yet.) I showed them to the director and he said. Wouldn't one of those record players upstairs work to play those? I had no idea what size of records the Victrola played so I was really excited. The director had to go somewhere that day so that meant I could hike myself upstairs to play with the Victrola.

And play I did. A side note first. We actually have two Victrolas upstairs. One is a standing Victrola, that has sadly been repainted, and the other is a table Victrola (meant for sitting on the table) not repainted. Double unfortunately though, the table one - which looks the best - does not work. Something is wrong with the mechanism that spins the record. Oh! Another side note, for those of you that don't know, a Victrola is a type of record player very similar to a gramophone. The only difference is that the Victrola's horn, where the sound comes out of, is actually underneath the spinner and hidden inside the casing. The standing one, I knew from experience, could play but it didn't play well and it was hard to hear. I decided I would try the standing Victrola. I set a record on it to see if it fit, wound up the spinning mechanism and played with the needle holder until I could hear a faint strain of music. (There's a little knob that you twist to tighten and loosen the needle and I fooled with that because I found it could make the noise just a little bit louder.)

Convinced I had got it to work, I ran downstairs to pull Pheobe, one of the two lovely women who manage the front, to come tell me if I'd done it right. Pheobe came up, I played the record, and she looked at me and said, "Does it have the needle in it?" I said, "Needle? Of course it does", it just doesn't play very loud. So I flipped the needle holder around to show her and she told me, "There's no needle there!" I was very disappointed for a few minutes because it didn't have a needle and now we would have to find one. Then Pheobe says, "What about the other record player?" Bless her heart if the other record player didn't have about 10 or 20 needles in the holder on the side. (Which before this point I had wondered why an empty holder kind of thing was in the Victrola without figuring out what it was for.) We plucked out a needle, put it into the standing Victrola and let that record spin. Boy was it loud! Much louder than it'd been when I was running it without a needle. They could hear it downstairs quite easily.

So now the Victrola is going to go downstairs so we can play the records we found. Most of the records are from children song books from school, which is pretty awesome. Actually, and this is a very happy story for me, one of the records contains a song I have been looking for forever. You see, when I was 8 or 9, I lived in New Mexico and was taking a class (I don't recollect if it was singing or just part of my regular class.) and entered into a contest to sing a song. I remember this quite well because we had to travel about 30 minutes to an hour to get to the high school I had to sing it at. I remember the school being a huge building, I had a cold (or actually I believe I was just coming down with the flu or recovering from it) and was very intimidated. The song I had to sing was There Stands A Little Man. I still know some of the words, but not many. Anyway, for years I'd been trying to figure out where that song was from because my teacher had assigned it and it was part of a fond memory. It turns out that its actually from Hansel and Gretel, I'm not sure from when or if it was a production or not. (I still have to do some research on that.) But I found it and was quite happy to hear them sing a verse or two from the song on the record. It was exciting! (And just so you all know, I didn't win that competition, in fact I'm pretty sure I screwed up rather badly. I don't remember the singing part very well.)

I think soon I will have to record some of the music we often hear at the museum and put into one of my posts for everyone's enjoyment.

So I have discussed some of the cotton, the Victrolas, and other stuff, but now its time to get onto the shelves. This past month we have been working on exhibits. Including mine. Due to some issues with our bank card, we were delayed about two weeks on making any progress on my exhibit. But just last Friday I was there with the director and he had finished building the first half of my exhibit shelves! Which is fantastic! So now I can start putting up some of the things that are going to go into my exhibit. (Its been coming slowly together, in fact the other week we put the two radios down there and a few weeks before that they moved the Print Shop Camera down.) I can't wait! I still have to design the shelves for the other side, it will probably be very similar, but I'm not sure yet. I do that tomorrow, actually. Anyway, this post as probably gone on long enough. So I'm going to quickly list what all we've done to make improvements.

We've cleared out another room downstairs for Jessica's railroad exhibit, we're getting air conditioners sometime around August! Which is great because Friday it was 92 degrees F, inside the and that was just the first floor. The second floor was probably closer to 110 and outside was 103. Talk about sweating the pounds away. It was so hot we spent most of the day sitting around. However, we did get the first side of the library shelves cleared away, so yay! Ellen, who I mentioned in my last post, is a really hard worker. I started her on designing our brochure and she was interested in working on our Sports Room, so that is what she's going to be spending her July doing. If she survives it.

Downstairs mostly in the system/ 15,043 artifacts and shrinking.

Up to my ears in Interns!

Egads! Another post in May? Its a miracle!

Actually the real miracle is that I now have four interns under me at the museum. Can you believe it!!! 4 interns and they're all from Berry college! I'm practically jumping with joy! I don't know what I'm going to have them all do.

Amanda and Jessica have been working beautifully and we now have almost all of the artifact boxes on the 2nd floor completed. (I've only just started on the archive boxes, the library, and I'm still trying to clean the same artifacts I was cleaning two or three weeks ago. More on all that later.) They both work really fast together. Hunter, I actually interviewed for his Internship and just found out today that he'll be joining us this week! Though he won't be there on a day I am. Ellen started last Friday but because of work at the Library I couldn't make it down to Cherokee to meet her. I meet her tomorrow though, which is pretty exciting.

Things are really starting to hop at the museum. I think tomorrow both Amanda and Jessica will be ready to start on the jumble that's upstairs. We're going to clear away a corner for shelving, put artifacts away into boxes, and generally sort the whole mess so that it can be walked through. Of course, Ellen and Hunter will be working on the same task for right now. Especially because both Amanda and Jessica are currently working on exhibits.

Amanda expressed an interest in making a weaving/ cloth making/ washing/ using exhibit. I'm not totally sure what its shaped up to be yet but I'll find out tomorrow when I get her list. I'm pushing her a little fast with this exhibit because she should be leaving us at the end of June. (If I remember correctly. I really need to write all this down.)

Jessica wrote up a lovely list for me of several ideas she had for the museum, including a railroad exhibit. So we're going to let her get a start on that. Tomorrow I'll go downstairs with her and we'll discuss where she wants to put it. Then she'll be making me a list of the items she wants to put into it and making a design plan.

In the meantime, I have to work on my exhibit, for which I have yet to create a design plan. I'm going to try measuring out the exhibit cases I'll need. On top of that, we're preparing for the air-conditioning which might take months to get put it. That means I have to go through the books in our "library" which is currently the wall hiding the staff kitchen and workspace. All of the books I'm going through are ones that were donated to the library. I've been looking through them to evaluate whether they're useful or from prominent people or places in the community. For example we found a book from a town that doesn't exist anymore and told us about the history of clothing up to the 1920s. So it was a double keeper. Some of the books that were donated have been damaged in the past (water damage, pest damage, and so on.) So unfortunately we have to put those in a de-accession pile. And of course, a few aren't about Cherokee, the museum, nearby, or aren't historic resources. For example, the many college text books we have from the sixties. I had three copies of one on home-ec cooking. So those we're going to put in the de-accession pile as well.

I've also started working on the archives upstairs. This last week I found a real treasure. There's a picture of the courthouse that was burned down with the Coosa River News building in the 1880s. We have a copy of a picture from a tintype, but its not really very clear. I found the aniversary newspaper from the Coosa River News celebrating 50 years of reporting - also known as the year of 1928. The paper is not in the best shape but I managed to open it, relatively safely. There right in the middle of the section I was holding was the clearest picture of that tintype that we had ever seen. Get this. In the picture there are two or three people standing around the Coosa River News building. In ours you couldn't even tell there was a single person. And we now know that there was some kind of pavilion in front of the courthouse which could have been just about anything. Though I personally think its a telephone station type thing.  The director was really happy with me. Especially because in other sections of that paper we found different pictures which he had never seen before. Score me!

So we've started cleaning some artifacts that are downstairs because they're pretty rusty. (We're only working on the metal ones currently.) I got it started but I haven't been able to complete the first batch. Basically we rub off the rust, apply a baking soda and water paste, and then scrub that off. It works really well. We even got one of the items so clean you can see the maker's mark clearly now. Though its been eaten away a bit by the rust so its only possible to read that the company was placed in Rockford, IL. I'm hoping to get back onto that project but I've been stopped by working on my exhibit. Which tomorrow my lovely F block should be all cleared away. Yay!

Its a little hard switching from library mind to museum mind. I wish I could make it out there more than twice a week (at most.) However, all my interns are incredibly smart and hopefully resourceful so we shouldn't have to much of a problem getting this place into shape. Here's to having all of the artifacts in the system by the middle of August! With four other people helping, I don't see how we can't.

Second floor shaping up!/ 15,043 and starting to shrink.

Where did April go?

What?! I completely missed posting anything in April! Can you tell I've been busy? Well I have some exciting news for everyone reading this. I've been promoted!

If you can call it that. Its still an unpaid position, but I am now the official curator for the museum! Yay! I think. Its actually a little scary because, I don't have very much training. Everything I'm learning is from reading things, Tilden - the godsend - and grasping at things I've picked up over the various volunteer jobs I've done.

All in all though the museum is looking really good. I mentioned last time that we got permission to do Leesburg's exhibit, and a lovely $500 to supply us with necessary furnishings. Well, the director already had the space and now we're just waiting on Leesburg to give us the artifacts. It actually looks really good, we did sliding glass doors on this exhibit because the space next to it will be for the West Point stuff. (Which the loaner wants to remove occasionally so he can tour it around.)

Tomorrow I should have my first intern appearing, at the moment we have three. Jessica, Ellen, and Amanda. Amanda should show up tomorrow, and since I can't, she'll be familiarizing herself with Past Perfect. So that's some of whats been happening in the museum. Now I'm going to catch up on what I've been doing!

Cleaning, designing exhibits, working on getting computers up, and trying to figure out the basement. Oh which reminds me, I have to redo the basement map because we have one more partition space that I thought we would.

Now when I say cleaning, I don't mean just any old cleaning. I've been removing rust from some of our metal objects around the museum. This means scrubbing the artifact, putting a baking soda/water paste on them and letting it dry, and then scrubbing it again. Actually its turning out really well. I've started on the Blacksmith shop because its a prominent exhibit, and I wanna make some of those tools shine if possible. Unfortunately I just found out that on some of the wood artifacts, like the plow pieces, there is mold growing, which is actually pretty dangerous for our visitors, and us. (Its never good to breath in mold.) So I'm going to have to look into a sealant to seal off moisture from our wood artifacts.

If you wanna know why there is moisture, well, its a basement and they can get cold and damp. It happens. Anyway, the metal artifacts are starting to look pretty good, the four or five I've done, on a couple of them, I've actually unearthed maker's marks! Yay! And with, more cleaning, I think I can get a few of them to shine. So that will just make the blacksmith's shop an even more fantastic exhibit. The important thing is to remove the rust so that the artifacts stay clean and look like they actually would in the time period they were made.

So we recently received two computers from a local bank. We got one of them running, and then had to figure out how to hook it up to the printer. But the other one is just giving us all sorts of problems. At first it wouldn't read the Operating System Disk because it didn't have a DVD reader. Now it simply won't load it, it gets to a certain point and then sticks and won't budge any further. We're a bit worried its broken and may be unusable.

The other two things I'm doing are pretty simple. The basement, I mentioned, is all messed up from the partitions, so my lists don't actually have the objects in the right places. (Not that it matters since we'll all be moving them around eventually anyway but...) As for my exhibit, the director is supposed to get some people to move stuff out of the F block and then I can start figuring out exactly how I'm going to set up the exhibit. I have to talk with him about lighting still, because the lighting in the basement isn't the best, but we'll see how it goes!

First floor almost completely done/15,053 and growing.

Really Really Late Post

Hi everybody!

So here is a really really late post. There are two reasons I haven't really been writing. Firstly, now that I have a job, I've been far too busy. Secondly, not much happened at the museum until last week. So here are the things I'll talk about today. Autographed Player Piano Roll, Partition, West Point, TAG Picture, Leesburg, Ashley 5, Reel to Reel Player, and Interns.

Now, when I went into the museum Tuesday the 20th I didn't think that I would spend 30 minutes trying to unroll a player piano roll. In fact when I went in, I didn't even know we'd recieved a batch of player piano rolls. Which, side note, the best one out of the bunch was Down at the Old Water Mill which is a fantastic foxtrot with a lovely catchy beat and tune to it.

Actually I have to first backtrack to Ashley 5, as the director calls her. Ashley 5 was a young woman who was waiting for a job to open up with the State and so they placed her at the museum for a month. The director, who knew I needed help, handed her over to me. I made up a sheet so that she could inventory and measure everything in the bottom shelves of the East Wall and in the Basement. She was a very quick worker, by the end of the month she had both done which would have taken me about 4 months to finish measuring. Thanks to her, I now have all the bottom east wall shelves in the system.

Okay so back to what led up to the player piano roll. While putting in some of the items from her list into the system, I discovered that a whole group from the same donator were not in the system at all. So instead of wasting 30 minuts writing the list down, I made a form so that each new item could be put in and I'd know the date of accession. The director asked me what I was doing and when I showed him the sheet he recieved a great idea. He could use the sheets to mark down all of the new stuff that enter the museum when I'm not there. Then I'd know what new stuff I'd have to add when I'm done inventorying everything else. I really wish we'd thought this up before.

Then he told me, oh yeah. We could use this for those player piano rolls that were donated yesterday and the baby clothes. We weren't sure how good the piano rolls were so he had me go through them. Unfortunately a few of them were moldy, so we had to get rid of those. But a good amount of them were good and still playable. I showed the director the ones I thought we should save and he agreed. I was holding the Under the Double Eagle roll when the director looked into the bottom of the box. It said, Autographed Player Piano Roll. We were like really? I looked to see who wrote the music and was excited. The roll was potentially autographed by Josef Wagner! Wagner! I was so excited, I unrolled the whole thing to see if the autograph was there. Sure enough at the very end of the roll there was his signature. Unfortunately, the rolls is only worth about 5 dollars according to the internet. Since I didn't actually find a Wagner roll, I'm going to try and persuade the director to get it appraised.

The next day I went into the museum was Friday of that week. The director was really excited because a celebration for a student from the area, who was admitted into West Point went really well and ended in a donation of all of the West Point stuff to the museum. It's fantastic because it really added to the exhibit that the director already wanted to do with West Point. (Cherokee county has a long history of West Point graduates.)

That same day, while I was putting stuff into the system, the Mayor of Leesburg came in. The director, after talking with him, told me that Leesburg was one of two towns who he had yet to get to agree to putting an exhibit about the town in the museum. Leesburg voted last week and they're going to give us $500 to put together an exhibit.

Which brings me to my interns, because they'll be helping with it. We have at least two interns from Barry College that will be coming into Cherokee this summer and will be studying under me. Can you believe it? Not only that but there might even be a third student. Anyway, they'll be learning about Past Perfect, how to design and put together exhibits, and various other things about working in a museum. It'll be a lot of fun. One of the girls is really excited and already told the director that she wants to start in May. So in a little over a month, I'll have an intern helping me out. This is doubly great because it frees up some space for me to think about my own exhibit.

Most everything else has a small mention so let me wrap this up. This Tuesday, the director took me down to the basement and showed me what the builders had put up last week. We now have our basement partitioned off into sections so that we can easily build a different exhibit in each, saving one for storage. Also, for my exhibit, I found out that one of our Reel to Reel players had a reel in it. I'm going to ask my dad to help me try to fix it, because well, I want to play the reel. We changed the batteries but nothing happened, if only it'd been that simple. Also on Tuesday, a man kindly brought in a picture of the TAG railroad from around lookout mountain. Though the picture is modern, looked up the artist, its still a great picture for our collection. I really wanna do a TAG exhibit someday.

180/15,053 supposedly

Exhibition Monday: Cameras

Hello Everybody!

So, I would have posted Thursday but I was out almost all day and too exhausted by the time I got home. Its pretty cool though because not much happened on Tuesday. Friday was exciting however and I'll be telling you a little about it today and more about it on Thursday.

Today I am going to talk about cameras, and a little about phones. I mentioned in my last post that I had been making a list of what's in what upstairs. I partially did that so we could get through the artifacts quicker but I also did it to see what's up there that I can use in my exhibit. Now the main things I was looking for were, old games, cameras, telephones, and kitchen ware.

I started two weeks ago but, because of the cold and the fact that its freezing up there, delayed finishing it until Friday. Two week ago I got through the first set of shelves and was quite happy to find, besides the original box of cameras, another box of cameras. Even better, it had at 3 or 4 different flashes that belonged to a Polaroid Land Camera. (I should say one of them but I'll get to that in a bit.) It also had instructions for the Argus 75 which was fantastic but I can use it to explain loading and unloading film in cameras that use 620 film. Because, despite what the director thought, this wasn't a 35mm film camera.

Along with the cameras, I found two boxes of phones. The phones are good because I have two sitting downstairs that are waiting to go in the exhibit. The first box, which I expected, didn't have any spectacular phones. The second box, on the other hand, had one of those old stand-a-lone phones that you picked up the ear piece to and simply told the operator who you wanted to call - no dialing. Its not in the best of shape, but the box was full of dust, so hopefully with a little cleaning it'll look great in the exhibit.  If that doesn't work, I suppose I'll have to figure out how to restore it a little.

After that first day, I was pretty sure I had found all of the cameras. So on Friday, eager to find kitchenware and games, I started on the next section. I was on the second to last set of shelves in the second section when lo and behold there was another box of cameras! After a brief moment of amazement, I pulled the cameras out of the box and looked to see if any pictures were tucked away with them. There were two other Land cameras in this box and I pulled them both out. The one in the first box, was open but I couldn't figure out how to get it shut. Both of these Land cameras were shut. So what did I do?

Of course, I opened one. I was happy to see that it slid open fairly easily and that it was in good condition. I looked over the rest of the cameras and then I put them back in the box, except for the open Land. I tried to close it. I looked all over the bottom of it to see if I could get it to fold back into itself. No luck. The lesson I learned, don't go opening things if you don't know how to close them. I had to rearrange the whole box so I could fit the camera in it.

I also found in that section, a box with two newer phones in it, including an early cordless. (Which I found hilarious and interesting because I had never seen a cordless that you tucked the phone into a kind of side box to hold it.) Then I moved onto the next section.

On the second shelf, and this time I was very surprised, I found another box of cameras! I really thought that I'd done with them after three boxes. But no. This box had the greatest treasure of all, though. Well two of them at least. So let me go into the not so interesting one. This box had a film developers kit. Including, one film canister, two trays, a ton of photo paper, two deeper trays, and instructions of some sort. (I didn't get the best look at them.) With all of this stuff was, guess?

Another Land camera. I guess they were popular in Cherokee. It also held a Argus Cintra, which was the camera the director was thinking of. I was playing with it, like normal, and I hit the button to take a picture, and it worked beautifully. So beautifully that I decided to try it again and I hit the lever to move the film forward. It worked so well that, instead of hitting the button again I debated an idea in my head. I just bet this camera has film in it, I thought to myself. So I took the tape off of the sides, popped open the back and closed it as fast as I could! Sure enough, there was a roll of film that hadn't been removed. I left the camera where it was, hoping I hadn't exposed the film badly, since the light was on. I finished my list on the third section, grabbed the camera and practically ran down the stairs.

I talked to the director and showed him the camera and told him about the film. Since we knew it had to be taken out in the dark he said I could take the camera home. However, I am not very good at waiting around and not fiddling with stuff. (As evinced by the now open Land camera.) So I popped upstairs, left the light off, made sure I was rolling the film the correct way, and pulled the film out of the camera. I handed it to the director and he asked if I thought we should have a lottery to guess what's on the pictures.

Thinking about that, we looked in the system to see who had donated the camera. We all thought it would be an individual but we were surprised to see that it was actually the Service Extension who had donated it. (I, being mainly from a city, had to ask what that was, so I'll tell you here.) Pretty much the Service Extension kept an eye on the farmland around the area and assisted farmers and so on and so forth. The director, who is going to get the pictures developed - if I didn't mess it up with that brief second of light, thinks that we're going to find mostly cotton in the pictures. Either way it'll be interesting to see them, if we can.

I won't find out until Wednesday, when I go back to the museum again. If even one blurry picture is saved, you can bet I'll put it in the exhibit.

This Tuesday I have an interview at the library, which is why I'm going Wednesday. Here's hoping I get the job. You all have a wonderful week!

Tune in for Thursday's update and hear about Radios!

Doings

Hello faithful readers!

I say that because if you're still reading this, you are definitely faithful. Sorry for the very long hiatus. My dog does indeed have cancer and we'll be putting her down tomorrow. But enough about that. I'm here to catch you all up on the doings at the museum.

 On the 20th of January we had a book signing at the museum! I heard it went very well, I didn't go that Friday because Saturday I went with my friend. :) Anyway, the book signing was for a book being written by George Wallace Jr. about his father and his family life. Since, I am not from Alabama, I don't know much about Governor George Wallace. I can say that everyone thought the book signing went very well, and according to the director they quickly ran out of books. One of the girls told me that it was interesting, but Mr. Wallace left out anything that could have been controversial. Either way it was a good event that got us some publicity.

So, the visit with my friend on the 21st went really well. Hopefully, when we're both not quite so busy, we'll be able to set up a schedule where we both go out to Cherokee at least once a month. Having someone else to work with me is a big help. We got so much done! In fact, I'm thinking of leaving the inventorying of upstairs to her. After, I go through a quick look through the boxes to see what is artifacts and what is archival material, as well as if there is anything else I can use for the exhibit.

Now to get into what we found:

Isn't this dress lovely? This is the flappers dress that I mentioned which was worn from the late 1930s until the 1950s. It was worn by Bonnie Brasfield who was a dancer, a singer, and daughter of Lawrence Brasfield. If you haven't heard of Lawrence by that name you may have heard of Boob Brasfield - his stage name, or Uncle Cyp and Aunt Sap - the characters he and his wife played on the Red Foley Show. If you haven't heard of him at all, then you may have heard of his brother Rod Brasfield, who did skits with Minnie Pearl on the Opry Radio Show.

If you'd like to see one of his brother's skits you can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xkn6yqACcWs&feature=player_embedded#!

I couldn't find anything from when Bonnie or her father and mother performed but if you find anything please comment and tell me!

We also found this gorgeous dress here which was handmade in the late 1800s. The detail on the dress was wonderful and we were both very happy to have found it in such good condition.













One of the other great things we found was a World War II Army Air Force jacket.

The patch on the picture below led me to suspect that it may have been an early Airborne patch. When I returned home I immediately looked it up and found out that it is the insignia for an Airborne Engineer Unit. From this little patch I am able to gather that Wellman, the name written in the jacket, was an Airborne Engineer and was therefore part of the support services. Pretty cool right?

It makes it a lot easier now that I'll have someone who can help me inventory. The last two Tuesdays I've gone to the museum I've been able to focus on putting information into the database and inventorying the first floor. Hopefully things keep moving this quickly. Even if my friend can't continue going with me I should be okay because the Director told me last Tuesday that I may have a high school student volunteer who can help me out. (To which I happily thought of trying to twist another mind to the wonder of public history.) Also this summer I'll probably have two helpers from a college in Rome who are going to intern at the museum! Yay! For both the supervisory experience, and the help. Cause I need it.

So I mentioned that I'm going through the boxes upstairs to mark off which ones are artifacts and which are mostly archival. I'm doing that so we can get through the artifacts quicker, and then can start on the archival and photo material after because the artifacts are vastly more important at this point in time. Anyway, its really good that I'm doing that because I was upstairs Tuesday and I found another box of cameras. Go figure! Shame on me for even bothering to think there would only be one.

Anyway, in the box was the card for the old Argus 75 that I had found in the first box. It said just the most beautiful thing on it too. It said that the camera should still be working! Yay! Because I was planning on taking pictures with a Polaroid, I'm donating to the museum, and a Konica, also being donated. (Both are 80s era and are the last group I need to round off the non digital cameras.) What I found further in the box was even better. The instructions to load it! The director, who I mentioned the box and the card to, remembers having one when he was younger and he thinks its a 35mm film! Which is really easy to get your hands on! So I'll check on that for sure next Tuesday.

What do you all think of having pictures taken of the various sites around the county? Wouldn't that be really good to put in the exhibit. I thought the kids might like to see both images from a non digital format, and a digital format. Kids today probably don't really know about cameras that even take film. Though, they've probably seen pictures from film cameras but, they might not link the two together.

Oh and I also discovered the boxes of telephones upstairs too, which is fantastic!

That's it for tonight. See you next Thursday!

134/Too many pages left to fill

Extended Hiatus

I know I was supposed to write a blog post today to make up for about two weeks worth of backlogged experience. However, this morning I found out my oldest dog might have bone cancer. Its probably spread to her lungs and even though its in the early stages she will most likely have to be put down. We lost our 14 year old German Shepard last October so I'm a little raw about her death and now we will be losing another dog. So, honestly I'm not in the mood to write today and I don't know if I'll be in the mood to write by Thursday.

What I'll tell you right now is my friend did go with me on Saturday, like planned. She had a blast so you can expect to hear more about her in the future. The next time I do write you'll get to hear about George Wallace Junior, a 1930s-1950s flapper dress we found that was used on stage for that time period, found teapots that weren't very interesting, a turn of the 20th century nutcracker, and several other things.

Have a good week.

Exhibition Mondays

So,

I've decided that instead of writing about random stuff on Monday, I will instead write about the Exhibit I'm building. That way my inventorying posts don't get to be quite so long as the last one. Though, that was mostly about car trouble than the exhibit. Also. I really suck at writing random stuff that doesn't relate to the museum.

Last Thursday I wrote that I was going to the museum with a friend on Saturday. Unfortunately, my friend cancelled Friday night so I went to the museum alone on Saturday. It was a really busy day too! That flintknapper was there but because I was so focused on upstairs I actually never saw his demonstration. : (

However! Thanks to my excitement about playing upstairs I did find those cameras I was looking for! As well as a bunch of other stuff I can possibly use. I won't go too into the inventorying bit, but I will list off what I found. I found: over 20 barbies and 8 kens, some kitchen equipment, and a couple of old toys. Not to mention the cameras.

These cameras are fantastic too. We have some old box cameras. A Brownie, a Brownie Junior, a Kewpie. There were at least two polaroids, a box of kodak film, and a nice Argus 75. So pretty much, its a good range of age for the cameras and I'll be able to exhibit the progression of technology nicely. But even cooler than the cameras was the picture that was taped to the Kewpie.

The picture taped to the Kewpie was a picture taken in 1915 of Mr. Dewey Parker. His daughter, in her 90s, was a prominent figure of a nearby town ( I think Ceder Bluff but I may be wrong) because her husband used to own the bank. Until it crashed at least. Anyway. I showed the Director the picture and he saw the name Dewey Parker and got to thinking.

In the Cherokee County Alabama: A Pictorial History, there is a picture of the man who discovered the complete piece of pig iron that is displayed in the museum. That man, is Dewey Parker. Now I was excited to see the picture because we know it was taken with the Kewpie because someone very nicely wrote it on the back of the picture. Now I have to tie in the pig iron with my exhibit. Luckily that should be just an easy bit of added information tacked onto whatever I'll write about the camera and the picture.

It was pretty cool to see the picture of Mr. Parker at 17 and the one taken much later when he was an elderly gentleman.

Judging by what I've found in the boxes upstairs so far, I've decided to focus on inventorying all of the boxes with artifacts in them. (Quite a few have books and papers stored in them and I will most likely leave those till I'm ready to deal with the archive and library materials.)

So here's a little side note on something interesting I found in one of the boxes. In two weeks the museum will be holding a book signing for the son of Governor (?) Wallace. I actually don't know much about Wallace or any Alabama history because I spent a majority of my childhood in or around Texas. According to the director though, Wallace was shot sometime during his time in office.

Anyway, there's an old Chevy truck downstairs with a Wallace sticker on it and the director asked me if I would do some research on it. (I'll get to that in a bit) Well. I said sure and I went upstairs to inventory some more boxes. The last box of the day, which I still haven't finished inventorying, gave me a pleasant surprise. Inside the box was a record from, my guess, a speech of Wallace's. As well as, three beautiful pictures of Wallace campaigning in Centre, right by the museum! The director was really happy to see those three pictures.Since they were stored in the box, he didn't even know we had them.

Before I left that afternoon, I took the liberty of looking up the truck in Past Perfect to see if there was any information on it. The only information I got was who it had belonged to. Originally, I didn't quite know what information the director wanted. After writing this, however, I have a better idea. You see, like me, the director is not from Alabama. So he doesn't really know much about Wallace either. So I'm probably going to research information on the truck, as well as information on Wallace and then hand it to the director, hopefully by Saturday.

Well that's it for this Exhibition Monday. Bis Später!

A week of troubles

Hello everybody,

So I didn't post last week. I had some serious car trouble. Very serious. You see, I "used" to drive a 94' Jeep Grand Cherokee. It was a pretty good car. I had it for a little over two years. It made it up to Kentucky and it made it back (of course it only made it back from Kentucky because my dad switched cars with me while I was up there.) Its broken down a couple of times, but normally cause I was stupid or because it was old.

Well, needless to say. I'd been waiting. I had a feeling it was going to cop out on me sometime soon. So when I left Cherokee county last Tuesday I was slightly concerned when for just one second, the Transmission didn't shift gears and dragged. However, it only did it once. So I thought, "Oh. I probably didn't warm up the engine long enough." So last Thursday, the day I was supposed to write my blog post, I was going to go out with my mom to do some Antiquing about 30 minutes away. Luckily, I had to run a few errands.

As I left the gas station to go to the post office. My car started doing that dragging thing. I told my mom, who was naturally concerned, that it just needed to warm up. It did it Tuesday.  I left her in the car with the engine running as I ducked into the post office to drop off a package. Oh good lord, I had just barely made it out of the parking lot when the darn thing's transmission started messing up again. I wasn't sure if we would make it home. Especially since the only way home, from the post office, is using the freeway, and my car wouldn't go above 35! No matter how hard I pressed down on the gas it stayed stuck in first gear. Luckily, I know the back way home along a little mountain road. So I got us home.

We didn't go antiquing. Which is good. See, I told my dad I was buying a new car. I couldn't use the jeep anymore. When he got home from work he checked out the car and decided that was probably a good idea. We decided to take it to the shop on Monday, which is why on Monday you also didn't get a post I was planning on writing. Then we would go car shopping over the weekend. Didn't find a car over the weekend so we decided we'd hit a few dealerships further away to find a used car. My dad drove my car to his work so he could drive it to the shop. He got it into a parking space and it quit! Wouldn't even bother going into first gear anymore. We had the shop tow the car.

Monday afternoon we went to Decatur to buy a car. I got the first one I was interested in. A 1995 (an upgrade :D) Infiniti J30. Which is a nice car, by the way. I got it for 3000 because I don't let salesmen push me around and well, that was almost all the money I had in savings. (Yeah, still jobless.) But the important thing is I have a working car. It, of course, has an idling issue and Tuesday I found out that the lock can get stuck. I'll work on those as soon as I get a job.

Now for the museum stuff! Actually, I have something very exciting to report. First, I finally got a friend to come help me out this Saturday! Yay! Even better, this Saturday they're having a guy come in to show visitors how to flintknapp. So that'll be pretty cool. It'll be the busiest day I've ever seen.

Guess what's even better though. No really. Guess.


Okay, I'll tell you. I finally figured out what I'm doing for that exhibit I'm designing. (Mentioned in last post.) And! The director approved my idea! So, this Tuesday I was looking for things to put in the exhibit. Cause, you can't have an exhibit without having artifacts. Wanna know what the exhibit's about?

A history of objects. (Oh man, just saying that makes me realize I have to come up with a title for it!) Well here's what its basically about. We're going to take everyday items. Like phones, toys, games, cameras, and household or kitchen items. (Probably household) Can any of you think up a good title for an exhibit comparing items used from the 1900s to now?

This is what I have to do to prepare for the exhibit. I have to: come up with the title, make a list of the artifacts I'm going to use, locate the artifacts that are in the museum, make a list of the artifacts I need to get a hold of, decide where to put the exhibit, decide how the exhibit is going to look, write up all of the information that will go in the exhibit, and of course put the whole exhibit together. All of this will have to be approved by the director. It gives me a headache just thinking about it.

Well. I've got a good idea of what artifacts I'm going to use. Except for the household items. I found board games I can use, a spinning top from the 1940s, and tons of old toys. The phones, except one, are at the director's house waiting to be put in the system. I know where the cameras are, generally. I just have to actually find them. The cameras are the frustrating part. See, I found out Tuesday that all... wait. I have to go back further.

Before the museum board hired the director (remember I just call him that, its not his actual title and he's not a museum trained person) the museum was run by a man who was also not trained, then after he died it was run by a few volunteers. The museum has these shelves mounted along both the east and west walls. I say shelves but today there are really only two left with shelves on them. The frames have been turned into wonderful exhibits. Each one of these frames had about 5 or 6 shelves on them. Each one of these shelves was crammed with no rhyme or reason. The director told me, it used to be so bad that the items actually reached up to the ceiling. Its a pretty high ceiling. Sometime in the last two years, all of the stuff cramming those shelves were boxed up and put upstairs. Or, not boxed up and put downstairs. The cameras were on one of those shelves. The cameras are in a box upstairs on a new shelf system. Each range upstairs, and I can call it that because it is the length of a single library range at New Mexico State University, has five or six sections with about 5 or 6 shelves on each section. Each shelf has two to three boxes. The ones with less than three have an artifact placed on the shelf as well. There are three of these ranges. In each box is anywhere from 2 to 20 artifacts.

I know this because I decided, since I'm looking for the cameras I might as well inventory the boxes. Tuesday I pulled down a box that had two bed pans in it, most definitely used before. The next box I opened had china from 5 different companies! Plus, a stamp holder, a tape dispenser, an unknown item, and two pieces of fleece cloth. When I asked the director if the cloth maybe had been used to protect the china, he told me nothing had been packed well. They only packed those boxes as fast as they could to clear space, so they're probably in the system. What! The fleece pieces were about the size of a handkerchief. Why in the world would you have that in a museum without any information attached to it! Gah!

Inventorying is just so much fun! < said in a sweet falsetto tone. Actually, it is. Especially because I like getting frustrated. And you really don't know what you're going to find. Which takes me to the last bit of writing of the day. So Tuesday I was entering stuff into the system. (I have a huge list that's built up and I don't want to risk losing the paper and having to redo things.) I was looking up items I knew nothing about, like this ashtray on shelf 37. Well, I went to look at it. I had a picture of it, but it was only of the front. So I turned it around and there was a maker's mark on the back. I typed that into google and came up with what it actually was.

That wasn't an ashtray! It was a porringer bowl that was eventually used as an ashtray! Don't know what a porringer bowl is? Well neither did I. A porringer bowl, which has been used since the medieval ages, is a bowl that you eat porridge or gruel out of. I got really excited. Is it pewter? Because the company on the back made pewter bowls in the 20s and that would be cool. Alas, fate is cruel. It was not pewter. I did some research, to make sure it wasn't a reproduction. You never know, also the director wanted to know its value in case we needed to lock it away. The pewter bowls from Stede (the company) have the handle soldered on. The later aluminum reproductions, probably made in the 60s (I was unclear on that), have the handle cast on. Another cool thing I learned. Pewter bends super easy. Like, really really easy. This thing, didn't bend at all. And when I looked at the handle, sure enough, it had been cast on. So we have the reproduction aluminum bowl. Which, neat fact, the aluminum bowls were used as ashtrays and various other items. Because really, who eats porridge nowadays? Not many people, that's for sure.

That's it for this Thursday. Look forward to a Manageable Monday this coming week.

84/More Thousands than I thought.