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.
