Tag Archives: Nostalgia

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Please Don’t Touch the Displays

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Today, officials at NASA will announce which three American museums will receive the decommissioned space shuttles Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour. NASA is also giving away the shuttle prototype Enterprise, which is a test craft that never left the atmosphere so technically it’s a Thin Air Shuttle.

Museum exhibit looking for a place to land

If you run a museum that features things that fly, getting one of these babies would be a real coup. It would also bring a hefty financial obligation, since the cost of preparing a shuttle for display and getting it to your location is a cool 28.8 million dollars.

The people of Dayton, Ohio are excited because their town is in the running. The National Museum of the United States Air Force is at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, ten miles northeast of the city. Dayton has been actively campaigning for the honor and people there will be terribly disappointed if they’re passed over, though who hasn’t been passed over by the shuttle at one time or another?

At the Museum of Flight in Seattle, they’ve already started building a place to house the orbiter they’ve not been given yet, which is either seat-of-the-pants audacious in the best tradition of barnstormers and test pilots, or flat-out foolhardy.

Other candidates include the Johnson Space Center, Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and New York City’s Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. Some of the contenders are not making a big promotional deal out their entry, possibly because they realize their chances of success are slim and nobody wants to be tagged as a “loser” in the museum world.

I have no such concern about my bid to bring a shuttle to the empty parking slot in my garage. Why, you ask? Building a suitable display for the only retired Space Shuttle on my street would keep me busy, for one thing. And when I was done I’d have a great central attraction to compliment the rest of my personal museum. The other day I went downstairs to retrieve something I can’t even remember the name of and was amazed at the range and scope of the things I have amassed, so I must be building a museum. What else could it be? Though I admit the collection is a bit unfocused.

I’m calling it the Museum of Invisible Objects because it is comprised of things I wanted to have out of my sight as soon as possible, which is what led directly to their installation in the basement galleries.

The largest expense in setting up my museum (after the 28.8 million for shuttle cleaning and delivery) would be the cost of building an escalator so visitors could be whisked from the garage directly into the Hall of Half-Read Books, where both hardback and paperback copies of classic stories and once new groundbreaking fiction are on display. There’s also a non-fiction area, where detailed explorations of things I once thought I wanted to know are carefully arranged in the order I abandoned them.

From there, it’s a short walk to the Obsolete Technology Collection, which includes a walk down Partly Functioning Inkjet Printer Alley, the amazing Inadequate Television Display and an amusing assortment of cassettes, 8 track tapes, LP’s, VHS tapes and laser discs I’m calling the Defunct Format Farm.

We’ll soften the lighting as people transition into the Sentimental Attachment Section where they can view the Enshrined Cute Baby Clothes and walk down the Boulevard of Broken Toys.

Then it’s directly to Ambition Row where they can see the Too-Scary-To-Use Table Saw and the Only-Tried-It-Once Power Washer.

As the tired but happy visitors move towards the exit they’ll pass through the wistful halls of the Period Furniture Farm, where they’ll have a chance to marvel at the things that used to be used to be in the main living area of this house, and in the homes of a number of my relatives.

And because it’s my basement, just before the stairs to the street there will be a whimsical display of bug carcasses under the heading, “Catalog of Things The Spiders Have Eaten”.

Late addition:

That Guy In The Hat sent in this item from his collection as a way to show us that, unlike me, he doesn’t just accumulate junk. Nice. Thanks, TGITH.

What’s on display in your personal museum?

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Time Traveler

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I guess it’s ’70’s week. For some strange reason, I keep going back there.
Brain tumor, perhaps?

In the mid 70’s I was in college, getting a Bachelor’s in Radio – TV. Yes, you could get a degree in that back then. We weren’t all at the disco, some of us were engaged in serious and weighty academic pursuits. What can I say? Radio – TV was my main area of interest.

Yesterday I made the terrible mistake of picking up one of my college textbooks from 1974. I didn’t take the time to read it back then, so why start now? It was a state-of-the-art Broadcasting 101 tome called “Radio and Television – Fourth Edition”, and here’s what it said in the “careers” section about securing the coveted job of announcer:

Announcing in radio is almost entirely a male occupation. Very few women staff announcers are employed, although there are a substantial number of women commentators who handle homemaking programs. Explanations ranging from “custom” to “overpatronizing style” of delivery are given for the scarcity of staff announcing positions for women in radio. The irregular hours of work and the necessity for operating technical equipment are other important reasons.

It is often possible for announcers to move into management, production, or sales positions, instead of into specialized performing work, following the beak-in period. Women in secretarial positions, traffic, or continuity, may be pressed in to service in small stations as occasional commercial announcers or demonstrators or may be asked to handle women’s or children’s programs. If they give evidence of proficiency in these assignments they may transfer to staff positions in larger stations. Women who work in non talent jobs in large stations and networks seldom have opportunities to move over into programming.

This depressing scenario is made more bleak by the knowledge that this was, in fact, the world as it existed for professional broadcasters in the early ’70’s, so our teachers weren’t lying to us, but what ridiculous stuff to have to tell people with a straight face. .

Clearly, my female classmates didn’t buy it – look how the world of broadcasting has changed. If you could be transported instantly from 1974 to 2011 the differences are so stark you might think you had landed on a different planet. We are all time travelers, I guess, it’s just that we’re traveling very slowly.

But when I look at this old textbook, I realize that this kind of thing makes up a large chunk of what I learned in school. Virtually all of it is out of date. No wonder my degree is worthless!

Is what you learned in school still true today?

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Early Exit, Lasting Impression

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Today is Jim Croce’s birthday. He would have turned 68, had he not died in a plane crash at the age of 30. His most famous songs are “Bad Bad Leroy Brown” and “Time in a Bottle” – both of them were hits and are still heard occasionally today.

There are others that are not quite as famous, including this nice You Tube video version of “New York’s Not My Home”.

Croce is another in what seems to be a long line of musicians who perished in airplane crashes. He and his guitar accompanist Maury Muehleisen and four others died when an air taxi taking them from Nachitoches, Louisiana to Dallas, Texas hit a pecan tree past the end of the runway. The weather conditions weren’t extreme or threatening. The NTSB report said the pilot had severe coronary artery disease and had run part of the way from his motel to the airport. On such mundane things tragedies pivot.

It’s hard to say if we’d be thinking about Jim Croce today had he not died so young, in 1973. We are often more impressed with musicians who live a short life of unrealized potential than we are with those who are blessed with a long life full of false starts and wrong turns. After all, the disco era was just beginning. There were plenty of chances throughout the ’70’s for everyone to make tasteless mistakes.

Name your favorite 1970’s cultural touchstone.