LIVING HISTORY? IT WORKS FOR ME

Living history is what you see when people put on costumes and churn butter.

At least that’s what comes to mind for most people.

It’s a farm, a museum, a town.

History is one thing; living it another.

Which one is right for you? I have the right answer:

All of them and everyplace in between.

It’s good to experience the past the way it was, to break a sweat along the way.

Who likes to pretend air conditioning doesn’t exist?

Today we complain about the heat, complain about the cold, the wet, the dry.

It’s too much of this, too much of that, and not enough of anything that matters.

Matters to you. Not enough of anything that matters to you.

That’s the job of living history, making it matter to you. 

That’s their job. You might feel uncomfortable, awkward, out of place.

If you do, and also learn something useful, living history is working.

Your Job Is Participating

This is a list of living history spots in Oregon.

Wiki has the same list for every state, though some look to be lacking.

Idaho isn’t listed, but rest stops along I-80 are a living history of the Oregon Trail complete with wagon ruts.

If you wonder why I-5 doesn’t have the same features, ask a history guy.

Just don’t ask about their historical resume.

If you do, and it’s some old guy, they might say things that seem too far fetched, way out there.

They might say they were an active duty Army soldier in 1976 during the bicentennial, standing in the crowd at Liberty Hall in Philadelphia listening to the President of the United States give his big speech.

(It was a hot day in the city.)

Or they might say they had lunch in Thomas Jefferson’s favorite tavern in Virginia.

If measurements are correct, and Tom really was 6′ 2″, the staff of the living history tavern must have a good laugh when people the same height hit their head walking in the front door.

(I’m six two and a half and nearly knocked myself out.)

 

If you love the idea of farm life, a Civil War fan, or a student of WWII, you’ll find more living history than you know what to do with.

Those are big topics with many interpretations.

Fans of Oregon history have the Oregon Historical Society and the Oregon History Museum to guide them.

 

Administrative History Leaves A Mark On The Crew

This was my crew, my trusted museum crew I called on for collecting museum artifacts from important donors.

This was in SE Portland packing up the details of a special airplane pilot.

White coats and ties were the dress code, though not everyone complied.

Who wouldn’t want to hand over their treasures to these characters? (Hey Dale, Hey Charles, Hey Greg)

We had a mentor back then who knew how to inspire and educate people to the importance or safe-guarding their treasures.

But times changed, people added years, and a breath of fresh air decided that after thirty-five years it was time to change the guard.

Out with the old boss, in with the new.

Except the new boss lacked an important part of leadership, namely inspiring and educating.

Hiring an unqualified man for a very qualified job did no favors for anyone.

The March 24, 1991 Sunday Oregonian magazine ‘NORTHWEST’  cover said,

 

“-  – thought he had it wired . . . he wanted to shake up the place. He did. When he quit this month, he left an organization riddled with gossip, recriminations, and resignations.”

 

The sassy story is inside, but I can’t find a link.

Before the shake up, the quitting, the resignations, and recriminations, there was a party at the Bybee-Howell House on Sauvies Island.

A good-bye party on the back porch, the same porch where my band played gospel songs during Wintering-In.

The new guy sat in a chair like he was waiting for the warden to throw the switch.

This chair:

I’d been about eight years in the museum at the time and was as awkward as usual in social situations.

The old boss spoke in a deep cadence which I’d somehow mastered where others had failed.

I could mimic his voice so well that I’d prank-call work buddies and they’d think it was him.

“ThaaAAaank you.”

So I convinced the old boss it would be funny if everyone spoke in his voice. I pitched him in his voice, part Jack Benny, part Douglas MacArther:

 

“Wellll. How about, if we allll work together, in one voice.”

 

The new guy sat in the famous Elk Chair in a cap and gown while men and women carried on in costume and weird voices.

No big deal, you say?

This was a forty-two year old stranger out in the middle of nowhere in the dark with the “upper crust”, people who had Town and Country Magazine “gracing their tables,” made fun of his lack of insider knowledge.

Did he know he was surrounded by west hills mansion living old money and new money beside big country living monied farmers and ranchers with disdain for any place with more than two stop lights?

“HO ho ho, OH no.”

The poor guy never recovered even after two years and Oregon lost more than it should have.

 

Career Stepping Stone On Local History

One itinerant museum worker said the typical career lasts five years in any particular museum.

You come in and bring the new, the different, the energy and ideas to move a museum into the future.

In two years you burn out then spend the next three cultivating letters of recommendation for the next heroic job while writing heroic letters of recommendation for the network of fellow itinerant curators you meet at state and local history conventions.

It’s a lifestyle of what?

When I joined the museum I had recently returned from living in NYC.

I wanted to do work that could only be done in Oregon. Call me idealistic.

But I’d already worked in a saw mill and a fish packing dock. What else was there?

Call me short-sighted.

When a job for a museum guard came up, a temp job with a six month run, I signed up.

One thing led to another for the next twenty years, along with the whole point of museums and museum work.

Oregon history isn’t specific to just Oregon, but Oregon history at the Oregon Historical Society felt like national history at the Smithsonian, art history at the Louvre.

Maybe it was so special because of the time in my life? Maybe.

I met my future wife and got married during my time there, welcomed my first baby, bought a house, then my second baby.

The older staff had kids my age, others had started their families. I’m wasn’t alone in feeling the kindness of the company.

It was an Oregon time of being the best Oregonian I’d ever be.

 

While the young pros see museum collections as a necessary evil on their way to the director’s chair, others see them as their raison d’être.

Nothing less than my ‘reason for being’ would have gotten me up in the middle of the night to answer the call for a museum robbery.

There I was on NW 14th and Everett on the second floor, prowling around with cops after some punk-ass group broke into the building, defeated the interior fence and security, clipped the locks on the weapons vault and set up a crossfire with the WWII bipod machine guns.

And pocketed historic handguns.

Only in Oregon; only for the Oregon Historical Society:

 

The society’s museum cares for an estimated 85,000 artifacts, ranging in size from political campaign buttons to a steam-powered logging locomotive.

The Davies Family Research Library holds more than 35,000 books and pamphlets, 3.5 million photographic images, 30,000 maps, 8.5 million feet of film and video, 16,000 rolls of microfilm, 1,000 periodical titles, 12,000 lineal shelf feet of manuscript materials, and oral history interviews with more than 6,000 Oregonians.

The society’s collections are without doubt the largest and most comprehensive on the globe supporting research on Oregon history.

 

Thinking about an appropriate tattoo for Oregon history.

Something for the calf?