The Blast
July 29, 2016
RSVP 702 794 5151
linda.swancy@natm-nv.org
Want something a bit different? – like a couple of nights in a “Las Vegas Hotel close to the Strip”?
You have the chance – so come join us for an fun
“off-world” movie night at the Museum,
with a chance to win the RAFFLE!!
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Curator’s Corner with Natalie Luvera,
Assistant Curator
Natalie Luvera
I have been working on entering all of our loaned artifacts in to Pastperfect, our collections and records program. At the moment, that is 149 objects spanning many loans from different institutions like NSTec, the Smithsonian, LANL, NAM, and the Nevada State Museum. Before each of these artifacts can be entered in to the system, they need to be cleaned, photographed, and researched. Some of these may not have been cleaned since they were put on display in 2005, and some of the records of these objects are missing or incomplete. We are getting closer though, there are only a handful more loans before they are all entered in to the system.
Geiger Counter display at the National Atomic Testing Museum
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National Order of The Legion of Honor
The DRI auditorium recently hosted the presentation of the French equivalent of the Medal of Honor to American World War Two veteran Robert W. Stava. The award is presented each year by the French government and is the highest honor France bestows on its citizens and foreign nationals.
Picture credit, French Council Eric Auger and Robert W. Stava.
I was honored to speak to the gathering and explain the importance of the National Atomic Testing Museum and our projects. We all give our great appreciation to Las Vegas veteran Robert Stava for his service on the beaches of Normandy, to this and allied nations. Thank you to Bob Reed for organizing this gathering and helping honor the men and women who have served.
Master Interpretive Plan First Site Visit Report
We have just received our first site visit analysis from Andrew Merriell and Associates. It is only a first step in many toward better evaluating who we are and where we want to go. This is a critical time for the Museum as we begin work on the new Master Interpretive Plan.
My personal interpretation of our first site evaluation is as follows: Many people who tour the National Atomic Testing Museum leave with a good impression of the general events surrounding nuclear testing. Others glean some useful associated stories from our innovative use of time-lines. One noted task our Museum does well is providing a good overall “experience”. That experience is appreciated by a diverse audience.
As someone who has managed four museums in four different areas of the country, what I am most struck by is the uniqueness of our Museum. We are not a conventional gallery space where visitors spread out and look at areas independently. We instead provide a viewing experience as opposed to a space to be viewed.
At the NATM we tell a story very much associated with a time-line of history and walking through our Museum is to me similar to walking through a tunnel of time. Having had the opportunity to tour another very successful museum in Las Vegas, the Mob Museum, I noted they have a similar experience in that visitors are channeled along a path from one floor to another in a viewing experience that is equally unique and well received.
Andrew Meriell during his visit to the National Atomic TestingMuseum
I thus feel the unique design and layout of our Museum is a tremendous strength given that we are in an area that heavily relies on serving an internationally diverse audience. Our audience, both out-of-town and local visitors, expect a certain entertainment factor as well as an educational experience. Unlike many other areas of the country we must, even as a museum, be competitive with a whole host of entertainment venues. Serving a community that hosts forty-two million visitors a year, we are blessed with many prospective visitors who patronize hotels, shops and restaurants in our immediate location. We want to offer those people an educational as well as an entertaining experience. The two are not contradictory and the “Best-Practices” today in the museum field stress the usefulness of an “entertainment factor” in portraying a story and also as a valuable tool in educating a wide and diverse audience.
We are also unique in that we strive to run the Museum as a business so as to maximize our ability to carry out our mission of education. While our mission is important to us we do not always have the luxury of focusing solely on that alone. Unique programming and exhibits that do not always directly relate to the mission of the museum should also be valued because they help pay the bills and maintain some of the exceptional staff we have.
I think that should be repeated for emphasis. Unique programming and exhibits that do not always directly relate to the mission of the museum should also be valued because they help pay the bills and maintain some of the exceptional staff we have.
Over the past thirty years I have seen a lot of fine museums with great adherence to high ideals and a sincere desire to tell a particular story but with an equal passion for inflexibility to innovation. Sadly, most of those museums failed. The National Atomic Testing Museum is too important to fail, and it will grow and prosper because we are doing important evaluations now.
I have been in the situation before, as many museum professionals have, where a museum gets committed to privilege as opposed to access and it is a disastrous experience. The National Atomic Testing Museum is so refreshing and relevant because it has a passionate staff and board as well as stake holders who are working hard to tell an important story and are open to the best way to do that and reach as great an audience as possible. No one here is afraid to think outside the box and be innovative. Our marketing director like our education director are doing outstanding jobs! We value consensus here and the extensive life and work experience of our stake holders. That is a formula in itself for success.
What we do and how we do it is thus largely the nature of where we are and who we serve. So we can be proud. However, the reason we are looking ahead is to improve. We also want to serve our local community better, and we do already host many school groups. Our outreach programs are numerous and of high quality. All Master Plan studies to date have agreed our programming is exceptionally strong. Improving on all those areas is of course still critical. We average an attendance of over one hundred people a day, but we need to triple that.
There are many areas in need of updates and improvements. This is what our Master Interpretive Plan will deal with.
One area in particular needs improvement and consideration. This concerns the fact that many of our visitors do not understand clearly enough the “why”. Our displays deal with nuclear testing as part of our nation’s history, but we do not really explain the why. I find even highly educated people ask me on tours why any further development was needed after the atomic bomb was tested in 1945. They sincerely inquire why the nuclear bomb would ever need to be tested again once the theory proved valid. It is not a dumb question. No question asked to us is invalid. If even one of our visitors does not understand something, it is important. It is why we are here.
The answer to that question of course involves a lot of related history as well as a perspective. When people tour the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum they instinctively understand why other aircraft came after the Wright Flier. The need for the progression of technology is obvious. Nuclear weapons however are not as familiar a story.
This Master Plan Study is timely because we need to put things into perspective for our patrons. We are seeing so many visitors from a new generation. Myself, I grew up among a generation who fought in World War Two and lived through the Cold War years. I recall hearing so many stories as a child from my father and his many friends who fought in Europe and the Pacific and waited to the post-war years to build lives and careers which they would have done much earlier if not for the Second World War. For them the time period of the Cold War encompassed the life they had to live in. By the time the Soviet Union broke apart I was a grown adult, and many of the people I admired from a generation earlier had passed on. Today, however, so many of our younger visitors have only vague concepts of any history predating the fall of the Berlin Wall. They have a fair idea of the history of World War Two and the Bomb, but it gets pretty fuzzy for them after that. On the other hand our many foreign visitors have a much better liberal-arts education and are more versed in history, and for that reason they want even more information on the cultural repercussions of the nuclear age. Our small pop-culture exhibit absolutely fascinates them.
We need to appreciate and respond to generational progression. Multigenerational programming and exhibits are critical. Doing so will help in many areas of the Museum’s growth including membership!!!
As our new Master Interpretive Plan takes shape, it appears to be a consensus that we need to expand on and define our mission to cover some more detailed aspects of history in general. In particular, focus on the Cold War and veterans’ contributions into winning the peace is vital. So many of our contributors and founders literally did win the peace of the Cold War via nuclear deterrence through the many desperate years of tension.
By expanding our mission scope our programming will benefit as well. Programming can also exploit lessons in science and engineering which accentuate the backdrop to the exhibits we display in this Museum. A greater focus on science and engineering will also help us with funding sources.
Science and engineering will be useful disciplines to stress in the new exhibits that will detail current projects taking place at today’s Nevada National Security Site. Andy Merriell expressed to me the science was somewhat overwhelming; however, if we again explain the why of it, we can make it transparent. Nuclear security, stockpile stewardship, threat assessment, emergency response and countering nuclear proliferation are obvious 21st Century goals.
The whole story is still a big one and the heydays of the original Test Site will always be a central focus. Telling that overall story, however, has a beginning we do not define very well as yet. We like to jump to the middle or ending of the story first and that is where we lose a lot of people. We all know the story well, but our visitors do not always have the same knowledge we do. We must continue to recognize the generational progression that is always ongoing.
In a former museum I often gave tours to young children of the Robert Goddard exhibit. The display consisted of the original workshop of the rocket pioneer Robert Goddard faithfully reconstructed. At first I found it very difficult to explain to the children the significance of the early pioneering work done in that workshop. It was not till I realized that the children did not have a perspective of rockets that I finally understood the difficulty. I had grown up during the days of the Apollo moon missions, and at their age I and all children were extremely familiar with rockets. This is no longer the case. Times have changed. So the analogy I found to reach the children concerned the bicycle shop of Wilbur and Orville Wright. All the children, even the kindergarteners, knew that story and knew it by heart. You could see the connection instantly click on their faces when I explained that this is the same type of early pioneer that was also using a small workshop to build the first rockets. It still took some explaining of what a rocket consisted of, but from that point on they understood the significance of the display and were enthusiastically engaged in a learning experience.
We can use similar techniques here, and there is nothing more rewarding than making a learning connection with someone. I feel one critical story to understand better is that the gradual development of the Cold War had a direct impact on atomic testing. There is a huge story to better define between the end of the Manhattan Project and the opening of the Test Site in 1951. It has many parts which can be told as a series of very unique and interesting as well as entertaining stories. Our Journals have provided excellent tools for telling other interesting stories of later times, broken down to the human level. They have done an excellent job! Some of that now needs to translate into exhibits.
At the same time we do not always need to go into extreme detail in our exhibits. In fact, broad strokes tend to be much more effective in doing what museums do best and that is “exciting the imagination” to encourage continued study. Today, we do not go to museums to learn it all. We go to have our imagination excited and to give our youth encouragement and interest in a particular subject. From there the seed a museum plants can grow for years.
So moving forward with a new Master Interpretive Plan is our great challenge. It is a timely challenge. Our story is a big one and is now spanning more than eighty years. We have hired a good team to help us in Merriell and Associates. They are making us ask ourselves hard questions but good questions. Those questions make us realize where we want to go as we move into the next phases of the Master Interpretive Plan.
July Membership News
A Warm Welcome to our New Members
Family Membership
Vernon H. Jones
Doris J. Jones
Richard Nolan
Marilyn Nolan
Rudolph J. Scialo
Lorraine L. Scialo
Roger D. Stenerson
Individual Membership
Dr. Cynthia McMullin
Steven M. Kowalkowski
John Pavelchik
Natalie Marsh
Jolie LaChance
Mike Heiner
Robert Pritchett
Kenneth E. Johnson
A continued ‘THANK YOU’ to our renewing Members
Patron Membership
Richard Reed
Andree Reed
Support Membership
Arthur N. Hicks II
Debra Krutul-Hicks
Family Membership
Ruth & William Widmier – 2 year Membership
Melva O’Neill
David Grier
Carla Grier
John H. Bearce
Patricia A. Bearce
David Stahl
Bette R. Stahl
Gregory N. Doyle
Sarah Kunzi
Kirk Lachman
Teri Lachman
John Senn
Heather Senn
Individual Membership
Marie McMillan
James Culpepper
Colleen Beck
Richard Arnold
John P. Bearce
Ronald Barnak
Linda Milam
Marsha L. Rees
Betty Van Vliet
Carol Billigmeier
Glenn Mara
Mike Weaver
For Membership, Bricks and Administration Linda Swancy
702 794-5151 or linda.swancy@natm-nv.org.
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SUMMER ‘SPECIAL’ FROM THE MUSEUM STORE
To order call Lola or Judy at 702 794-5150.
Education, Museum Tours, Intern Program, contact
Director of Education Joe Kent 702 794-5144 Joe.Kent@natm-nv.org
The National Atomic Testing Museum
755 E. Flamingo Road
Las Vegas
NV 89119-7373
www.NationalAtomicTestingMuseum.org
Inquiries 702 794-5151