CLS Journal of Museum Studies, - University of Oklahoma · CLS Journal of Museum Studies, Volume 4,...

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Transcript of CLS Journal of Museum Studies, - University of Oklahoma · CLS Journal of Museum Studies, Volume 4,...

Page 1: CLS Journal of Museum Studies, - University of Oklahoma · CLS Journal of Museum Studies, Volume 4, Number 1 iii Journal Editor Dr. Michael A. Mares, Director, Sam Noble Oklahoma
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CLS Journal of Museum Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1. (2010) URL: http://www.ou.edu/cls/jms/

CLS Journal of Museum Studies is currently published online by the College of Liberal Studies, MALS Museum Studies Program, the University of Oklahoma. Your use of the CLS Journal of Museum Studies archives indicates your acceptance of the Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.ou.edu/cls/jms/. Museum professionals, students, and other readers are encouraged to distribute the articles published in this journal as widely as possible, to use them in classes, and to reprint them as needed. For commercial use of any of these articles (e.g., charging for articles, republishing figures, tables, text, etc.), permission must be obtained from the Editor. All questions relating to the journal should be directed to the Editor. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.ou.edu/cls/jms/board.html. Each copy of any part of a CLS Journal of Museum Studies transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or PDF file of such transmission.

CLS Journal of Museum Studies is an independent not-for-profit publication dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly articles in the field of museum studies. For more information regarding CLS Journal of Museum studies, please contact Dr. Michael A. Mares at [email protected]

http://www.ou.edu/cls/jms/index.html Publication date: October 2010

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CLS JOURNAL OF MUSEUM STUDIES Volume 4, Number 1/2010 The CLS Journal of Museum Studies is issued annually (with individual numbers appearing as they are completed) by the College of Liberal Studies, MALS Museum Studies Program of the University of Oklahoma. The CLS Journal of Museum Studies is designed to provide a worldwide e-journal as a publication outlet for students enrolled in the Museum Studies Program of the College of Liberal Studies of the University of Oklahoma. The journal is also designed for use by faculty in the CLS MALS program. Any topic of relevance to the field of museum studies is considered suitable for publication in the journal. Contributions may be solicited by the Editor from museum professionals not affiliated with the MALS Museum Studies Program. All submissions are reviewed by one or more members of the Editorial Board or by outside reviewers. COVER ILLUSTRATION: Montage of the main building and exhibits of the Sternberg Museum, Fort Hays Kansas State University, Hays, Kansas.

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Journal Editor Dr. Michael A. Mares, Director, Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, and Joseph Brandt Professor, Department of Zoology, University of Oklahoma Editorial Board Gail Kana Anderson, Assistant Director/Curator of Collections, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma Marcia Britton, Executive Director, Wyoming Council for the Humanities, Laramie, Wyoming Byron Price, Director, University of Oklahoma Press and Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West, University of Oklahoma Peter Tirrell, Associate Director, Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, University of Oklahoma Dr. Mary Jo Watson, Director and Regents’ Professor, School of Art and Art History, University of Oklahoma

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CLS Journal of Museum Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1. (2010) The CLS Journal of Museum Studies is published annually by the College of Liberal Studies, MALS Museum Studies Program, the University of Oklahoma Dr. Michael A. Mares, Journal Editor Manuscripts submitted for the Journal and all correspondence concerning them should be addressed to Dr. Michael A Mares. Guidelines for contributors are given on the last page of this volume. Copyright © 2010 by the College of Liberal Studies, University of Oklahoma

Laid out by Catherine Kerley, on a format established by Dr. Michael A. Mares.

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CLS Journal of Museum Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1. (2010)

Contents Foreword by Michael A. Mares 1 Dome on the Range: The Improbable Dream 7 by Jerry R Choate

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Dr. Jerry R. Choate, Director, Sternberg Museum,

Fort Hays State University, Hays, Kansas (2005)

Foreword

Michael A. Mares

Director, Sam Noble Museum, University of Oklahoma,

Norman, OK 73019 [email protected]

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hen Dr. Jerry Choate presented his Grinnell lecture at the American Society of Mammalogists meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico in June 2007, perhaps more

than most of those present, I found it delightful. Jerry and I were in that small group of museum directors who have built a major natural history museum and I know we shared many of the triumphs and travails that are part of every significant museum construction project. I approached Jerry at the conclusion of the lecture and asked him to submit a paper on the history of the Sternberg Museum project to the CLS Journal of Museum Studies so that his story could be shared with other museum professionals and students throughout the world. He agreed, but said he had some other pressing matters and would have it to me shortly. At the time he was trying to complete and staff an annex to the Sternberg, a wildlife museum at Cheyenne Bottoms, near Great Bend, Kansas. Over the next two years, I would regularly remind him that I was still waiting for the manuscript and he would promise to get it to me soon. Jerry planned to retire as director of the Sternberg Museum in June 2009 and wanted to complete fieldwork and the many unfinished manuscripts that back up over a long career and await attention. He was looking forward to a busy life wrapping up his years of work in mammalogy.

Tomorrow, as they say, is promised to no one. Jerry was diagnosed with melanoma in early 2003. By April 2009 the melanoma had returned as brain lesions. He did, indeed, retire in June 2009, but his life was far different from what he had planned. He underwent brain surgery and chemotherapy, then follow-up experimental treatments. I gently and almost guiltily reminded him of the promised story of the Sternberg so that he could share his accomplishments and challenges with the people who care about these types of things, even though I was aware that he was undergoing very difficult treatment by specialists. He finally sent me the “talk.” It was, literally, a talk, not a manuscript suitable for publication. It was folksy and entertaining, but not really journal material. I edited it heavily and sent it back to him for revision, reminding him that I needed photographic material to illustrate the finished article. “I’ll get it done,” he said, and “I’ll get the figures sent to you shortly.” Jerry died in December 2009: the revised manuscript and figures never arrived.

In winter of 2010, I contacted Jerry’s wife, Fi, and his son, Judd, and asked them if they could look through Jerry’s computer and

W

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office to search for the revised manuscript and figures. They enlisted the help of Mark Kellerman, Director of Public Relations at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, who was able to locate the compact discs that Jerry had prepared for me, but that somehow had never been sent. The discs contained his PowerPoint presentation, many photographs, and two videos that are important to understanding the history of the Sternberg Museum. There had not been time to revise the manuscript, but I am sure Jerry trusted me to do that for him.

The story of the Sternberg Museum, like any museum, involves keystone personalities who must struggle because they are the first person to dedicate their lives to developing a museum where none exists. Certainly the person who played the pivotal role in the museum’s earliest days was George F. Sternberg, whose passion for collecting fossils led to the development of the original museum. Vertebrate fossils are large, showy, and fascinating. They bring a lost world to the attention of the general public and are dug from the very soil tilled by farmers, grazed by cattle, and trod upon by hunters. They may even lie buried, unseen and unknown, below towns and cities. It seems incredible that such remarkable animals not only once lived, but also had remained hidden for thousands or even millions of years under our feet. Each specimen is not only a mystery, but also a miracle. People love fossils, those denizens of lost worlds that are resurrected to inspire and awe us humans, who by comparison have been on earth for a short span of time. It is thus not surprising that Sternberg was given a small space to carry on his work and that the collection would form the nucleus of a future museum.

The self-taught Sternberg became a prodigious fossil collector whose fame extended far beyond the little town of Hays in western Kansas. He earned his living selling fossils to great museums, but his most famous fossil, the “fish within a fish,” was not sold. That one he kept for “his” museum at the tiny college that would eventually become Fort Hays State University. Absent the happenstance move of the Sternbergs to Hays in the 1860s as part of a military posting, there would be no Sternberg Museum today. Coming from a family for whom fossil collecting had been a passion, the young fossil collector, George F. Sternberg, would become the keystone personality of the first museum at Hays.

In 1967, I entered Fort Hays Kansas State College to work toward a Master’s degree in mammal ecology under the direction of Dr. Eugene Fleharty. Fleharty had been trained as both a

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mammalogist and herpetologist, and shortly after arriving at Hays in 1962 had begun to build significant collections of mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. Similarly, the ornithologist Dr. Charles Ely built an excellent bird collection with specimens from throughout the world, as well as significant collections from western Kansas. Both Fleharty and Ely had large coteries of graduate students, as did Dr. Thomas Wenke who studied fishes, and all of us graduate students contributed many specimens to the collections as part of our graduate courses and research. These growing collections became known as the Museum of the High Plains, a name applied to the vertebrate collections by Fleharty in the 1960s (and which had been the name of the plant collection at Hays since 1929). Part of my graduate duties included curating the collections of mammals, reptiles, and amphibians of the museum, and I was proud to have contributed specimens to this important research collection.

By the time I graduated in 1969 and left Hays for Austin, the Museum of the High Plains was a major research collection for the State of Kansas, and particularly for western Kansas. Jerry Choate arrived two years later and produced a prodigious number of graduate students and scientific papers. These activities contributed greatly to the growth and scientific reputation of the collection of mammals of the museum, as well as to the reputation of the Museum of the High Plains, itself. At that time, the Sternberg Museum consisted of a large collection of historical materials, as well as fossils, and was housed in a separate building from the Biology Department, where the Museum of the High Plains resided. Common sense would suggest that these museums (and other collections) should be united under a single museum organization within the university hierarchy, but common sense is one of the hardest things to find on a college campus, where personalities, departmental fiefdoms, tradition, and an “it can’t be done” attitude are the rule.

Few museum directors have an opportunity to develop a natural history museum de novo, and in a sense Jerry did not develop the museum from the ground up: Sternberg had developed the fossil museum and Fleharty had greatly influenced the growth of the vertebrate collections. Nevertheless, the Sternberg Museum as it exists today is mainly the result of Jerry Choate’s moving forward with an idea to bring the collections together as a single academic unit within a single physical plant.

Most directors are hired to manage museums that already exist as organized institutions in a dedicated facility. Their challenges are

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many, but pale in comparison to those founding directors who have a vision and then must find a way to realize it. On a university campus, the challenge of developing a museum is perhaps even more difficult than it is at a private or municipal museum. First are the administrators, who often do not wish to undertake a task that will far exceed their term of office. University faculty members may not be supportive either. To develop a museum may be considered as lying outside the mission of a university, which is mainly dedicated to teaching classes and conducting research.

No university administrator comes to a museum director and says, “We have tens of millions of dollars in hand and would like you to spend it for us building a new museum.” More likely, collections have grown over time and created a tension on campus because of their increasing need for space, staff, and funds. At state universities the legislature gets involved; they are the source of state funds. Elected officials, who may know little about collections, may question why they should allocate precious funds to what to them appears to be a quixotic quest of a museum director they have never heard of on a campus they have never visited. What could this have to do with teaching? Such problems are magnified when the museum is in a small town (such as Hays, Kansas) in the middle of a vast prairie. Why on earth would the state of Kansas want to build a museum there?

The director of a university museum works within a constantly changing milieu of personalities. Museum projects take years to complete, sometimes decades. Department chairs, deans, and presidents often measure their administrative tenures in only a few years. Thus, selling a vision means dealing with new people in the chain of command, people who may never have heard of the museum and its collections, and may not understand its importance. State legislators, too, are constantly changing.

Then one must consider the local community. It is difficult for a small town to take on a major project because money is so limited. Small universities are hard pressed for discretionary funds. A museum project may appear an impossibly high hill to climb to administrators and donors. In the case of Hays, Kansas—where population density is extremely low—raising money is a special challenge.

Jerry Choate faced all of these challenges and many more. He did not leave and he did not give up. He was fortunate that Dr. Edward Hammond was named President of Fort Hays State

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University. Ed was a fellow visionary and, indeed, was the first person to see the museum potential in the abandoned dome building. I went to see Jerry shortly after he had accepted the building as the future home of the new Sternberg Museum. I was doubtful about his ability to convert the facility to meet the space needs of exhibits, collections, education programs, and research of a natural history museum. Moreover, the building had been abandoned long enough that it was in terrible shape. It had a pool full of frozen, moldy water. Mold was everywhere. The dome itself was unnerving in its curving volume that affected one’s tranquility and made it difficult to feel things on a human scale under the massive curved ceiling. “I don’t know, Jerry,” I told him, “this is going to be tough to pull off.”

Jerry Choate did, indeed, pull it off. He, too, became a keystone personality in the development of the Sternberg Museum. Today the museum is one of the important university natural history museums in the country. It stands on the windswept prairies of western Kansas, a testament to a passionate collector of fossils, a good university, a visionary president, and Jerry Choate, a tenacious and dedicated director who spent much of his professional and personal life developing the Sternberg Museum as it stands today. As he said in his history of the development of the Sternberg Museum, he may have been disappointed now and then, but he would not accept defeat. That is the attitude that makes a successful field biologist, which Jerry was, and a successful museum director.

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Choate in the field in 1965. Note the four-eyed opossum peeking out of his pocket.

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The Sternberg Museum of Fort Hays State University,

Hays, Kansas

Dome on the Range: The Improbable Dream

Jerry R. Choate1

Former Director, Sternberg Museum of Natural History, Fort Hays State

University, Hays, KS. 1Deceased.

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he two things in my career that I am most proud of are the graduate students I mentored and the museum I championed. Rather than discuss my students and my philosophy of mentoring, I take this opportunity to explain my role in developing the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, which is better known to

truckers on the Interstate-70 highway that runs alongside the museum as the “Dome on the Range.”

Origin of a university museum in Hays, Kansas

By a purely historical accident Fort Hays State University, a school with no PhD program and with just 10,000 students (it had fewer than 4,000 students when I was first employed there in 1971) came to house some of the most important Cretaceous fossils ever found. The historical accident has to do with a person named Charles H. Sternberg and his sons, who were among the most famous fossil collectors who ever lived. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hazelius_Sternberg]

Charles’ older brother, George Miller Sternberg, was an army surgeon during the Civil War. He has been called the first bacteriologist in the US, and rose to the level of US Army Surgeon General. After the war, George was stationed at Fort Harker near the town of Ellsworth in central Kansas. He bought a ranch near the fort and encouraged his father, mother, and 7 siblings to move to Kansas to help him manage the ranch. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Miller_Sternberg]. One of those siblings was Charles H. Sternberg (Fig. 1).

When Charles arrived in Kansas, he became fascinated with all the fossils he found, and he decided he wanted to become a professional fossil collector. Big brother George used his connections in Washington, DC in an attempt to promote Charles’ interest in fossils by sending some of his fossil plant specimens to the Smithsonian Institution. The curator at the

Fig. 1. Charles H. Sternberg (undated photograph, Archives, Fort Hays State University)

T

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Smithsonian was impressed with the fossils and encouraged Charles to collect more. However, he offered Charles no money. Charles subsequently wrote to Edward Drinker Cope (Fig. 2) at the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia and literally begged for $300 to buy a team of ponies, a wagon, a camp outfit, and to hire a cook and driver so that he could begin collecting fossils for the Academy.

Abstract. This article is based on a lecture presented in the plenary session of the 87th annual meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists, which was hosted by the University of New Mexico in June of 2007 in Albuquerque. A lecture is a requirement of recipients of the American Society of Mammalogists’ Joseph Grinnell Award for Excellence in Education in Mammalogy, which Dr. Choate received. Typically, Grinnell Award presenters review their accomplishments with respect to education. Choate’s presentation dealt with his career-long effort to develop a major natural history museum at Fort Hays State University in western Kansas. The Grinnell Award specifically includes broader educational accomplishments, such as those involved in exhibits, museums, and so forth, as well as providing information on mammals to the general public and specialized users such as government agencies. Choate excelled at several of the categories for which the award is presented.

Fig. 2. Edward Drinker Cope (undated photograph courtesy of Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University)

This occurred during the time that Cope was in the midst of his

famous “Bone Wars” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Wars] with

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Othniel C. Marsh (Fig. 3) of Yale College, and Cope needed all the help he could get to best his rival. Cope sent Charles a draft for $300, and Charles’ career as a fossil collector began in earnest (Liggett 2001). Charles eventually married and had three sons, George F., Charles M., and Levi, all of whom followed in their father’s footsteps and became professional fossil collectors. The three sons and their dad collected throughout the American West, as well as in Canada and Argentina. The fossils they collected now grace the halls of major museums around the world, including the National Museum of Natural History, the American Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum in London, the National Museum of Canada, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Field Museum, and many others. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_F._Sternberg]. Arguably, the most successful member of this famous family of fossil collectors was George F. Sternberg . One of his best-known fossil finds is shown in Figure 4.

After a lengthy collecting trip to South America in 1926 for the Field Museum, George Sternberg returned to the family ranch in Kansas, where he felt fossil collecting was better than anywhere else he had been. Soon after he returned, the President of the college that would become Fort Hays State University visited with George and encouraged him to move to Hays and continue his work there. The college had a tiny museum—actually a hodge-podge of taxidermy mounts and other such things—and the President wanted George to build upon this and develop a proper museum. As an enticement, George was offered an office, use of an old truck, student labor, and not much else. He was not offered a salary and would need to continue selling fossils as his source of income. Nevertheless, George accepted the offer, and the little college that would become Fort Hays State University became the focus of Cretaceous paleontology on the Great Plains (Fig. 5.)

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Fig. 3. Othniel C. Marsh (middle, back row) with field crew prepared to collect fossils in 1872. (Courtesy Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University)

Fig. 4. Mummified dinosaur discovered by George Sternberg in 1908. It is on exhibit

in the American Museum of Natural History. (Courtesy Department of Library Services, American Museum of Natural History)

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Fig. 5. George Sternberg at his desk at Fort Hays State University. Note photo of mummified dinosaur on the wall. (Undated photograph, Archives, Fort Hays State

University)

Over the next 37 years, George Sternberg collected many of the most complete fossils in existence from the sea that had covered central North America during the Cretaceous Period (Fig. 6). The very best of the fossils remained at Fort Hays State University, whereas George sold the others to various major museums. If you visit museums, you can find numerous fossils that were excavated and prepared by George, as shown by his signature “dimpled” background and yellowish color.

George died in 1969, and many years later I learned of a file drawer in the Fort Hays State University archives labeled simply “George’s stuff.” The file drawer contained numerous old 16 mm filmstrips, one of which showed the excavation and preparation of George’s most significant fossil find (Video 1).

Fig. 6. Map showing approximate boundaries of Western Interior Sea during Cretaceous Period. Adapted from Everhart, 2005 (Oceans of Kansas: a Natural

History of the Western Interior Sea, Indiana University Press).

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Video 1. George Sternberg’s famous “Fish-within-a-Fish” fossil. Prepared from a film obtained from the Archives of Fort Hays State University.

As a result of George Sternberg’s fossil collection and other collections

amassed by the likes of paleontologist Dr. Rick Zakrzewski, botanists Elam Bartholomew and Dr. Joe Thomasson, mammalogist and herpetologist Dr. Eugene Fleharty, ornithologist/entomologist Dr. Charles Ely, and my own work on mammals, as well as several others (and our many graduate students), Fort Hays State University came to possess outstanding research collections.

As a graduate student at the University of Kansas, I naïvely dreamed of someday working in a museum like the KU Natural History Museum or the National Museum of Natural History. When I completed my PhD in 1969, there were no positions available at either place, so I accepted a post-doc at the University of Connecticut, standing in for Dr. Ralph Wetzel while he was on extended sabbatical leave collecting mammals in South America. This appointment gave me the chance to curate the UConn collection of mammals while looking for a job. When a position for a mammalogist at Fort Hays State University opened, I was not interested in applying. However, an alumnus of Fort Hays who became a well-known mammalogist, and a close friend of mine, Dr. Elmer Birney, raved to me about what a great place Fort Hays State University was, and he reiterated time and again that the department emphasized field biology and had a small but nice collection of mammals. I took his advice and applied. I was hired in 1971 and I never considered leaving Fort Hays in the years that followed.

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Fig. 7. Dr. Jerry Choate as a young professor at Fort Hays State University in 1971—a field mammalogist who would culminate his career developing the Sternberg

Museum into a major natural history museum.

When I arrived at Fort Hays, the university’s biological collections were in the Department of Biological Sciences. There was a named herbarium (the Elam Bartholomew Herbarium) with a designated Curator but no budget. The bird, fish, reptile, amphibian, insect, and mammal collections were not recognized as an administrative unit, although each collection had a designated Curator with no budget. Surprisingly, the collections were very well maintained. The paleontological collections and a wide variety of non-biological collections were housed in the university museum, which by that time had been named the Sternberg Memorial Museum in honor of George Sternberg and the other Sternberg family members. The Sternberg Memorial Museum (Fig. 8) had some outstanding but static exhibits and a half-time Director (Dr. Rick Zakrzewski), but no other staff members. It had an operating budget of $5,000 per year. The museum was beloved by local citizens because of George Sternberg’s fossils, and it had a good scientific reputation both nationally and internationally.

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Fig. 8. Entrance to Sternberg Memorial Museum (Archives, Fort Hays State University)

Soon after I arrived, Gene Fleharty gave me responsibility for curating

the collection of mammals (which, along with the other collections in biology, had become part of the Museum of the High Plains. Keep in mind that in those days a curator at Fort Hays State University taught 4 courses per semester, worked with graduate students, served on numerous committees, conducted research, and was expected to curate in his copious spare time. Soon after I became curator, I convinced the other curators of the biological collections to join with me and form a paper museum—a museum in name only and with no budget. I then succeeded in convincing the university president to formally recognize the Museum of the High Plains as a separate administrative unit with a small budget, and I was named director. Administratively, I moved the Museum of the High Plains out of the Department of Biological Sciences and set it up so that the director was in the administrative chain of command of the Vice President for Administration and Finance, together with Athletics and other departments that make the university look good but don’t generate credit hours. In this way, I managed to keep the museum off the chopping block in tough years when there were budget cuts.

In 1973, I began lobbying the university administration for a museum building. I convinced the University President (Dr. Gerald Tomanek, a botanist and former chair of the Biology Department) to ask the Kansas Legislature for a new building to house both the Museum of the High Plains and the Sternberg Memorial Museum. However, the fiscally conservative Kansas Legislature told the President that we would “never, ever” receive funding for a non-academic, largely research, building at Fort Hays State University. The President came back and told me he had done

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all he could do, and that it was up to me to figure out how to make a better case for a museum building.

I was disappointed, but not defeated. I decided that the best strategy would be to focus on building museum programs that could attract extramural funding. To do this, I really needed to involve the Sternberg Memorial Museum, but I had no control over that museum, which had its own Director. I liked and respected him, and did not want to step on his toes. Therefore, I took the tack of convincing Rick Zakrzewski that the Sternberg Memorial Museum and the Museum of the High Plains should join forces in a loose compact, which I termed the Fort Hays State Museums. For the purposes of this compact, the Museum of the High Plains and the Sternberg Memorial Museum retained both their identities and directors under the umbrella of the Fort Hays State Museums. I then used this umbrella to begin seeking funding from agencies such as the Institute of Museum Services to produce educational programs, hire staff, develop a museum store, start a program of temporary exhibitions, and the like. Over the years, I received well over $1 million from the Institute of Museum Services and dozens of additional grants from other agencies and foundations, and I started marketing the Fort Hays State Museums as a tourist attraction for the city of Hays. This strategy was successful beyond my wildest dreams.

When a new university president (Dr. Edward Hammond) took office in 1987, I immediately began lobbying him for a new museum building. The previous president had been a champion of educational excellence but was not at his best at fundraising. President Hammond, on the other hand, was a fundraiser par excellence and was always looking to enhance the reputation of the university. He saw what I had done for the image of the university with the grants I obtained for the Fort Hays State Museums, and he envisioned that more could be done with a large and modern museum building. However, with no help coming from the Kansas Legislature, he knew he needed just the right opportunity to build on.

“The Dome” becomes available

That opportunity came in the late 1980s in the form of the Oil Glut [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_oil_glut]. When Saudi Arabia and OPEC flooded the world with oil to drive down prices, many of the previously wealthy oilmen in western Kansas were driven into bankruptcy. One of those oilmen had constructed a unique building just off Interstate-70 in Hays to serve as a recreational facility. It contained an Olympic-sized swimming pool, 4 racquetball courts, 2 tennis courts, a weightlifting area, an aerobics room, a dance floor, a 24-lane bowling alley, locker rooms, a restaurant, and office space. When the oilman went bankrupt, he took down a local bank. The bank was gobbled up by Chrysler Credit Corporation, a subsidiary of Chrysler Corporation. Chrysler Credit

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Corporation tried unsuccessfully to sell the building, and it sat empty for a couple of years (Fig. 9).

Fig. 9. The defunct recreational facility after its owner had declared bankruptcy.

One day in 1991, I was summoned to President Hammond’s office to talk about the future of the museum. When I got there, he said “Choate, you’ve been on my back ever since I took office to get you a new museum building. Would you be interested in the big, round building up by the interstate highway?” My initial response was “No, that won’t work.” This response was based on the fact that the building in question was nearly three miles from campus and was round—“How in the hell do you put rectangular museum cases in a round building?” Not deterred, he told me to keep an open mind and consider the possibility.

Actually, the building consisted of two sections, one of which was a 3½-story-high dome and the other a 3-story rectangular structure. I made arrangements to see the building, and I spent most of a day wandering through it just imagining how it might be transformed into a museum. After toying with all the possibilities and problems, I told President Hammond that I thought I could make it work.

President Hammond had served on a national committee with Lee Iacoca, who at that time was Chairman of the Board of Chrysler Corporation. They had gotten to know each other fairly well, so President Hammond called Iacocca and asked if Chrysler would be willing to give the building to Fort Hays State University. Iacoca said he needed to talk to his attorneys and accountants, but that he would get back to us. When he called back, Iacocca said they could not give the building away because of the tax liability on the building that Chrysler would need to pay to Ellis County (the Kansas county in which the building is located). Instead, Iacoca proposed to give the building to Ellis County in lieu of payment of back taxes. To make a long story short, that is precisely what happened. Then Ellis County conducted a tax sale at which they solicited bids for the building. At the tax sale, the Fort Hays State University Foundation submitted the winning bid of $10.

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Video 2. Into a new era. (Archives, Fort Hays State University)

So, the University Foundation had bought a building. However, the building was in terrible condition from having sat empty (pipes had frozen and broken, ceilings had fallen in, and because the pool had not been drained there was mold everywhere). Basically, we had to remove everything down to bare concrete before doing anything else. Then, before the building could even be considered for use as a State building, it had to be inspected by State engineers to ensure that it met state building specifications. Then it had to be accepted by the State Board of Regents as a university building and approved by the Kansas State Legislature as a state building. The Board of Regents had to be convinced that Fort Hays State University should be in the business of public, as opposed to just student, education, but that was easy compared with convincing the State Legislature that Fort Hay State should develop a new museum. The problem we faced was that every state building in Kansas has a budget attached for utilities, security, and maintenance based on a formula that has to do with square footage of the building. Our new building was more than 100,000 square feet, and the legislature was disinclined to put money into it after having told us earlier that they would never do that for a non-academic building at Fort Hays State University. All told, it took us about a year to get their approval so that we could proceed with development of the museum.

I formed a committee to prepare preliminary plans for the museum that could be given to an architect. I also formed a committee to begin planning for exhibits in the new museum. Simultaneously, President Hammond began fundraising. That was no easy task. We could expect little support from the state, city, or county, and Hays, Kansas, is a small community of financially tight-fisted Germans. Moreover, there are no corporate headquarters nearby. We made a short video to show to prospective donors (Video 2). It took several years to raise almost $13 million for the project because, with a few exceptions, we had to raise the money in small parcels instead of large contributions. The project would have cost twice as much were it not for the fact that almost all of the

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construction labor was provided by employees of Fort Hays State University’s physical plant.

The new Sternberg Museum opens in 1999

We were successful in receiving enough support from many small donors so that the renovation could move forward fairly quickly, although “quickly” is a relative term. It took 8 years after President Hammond’s initial suggestion that the big round building might serve as a museum before we were ready to open. The Grand Opening of the new Sternberg Museum of Natural History occurred during a blizzard on 13 March 1999. By that time, the public areas of the museum, including the permanent exhibits, had been completed (Fig. 10). However, the research collections, consisting of more than 3 million specimens, were still on campus. It took another year to prepare the collections for moving and to install them in the new facility.

Probably the biggest success the Sternberg Museum has had in its new facility was when we hosted the traveling exhibition of “A T. rex Named Sue.” During the two months of that exhibition, the museum was visited by nearly 106,000 people. That might not seem like many to those who live within a 4-hour drive of a metropolitan area, but keep in mind how low the population density is in western Kansas. Hays is a small town in a vast prairie. In fact, the 106,000 visitors came from 103 of the 105 counties in Kansas, 42 of the 50 states of the United States, and 9 foreign countries (Fig. 11)!

Fig. 10. Entrance to new Sternberg Museum of Natural History. (Archives, Fort Hays State University)

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After the new Sternberg Museum of Natural History opened to the public, my university president said “Choate, don’t ever ask me for any more space—you’ve got all you are going to get!” Neither of us anticipated what would happen a few years later. Several occurrences took place that would affect the future of the museum. Great Bend, Kansas lies about 65 miles southeast of Hays. Like most other small towns in central and western Kansas, Great Bend was slowly dying. No new businesses were

Fig. 11. Choate and US Senator Pat Roberts during the “Sue” exhibition. (Choate personal collection)

moving in, and young people were moving to cities to find jobs, thus causing the average age of residents in Great Bend to increase and the population to decline. The city fathers of Great Bend contracted with a consulting firm from Texas to see if there was anything they could do to reverse this trend. After studying the situation, the consulting firm informed the city that it should take advantage of their greatest potential asset, the nearby Cheyenne Bottoms wetland, and use it as a tourist attraction.

Fig. 12. Cheyenne Bottoms (Kansas Department of Wildlife & Parks Cheyenne Bottoms Livecam)

Cheyenne Bottoms is a 41,000-acre wetland just northeast of Great

Bend (Fig. 12). It is the largest wetland in the interior of the United States and one of the largest wetlands in the Americas. It is perhaps best known

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as a major migratory resting area for whooping cranes, but it also is visited by or home to about 320 species of birds and is regarded as the most important site for migratory waterfowl in the entire Western Hemisphere. In 1988, it was officially designated as a Wetlands of International Importance by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. Cheyenne Bottoms and other nearby wetland areas are managed by the Kansas Department of Wildlife & Parks, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and The Nature Conservancy.

Fig. 13. Artist’s rendition of the new Kansas Wetlands Education Center.

The city of Great Bend began trying to convince lawmakers to fund a visitor center at the Bottoms with the idea that such a center would serve as a base of operations within the Bottoms that would attract visitors, and those visitors would stay in motels and eat in restaurants in Great Bend. However, they were unsuccessful in their efforts to get the attention of the Kansas Legislature until two people came to their aid. Those two people were Mike Hayden, who is Secretary of the Kansas Department of Wildlife & Parks (former Governor of Kansas and former graduate student in Biology at Fort Hays State University) and President Hammond of Fort Hays State University. Wildlife & Parks subsequently offered land for development of a museum (as opposed to just a visitor center) at the Bottoms, and President Hammond began sweet-talking legislators. The Kansas Legislature soon approved the project but, in conservative Kansas fashion, provided no funding. Therefore, inasmuch as the structure would be located on a highway, Secretary Hayden and President Hammond proposed that the particular stretch of highway be designated as a National Wetlands and Wildlife Scenic Byway. This proposal was approved, after which the Kansas Department of Transportation agreed to fund about half of the project (Fig. 13).

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Yet another museum!

President Hammond again summoned me to his office, this time to ask my opinion how best to staff and manage the new museum. I told him that, in my opinion, neither the city of Great Bend nor the Department of Wildlife & Parks should be involved, the former because of lack of expertise and the latter because many of the eventual primary visitors—i.e., birdwatchers—could be offended if the facility were run by an organization that promoted hunting. I went on to say that the logical agency to run the new museum was the Sternberg Museum. In this way, it was decided that the new facility would be a branch museum of the Sternberg Museum of Natural History.

A building design committee was formed, building design was completed, and construction began. Another committee to design exhibits also was formed and eventually completed its task. Construction delays resulting from excessive rainfall slowed the process of completing work on the structure, and the grand opening of the Kansas Wetlands Education Center was not held until the spring of 2009. In the meantime, I went about hiring a facility manager and other staff members to work in the Center (Fig. 14) . . . the Sternberg Museum had grown once again.

I have been unusually fortunate in my career. I’ve worked at a great university, had absolutely phenomenal graduate students, and curated an outstanding mammal collection. I have also been partly responsible for the development of two major museums. Much of what I accomplished was a matter of being in the right place at the right time, along with some very lucky breaks. My mentors, Professor E. Raymond Hall and Dr. J. Knox Jones, Jr., drove into my head the philosophy of the importance of collections and education that was championed by Joseph Grinnell. I have tried to live by this philosophy and to instill it in my own graduate students ever since. Moreover, I have tried to convince them that it is good to dream, but that really big dreams may take a lifetime of effort to achieve.

Fig. 14. Kansas Wetlands Education Center. (Photo provided by Kansas Department

of Wildlife & Parks)

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References

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References Liggett, G. A. 2001. Dinosaurs to dung beetles: expeditions through time. Sternberg Museum of Natural History, Hays, KS.

Sam Noble Museum The University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK