It Happened at the World's Fair

I haven't written about the Museum of History and Industry lately, but I'm still doing my my volunteer archivist thing there once a week. The clock is ticking down on the Museum's location in Mountlake, and our afternoons in the chilly basement are coming to an end-- for better or worse. In 2012, MOHAI will open in the historic Naval Reserve Building near Lake Union. The new museum will be grand and spacious, but unfortunately not large enough to house the research library, administrative offices and the museum collections. I don't know the details, but off-site locations have probably been found and moving trucks are now parked behind the old museum as artifacts and records are slowly packed. When I worked at Microsoft, our department moved an archives collection and library several times-- so I feel their pain (and excitement.)

The big buzz this month was a $10 million dollar gift from Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos to help fund the new museum. So things are happening at MOHAI and it's exciting to be part of it, even in a tiny way.

In the meantime, work on the Seattle World's Fair archive collection goes on. Since I've been on the same project for months there hasn't been much to say, but I felt a little thrill last week to see that monster finding aid finally published on Northwest Digital Archives. Carolyn the librarian told me it's the largest finding aid the Museum has posted (can that be true?) Maybe. If you click HERE you'll see a mind-numbing list of over 1,000 photographs and slides, all entered by yours truly into an Excel spreadsheet. The fun part of doing a finding aid (and the reward for all that detailed data entry) is writing the background section. The 50th anniversary of the Fair is coming up, so all these photographs should be useful to the researchers and writers.



As I learn more about the fair, it's easy to fall into the nostalgia. Imagine a time when you dropped your kids off at the gate of an Expo and came back to pick them up at 6? The fair was a bizarre combination of popular science, nationalism, commercialism with high and low brow entertainments mixed in.

Just for the heck of it, we watched the 1963 Elvis movie the other night. Oh, how the new Seattle Center sparkled white and bright as Elvis cavorted around! Seattle at night was as warm and balmy as southern California. (Where part of the movie was actually filmed.) Anyway, all Elvis movies are the same so don't watch it for the plot but to catch a glimpse of this old Seattle. The Gayway amusement park eventually became the Fun Forest at the Seattle Center, and when Amanda was little we took her on rides that were still left over from the fair. The Fun Forest was recently torn down with the hope of building a Chihuly-type glass museum on the spot. What a shame.