By their examples they taught us how to balance staffing and logistics, and how to manage stocks, supplies, and people. Linda King kept the administrative office humming along, and Kelly Sullivan become a Jedi Master of juggling docent schedules and running the museum gift shop back when it was a stifling nook tucked next to the front door. Getting to know the museum staff and learning from them also proved valuable. No matter who’s in the audience today, they’re never as tough or intimidating as a dozen hyper-excited and distracted 7-year-olds, or a group of ‘tweeners’ trying hard to appear disinterested and disdainful in front of their friends (but secretly being fascinated by what they’re seeing). The experience and skills honed on those tours serve to this day and are repeatedly manifested in lectures, public presentations, and media interactions. The two-hundred-plus public tours given provided the best on-the-job public speaking and ‘think-on-your-feet’ training anywhere. The years spent as a museum docent were valuable for me in so many ways. Who could have known on that first night of docent training (taught by the ever-energetic Matt Linke) in a room filled with dozens of newly hired docents, that the cute, curly-haired brunette sitting in the front row (MJ Gray was her name at the time) and I would wind up married to each another just five years later? After almost twenty-two years of marriage we still snicker and tease each other about that first training night. In my case, so many of those lines trace their way back to one dot in particular, the University of Michigan Exhibit Museum (now the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History). It’s always amazing when one looks back at all the lines connecting the dots leading to their present moment in life. Shortly afterwards the call came that I’d been selected, and was told to attended my first night of docent training. It turned out the museum was looking for work-study students to be docents, and I was downright giddy at the chance to actually work in the museum that had enthralled me from my first visit. Thirteen years later (Fall semester, 1990) as a brand-new freshman at U of M, I stood at the front of a line before the museum’s table in a work-study job fair. As I stood there in awe, my parents said in an amused way, “You know, if you work really hard in school maybe one day you can come work here.” From that point on, as far as I was concerned it was a no-brainer. The Sakstrup mastodon seemed to stare back up at me, and the black bones of the Allosaurus menaced the hall. I was standing on the 3rd floor balcony, looking through the rails at the incredible view of the paleontology hall. We went back and visited the museum about once a summer after that, but I can distinctly remember a visit when I was 5. Year of Memory: Visitor 1975 through early 1980s, Docent 1990-1995, rare visitor from 2000 through 2015 (last visit in June 2015)Īccording to my parents, my first visit to the University of Michigan’s natural history museum was in 1975, when I was 3 years old. Michael Erlewine, he of later Prime Mover fame (fleeting, but long enough to overlap with Iggy), had his own desk there as a child, and somehow wangled a position of responsibility, I think feeding creatures, in that strange post-war environment in which the university exploded with vets on the GI bill and all things were possible. I visited them regularly during my undergraduate years, in their Stendahlic red and black solitude, marveling that they could pass their long lives so calmly in a 2×3 glass box, and wondering if they were quietly insane. They were quite long-lived, and still there when I returned to Ann Arbor in 1969 as an undergraduate, and again later, at some point in my young adulthood. This was in 1953, when my mother returned to school after my father died, and I was 3.Īnd on the landing, on the stairs to the hall of dinosaurs, there was a pair of live gila monsters. I remember the menagerie that used to be located just outside the front door, which included a black bear and, I believe, for a time, a wolverine.
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