Museums, Memory, and the Military

People can sometimes have oddly personal relationships with museums. Museums become repositories for personal memories, whether it's because we re-visit museums we knew as children, expecting to see the same artifacts we knew then, now burnished with the patina of nostalgia; or because we are in some way personally connected with the objects on display.

A rumination on the role of a museum in one life came to me from a surprising source: my mom. She's not aware of this blog, as far as I know, and I haven't asked her permission to republish this. She's the editor of my hometown newspaper, and that community is still absorbing the shock of an impending base closure. She could have written about this from any number of angles - through local economics, through interviews with current staff, or just in the omniscient editorial voice so often used to tackle issues of national import. Instead, she wrote about a museum.

I have clear memories of this museum myself. The strongest one is olfactory - the smell of olive drab field canvas slowly disintegrating, mixed with the heady aroma of old diesel fumes. All who have ever been to a military museum know exactly what this smells like. I do wonder - as this latest round of base closings lumbers along, what will become of these repositories of memory? What of the museum at the naval shipyard not too far from my front door, where sub vets give passionately non-objective tours of commemorative models and newspaper clippings and submarine place settings? When it's time to shut these bases down and develop them into golf courses and condos, it'll be one problem to find new homes for the tool-and-die machines, the hydraulic lifts, the cubic acres of poisoned soils laden with heavy metals. Developers and salvagers are eager to solve those profitable problems. But what will happen to the museums -- the emotion-laden collections of artifacts which represent the aspirations and lifelines of the common soldier and sailor?

Anyway, thanks mom, and if you're reading this, don't get mad at me for not clearing it first, please.

Help Wanted: Carrier Pigeon

Because my dad spent 23 years in the U. S. Army and another 20 or so as a federal employee, Fort M--- is for me familiar territory. Summer days we roamed its nooks and crannies, popping into the library, taking a swim at the Field House, picknicking on the parade ground, safe inside the fences of this federal installation watched over not by angels, but by military police.

For us, it wasn't a black and white world. It was more like khaki and green - fatigues and dress uniforms. At the close of each day the trumpets would sound. Cars would stop in their tracks and their occupants would step out as everyone, military, civilian, and kid, observed the moment when the American flag billowed down from the summit of the flagpole, ending another day on the fort.

The post was a busy place in those days. It was the home of the Signal Corps, the elite R & D unit that would move the American military into the future of high-tech communications capabilities.

The role of the signal corps on Fort M-- bridged wars and the peace between them, and that history was something about which those who had a part in it took great pride.

Many ideas were born there - ideas that helped in the defense of the nation and its scientific advancement. For us kids, that legacy provided us with the never boring summer pastime of visiting the Post Museum, which housed, among many other interesting things, the stuffed carcasses of those long-departed pigeons who carried messages across time zones and war zones starting in World War I.

The pigeons played an important part in that war and have been credited with saving hundreds of lives. Messages were secreted in tiny containers affixed to the pigeons' legs. Most of those pigeons were many decades past their final flights when we happened upon them in the museum, but we could see pride in their beady little button eyes even then.

That little museum also housed the first telegraph and phone equipment used by the military and the evolutionary items that followed - the bulky field phones carried into the war that had to be wound up like an old Victrola before they'd work. There were uniforms and weapons, typewriters and faded photographs, each with a tale to tell about the history of Fort M-- and the people who were part of it.

It's not surprising that even as kids my brother and I liked to go there. The stories these exhibits told were about innovation and exploration, invention and possibility, courage and adventure, and they were good for much more than a summer day's worth of dreaming and supposing.

Those days have been on my mind again lately as the drama of the attempted closure of Fort M-- unfolds.

Much has changed since those pre-Kennedy-assassination years, when the nation was energized by the possibility of landing a man on the moon. Satellite communications, radar, sonar, and computer technologies were still in their infancies.

Our national explorations have traveled beyond the distance a pigeon could fly in 1917 - far beyond.

It was at Fort M-- that advances in weather prediction, radar, space communications, and computers were developed and refined. Those innovations took the combined efforts of a military and civilian workforce that numbers more than 5,000.

Like Detroit, Fort M -- is a factory town. Unlike Detroit, the product isn't the automobile; the products are ideas, and the engines of intellect necessary to make them reality live here.

Perhaps a pigeon could carry that message to Washington.