Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 20, 1994 TAG: 9402170105
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MARTINSVILLE LENGTH: Long
Clawd - so named by a fourth-grader "because he has claws" - is a marvel, and not just because he stands 9 furry feet tall, and not just because he's a replica of a prehistoric beast that roamed Ice Age Virginia.
True, the giant ground sloth represents a bona fide scientific curiosity: The skeleton of one such creature was found in 1966 in a Scott County cave, a find described at the time as a "spectacular paleontological discovery." And the fossilized tracks of another were discovered in Saltville in 1991, only the second time that the animal's footprints have been found preserved for the ages.
No, the truly marvelous thing about this Virginia Museum of Natural History version of the giant ground sloth is much more substantive - or much less so, to be precise.
The behemoth's innards are fashioned out of Styrofoam. "He's light as a feather," confides museum director Connie Gendron.
"From a marketing standpoint, I wish we could put Clawd in the back of a pick-up truck and haul him around Virginia," says the museum's marketing director, Don Sutton.
Clawd won't be leading any local fire department parades anytime soon, but Sutton's quip is not entirely in jest.
After all, the museum's exhibits are intentionally built light so that they can be trucked around the state - albeit with somewhat more dignity than Sutton has in mind for Clawd.
The recent flap over the Virginia Museum of Natural History - and its interest in taking over the Roanoke Valley's Explore Park with an eye toward someday building a major exhibit hall there - obscured one central point about the museum:
If you want to see what the museum has to offer, you don't have to go to Martinsville.
Try a middle school in Abingdon to look at the exhibit on insect research.
Or a juvenile detention center in Hanover County to see the dinosaur display.
Or a shopping mall in suburban Richmond if you want to learn about volcanoes - complete with a model volcano that belches smoke.
Or the library in Stuart to find out how watersheds work.
Or even Roanoke's own Center in the Square if you're interested in how fossils were formed - and how they're studied today.
Yes, Virginia, there is a museum in Martinsville. But as a matter of necessity - the result of both cramped quarters and the dicey politics of having a state museum headquartered in an out-of-the-way place - the Martinsville facility has little exhibit space.
Instead, the Virginia Museum of Natural History is set up as a "museum without walls."
Its exhibits are traveling ones, circulating first to branch museums at Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia - and then on to anyplace else that wants them (for a fee, ranging from $1,000 for a two-month gig to $5,000 for a six-month run, depending on which exhibit you're talking about and how elaborate it is to set up and maintain).
In that way, the museum guesstimates some 766,600 people last year saw its exhibits, even though only 18,742 visitors actually passed through the doors of the old schoolhouse that serves as the museum's Martinsville headquarters.
The museum's format has made it a godsend to educators in some rural corners of the state, for whom a field trip to a conventional museum is out of reach - and therefore, out of the question.
"In Northern Virginia, they told me to wait in line [to get exhibits placed there], they have so many cultural opportunities," says Barbara West, who books the museum's traveling shows. "But in the rural areas, I've been called manna from heaven."
Take the exhibit on insect research, which just finished a two-month run at the E.B. Stanley Middle School in Abingdon. Among the highlights: a specimen of the "Virginia Beach bug" (a rare critter found only in Tidewater), an explanation of how gypsy moths are ravaging Virginia's forests, and a model of said gypsy moth being devoured by its natural predator, a green-spotted beetle.
Just the sort of thing that's a hit with middle-school kids, says Ruth Ann Croghan, a sixth-grade math and science teacher who oversaw the exhibit, and not simply because bugs engaged in a death struggle is gross and disgusting.
"Most of our students do not have the opportunity to travel," Croghan says. "Some, I know, would never get to a museum, so this was a way to get some of the museum to them. It was real special."
So special, in fact, that other schools in Washington County bused in their kids to see the exhibit. "The parents were impressed," Croghan says. "It was something of quality."
Rural areas aren't the only ones who latch on to the museum's exhibits, either. The dinosaur exhibit recently completed a three-stop tour of juvenile detention centers in the Richmond area. "It was a wonderful opportunity for us, since some of the children are not allowed to go outside," says Sharon Trimmer, principal of one such center in Chesterfield County. "I'm sure many of our kids have never been to a museum."
And that, of course, is the precisely the point.
Museum faces `conundrum'
In many ways, the Virginia Museum of Natural History is a relic from a brief and long-ago time when all manner of exotic life forms flourished in the state.
The Jurassic?
The Pleistocene?
The Cretaceous?
No, the Baliles administration.
The museum and Explore began about the same time, in much the same way.
Both were initiated by visionary founders who were eventually deposed - in Explore's case, then-city manager Bern Ewert; in the museum's, anthropologist Noel Boaz.
And both were boosted by powerful legislative patrons - Del. Richard Cranwell of Vinton for Explore, then-Speaker of the House A.L. Philpott of Bassett for the museum. Both cashed in IOUs with Gov. Gerald Baliles during the fat years of the mid-1980s to get millions for the projects in their home districts. That meant $6 million for Explore, $5 million for the museum.
To this day, if you ask around the State Capitol about the Virginia Museum of Natural History, many lawmakers don't know what you're talking about. But mention "the Philpott museum," and there's an immediate spark of recognition.
If any name is attached to the museum, though, it should be Boaz's. The Martinsville native had made a name for himself in scientific circles for his work in excavating sites of prehistoric man in Africa, then returned home with a mission of starting his own natural history museum.
Thomas Jefferson may be regarded as the father of American paleontology (he once filled a room at Monticello with the bones he collected), but the state that reveres his memory had done little to carry on his tradition. Twice in the 1800s, Virginia started natural history museums, only to see them fizzle. Over the years, Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia acquired a vast number of rocks, fossils and stuffed wildlife - but with no other place to put them, many of them wound up stashed away in warehouses.
Boaz, though, rallied Martinsville civic leaders behind his dream. The city gave him an old schoolhouse, and he raised $700,000 in two years' time to get the museum going. The University of Virginia loaned a prized collection of rocks and fossils, some of which once belonged to Jefferson himself. In 1985, the museum opened, run as a private, nonprofit foundation.
But Boaz says he always saw state funding as the key to the museum's long-term "stability."
"I thought it was really criminal Virginia didn't have a natural history museum, especially when the state's budget is equivalent to the country of Austria - and the Vienna Museum of Natural History is a major national monument," Boaz says.
Boaz found a champion in Philpott, and in 1988, the state formally took over the museum - making it an agency under the Department of Natural Resources.
Unfortunately, Boaz says, "We hit a high point on the curve when we were taken over by the state."
Certainly that was true for Boaz. When the state assumed control, it hired a new director with more museum experience - Michael Hager - though Boaz was retained as a curator.
Not long afterward, though, the economy went south, and the state started slashing budgets. The museum's plans to renovate its current building were axed, its plans for a major expansion were shelved and even the museum's operating budget was whittled away - from $3.1 million in 1989 to a proposed $1.9 million for 1994-5.
Among the first casualties of the budget cuts: Boaz himself, whose position was eliminated. "It was sort of my baby, and it was taken away from me," laments Boaz, who now heads an anthropological institute at George Washington University.
The other casualty was the museum's expansion plans.
Rather than build a single, large facility in Martinsville, Boaz foresaw a network of natural history museums across the state. Two of those branches - at Blacksburg and Charlottesville - did become a reality.
But the proposed state budget for the coming year would eliminate the state funding for those two branches.
"It certainly spells the doom to the museum as I envisioned it," Boaz says. "If you don't have a branch of the state museum at your largest state university and the university with the biggest collection, then you don't really have a state museum. You're not even making a show of it. You really do just have a local facility that may do some educational outreach for schoolchildren. I think that's the real issue."
Especially since that "local facility" is tucked away in a corner of the state far from Virginia's population centers.
When Hager took over as director in 1989, he broached the question of moving the museum someplace else.
"My professional museum experience told me that it should not be located in a small, rural Southside Virginia town that did not have a large research population or a large university faculty base," he says. "That was my professional reading on it." And that reading, he says, was confirmed by his difficulty in recruiting Ph.D.s to work for the museum, when the closest research university was two hours' drive away.
"It takes a special person to get out of the educational mainstream and move to Martinsville," he says. "It's a wonderful community, just not for educational resources."
But Hager says unnamed state officials quickly explained that moving the museum was out of the question. "We were told to leave it alone," he says. "You know it's located in Martinsville for political reasons - A.L. Philpott."
So instead Hager pushed the "museum without walls" concept as a way for the museum to fulfill its statewide mission in spite of geography. "One of the things we desperately wanted [to avoid] was having somebody in Northern Virginia ask the question: Why do we have a state museum in Martinsville?'" says Hager, who's since moved on to the San Diego Museum of Natural History.
As long as the museum focuses on traveling exhibits, says Philpott's successor in the House, Del. Ward Armstrong, D-Martinsville, it doesn't matter where the museum is located.
Or does it?
Gendron, the museum's new director, warns that if the museum's budget is cut much deeper, it's not worth the state's effort to keep the place open. She says the best way for the museum to justify its existence, and win better state funding, is to take on new duties - another reason the museum's leadership welcomed the idea of acquiring Explore.
But some civic leaders in Martinsville worry that the more the museum expands, the more likely it will be that, come some future round of state cutbacks, it won't be the branches that are cut, but the headquarters in Martinsville.
That's why they reacted so violently to the prospect of taking over Explore; they saw the museum's center of gravity inevitably shifting to Roanoke. "An entangling relationship," board member (and U.S. Attorney for Western Virginia) Bob Crouch called it. "A Trojan horse." If the merger went through, the Martinsville headquarters "would have a shelf life of 24 months," he warned.
Those Martinsville leaders see the best way to "nail" the museum permanently to their city is to build a major exhibit facility there. Yet Gendron says it's difficult to justify the state putting up the money for a large facility in Martinsville because the city has such a small tourist base.
"That," says Bob Maricich, the Martinsville furniture company executive who heads the museum's private fund-raising arm, "is a conundrum."
`Lousy facility, difficult location'
So what happens now?
For one thing, the museum-Explore merger idea isn't entirely dead; state Sen. Brandon Bell, R-Roanoke County, says he's suggested the governor's "strike force" on streamlining state government take up the issue.
For another, the museum's board of trustees, which found itself divided on the merger question, will devote part of its April 30 meeting to a "philosophical discussion" about the museum's direction.
"There's no question but the future of the museum is a real concern," Maricich says. But he and other museum backers are hopeful that the recent controversy - which may have hit its low point when the museum's director described Martinsville's corporate contributions to the museum as paltry - may energize the community.
"In that respect, it helped," Armstrong says.
He and state Sen. Virgil Goode, D-Rocky Mount, are now pushing in the General Assembly to increase the museum's funding - and keep open its branches.
And Armstrong suggests that, if the state isn't going to fund a new exhibit hall anytime soon, perhaps Martinsville civic leaders could mount a private fund-raising campaign for one.
On that point, just about everyone connected with the museum agrees - to prosper, it needs more private contributions. (Last year, the foundation raised just under $80,000 for the museum; by contrast, even Explore, with all its money woes, raises about $500,000 in private funds each year.)
"There's no question, it is not good times for most museums," says Frank Talbott, the director of the Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution and the former head of the Association of Science Museum Directors. "A number of museums are in quite serious downsizing."
Natural-history museums around the country may have been hit the worst of all, Hager says, because they traditionally have not had the civic support that art museums have had.
Nevertheless, Talbott believes natural history museums are about to "go through a major renaissance." The increased attention on environmental issues puts natural history museums in, well, a natural position to educate the public about the environment through the ages, Talbott says.
With more state funding, Hager says, the Virginia Museum of Natural History could be among them. "You can't go anywhere and find a state with more fascinating natural history. The collision of Europe and Africa with the east coast of North America created the Blue Ridge. There's a lot of change and degradation in the Chesapeake Bay. It has a fascinating geological and biological story. And you should have seen the people of Saltville come alive when we talked about the wonders of their geological past during the Ice Age instead of the town as a Superfund clean-up site. It's neat stuff."
But the state museum that celebrates this natural history?
"It's just in a lousy facility in a difficult location."
by CNB