THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Wednesday, January 8, 1997            TAG: 9701080001
SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A12  EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Letter 
                                            LENGTH:   43 lines

HOCKEY'S FINE BUT STRONGLY FUND MUSEUMS, TOO

The debate sparked by bringing professional hockey to Hampton Roads underlines how seriously civic priorities are out of whack. I love a good hockey game as well as the next person, but before we consider fund raising and contributions from government and local sources, we must provide major ongoing support to our museums.

In 1980, when I was director of the Virginia Museum, I received a frantic telephone call from the head of the Richmond Chamber of Commerce. He said we had a chance to bring a major Fortune 500 company to Richmond. The executives loved the idea of being so close to Williamsburg, but the CEO's wife was involved in a museum-docent program and didn't want to relocate where there wasn't a similar facility.

In two hours' time, I had 30 people coming to cocktails in the VM gallery; dinner and an evening at the museum's theater followed. I showed the CEO and his wife the whole museum. Two days later, the company agreed to come to Richmond. This arrangement also included moving thousands of employees to the Richmond area.

Sports are big, and newspapers promote them. Museums, on the other hand, do not buy much advertising or make much front-page news. But it has been shown for years that more people visit America's museums than attend all the major sports events together in any given year.

For the price of a few luxury boxes, local businesses can make the fine museums in our area into even greater education and tourist centers. A tiny percent of the subsidies from the city planned for arenas would transform our existing museums from financially struggling institutions into engines of economic development.

No right-thinking person would argue that we should concern ourselves only with museums and exclude hockey, or any other sport. By the same token, the opposite should not be argued. Ancient Athens recognized that to be great, a city needed a theater, an agora (marketplace), art gallery, music hall, temple, stoa (school) and a stadium for athletics. Norfolk is already building a new agora, and it has the other elements. But a city needs all of the elements to be truly great.

R. PETER MOOZ

Virginia Beach, Jan. 1, 1997