A Look Behind the Scenes: Why we Collect Things....
/A Staff Member from the Past…
Blog Post By: Keith Ulrich, Former LHS Program Coordinator
About two months ago, Alison, the Executive Director asked if I’d be interested in visiting Lombard to help with the collection relocation project currently underway for the new Carriage House Addition. Since leaving the museum world nearly 3 years ago (a blog post for another time!), I’ve been itching for opportunities to get back into the history pool. My mother, a recent retiree, seemed like the perfect co-pilot to accompany me – she spent the last 15 years as a manager for one of the monster insurance conglomerates and is ploddingly familiar with endless, tedious documentation. I needed a sidekick who’d be down for potentially boring-as-hell work for hours on end (as rewarding as the work would be in the long run, of course).
Music box: c. 1870’s. Wood graining printed on paper and pasted on box. Music boxes were popular entertainment for the family, for special occasions and visitors, in the pre-radio era.
And she took right to it, recording accession numbers and filling out condition reports like she was the one who spent thousands of dollars on a museum studies certificate (brava, mom!). Of special interest to her was the physical collection, wondering about the many mundanities being preserved. A spoon. A yellowing doily. A music box. A blocky wooden thing that could be a lathe or an exceptionally dull doorstop. I proudly rippled into collections manager mode, explaining with freakish joy how these objects are just physical manifestations of an immaterial past we can actually visit, that preserving these washboards and creepy hair jewelry is the closest we’ll come to time traveling. In other words, it’s freakin’ cool.
“Remember the postcard you got from grandma and grandpa when they went to Greece that one time? You still have it in a box. What do you think about when you pull it out and read it?”
“I think about how they left me at home to babysit my two sisters for something like a week,” she countered.
“Huh. Okay, sure. What else?” I prodded.
“I remember playing my records loud and teaching the girls how to do the Twist.”
We’re getting somewhere. “Yes! See, there. That postcard and your memories around it help preserve a ton of historical stuff. African-American singers and their indelible influence on the music industry. A post-war, burgeoning middle class suddenly able to afford overseas travel. Inappropriately leaving young children unattended by adults for extended periods of time. That’s straight-up American cultural history. Represented symbolically by a 60ish-year-old ‘wish you were here postcard.”
2019.1.1 St Charles Road, view west from Park Ave, photo postcard, postmark 1929, Bernice to Aunt Mary Wilkinson, verso. LHS Collection
Vigorous nodding, understanding, appreciation. My education feels validated. We get back to condition reports and recording, recording, recording.
“I miss my mother,” my mom says. And I say I agree, I miss grandma, too. And I assume that the postcard made an appearance that night, along with the gradual depletion of a middling bottle of white wine.
Objects serve as the portals to another time, housed in stationary time-traveling machines we call museums. I think I miss my museums.
Keith and Samantha dressed for a tea party, c.2016.
A little bit about our Guest Blogger
Keith Ulrich was the program coordinator at Lombard Historical Society from 2016-20197 and still volunteers with the organization. He begrudgingly left the museum field, and now manages the Editorial department for an advertising agency.
