StoriesHere Podcast

Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site Conversation with Sean Kelley – Senior Vice President and Director of Interpretation.  This is Part 1 of our conversation, and these remarkable stories continue in Part 2.

Note from Wayne Parker, Host of the StoriesHere podcast.  "Many years ago while working for the State of California, the newly created SolarCal office, I made an official visit to San Quentin prison with a number of state prison officials.  San Quentin is a maximum security prison and we toured the entire facility, including the death chamber.  The goal at the time was to see if prisoners could be involved in helping produce solar panels in the state.  After the tour we met in Warden George Sumner's office, and he was very emotional, saying 'you have to give me something for them to do'.

That story relates to Eastern State, and the mindset of people left continually in solitary confinement with nothing to do.

Here's a bit of history of Eastern States that's discussed in the episode:

“A group of prominent Americans were horrified by the conditions in the jails. They met, just after the American Revolution, in the home of Benjamin Franklin. They had a great 18th century name for their organization: “The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons" and they were the first prison reform group in the world. They believed convicts needed time alone—in silence, to rediscover their good nature. The early prison reformers saw solitary confinement, not as a punishment, but an as opportunity for reflection. A chance to become penitent.”

....but they were wrong, at least in the way Eastern State was built and operated:

"There is but one step between the prisoner and insanity.” Inmate James Morton

Senator and POW John McCain - "It’s an awful thing, solitary,” John McCain wrote of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam—more than two years of it spent in isolation in a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot cell, unable to communicate with other P.O.W.s except by tap code, secreted notes, or by speaking into an enamel cup pressed against the wall. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” 

Charles Dickens - "I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body". 

As Hawthorne relates, Dickens visited several prisoners, including one who was about to be released after two years in solitary confinement. Dickens remarked to his guide that “they trembled very much.”

Charles Dickens wrote that the two sites in the United States he most wanted to see were “The falls at Niagara” and the Eastern State Penitentiary. 

We’re talking today about the very special California State Railroad Museum, and with the President and CEO of their Foundation that runs the museum, Cheryl Marcell.  The Museum is stunning, in Old Sacramento along the Sacramento River, at the western end of the transcontinental railroad and also the Pony Express.  

And you can hear more great episodes at storieshere.com, and also on your favorite podcast service.

We’re talking in this episode with Cheryl Marcell, President and CEO of the California State Railroad Museum Foundation in Sacramento, California.  Our conversation today touches on so many crucial elements of American history, from the move west, the Gold Rush, Abraham Lincoln’s desire to bind the nation from the wounds of the Civil War, and the birth of modern day California.  Image credit California State Parks

This episode is our conversation with Braden Paynter, Program Manager for the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience.

Imagine 290 historic sites, museums and memory initiatives around the world that have come together to learn, to share and to move forward from the belief, as Braden says, “that our historic sites enable us to have conversations we can’t have anyplace else.  That being in that physical space, with the history that happened there, calls us to behave in particular ways, enables us to behave in particular ways, activates parts of who we are.”  And thus helping to fulfill the Coalition’s mission ‘to turn memory into action’.  Hear more from Braden in this podcast about some of the world’s most important initiatives and places and the things that make them so effective.  Learn more at sitesofconscience.org.

This episode is our conversation with Braden Paynter, Program Manager for the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience.  Learn more at sitesofconscience.org, and here is a little background...

“Founded in 1999, the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience (“the Coalition”) is the only worldwide network of Sites of Conscience. With over 275 members in 65 countries, we build the capacity of these vital institutions through grants, networking, training, transitional justice mechanisms and advocacy. These members and partners remember a variety of histories and come from a wide range of settings – including long-standing democracies, countries struggling with legacies of violence, as well as post-conflict regions just beginning to address their transitional justice needs – but they are all united by their common commitment to connect past to present, memory to action.”

What history the Wilton House has seen.  This episode is a conversation with Katie Watkins, Education Director of the Wilton House Museum in Richmond, Virginia.  The Wilton House has been a part of important times in American history, including both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

Katie found her interest in the history of that area at an early age, and you can hear her knowledge and enthusiasm in this conversation.

Thank you for listening.

What history the Wilton House has seen.  This episode is a conversation with Katie Watkins, Education Director of the Wilton House Museum.  Visitors to the property included Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Patrick Henry.  It was built 1753, was a tobacco plantation with large slave population, and in many ways at the center of much of early American history.

Julie Stein, Executive Director of the Burke Museum, and Wayne Parker, Host of the StoriesHere Podcast

Wayne: Greetings. This is Wayne Parker letting you know that something remarkable has happened on the north end of the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle. A new museum is opening and it is unlike any other.  A new $99 million building is completely replacing the old Museum, and not just a new building but a new way for people to experience a museum.

Here’s Dr. Julie Stein, Executive Director of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture to tell us about the new Museum and how this came about. And then after this podcast find out more at burkemuseum.org.

Julie: Well, the New Burke is I believe something different from most museums if not all museums, and that we truly, truly tried to turn this museum inside out.

There’s a story I tell about the Old Burke. The Old Burke was right adjacent to us and it was a fairly traditional museum that had exhibits about dinosaurs and people of the Pacific. There were cases with objects and labels and you could read a little bit on the label about whatever it was the Curator was trying to tell you.

But when you were done looking at those exhibits you would leave. Maybe you’d buy something at the shop or the cafe, but you would leave and not understand that there were many other things at the Burke behind the walls that you couldn’t see. And I used to give people tours of the Burke. And I would take them downstairs to the basement and there were, down there, cases and cases of objects in archaeology and paleontology, open shelving with big mammoth bones and dinosaur bones and eggs of dinosaurs. And while you were walking along from archaeological cases you’d stop and see a room full of students and employees, staff, undergrads and graduates.

They’d be working on a problem that somebody was trying to solve by looking at an object. And you’d continue walking down the hall and you go past offices with people who worked in our finance department or communications. And then by that time people’s mouths were hanging open and they’d say, “I had no idea that you had people in here, that they had jobs, that they were working on collections, that you had collections, that there were this many objects”.

And then we would go upstairs to the Culture section and they’d see 9,000 baskets and masks and all kinds of beaded clothing and footwear from all over the Pacific. And then birds and then mammals.

And you’re getting my point here. By the end of a tour, which usually lasted an hour, sometimes I couldn’t get people out of there for an hour and a half!

They were just overwhelmed with all the information and all of the interesting, difficult issues that people were using the collections to try to address. And it was so clear to me after doing this for 10 years that the new museum had to give that experience to every single visitor.

(3:50)

Wayne: That’s Julie Stein, Executive Director of the Burke Museum, talking about a new approach to the museum experience.

Her comments really resonate with me since that kind of guided tour experience that she described was our motivation for launching this StoriesHere Podcast.

And imagine moving millions of items from one building to another! Let’s hear that story now.

Julie: It’s true. We took possession of the New Burke Museum, which is a new building adjacent to the old Burke Museum.

We took possession of it in May of 2018, and we couldn’t move anything in before the fire department gave us permission. We started moving like crazy and the last object came over on the last day of February in 2019, so that I think is just roughly about nine months. So we thought of it like we were pregnant!

Wayne: I want to hear, of course, a lot more about the New Burke. First, I did want to ask about your interest in this, and what sparked that interest. You went off to college in archaeo

Burke Museum Podcast Transcript

StoriesHere Interview July 15, 2019

Julie Stein, Burke Museum and Wayne Parker, StoriesHere

Wayne: Greetings. This is Wayne Parker letting you know that something remarkable is happening on the north end of the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle.  A new museum is about to open and it is unlike any other.  A new 90 million dollar building is completely replacing the old Museum, and not just a new building but a new way for people to experience a museum.

Here's Dr. Julie Stein, Executive Director of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture to tell us about the new Museum and how this came about.  And then after this podcast find out more at burkemuseum.org. 

Julie: Well, the New Burke is I believe something different from most museums if not all museums, and that we truly, truly tried to turn this museum inside out.

There's a story I tell about the Old Burke.  The Old Burke was right adjacent to us and it was a fairly traditional museum that had exhibits about dinosaurs and people of the Pacific.  There were cases with objects and labels and you could read a little bit on the label about whatever it was the Curator was trying to tell you.

But when you were done looking at those exhibits you would leave.  Maybe you'd buy something at the shop or the cafe, but you would leave and not understand that there were many other things at the Burke behind the walls that you couldn't see. And I used to give people tours of the Burke. And I would take them downstairs to the basement and there were, down there, cases and cases of objects in archaeology and paleontology, open shelving with big mammoth bones and dinosaur bones and eggs of dinosaurs.  And while you were walking along from archaeological cases you’d stop and see a room full of students and employees, staff, undergrads and graduates.

They’d be working on a problem that somebody was trying to solve by looking at an object. And you’d continue walking down the hall and you go past offices with people who worked in our finance department or communications. And then by that time people's mouths were hanging open and they'd say, “I had no idea that you had people in here, that they had jobs, that they were working on collections, that you had collections, that there were this many objects”.

And then we would go upstairs to the Culture section and they'd see 9,000 baskets and masks and all kinds of beaded clothing and footwear from all over the Pacific.  And then birds and then mammals.  

And you're getting my point here.  By the end of a tour, which usually lasted an hour, sometimes I couldn't get people out of there for an hour and a half!

They were just overwhelmed with all the information and all of the interesting, difficult issues that people were using the collections to try to address. And it was so clear to me after doing this for 10 years that the new museum had to give that experience to every single visitor. 

(3:50) 

Wayne: That's Julie Stein, Executive Director of the Burke Museum, talking about a new approach to the museum experience.

Her comments really resonate with me since that kind of guided tour experience that she described was our motivation for launching this StoriesHere Podcast.

And imagine moving millions of items from one building to another!  Let's hear that story now. 

Julie: It's true. We took possession of the New Burke Museum, which is a new building adjacent to the old Burke Museum.

We took possession of it in May of 2018, and we couldn't move anything in before the fire department gave us permission. We started moving like crazy and the last object came over on the last day of February in 2019, so that I think is just roughly about nine months.

Folklife Stories with John Fenn – this episode includes some surprising stories and a peek into the life of a folklorist.  Those stories range from a shootout in Texas to the work of preserving Native American language and cultural heritage materials.

John is the Head of Research & Programs at the American Folklife Center, part of the Library of Congress.  He’s married to a folklorist so his kids think that is what everyone does!

The song sample at about 8 minutes into the episode is “Coal Miner’s Blues” from the ToneWay Project.  Learn more at https://toneway.com/song/coal-miners-blues.