Museums

Museum Monday: Posters for Boeing’s canceled supersonic transport (SST) aircraft

July 3, 2023Harriet BaskasMuseumsArt + Flight, aviation history, aviation posters, Boeing, Boeing 2707 SST, Museum Monday, Museum of Flight

They are easy to miss as you cross the pedestrian bridge connecting the main campus of Seattle’s sprawling Museum of Flight to the museum’s Space Gallery and Aviation Pavilion across the street.

But as part of the delightful Art+Flight exhibit currently underway at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, there is a display of charming motivational posters created for the Boeing Model 2707, a supersonic transport (SST) aircraft developed in the 1960s to compete with the British and French Concorde.

Boeing had a government contract to develop and build the supersonic airliner, but the contract was canceled in 1971 before the prototypes were even completed.

These posters are from the archives of the Museum of Flight, which says all it really knows about them is that they were made as motivational posters for employees working on the 2707 SST program during the 1960s. The colors and imagery clearly take influences from the pop art of the time. And the messages and slogans are all about making the plane as light as can be.

Images are courtesy of Seattle Museum of Flight’s Holden Withington Boeing SST Poster Collection and the Clarence S Howell Collection of Boeing SST Posters

The Days of Drag Racing at John Wayne Airport

June 21, 2023Harriet BaskasMuseumsDrag races, Drag racing, John Wayne Airport, Lyon Air Museum

In the 1950s, when ‘hot rods’ were all the rage in Southern California, and John Wayne Airport (SNA) was officially called the Orange County Airport, sanctioned drag racing took place on one of the airport runways.

According to the Lyon Air Museum, an aviation and automobile museum on the west side of the airport, in June 1950 Santa Ana local C.J. “Pappy” Hart struck a deal with Orange County to use a portion of an unused runway for drag racing.

He promised to give 10% of the proceeds to the county. And the country’s first official commercial drag strip was born.

Racing was held every Sunday, from dawn to dusk, on what became known as the Santa Ana Drag Strip and continued until Sunday, June 21, 1959.

The Lyon Air Museum is paying tribute to those drag races with a new exhibit, Santa Ana Drags and Beyond: America’s First Official Drag Strip, running July 1 through September 4, 2023.

Bean Bandit Dragster

Joining the history-making drag racing cars on display during the Santa Ana Drags and Beyond exhibit is the famed Bean Bandit Dragster.

The Bean Bandits was one of the earliest drag racing teams and was organized in San Diego in 1949 to pool its member resources so they could afford to go drag racing.

Known for its Mexican membership, the Lyon Air Museum says the club in reality consisted of multiple ethnic groups, including Anglo, African-American, Asian, and Lebanese members.

“A few months after Santa Ana Drag Strip opened, the Bean Bandit Dragster was built. Within a short period, the dragster was winning races at Santa Ana Drag Strip, as well as all over California. The Bean Bandits went on to win hundreds of races and are still racing on the dry lakes, salt flats, and select drag strips where they continue their tradition of breaking records.”

(All photos courtesy Lyon Air Museum)

The latest from the SFO Museum

May 18, 2023Harriet BaskasMuseumsArt in airports, San Francisco International Airport, SFO Museum, Unknown Museum

If you miss your flight at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) blame it on the curators of the SFO Museum.

At any one time, there are perhaps 20 top-notch exhibitions on view throughout the terminals, spanning everything from vintage radios and Victorian wallpaper to all manner of aviation history.

And each exhibit will make you want to stop and stay a while.

One of the newest exhibitions, Recollections… From the Unkown Museum, on display through March 2024 in Terminal 2, offers selections and creations culled from a quirky collection of vintage pop culture artifacts.

A well-known ‘secret’ museum in Mill Valley, CA since the mid-1970s and now artist Mickey McGowan’s private collection, the Unknown Museum is filled with a mass amount of objects dating from the 1940s to the 1980s. The museum is an “exploration into America’s brain” and a “complete immersion in conceptual art and American consumerism.”

Among other things.

Recollections… from the Unknown Museum at SFO Airport is a sampling of the many fantastic art and object installations on display at various locations of the museum from the mid-1970s through the present.

“My original intent was to rescue these items, to provide them with a rest home for the remainder of their days,” museum curator and archivist Mickey McGowan said back in 1988.

Thank goodness he did.

Here are some snaps from the exhibit, courtesy of SFO Museum, and Mickey McGowan.

Visiting: Indiana Medical History Museum

March 29, 2023Harriet BaskasMuseumsHistory Museums, Indiana Medical History Museum, Medical History Museum

“Are you SURE you want me to drop you off here?” the Uber driver said as she turned left onto the road to the abandoned-looking grounds of the former Central State Hospital near the west side of Indianapolis.

“This doesn’t look right.”

But that is exactly where were wanted to be.

Central State Hospital, which opened in 1848, was originally known as the “Indiana Hospital for the Insane,” and the grounds sprawled across 160 acres. During the 150 years the hospital was open, people diagnosed with everything from schizophrenia, depression (melancholia), and hysteria to alcoholism, and epilepsy were patients here.

The hospital’s Pathology Department building, which first opened in 1896 for the purpose of studying the conditions of the hospital patients, is now the Indiana Medical History Museum.

It’s also the oldest surviving pathology facility in the nation. It is on the National Register of Historic Places. And it still has much of its scientifically equipped interior intact.

We joined a tour that made stops in the teaching amphitheater, various laboratories, the library, the autopsy room, and the early-day anatomical museum which houses preserved specimens–mostly brains, organized by pathology.

Here are some more images from the museum.

Visiting: Indy’s Teeny Statue of Liberty Museum

March 15, 2023Harriet BaskasMuseumsIndianapolis, Indy's Teeny Statue of Liberty Museum, Museums

Indy’s Teeny Statue of Liberty Museum, on East Tenth Street in Indianapolis, IND, is home to Tim Harmon’s collection of about 1000 items portraying or bearing the image of the Statue of Liberty.

The museum is about 10 feet by 16 feet (hence, “teeny”, says Harmon) and resides in the front room of a building created by enclosing an alley.

Harmon says his collection started innocently with a handful of Statues of Liberties arranged on the back of his toilet tank. “Then there was no reason to stop,” he said. “And when you collect you get a shelf, then you get a couple of shelves, then people start giving you things. And in my case, it was Statues of Liberties.”

And then it was Indy’s Teeny Statue of Liberty Museum.

“The museum’s not patriotic,” says Harmon. “The museum just is what it is. It’s a museum filled with Statues of Liberty.”

Here are some snaps from our tour of Indy’s Teeny Statue of Liberty Museum.