Word: ravenswaay
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...only one thing wrong with the Jefferson Memorial Museum in St. Louis: too few people ever stopped to see what was on display in that white-limestone building on the edge of big (1,380 acres) Forest Park. But that was before 35-year-old Amateur Historian Charles Van Ravenswaay got out of the Navy, took the job of museum director and began changing things...
Born and raised in the Missouri River town of Boonville (pop. 6,000), Charlie Van Ravenswaay had had a passion for frontier history since boyhood. If present-day youngsters didn't see things that way, he thought it was partly the fault of the museum. Jefferson had a whole wing full of frontier treasures (as well as a somewhat more popular permanent exhibit of the trophies of Charles A. Lindbergh). But there they were, locked away in glass cases or, if in open displays, with "Do Not Touch" signs all over them. Last year Van Ravenswaay got his long...
...dueling pistols, peered through a telescope (see cut) carried by Lewis & Clark on the exploration up the Missouri and Columbia Rivers. They even shook dice in a gleaming mahogany shaker from a palatial riverboat of the 1880s, the Grand Republic. As the children examined the trophies, two of Van Ravenswaay's museum staffers gave them a running account of the frontier history the objects represented...
Last week, after the tours ended for the season, Director Van Ravenswaay had reason to judge his idea a success. The St. Louis school board wanted the tours to continue next fall. Visiting Harvard Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had been so impressed that he promised to "tell the Massachusetts Historical Society all about it." Best of all, to Van Ravenswaay's thinking, 6,000 youngsters had written in asking for more...