posted May 10, 2006 01:14 AM               

My wife and I went to a bed and breakfast for one of their "set dinners" ... we had to make reservations, but we had heard great things about the food at this place. The owners were antique collectors, and before the meal they took all of us on a tour of their place where we saw many American colonial-era pieces.

After dinner, the owner announced that he would like to share a piece of history he and his wife had obtained recently -- he told the story of a letter written by a secretary who had been with his boss for 16 years at the time of the writing. The secretary was very loyal, and he was at the bedside of his boss on the day he died in December 1799. The letter he wrote was to the President, John Adams, announcing the death of George Washington -- the letter writer was Tobias Lear.

I asked afterward how he had obtained the letter, and he told me that he had won it at an auction. He was a telephone bidder, and he had an agent at the auction house who he was on the phone with during the live bidding. As the auction went up in price, he and one other bidder were the only ones still bidding, and he finally placed the highest bid.

About a year after obtaining the letter, he and his wife were at Mount Vernon visiting, and he asked to see the curator, saying that he was the owner of the Tobias Lear letter announcing Washington's death. The curator came out of his office immediately.

As it turned out, Mount Vernon had originally held the letter in its own collection for many years, but decided decades ago to sell the letter in order to obtain other pieces for the collection -- and they had lost track of where the letter was. On the day of the auction, Mount Vernon was the other bidder who was beaten out (although that was not known at the time).

The curator said that, if he ever wanted to sell the document, Mount Vernon would like the opportunity to buy it back.

So, in this case, the museum made a decision to sell the letter in order to improve its collection in other ways -- so why should we prevent museums from making decisions such as these?

A good lesson learned is: If you are the owner of a valuable piece of memorabilia, and you want to ensure it never enters private hands, you should form an estate and lend the item to your museum of choice with the agreement that they keep it on display and return it if they choose to no longer display it.

Otherwise, museums can sell items from its collection if it chooses to do so, and collectors help meet the museum's goals by purchasing those items for cash. Hopefully, the new owners will protect these historical items carefully ...

posted May 14, 2006 10:07 AM               

That is an excellent example of how museums and collectors do work together.

As stated in an earlier post on this thread, museums place in their donation contracts the right to sell a donated artifact. The term is called deacquistion. Most museums will sell a piece to raise money for an artifact that the museum curator feels will enhance the museum's collection. Most curators tend to look at extras or duplicate artifacts as potential sale or trade material. The Grissom dime that started this post is a perfect example. There are 52 Mercury dimes (dated in various years including 1942). Ten dimes were given to expedition members and two dimes were given to the Grissom Memorial (one for display and one for fundraising purposes). That leaves 40 dimes left in the Kansas Cosmosphere's collection. A collector can obtain this dime and either keep it in his or her collection or loan it to a museum.

I also agree with your assessment that the collector should loan any material to a museum that he or she does not want sold in the future. Remember curators change and what was one curator's treasure might be another curator's trash. While I find it hard to understand why a curator at Mount Vernon would sell such a one of a kind letter, at least the museum now knows where the piece is and has the chance to reacquire it in the future. The bed and breakfast owner can loan that piece if he wishes, but it looks to me as if he enjoys showing it to his many guests.

So museums and collectors can and do work together help perserve history and your's was an excellent example of how this works.

posted May 17, 2006 10:18 AM               

When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, he had his reel to reel recorder running to document the events as they were playing out on the radio and TV.

I was aware the recordings existed, and so I decided to transfer them over to a digital format. In the process of doing so I realised that the recordings contained information that had been forgotten or neglected over the years. I called up Colin Mackellar over at www.honeysucklecreek.net and told him what I was listening to. I sent him a copy which lead to the following developments and preservation og history:

The ABC (the national broadcaster in Australia) had wiped its original TX tapes, maintaining only concise sections of the telecast in its archives. My father's recordings are now the most complete archival copy they have. The late Bob Leslie who was a co-announcer on the TX did not have a copy. His widow is now in possion of the only known record of his discussions during the Apollo 11 EVA.The HSK website's historical accuracy was further enhanced by the tapes, including confirmation that a QANTAS pilot was the first to see the CM re-enter, rather than NASA ARIA planes.

In all, the official sources had lost their archives, and it was the efforts of a private collector/enthusiast who restored the integrity of the original telecast.