Lives of Museum Junkies: The Story of America's Hands-On Science Movement

2016 Honorable Mention Great Midwest Book Festival Awards

2018 Shortlist for Chanticleer International Book Award

As a young wife and mother, I started a science and art museum in my Michigan basement. The year was 1972, and founding Impression 5 in Lansing heralded the start of an adventure that would change a timid, naive woman into one capable of running one of the nation’s foremost institutions, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

A wise man advised me by saying,  “When the time feels right, go for it!  Don’t wait for everyone else to agree because that never happens. Grab your own opportunity.” And that is what I did, but I was not the only one.  In Brain’s Night Out  I share my joys and difficulties as well as those of eleven other men and women on the leading edge of an international movement to build experiential museums dedicated to science.  Childhood stories show how their curiosity became a permanent way of thinking that stimulated a lifetime of making societal contributions. Their stories inspire parents everywhere who are interested in raising creative, curious children. 

This story has never been told.  In the late 1960s there were twelve science centers in the United States and a few in Europe. Today, there are many thousands dotting countries around the globe, all focused on raising science literacy. To understand how this growth happened, I delve into political influences of those early days beginning with Sputnik. When starting our museums we were not very sophisticated. We did not understand the intricacies of fundraising, board development, staff management or construction of interactive displays, and so we often stumbled when putting ideas into action.  Our passions stayed fired, though, by the philosophies of psychologists, educators, and scientists  such as Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori, Jonathan Kozol, John Hart, A.S. Neil, Carl Rogers and Frank Oppenheimer. 

During my years as museum president, I realized with increasing clarity that education starts in the home, so in 1995, with the help of twenty-two national museums, I left OMSI to start the Museum Tour Catalog in order to reach out to over two million households. Though I sold the company in 2013 I continue to work as a consultant to oversee the museum-quality educational toys and materials it provides to the nation.

Mostly, Lives of Museum Junkies demonstrates how perseverance can overcome obstacles when you follow your dreams.  As Dr. Seuss implied in his book Everything in the Whole Wide World Museum, the entire universe is everyone’s museum and we just have to organize our lives and psyche to embrace and take advantage of all that we see.