Once again I went to a museum that was seemingly designed for my nerdiness. I’ve never been to The Newseum before. The first time I was in D.C., 10 years ago this summer, it was closed in preparation for the move to the new location on Pennsylvania Avenue. And so, finally, after years on their site, having lunch with their executive director and so on, I’m finally here.
They have a large section of the Berlin Wall. The side facing East Berlin was painted white — the better to spot people on. The side facing West Berlin often looked like this. Vandals had to actually stand in the eastern sector to cover the wall, so they faced considerable danger in making their statements and art.
The microphone tour continues — I should start a subsection on the site, I guess. This WTOP is a DC operation. It is one of the few major markets where I was never on the air:
Another CBS flag, another supposedly used by FDR for his fireside chats. I bet all the microphones from the 1930s, when they get together at microphone reunions, say that they were there. The stopwatch, before software, was a big part of the backtiming enterprise:
Radio Free Europe, a station set up to send a broadcast over the Berlin Wall. That’s the famous Brandenburg Gate in a photo in the background:
This is a reporter’s notebook used to cover the famous 1963 church bombing in Birmingham that killed four little girls one beautiful Sunday morning. Denise McNair, whose name you see there, was one of them. Her father tells the story so beautifully. I interviewed him several times in 2001 during the Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry trials over the bombing. A former Jefferson County commissioner, as of this writing McNair is in jail on a bribery conviction.
(Update: Less than three weeks later a federal judge ordered McNair released for health considerations.)
This 1950s-60s teletype is part of a JFK display. They have it loaded with the first flashes of the story. That’s how newsrooms once received reports from far away, kids. The first report was that three shots rang out in Dallas:
In that same 1963 sliver of time, this camera was considered top of the line. Technology is grand:
Found this in the Newseum’s incredibly impressive newspaper display. I’ve always thought it was one of the best mastheads in the nation’s history. It was first published in April 1789 as a biweekly rag friendly to the George Washington administration, back when publications were more obviously partisan.
This is the first issue of the New York Times. Founded by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones, the paper announced “We publish today the first issue of the New-York Daily Times, and we intend to issue it every morning (Sundays excepted) for an indefinite number of years to come.”
The Neosho Times here was a sample of advertising on the front page — which is no new thing. I include it because my family was related to Jesse James. The Missouri Historical Society, a good one, has six years of the Neosho paper digitized. The Missouri town these days is served by the Neosho Daily News. Newspapers.com tells us the Times ran at least until 1939.
A nice little Frederick Douglass display:
And the increasingly rare Double V campaign:
This was worth coming to see all by itself. This is Ernie Pyle’s typewriter. He carried that into Europe and the Pacific islands and typed his stories right there. Ernie Pyle. This is the Pyle book you want to read, by James Tobin.
Benjamin Harrison started a paper in London in 1679 and, later opened North America’s first paper, Publick Occurrences in 1690. This is that paper. It was shut down by authorities after just one issue. He wrote a piece that accused the king of France having an affair with his daughter-in-law. Ahead of his time?
The Newseum is contemporary too. This is less than a week old:
They have some rare books. This is a 1774 reprint of Letters From a Pennsylvania Farmer. It is hard to overstate the importance of this book in colonial America. It has has somehow escaped common history tellings. Scholars have likened it to Milton, Swift and Burke or Cato’s Letters or Cicero:
After the 2011 tsunami in Japan the local newspapers were offline. This is how one staff kept the news going. Heroic, in its own way, if you ask me:
This is a Pulitzer Prize winning photograph. The subject is Auburn’s gold medalist, Rowdy Gaines. Three photographers from The Orange County Register were up against bigger papers with huge staff, so they started looking for something unusual, heretofore unseen. They wanted readers to see an image they hadn’t watched on television the night before. (Novel approach, right?) Rowdy had just won the gold in the 100-meter free and was celebrating with his swim teammates, and this was the iconic picture. Golden-haired All-American speed demon does good, wins a paper, and photographer Hal Stoelzle, the prize.
We’re now making the joke public, apparently. In one of the Newseum’s three — count ’em, three — gift shops:
We’re all about the second amendment too:
We had lunch at Merzi, best described as an Indian Chipotle. And it was delicious. And then we visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum. It is a no pictures place. I wanted to take two, but I only had the opportunity for one, with no flash:
The wall reads:
We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses.
We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers,
From Prague, Paris and Amsterdam,
And because we are only made of fabric and leather
And not of blood and flesh, each one of us avoided the hellfire.
— Moishe Shulstein
And you are in a world where people’s fillings were extracted, property stolen auctioned, people were worked to death and their hair shorn, so it could be sold to serve as stuffing for mattresses, socks, boat bumpers, thread and anything else hair can be used for.
There’s a lot of grim life and death in this museum, and precious few smiles. But they stand out just because they are there.
There are two walkways where the glass is simply etched with the names of towns that were raided and disappeared. The photograph I wanted to take was a three-floor room of nothing but photographs. I’m drawn to old photos anyway, of course, and these were no different. Four photographers had documented the village of Eishishok in modern Lithuania for decades. Scholarship says Jews had been there for 900 years and, in 1941, they were wiped out in two days. And they are on display there, all of them ghosts. Some of them died from ill health or old age or pure evil. And they’re all looking out, staring at you.
It was singularly one of the most curiously haunting experiences I’ve ever encountered.
They call it the Tower of Faces, but there’s no name strong enough.
One last look at the Capitol, because it is from a angle three degrees different from the last one:
Here’s a building of the National Bank of Washington, one of those boom-and-bust organizations that so readily speaks to the banking condition. You can read all about it here. It was a PNC bank recently, but that’s gone now too. The National Registry of Historic Places document is a good read.
Look who made another great trip possible! She’s the best trip designer ever, even if I have to sell my feet at the airport for a new pair:
We’re going up into the light! Did pretty well on the Metro, I came home with a card holding five extra bucks. Who is going to DC soon?
And here’s the sunset we watched most of the way home. I’ll have a video about this tomorrow:
Great trip. Wonderful weekend. Hope your weekend was even better than mine.
