Kathryn Boardman, November 4, 2020

Title

interviewee

Kathryn (Katie) Boardman

interviewer

Sybil Tubbs

Date

2020-11-4

Subject

American Guild of Organists

Appalshop

Bassett Hospital

Covid-19

Ecumenical Council

The Farmers' Museum

Garrattsville

Hagley

LGBTQ

More Light Church

Presbyterian Church

Stagecoach

Tinsmith

Description

Kathryn (Katie) Boardman is a 1982 graduate of the Cooperstown Graduate Program. Boardman is from Roanoke, Virginia. As a child she enjoyed spending time in her grandparents' antique shop. While in undergraduate school she earned a degree in Liberal Studies including music performance, history, and art history. When an internship opened up at The Farmers' Museum she applied. This led to a twenty-year career at The Farmers' Museum. Today, she is an adjunct professor at the Cooperstown Graduate Program.

Transcription

KB = Kathryn Boardman
ST = Sybil Tubbs

[START OF TRACK 1, 0:00]

ST:
This is the November 4, 2020 interview of Katie Boardman by Sybil Tubbs for the Cooperstown Graduate Program's Research and Fieldwork course, recorded on Zoom. So, how did you become interested in museums?

KB:
Oh wow. This is one of those, kind of circuitous paths with a lot of things converging. The factors include, growing up in my grandparents' antique shop in Virginia when I was a kid. My dad being a mechanical engineer having interesting hobbies like blacksmithing and cabinet making, and collecting old tools to use. Undergraduate degree wound up being a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies, which included a music performance degree, history and art history sort of secondary studies, so a real mixed bag and kind of thinking about what I wanted to do when I got out. Turned out that my roommate, I worked at a fruit and vegetable farm in northern Delaware, probably the Bidens have shopped there, you know in those times. But my roommate, he was a member of the family there, was taking some certificate classes, postgraduate in Museum Studies at the University of Delaware, and an opportunity came up for an internship at an odd time of year. It was actually, a museum in New York State could not take this internship and The Farmers' Museum found out about it. Talked to the folks at New York State Council of the Arts; they said we'll take this internship and so it was advertised through the various museum studies programs and the history departments and stuff and it was to start in January. It was pretty unusual. So, I talked to the person who I knew at that point was Bill Alderson at the University of Delaware program. He had worked for AASLH [the American Association for State and Local History] for a while, and we knew each other vaguely. He was a real leader in the field. I said, I'm thinking about this, he said you should go, go interview, go see. I said, okay. So, I drove up in the first part of December, right around about a month from now, and had this great interview. It snowed four inches during my interview. My first view of The Farmers' Museum was in a car that David Parke, the site director, drove me around in. Anyway, I wound up working there for a nine-month internship. Found that it was an amazing match for a lot of things that I knew already or knew about or had an interest in, and so it just kind of was a convergence of stuff. I was like, you know what, this is what I need to do. I can even use my music degree and did. So, then I was looking at programs, and of course I had to think about Hagley because I was from Wilmington and one of the instructors of that program was one of my undergraduate instructors who was a graduate of CGP. It's all intertwined. Suffice it to say, I wound up at CGP, and it was great. I had a ball. The core of the program was pretty much like it is now, with lots of hands on, lots of practical kinds of things. The specifics of course have changed over time as the program, the industry has changed as practices have changed. I wound up working at The Farmers' Museum for twenty years. First ten I was a curator. So, I got to play in collections and with exhibits and some of the big major exhibits; the first big changes in twenty years that had happened there. Working with some really amazing people–a guy named Dan Mayer who was our on-site exhibit designer, another graduate of the program. Just learned a whole lot from these great people. Also when I showed up for my internship the people from the folklife program, that had just closed. There was a third program here related to Cooperstown and it was a folklife program. That program had just stopped but a lot of the folklorists were still around. A lof the grads were still around, so I got to meet a whole bunch of neat people during that year. And I was interested in that too. Especially because one of my undergraduate mentors had that interest too. So, I mean it all fell into place, very nice stuff. So, first ten years I was a curator; next ten years I was [laugh] middle management. I was supervising all of the really talented and wonderful frontline people who were the craftspeople and the interpreters at The Farmers' Museum. Truly amazing group of people. There's only a few of them left at the museum now, but it was a real interesting, creative time in the life of that museum. All museums go through various cycles. It was a very different, very lively, trendsetting, nationally known museum at the time. After a while it was time to go out on my own, which I did. So, that's more than you needed to know probably, but it happened because nothing is ever lost in your experience and in your studies and in your contacts. There was just this gradual convergence of interest and skills. I interviewed for a job that had one of the best tool collections, hand tool collections historically, on the East Coast, The Farmers' Museum. The collection rivals, it's smaller in size, but the quality rivals the Henry Ford, the Smithsonian, and Old Sturbridge Village. And I knew what a molding plane was because my dad collected them. How does that happen? Right. So, that's how that happened.

ST:
How did your CGP interview go?

KB:
Oh my gosh. Well, that was pretty funny. Anyway because of course I had worked there for nine months as an intern and then I took it was like a gap year that I worked as staff photographer for what was then the New York State Historical Association, which had Fenimore House and The Farmers' Museum. I was trained by Milo Stewart and other photographers. So, I was running the dark room and doing a lot of event, object photography, P.R. [public relations] photography, glass plate negatives, the whole thing. So, they knew me because I had worked at The Farmers' Museum and I was in the basement all the time with the water running. Everybody on the panel knew me. There was Minor Wine Thomas, there were the Joneses, Louis and Agnes, the faculty of the time, Gib Vincent I think was on that panel. I can't remember who else but those were the key players. Of course, it always happened in the conference room that was in the library building. There was this kind of funny joke, and it always happened in the spring, close to Easter. But there was always this bowl of jellybeans of various colors, right. And the joke was be careful what color jellybean you select because they may be watching and there may be an issue about that. So, that was the kind of funky dark humor that was going on. So, here I am dressed up. It's March, it's raining, it's muddy. Of course, it is, it's Cooperstown. I'm really nervous because it's like I have worked with all these people, but this is wacko. So, at that time, you were sitting at the end of the table. One interview with everybody, right. I'm all dressed up, had my blue blazer on. Selected a jellybean. It was in my left hand. I'm answering the questions and I'm thinking, how am I going to eat this jellybean? I still have this jellybean. Thank God, it's in my left hand. So, as the conversation is going on. Frankly, I don't even remember all the questions. I have no memory what the questions were. I just knew that this jellybean was slowly melting in my hand. So, it gets over, it's great. I shake hands. I look at my hand and it's this muck of melted jellybean. I think it was orange or something. It was kind of fun, but it was great to be a part of that class. And also the class that was before us was good people, and I knew a bunch of these people because they had been around, and the folklore people were around. I knew some of the faculty, I was getting to know the faculty. So, that was my interview.

[TRACK 1, 11:37]

ST:
That was a very good interview. Tell me about life as a CGP student.

KB:
Well, my experience was a little different than some because I already lived here. I was already making Cooperstown my community. So, I had connections in town, and I was living in the Cricket by that time. The Cricket was this, is this house that sits down off the road on Estli Avenue right where Mill Street comes in at the top of the hill there. The core of it, it's actually a log cabin and it's been there for a long time. And it has a long history of having winter rentals. The family would come up in the summer, so you had to get out. So the graduate program students, a lot of the graduate program students were there. And recently I found a bunch of those folks. I've always wanted to do like a homecoming to the Cricket because I know the current owners, who thought that would be a great idea too, but it was fun. So, I was kind of in this communal living situation in this building with people who worked at the hospital. So, there were interns and residents, you know, who were working crazy long hours at the hospital, which is right down the hill. Another person who was there from Kentucky for a while. Various other people were in and out. Some of the other hospital people moved out to another location; some more CGP moved in. There were always dogs, cats, puppies that were born there. And it was the coldest place in Cooperstown. It had to be the coldest place in Cooperstown. It had no insulation. It was on a windy hill. Great sledding hill next door, by the way; this is a tradition apparently. We didn't know this until a bunch of us started talking about how many sledding parties had been on that hill. We covered the back wall during the winter with a big quilt. Just to keep a little bit [of the draft out]. You'll appreciate this, our friend from Kentucky put up what we called Appalachian storm windows, plastic. We plasticed the back wall and put up a big quilt to try to keep the draft out. When people came over to visit, we gave them a blanket. But it was a great place because it was close to town but not right in town. If you sat on the back porch, if the doc people sat on the back porch in just the right way, there used to be a big evergreen tree that if they sat in the right location they couldn't really see the hospital, which they didn't really want to see because they had been there for so many hours. It was really kind of fun. So, I had my foot in part of the community and the CGP community at the same time. That was a little different than the folks who were living on Fair Street. There was a house, a big green house, it's still green, I can't remember, on Fair Street, the corner of Fair and Lake. There was a lot of students that were there. It was a real kind of rabbit warren of grad students. There were some other places around town. Much the way people are still doing this, with shared housing and finding places to live. There wasn't as much going on in town as there is now. The town closed down pretty much in the winter. Except for like the Pit, which is the bar underneath the Tunnicliff. There used to be and some of these have been saved, and I was sorry to see them change the tables in the Tunnicliff, because they were carved in by a lot of graduate students. So, there was a whole kind of history of CGP in these tabletops. [TRACK 1, 16:20] It was modernized as some point. I think they saved one tabletop kind of put up on the wall or something. I haven't been in there in so long I have to go and look, just check it out. But that was the one place that kind of stayed open. It was kind of a hangout. But there was a lot of fun. It was cold enough. It was really cold those years and we had Winter Carnival. How cold was it? It was so cold that the lake [Otsego Lake] froze significantly enough that they were still having car races on the lake. That hasn't happened in quite a while. So that's how I measure global warming.

ST:
How did you have fun?

KB:
How did we have fun? Aside from watching the car races on the lake, we had a lot of potlucks. I mean that tradition of potlucks, people getting together and sharing meals and entertainment. There was a lot of making music. We did that in our house a lot. Local folks as well as CGP folks. There was a dance, a contra dance in Oneonta on Tuesday nights. A bunch of us would pile in the car and drive to Oneonta to go to the dances on Tuesday nights. It was always a live fiddler, lots of fun. It was a mix of students, mix of classes. The art conservation program was still here so there were people studying to be conservators who were part of that too. One year, that spring actually, there was a big dance workshop at SUNY Binghamton, or maybe it was one of the churches at Binghamton. Appalshop came up, a bunch of people came up from Kentucky. We said let's all go, so we piled in the car. We had really puffy jackets. You know we had down jackets, puffy jackets. You know how cold Cooperstown is, well we're at a higher elevation. We get a lot more snow, a lot more cold. So, we're in our car and we get to Binghamton and it's a bright sunshiny day. It's fifty degrees. Because it's the Southern Tier. We kidded, we said it was like the pillows go to Binghamton. That's what we named the trip, the four pillows go to Binghamton. It was a big adventure. It was a great time, and then we came back to the cold for a while. We did contra dancing, we had potlucks. The movie theater was still in town. Where it says “Smalley's” on Main Street there. That was still operating, and it was the only local theater. They got first rate stuff. Everybody knew everybody and so if somebody was late getting there, they'd call up the guy in the theater there and say we're on our way from Fly Creek, we'll be there in about five minutes. So, he'd come down, everybody's siting around and they're eating their popcorn. He'd say, you guys mind if we start the movie five minutes late? No problem. So, we had the movie theater, we had those kinds of things going on. People did field trips, those kinds of things. There just seemed to be a lot of parties, a lot of excuses for parties. We said it was because we needed to learn how to host cocktail parties for fundraisers. Yes, we did. The other thing that was kind of interesting was Halloween parties. There was one that a number of people decided to dress up like Dr. [Carol] Beechy, that's my partner. So, we were kind of pilfering white jackets from people we knew from the medical training. So, they could all wear a white jacket and fake a name tag. Pretty funny. So, a lot of that kind of stuff. There were some poker games, with Lanny Wright [Langdon G. Wright]. Actually, there was a group of guys that would get together smoke cigars, drink bourbon and play poker, with Lanny. So, I have a lot of Lanny Wright tales and he could cook like nobody's business. That guy was an amazing cook. He also made a pretty nasty punch. So, [laughed] I found a lot of things to do.

ST:
How did you meet your partner?

KB:
Countra dancing. So, the Methodists are right, dancing leads to. Anyway, never mind. Social events, social events.

ST:
How were your classes?

KB:
They were neat. They were very intimate. We didn't have the building we have now. The building you're in was being used by the art conservation labs. It was a different configuration. It was a little smaller. So, that was kind of protected territory. Once a year we'd be invited over for an open house so the conservation folks could practice telling people what they do in art conservation and show off their work, which was incredible. I mean amazing stuff. So, we were crammed into the White House, which is that two, three story actually, building, frame building, just across the creek from CGP. We also had classroom spaces in the library. So, we met in those places. We had a kitchen and a downstairs lounge and the offices. Secretary's office was in the front door to the right, when you first walked in. One of my colleagues, Jim [Van Buchove], decided we should not only practice cocktail parties, but we should also practice high tea. So, on Thursdays at four, the silver would come out. People would bring things from the bakery and we would brew up the tea and we would have high tea on Thursdays. That was our tradition. Small classes. We had a dark room, big dark room, left over in the basement of the White House. People were still learning how to print, how to use cameras. All of that tech stuff of the time was what was going on. Now we have different tech stuff that we're working with. It's all digital now. We did a lot of field trips. We did a lot of hands-on stuff. We fully utilized the campuses and collections of the adjacent museums. That was a full partnership. There were a lot of faculty members who worked for those organizations. It was fully integrated. That's how that program started. It was a fully integrated partnership at that time. When we went on field trips, much the same as now, part of those field trips, a lot of the behind-the-scenes was very important. Also, the sort of receptions where we met other people. Some of our alums who had gone before us and had important positions. Others who were important in the field, Nina Fletcher Little. People whose names are on book spines and who were the research and curatorial leaders of the time. Meeting those folks, they really were becoming our web of professional connections. It was really amazing and wonderful.

ST:
Tell me about a favorite project that you did as a CGP student?

KB:
[Laughed] Oh man, there were a lot of good projects but one that just popped into my mind because it was so huge. Some of us did a thesis, it was part of the program. Some people did what's known as a thesis project. Kind of harkening back to my interest in folklore, oral history interviewing, and all that kind of stuff, I documented the tinsmith shop, tin and sheet metal working shop. It was on the second floor of the McGown Hardware store, which sits, the building is still there. It's a baseball store, of course, but it's on the corner of Main and Pioneer. I think maybe the advertisement is still on the side of the brick building. It's on the same side of the street as Stagecoach. I inventoried the tools and equipment. Now, why tinsmithing? Well, when I first came to Cooperstown for my internship, the second day I was in town the curator of The Farmers' Museum and I high-tailed it to Fort Plain because there was a hardware store, Stewart and Bergan Hardware, in Fort Plain that had a tinsmith, sheet metal working shop on the second floor, as a lot of those hardware stores did. A big donation was being made of a lot of that collection of tools and equipment. That was what was coming into the museum. I spent the winter [laugh] [TRACK 1, 27:19] in a furnace room working with cold dirty iron ware, cataloging all of that collection and got really interested in tinsmithing. We did an exhibit on tinsmithing and sheet metal working that included that collection as well as a folk art collection that another intern who was at the Fenimore House was working with. That was of a guy that painted, he was a tinsmith. He was a sheet metal worker. He painted in his spare time and he painted images of sheet metal workers. I mean, how crazy was this? It was really a blast. It was a real interdisciplinary project that I worked on as an intern. I documented another really small one in Garrattsville. It still sits in the back of my mind as kind of a fun thing and I always look carefully at old hardware store buildings. Because it was a big deal. There's still houses in Cooperstown with stamped sheet metal shingles for roofing and siding and some really nice stamped architectural pieces on the buildings and gutters and boat pumps and all kinds of things that supported local industry. You know, everything that eventually became plastic. A lot of that stuff was made in sheet metal. And so, I documented that project using my photography skills, using my inventory skills, using my interview skills, and putting it in context. It was really kind of fun, but you had to type it. Computers were not there yet. So, here's my funky connection to Colin Havener. Colin's mom [Jeanne-Marie Havener], who's a wonderful woman, was a nurse and she teaches nursing now. She was a nurse at the time at Bassett. I knew her through my connections, my community connections. I was not a great typist. I mean I could do my draft, but you know the final had to be pretty well done and this is like slogging stuff. She typed my final project for me. My final project report. I paid her to do this. I hired her to do it. So, you know, I'm indebted to the Havener family forever.

ST:
How has Cooperstown changed since you were a student?

KB:
I think it's a lot more lively. Certainly, the numbers coming in the summer for baseball with this exceptional year are much higher. The tourism trade, and specifically baseball, has overshadowed a lot of any other kind of industry or activity. But there are a lot more restaurants, there's a lot more restaurants with really good chefs and some of them staying open and I hope a lot of them continue to stay open and we continue to get takeout and support them. There's a lot more activity. I think there's a rejuvenation physically, infrastructure-wise of Cooperstown. Thanks to people like Cindy Falk who is one of the village mothers, as it were, and the mayor, who is a village mother and a CGP conservation grad. Ellen Tillapaugh is a paper conservator actually. So, I mean people who care about community, and I think that's the thing that has really stayed. It's a complex community of people related to the hospital. Some of them are transient, because they are in and out for their short-term internships and residencies. Some are here for a longer term. Graduate program of course bringing people in and out. People coming in and out of the museums. I think the most lively of the museums, hands down is the baseball museum [National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum]. That has grown and changed a lot over time too. One part of that baseball museum used to be the Alfred Corning Clark gymnasium. The swimming pool was in there, until this younger branch of the Clark family built the big Clark Sports Center and then put a big addition on it, a little bit later, but I remember the squash courts in the old space. They had funky hours; it was really kind of weird. So, I think there's a lot more to do. There was no Montessori school then and yet some of the things still exist that are real community builders. Church potluck suppers, church suppers. Right now we're not having them as frequently, I mean we're getting away with Brook's BBQ pick-ups because they're a commercial kitchen and they can do this. But we're not seeing so much right now is the chicken and biscuit supper that used to happen at the Fly Creek Church. Well, actually the roast beef supper in Jordanville actually did happen. It was takeout. Starting in the fall you would get the Pennysaver [newspaper] to see where the next church supper was going to be. And the other thing is because there weren't as many different restaurants, the cafeteria at the hospital actually had pretty good food. A lot of people ate at the hospital cafeteria a lot. I mean we'd go over there and get dinner. Graduate students ate there all the time because it was affordable. It was a hot meal. You know there and the diner [Cooperstown Diner]. I got to know the quiche special really well at the diner. So, I think it's much more diverse now, but it retains a lot of charm that it certainly did and it is a small town. It has all the good, bad, and ugly of a small town.

ST:
How did you get involved with the church? [TRACK 1, 34:48]

KB:
Well, one of the other hats that I wear, I'm a church organist and choir director. I had training in that in undergraduate and an internship that I did in a big university-related Methodist church in Delaware. So, that was a part of my way of making a living. I was always interested in what was going on around. My partner and I were sniffing around to see what was going on in churches in town. Fourth of July weekend we walked in the Presbyterian Church and this guy, who was the pastor at the time, long-term pastor, a guy named Bob Hurst. We're thinking, you got to know my partner is Mennonite. She's a pacifist, right. So, we're like, what's this going to be like? Well, come to find out this guy was a pacifist too, and he had sort of gotten in trouble, I think, with some of his parishioners because of what he was saying about the Vietnam War. So, he was coming out of that kind of thing. We sat and listened to this guy; it also had a really nice organ. We knew the organist; he was really cool. People were really neat. The other Mennonites in town were going to that church. And so, it was like, you know what? This is a cool place. There's some cool stuff happening here. We were feeling at home. It was a little odd for me because I grew up in a Lutheran tradition, which is a much more liturgically organized kind of thing. I played Methodist churches. I played Episcopal churches. So, what is this Presbyterian thing? This is kind of strange. This is low church, but anyway we wound up becoming very involved with the people in that congregation. The church as the church being the people. And over the years have just stuck with it and remained involved. I wound up being the organist for a while, for a really cool woman who was the choir director. Really wonderful woman. Then wound up eventually being both for a while. Then shifted over to being choir director, working with instrumental ensembles. Having an organist, it's amazing having two people at a church that size. I mean it's really a gift. I'm doing all kinds of weird other things right now in this interim when we can't sing as a group. I brought the handbells back again and so we started a handbell choir. Because we just can't sing right now, safely. We do it in the parking lot but it's going to get cold soon. It'll fog up your glasses.

ST:
How did the churches mingle? Because now the Presbyterian and the First Baptist have services together, right?

KB:
Yes, there was always, at least when we were first going there. All of the churches were a lot bigger then, all of them, bigger memberships. That's part of the story of what's happened with Main Line Christianity in general. So, we knew, didn't know a whole lot about what was going on at St. Mary's, huge parish. I knew more about the Episcopal church, had sniffed around there when I first got to town because I just had come from working in an Episcopal church. I was involved in the American Guild of Organist Chapter. There was a chapter in the area, and I was involved with that. So, I knew all the organists and the choir directors. It was kind of fun; you get to know each other. There was a very committed group of folks, an ecumenical council for the churches to collaborate on various kinds of projects and to get together occasionally, do some pulpit swaps, ecumencial Sunday kind of thing. Get together for the Easter Sunday sunrise service down on the lake, whether it's snowing, raining, whatever. Also, they put together, it was initially founded by a member of our congregation who's still alive, who's amazing, Ellen St. John and they formed an [TRACK 1, 39:52] ecumenical food pantry. That is still going, big guns right now. That is still operational. It is still housed in part of the Presbyterian church spaces. But there's been an interest in kind of getting together when we can. It really does depend on the clergy of the time and their interests and what's going on with the congregations. So, the Methodists, actually the Fly Creek folks have been together. When Covid hit it was right before Easter. We were without a pastor. We were in a transitional period without a pastor, but I knew all of the clergy from working with them on other things. We all wanted to be able to do Easter together and just sort of support each other, however we could. So, I was connecting up with folks in Fly Creek and Cooperstown. The Roman Catholic schedule and the Episcopal schedule is pretty packed. I mean they are following a pretty liturgical plan, so every once in a while, they are able to kind of accommodate being with the others. It's not because they're not interested, by any means. It's because they have a particular way of their lives, their spiritual lives together. So, we've been connected up actually for a long time. What's happening is the Baptists and the Presbyterians are right down the street from each other and we know each other pretty well. We've been doing stuff back and forth. We've been sharing services. They've got some equipment; we've got some equipment. Right now, we're talking about why heat both spaces when we're able to finally come back, masked, distanced, you know all of that stuff. We've been either livestreaming or putting up recordings of services since March. Initially, when we did it at the Presbyterian Church it was with our interim pastor and his two sons. They did it with two iPhones to do it. Talk about, I need to know some of that tech stuff. But anyway, we've been committed to doing that. I have no idea what the future is looking like. We're all in transition at this point. All new kinds of opportunities. We got together last night for a little service. They had an evensong service, a very Episcopalian over at the Christ Church, which was really neat. We thought about joining them at one point, actually they'd already started planning for a service that we would do. Sort of a quiet moment on election eve. Election day, just a quiet moment. It was a flip the coin which church, it wound up at the Baptist. We decided, well, they pretty well have their plan in place. We've got a particular liturgy that we are interested in and something that's not as complicated. We needed the low church version, to balance things out a little. That came together very quickly and now it's on the website, Facebook pages. So, we have a very good working relationship among us. We'll see what happens.

ST:
Tell me how you came to be a professor at CGP?

KB:
Another set of happenstances. I mentioned earlier a lot of the staff of NYSHA New York State Historical Association, Fenimore Art Museum, and The Farmers' Museum, were also faculty. It began that way. It continued that way to some extent, until recently. So, even if you weren't on deck for a full course we were often, like I was often doing things with material culture. I was a much more Paleolithic version of Cindy Falk with material culture. So, I wound up teaching material culture stuff and some curatorial things and a lot of that was also influenced by having studied with Minor Wine Thomas and looking at material and thinking what things are made of and that kind of thing. It was a different kind of approach and has evolved, really neat, very cool; material culture interpretation has taken off. I mean it's really cool where it's gone. So, I was doing some of that and then when I transitioned over to working with interpretation more directly and education more directly. Then I got pulled in by previous director who said would you do more this kind of teaching? I said sure, more than happy to. So, I think I did a special class on outdoor museums for instance because that's a specialty. It evolved over time and there was a changeover. When there was a changeover, Gretchen came in twenty years ago, twenty-five years ago. I had left the museum at that time and was doing independent work with a small company, which was really fun because that was like every time you got a new job it was like your Baccalaureate exam. All your CGP training you've ever had in your life comes into play. She called me up and said, could you come in and do some stuff here with this? And it sort of grew over time. Visitor experience, the guy who was doing the visitor experience class left rather abruptly. I came in and redid. Every year it's slightly different because it's got to keep up with what's going on now, right? Because experiences change, expectations change, all that stuff. Gretchen was getting overloaded with a bunch of other things, she said you want to supervise these interns. Yeah, okay cool that's fun. I was doing Applied Museum Education class. There was another person who was teaching who had been a staff member at The Farmers' Museum. He left The Farmers' Museum went to do other things. He's actually in Saranac, at the oh gosh. One of the big Adirondack camps [Sagamore]. I'm blanking on the name of it right now. It became kind of burdensome to be doing everything so, then I wound up taking on more of the education interpretation stuff and got officially adjuncted and then last year after the union had negotiated a memo of understanding with the college, they developed a promotional scale for long-term adjuncts. So, I got an official title last year, which was amazing. It's one of the funnest places in the world to be. How can you beat it? It's a great faculty, amazing students. It's really fun stuff. Yeah.

ST:
As a member of the LGBTQ community, how has that influenced your experience in Cooperstown?

KB:
Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's changed over time. It reflects society at large. The arc of justice in that realm. Things were fairly quiet. I mean you knew who people were. You knew who the people in the arts were. The guys that started Glimmerglass Opera. The various other kinds of folks. There were folks around and they had potlucks just like everybody else. It was a fairly quiet kind of thing. You were careful about who you told because those were the times. There's a lot of other things about my personality and what I do that this is not the only characteristic of my being. We are very conscious that things could be kind of crazy. That was another reason to hang out with the people at the Presbyterian Church because they were inclusive before it was fashionable to be inclusive. They were also, and as I became involved with that congregation more, we were a More Light church, but we were also being careful about, we hadn't put the [Rainbow] flag out yet. We were also careful. We wanted to protect our clergy and we wanted to protect some other folks. Rather than putting the light on the bushel, we had the light under the bushel. We were officially a More Light church, but we had the bushel basket up two inches from the floor. People who needed to know needed to know, right? So, a whole pile of years later and there was a joke about the first person who was elected to Session. Session is the governing lay body, well not really lay because we ordain the position. They're the governing body of the local church. They're like the church council in Lutheran terms. I can't remember what they call them in the Methodist church and whatever, but they're the head honchos. A friend of ours was elected to session and unbeknownst to some other people in session, including one fellow who was kind of old school Germanic background guy [unclear], he was the first person to be elected on session who was LGBT. Well T hadn't been invented yet. It was a very short acronym then. Over time, increasingly that became a part of being a welcoming church and we were a part of that nationally. Eventually after a lot of careful strategy, we said, okay we're putting the flag out. That was within the past ten years. Yeah, but what made the change? New generations of people. I was seeing it in the national church. I went to a big national church thing. You know when the votes came up about whether gay and lesbian people could be ordained, by the way it passed positively the year that I happened to be there. That was amazing. I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime, but the way the young adult delegates were voting, the way the seminarians were voting, this was a nonissue. This was like of course. That was happening at CGP as well and it was happening at the hospital. It was a whole new generation of what is just commonplace and to be welcome in a civil society. The second thing I never thought I'd see in my lifetime was the day that the marriage law passed in the State of New York. I was watching it online on my laptop and remember running upstairs to show my partner and saying look they just voted in the state to do this. I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime. It's been amazing. Cooperstown is, you know there's pockets of folks who don't really care for it. There's one particular bar in town that folks do not go to because the management doesn't do anything about people who bully. So, we just don't go there. They've been warned. It's like we're not going there. It's a very interesting place in the middle of rural New York, so you've got our road is all blue signs but if you go out in other territories there's not as many, right? You just have to be kind of aware, but there's a much, more open livelier community now, and I think that's also really important for our diversity element and our ethics element in CGP. That folks need to feel welcome that this is a safe place. This is our future. This is where we need to be going. This is the right thing to do and so holding firm to that is going to be interesting.

ST:
Tell me how you see the future of CGP?

KB:
Oh man. Continuing to change and evolve with the needs of museums and society. I don't think this program will ever stagnate. I think it's built on really firm ground. It has an amazing structure of over fifty years of alumni. That many of the policy makers, many of the leaders in our field are graduates of this program or have been influenced by this program in some way or the other. It's really an amazing thing to watch and it's an amazing thing to be a part of. The faculty always jokes about being quizzed at conferences from other people who work at other programs saying how do you do that? It's almost like they're saying can I see your syllabus? It's like, no. There are some really good programs out there and they are different. The funding folks like to hear about what's going on at CGP, it's true and we have to be a little humble about that to. We have to protect that tradition. Those values are important and those need to be there. Supporting our alumni, I was so proud this year, the CGA [Cooperstown Graduate Association] board put together an emergency fund for alumni in this time when people are losing jobs or being furloughed and all that kind of stuff and that's exactly what you would expect of them. It was just so good to see they've got your back. As John Pentangelo says, “It's a mafia.” It's a really kind mafia. It's true, I always feel I can cold call anybody in that directory and I've been privileged to know a bunch of these people over time. They're doing good work and I would hope that work continues and be right out there in the midst of it. I can't visualize what some of that's going to look like, but we need to be flexible, we already are. I mean it's like we're changing a whole lot of things. We've learned a whole lot of new stuff. That's good and I think that's another element of the program is that for the most part our alumni, our students are lifelong learners. They're eager to, they're sponges, they're eager to take on the next thing. Eager to look to the future. Sometimes we aren't as patient as we'd like to be. The museum community can be pretty stodgy, you know. How to gently leverage people out of stodginess. So, yeah.

ST:
Well thank you so much, Katie. I have enjoyed learning how you came here and built this community. It's very fascinating.

KB:
The community built me. To be fair. To be really fair. There's a lot of good influences in this neighborhood. I feel so lucky to be here and to have been here over time. It's been an incredible ride so who knows what's next. Thanks, it's been great to chat with you.

[TRACK 1, 1:00:40]

Coverage

Cooperstown, NY

1952-2020

Zoom

Creator

Sybil Tubbs

Publisher

Cooperstown Graduate Program, State University of New York-College at Oneonta

Rights

Cooperstown Graduate Association, Cooperstown, NY

Format

audio/mpeg

45.9mB

image/jpg

871KB

Language

en-US

Type

Sound

Image

Identifier

20-017

Item