The Wasilla Museum and the museum of politics

[jpertello]

For a small local history museum, the Dorothy G. Page Museum has been getting unusual amounts of national publicity.

The city-owned museum in Wasilla, Alaska has been spotlighted (or, well, mentioned in passing) in discussions of VP hopeful Sarah Palin’s record as mayor of the smallish town near Anchorage. After Palin took office in the late ’90s, she fired or asked for the resignation of many top city officials, including the museum director, John Cooper, and the library director (who was later spared). Palin also pushed through drastic budget cuts for the museum, whose mission is “to identify, collect, preserve, research, interpret and exhibit the cultural and historical heritage of Wasilla, Knik and Willow Creek areas,” cutting $32,000 a year from a museum with an annual budget of around $200,000. Additionally, three long-term employees were told that one of them must leave and all three resigned in protest. Media reports unfailingly describe these staff members as “septuagenarian,” “grey-haired,” “matronly,” or just “old.” For this I’ll excerpt an article from the Anchorage Daily News, August 1997, which has been making the rounds on the web (for instance, as well as this, and Jessamyn has discussed the library implications):

Opal Toomey, Esther West and Ann Meyers don’t seem like politically active types. There are no bumper stickers on their cars, no pins on their lapels.But the three gray-haired matrons of Wasilla’s city museum decided to take a stand last week. Faced with a $32,000 budget cut and the prospect of choosing who would lose her job, the three 15-year-plus employees decided instead to quit en masse. They sent a letter to the mayor and City Council announcing they plan to retire at the end of the month, leaving the museum without a staff. They also sent a message: They’d rather quit than continue working for a city that doesn’t want to preserve its history.

”We hate to leave,” said Meyers, who at 65 is the youngest of the three. ”We’ve been together a long time. But this is enough.” If the city were broke, it would be different, she said. ”If they were even close to being broke.”


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http://publichistorian.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/the-wasilla-museum-and-museum-politics/