History to Touch

There was really only one thing wrong with the Jefferson Memorial Museum in St. Louis: too few people ever stopped to see what was on display in that white-limestone building on the edge of big (1,380 acres) Forest Park. But that was before 35-year-old Amateur Historian Charles Van Ravenswaay got out of the Navy, took the job of museum director and began changing things.

Born and raised in the Missouri River town of Boonville (pop. 6,000), Charlie Van Ravenswaay had had a passion for frontier history since boyhood. If present-day youngsters didn't see things that way, he thought it was partly the fault of the museum. Jefferson had a whole wing full of frontier treasures (as well as a somewhat more popular permanent exhibit of the trophies of Charles A. Lindbergh). But there they were, locked away in glass cases or, if in open displays, with "Do Not Touch" signs all over them. Last year Van Ravenswaay got his long-planned changes underway.

Boone's Gun. With the cooperation of the St. Louis school board, he set up a series of special student tours of the museum, during school hours, for the study of subjects ranging from frontier Christmases to pioneer medicine. He took down the "Do Not Touch" signs, unlocked his glass cases, brought out his guns, pioneer medical instruments and candle molds. If schoolchildren could handle these trophies and "hold history in their hands," he reasoned, the past might come alive for some of them.

Before long, teachers from all over town were parading their charges through the museum, many for the first time. The kids fondled Daniel Boone's own flintlock, modeled the formal tasseled coat worn by one of the city's founders, pint-sized ("Boy, was he a shrimp!") Auguste Chouteau. As the children listened to the story of St. Louis' great fire of 1849, they clambered over the old fire engine, tried on the old derby-like helmets, shouted through the trumpet megaphones used by the fire vamps of 1849.

Mahogany Shaker. They spun old-fashioned spinning wheels, fondled tomahawks and dueling pistols, peered through a telescope (see cut) carried by Lewis & Clark on the exploration up the Missouri and Columbia Rivers. They even shook dice in a gleaming mahogany shaker from a palatial riverboat of the 1880s, the Grand Republic. As the children examined the trophies, two of Van Ravenswaay's museum staffers gave them a running account of the frontier history the objects represented.

Last week, after the tours ended for the season, Director Van Ravenswaay had reason to judge his idea a success. The St. Louis school board wanted the tours to continue next fall. Visiting Harvard Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had been so impressed that he promised to "tell the Massachusetts Historical Society all about it." Best of all, to Van Ravenswaay's thinking, 6,000 youngsters had written in asking for more.

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