The D-Day Memorial Foundation: Week Two

TUESDAY——- 

I got to the site at about 9:30 on Tuesday morning, all geared up for a full day of field trips. I sat in on the first program in the M.A.S.H./Education tent. Sometime soon, they are hoping that the Foundation can raise enough money to get a permanent building set up on site so that they can set up the already existing exhibits as well as the ones that the site does not have room for. Which would be an amazing, air-conditioned, and educational experience that everybody could enjoy at all times instead of just field trips when the Education coordinator is in there.

Anyways, I went on a tour with the field trip group to gain more ideas of what my field trip tour script could be. It was a small group of kids, so the tour went smoothly and they seemed to enjoy it. After I finished that tour, I turned right around and went on a public tour. This tour guide focused a lot on the symbolism of the scenes, statues, and set-up of the Memorial and I learned a lot of cool stuff. For example, the beach scene of the Memorial all funnels into one statue, the one that climbs up over the waterfall to the Victory Arch, just as the Allies did on D-Day. There are many more interesting tidbits about the architecture of the Memorial; however, you have to go to hear more about them 😉

Felicia and I talked about how the symbolism tour is good for adults because most of them know more about D-Day, and the normal informative tour is good for kids. I fed her my brainstorms about my “summer project,” including the idea of making it personal. If I follow through with this one the idea would be to assign each child a name of a person who landed D-Day and their role in the day and give them a name tag with the information on it. Then we would try to keep the personal aspects consistent through the tour and find out what happened to their person at the end. Something like that, anyway…still brainstorming ideas 🙂

After I finished my tours, Maggie and I went to the downtown office to figure out some scheduling things and figure out what we should do with the rest of our day. We ran some errands in town and I got to see the variety of responsibilities that people in the Public History world have to deal with. Let me just say, these two ladies are jacks of all trades. They do so much for the Memorial and it’s great to see some behind-the-scenes.

THURSDAY——–

This morning I gave my first tour! SURPRISE! They didn’t have enough tour guides and we had a large field trip group come in so I jumped headfirst into my first tour. There were 40 kids, so my swim coach voice definitely came in handy (I got a little mic, too). I think it went pretty smoothly for how nervous I was. It’s nerve-wracking relaying information about such an important day in the world’s history that even I JUST learned about. The kids were very well-behaved for 7th graders and it was great to have them for my first group. They had open ears and were super grateful at the end, despite the relentless heat.  I even got a hug!

After the tour I was grateful to get back to the A/C. I helped Felicia clean up the tent and then headed to the downtown office to work in the archives. The other intern worked on some pieces of uniform and I got to look at some medals and ribbons. Some of them were easy to find the names of and others I still don’t know for sure. They were all in excellent condition—

This is a Good Conduct Medal. It reads “Efficiency-Honor-Fidelity.”

This is the Crest for the 116th Infantry (s/o Bedford Boys, 29th division)

I took this one to show the sheets that we have to fill out. The front has general info about the specific artifact and the back talks about the quality of it.

This shows the tags and the numbers we used to archive them. The first number is the year, the second is for this batch of artifacts, and the last number is the number of the artifact.

This is a pin for a uniform—a Presidential Unit citation for the Army-Air Force.

It was a great day full of exciting information. I am so excited to explore and learn more about the field and about D-Day itself.

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Now onto Public History: Essays from the Field, edited by James B. Gardner and Peter S. La Paglia

This week I read the Essay titled “In Local Historical Agencies, Museums, and Societies” by Robert B. Patterson, Jr. He begins his essay with the story of Clarksville, Tennessee where he moved and attempted to help start a Museum in the 1898 post office there. The museum suffered from lack of funds and lack of support for the museum from the residents. He had to publicly promote the idea of museum through different mediums. He played the administrative and curatorial roles. He deals now with board and personnel issues, trouble shooting, and raising money. He says that local history museums and societies are all different. Local museums get there visitation excitement from the region and the character of the local economy. Overall, his essay talks about how different the paths of museums are and how difficult it is to compete with other non-profits. Other non-profits and profitable amusement centers in smaller cities have to work together to provide a broad experience and a successful museum. Historical museums have to adapt with the times and use new technology to represent the past.

I think this essay helps show how small town museums are difficult to maintain. A museum in a small town can have the small town charm, but it has to have enough appeal to bring people from outside of that town to it for funding reasons. The essay also showed how many hats the person in charge of a small museum has to wear, and as crazy as it sounds that is appealing to me. Having a busy schedule and something to be passionate about can always be frustrating, but working for a small museum would be a good way to memorialize the history of a unique place. There would be politics involved, of course, but it would be worth it. The essay taught me more about those things, but I have already seen them at play at the D-Day Memorial Foundation. The small town of Bedford takes pride in the Memorial and that is how it is still running, and they throw so many marketing events for veterans which helps raise funds. The ladies I work with wear many hats, too. It is exciting to see what I am reading at work, and I get more excited everyday about finding something I would love to do in the future.

‘Til next week…. 🙂

The D-Day Memorial Foundation Internship: Week One, Day Two

After this week, I’ll probably just post one post for the week so everything is done at once. Anyways, day number two at the Memorial was a different kind of exciting. When I got there, there was another intern and he and I got to start the day out in the archives. 😀

I had never gotten to work with historical documents before, so Felicia showed us how to fill out the paperwork and let us start in on this box of paper documents that someone donated to the Foundation. We got to look at Yank magazines, Army Field Manuals, and travel guides for different places in Europe.

Yank Magazine Vol 1, No. 1 (didn’t take)

This field manual is similar to those we were looking at (didn’t take)

There was a funny (or not so funny) letter in one that was asking for advice because his wife had written him (the letter from the wife was published within, too) letting him know she was leaving him and taking everything but his clothes and his typewriter. She told him she hoped they could be friends because she still thought of him as a friend and one day she hoped he would think of her as one as well. The soldier was just asking the advice columnist what he should do.

It was that kind of thing that was most interesting to me. The social aspects of World War II that we talk about, but don’t really know into the mind of a soldier. It was amazing to see the personalities of all the people that were individually represented within the magazines, but it was also funny to see that not much about the Army has changed (based on how friends in it talk). There was a little box talking about how there wasn’t any money so everyone was going to have to cut down on their haircuts. 🙂

Anyways, we spent the first half of the morning in the archives, after a brief break because we were supposed to have a field trip group come in and do a program for them; however, they did not show up.

At around noon, Felicia had to go do a lecture at an old folk’s home in Lynchburg, so the other intern and I went up to the Memorial. I gave myself a personal tour of it, going through and reading all the plaques so I could try to gain as much information as I could. All the while I was brainstorming some sort of way to make something so serious an entertaining and informative experience for younger people. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to do my field trip tour using the S.H.A.E.F. symbol as a badge giving me (and kids) access to special info or something—I’ll figure something out eventually. 🙂 It was a nice first week at the Memorial for sure (10 hours total), and I am looking forward to continuing my time there.

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Now onto Public History: Essays from the Field, edited by James B. Gardner and Peter S. La Paglia

I read the essay entitled “Administrators: Students of History and Practitioners of the Art of Management by Michael J. Devine:

He talks about how most Historians don’t believe that working in the administrative part of the field is actually being a historian; they think that only working in academia is being a historian. He goes onto say that is not true, that administrators in museums and at memorials work hard to preserve history just the same as historians in the academic world. He talked about how an administrative historian has to have specific goals and must be willing to work for those goals wholeheartedly. Administrators have to be knowledgable about business as well as history. They must also deal with the boards of the museums who may not be qualified to make decisions on a museum and that is when the administrator has to stand by their goals. He emphasizes the importance of continuing education and that if done, more people who know about the administrative aspects will be teaching about public history instead of people who do not believe in it.

I thought this was a very realistic introduction into public history. It goes along with what I was thinking in my head, and it is a career direction that sparks my interest. Although it may not all be fun and games, administrators get to push for what they believe in and they have the power to make it happen. People/boards may try to get in the way, and I love how he does not sugar coat that, but the idea is to relay the information to the public so that they can understand the stories of the past. There are more aspects to history than just reading and researching, and I think that’s what I like so much about Public History.

Week One = 10 hours on site

The D-Day Memorial Foundation Internship: Week One, Day One

I’ve been absent from the blog-o-sphere for awhile now, BUT I’ll be back at least once a week throughout the summer to post about my internship, for class credit and to commemorate my experience. I’ll start each post with some information about what I’ve done, then what I’ve learned from that. Secondly, I will post the same topics about an essay that I have read from this book:

“James B. Gardner and Peter S. LaPaglia, editors. Public History: Essays From the Field. Malabar, Florida: Krieger Publishing Company, 1999, revised edition, 2004.”

DAY ONE (Training)

I arrived on site at the Memorial at about 9:45 AM (my internship will be taking place at the D-Day Memorial itself and at the D-Day Memorial Foundation office downtown). My coordinators, Felicia and Maggie, met me there and showed me around the gift shop, where I got my official badge.

Then I got to go into the education tent, where they take field trip groups and give them some insight into World War II life in the war and on the home front. More on that later, but at 10:30 AM I got to take my first tour of the Memorial.

It was a beautiful day that felt just like summer, and I forgot my breakfast, so the hour long tour was brutal; however, the Memorial was gorgeous and my tour was informative. The architect of the Memorial tried to tell different stories about June 6, 1944 (P.S. that’s D-Day), and he did an excellent job. The Memorial itself is shaped like the shield on the back of my badge, each part of the shield representing something to do with that day:

The black background = Nazi oppression

The Crusaders sword = justice the Allies wanted to give to the Nazis

The rainbow = the coalition of countries that fought that day (British, American, Canadian forces)

The blue at the top = promise of liberation

 

The first stop on the tour was the British garden, which encompassed the leadership of D-Day and is designed similarly to the shield symbol (you can see the sword in the above photo). The S.H.A.E.F. (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force) was made up of many military men from the Coalition, led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Each leader is represented by a bronze bust, except for Ike, who has a whole statue of himself modeled after this photo of him talking to a paratrooper (side note: about fishing, not war).

He is protected by a gazebo, whose ceiling is made up of a battle map mosaic of the troop movements on D-Day. The tour moved on to plaques that represented the companies of people that played a role in the invasion…including my personal favorites, the Keydets (RAH VA MIL!):

We then stepped up onto the recreation of the beaches the soldiers landed on in Normandy. In the East was Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha, and Utah respectively as we went West. Canadians made up the Sword beach, Canadians and British made up Juno, British made up Gold, and Omaha and Utah were reserved for the U.S. Omaha was the deadliest of the beaches and on it marched the Bedford Boys from the 29th Infantry Division.

This photo was taken from the South or France side of the “beaches,” with Sword on the right and Utah on the far left.

The major proponent of the D-Day Memorial, D-Day veteran J. Robert Slaughter, helped choose Bedford, VA as the place to build it because the community of Bedford lost the highest percentage of men (nineteen out of thirty five soldiers they sent in) of any community in the entire U.S. during D-Day. The scene in the reflecting pool depicts the different struggles the men may have encountered that day as they left their Higgins boats and headed for shore.

The giant arch on the Memorial site has the same idea as the Arc de Triumph in Paris, with the rooftops that must have been seen by Airmen that day represented in black and white. The arch is inscribed with the word “Overlord,” which is the name the operation was given. The significance of the black and white is that those colors were the indication of “invasion,” and were painted on every plane that flew above the beaches of Normandy that day.

I didn’t take this one (suelink.blogspot.com)

The D-Day Memorial Foundation’s motto is that their site remain a memorial to the “valor, fidelity, and sacrifice” of the Allied forces that took part in the landing on June 6, 1944 in Normandy. From what I saw my first tour my first day, I look forward to continuing the values of the Foundation because they were obvious and they are honorable goals. So many soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice that day.

After I left my tour, I went down to the downtown office to fill out paperwork and talk about the expectations for my internship. I will be traveling there on Tuesdays/Thursdays through the summer, with the exception of going only Fridays during my summer class and three days in a row for the day camp they hold in June.

To get a taste of my pathway of education, after lunch I got to watch Maggie give a presentation to a field trip inside the education tent up at the site. She used artifacts and information to appeal to the children to help them understand the importance of what happened in World War II, specifically D-Day’s importance. It was helpful to me to see what caught the kids’ attention and what did not. She dressed up one of the boys like a soldier and let the class decide what he might have needed when landing on the beach June 6, 1944. The education tent and its contents were a great way to put the kids in the perspectives of the soldiers, as the tent itself was a replica of a M.A.S.H. tent.

After the hour long education program I got to tag along for the tour for the kids to see how it was different for them. There was not much of a difference, which is convenient because it is my individual “project” for the summer to tailor a tour specifically for field trips. My goal is to make it interactive and make it more relatable to children of varying ages. We will see if I achieve that goal.

>>>>>Day One was important to my understanding of how the Foundation ran the Memorial. I learned about its fundamental values and its mission statement, and about the sacred nature of the site. I learned more about D-Day than I ever learned in school and I understand now the significance of it not only to Bedford, VA, but to the entire state of Virginia, as the 29th Infantry was made up of Virginians. It was a good start to the summer. I am looking forward to learning more about D-Day and more about how we as historians can make history applicable, interesting, and relatable to the general public.<<<<<<<<

For now, it’s off to bed because I’ve got an early start for Day Two (Training)———