From the Board Room

A message from David Morton, Chairman of the Portland Harbor Museum Board of Trustees

Checking  into a hotel in Worcester with 7 or 8 hundred other people also engaged in feeding and growing museums can be, well---revealing.  Four of us from Portland did that in the last week or October at the New England Museum Association conference.

I'm seated at a problem solving roundtable on fund raiding.   We're poling the group around the table, asking where people are from and what kinds of issues they're struggling with.  I'm explaining about how museum has this lighthouse that needs major maintenance and .  .  .

"You have this What?"  sputters  the middle aged director of an historic house somewhere in the northern tier of Vermont. As I try to explain why this might be a problem for us, I note bulging eyes and drooling lips around the table.  I find this distracting.

I try to explain that we have severe staffing needs,  because in the summer of 2000, we will be developing interpretive displays and programs around the arrival of a parade of Tall Ships in Portland Harbor.  "Explain to me what kind of PROBLEM is that!" gently, but firmly says a trustee from a college campus history museum.  I lapse into silence.  I am wondering if there is a danger I will be lynched by ten or so people who would happily slay me to exchange their "problems" for mine.

Truth is, in lots of ways we are in an enviable position.  Unlike many of the 800 pound gorillas of the museum world,  like the Boston Museum of Science or even our own Maine State Museum, we are not hemmed in on every side by bureaucratic restraints.  We have a mission, showcasing the Harbor of Portland, that's evolving rapidly in an almost free? form style.  We have a momentum, now, that's very unlike the preoccupation with static collections that characterizes many other smaller museums.

I don't know how to go about making it into a policy or even a planning goal, but I am utterly convinced that what will enable us museum folk to "win big" is going to be keeping our gaze focused on the whole harbor outside our windows, not what's convenient for us inside the walls of our antique ordinance shed.  Outside where the history and life is to be found, and the mystery and fascination of the sea that engages the unique breed of people in who's hearts and minds it's all held together.

The more I brood on it, the more I want for us to be a "living museum," whatever that is.  I've heard of schools and colleges that liked to think of themselves as "universities without walls."  I hope we can learn how to be a museum without walls.