Category Archives: Museums

Veterans Memorial Museum, Branson

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On Sunday, November 4, I had the Veterans Memorial Museum in Branson practically to myself, though I knew that only a week later, on Veterans Day, the place would be full. Or for that matter, more crowded during much of “Branson’s Veterans Homecoming Week,” which was from November 5 to 11 this year. The 18,000-square-foot museum opened in 2000 on Missouri 76, one of the town’s main streets, and is essentially the work of a Nebraska sculptor and “museum entrepreneur” named Fred Hoppe. Glowing information about him is at the museum’s web site; a less flattering story is at the Branson Tri-Lake News.

Be that as it may, the Veterans Memorial Museum is a fine little museum, traditional in design and subject matter. That is, most of the displays are static, relying mainly on artifacts, with a fair amount of expository text. The place runs counter to the line of modern museum thinking – which might be accurate, for all I know – that exhibits should be interactive two-and-a-half ring circuses to keep museumgoers happy. But I’m OK with static, text-heavy displays, especially if I’m by myself and have some leisure to look and read.

The subject and layout reminded me a little of the Imperial War Museum in London, as well as the Musée du Débarquement in Normandy, at least as those places appeared in the early 1990s, though both are larger and much more comprehensive about their subjects. The Veterans Memorial Museum is composed of ten rooms covering U.S. wars of the 20th century, beginning with a small room containing a large model of the U.S.S. Missouri, a newsreel about the Japanese surrender aboard that vessel on continuous loop, and a few other artifacts. After that, the exhibits began with World War I and proceeded chronologically. Because of my own inclinations, I spent more time with World War I than in any other room.

There was a lot to see just in that room: photos, paintings, uniforms, weapons and other gear, objets d’ art, and more, and not just representing the U.S. or even the Allies, though they were the main focus. I’m pretty sure I’d never seen an actual Blue Max before, nor a WWI German artillery helmet. Artillery helmets of that time, it seems, didn’t have the famed spike on top, but a ball-shaped peak. The room also sported a nice collection of trench art, especially decorated shell casings, including some remarkably elaborate carvings. One way to pass the tedium of trench life, I suppose.

Among the photographs was, I thought, a particularly poignant one. It depicted graves, a common enough sight, but with a caption explaining that they belonged to men of the 324th Infantry, all of whom “died in the last three hours of the war.”

One long wall of the World War I room looks, at first, blank. Then you notice that it’s covered, floor to ceiling, with sepia-tinted doughboys’ faces, each about the size of a dime. The faces are repetitive, since the effect is created by putting together long strips seemingly copied from the same panoramic regimental photo. No matter. The point of the wall is to impress you with a vast number of faces, and it does. One face, a sign says, stands for every two Americans who died in the Great War, which was about 117,000 men all together.  A wall of doomed youth, looking out at you from behind glass and nearly a 100 years.

The other rooms include a sizable number of interesting artifacts, both American and from other nations, including in what I can only call the Axis Room. (As the History Channel knows, Nazis are always interesting.) Besides Nazi and imperial Japanese paraphernalia, one can also find an Enigma encryption machine in that room, the likes of which I’ve seen at the Museum of Science and Industry and (I think) the Science Museum in London. I should have taken a moment to mock the machine: Ha! We decoded your ass! But I didn’t think of it.

The centerpiece of the museum is in a World War II room – there’s more than one room devoted to that war – that includes 50 bronze life-sized soldiers charging in two lines. A work of sculptor Fred Hoppe, “Each figure in the WWII centerpiece is modeled after an actual combat soldier, one from each of the fifty states,” notes the museum web site. “Leading the charge up the beach is Fred’s father, the late Fred Hoppe Sr.”

The room is long and narrow, as you’d expect, and the names of each American serviceman to die in the war, about 416,800 in all, are written all along its walls. An effective reminder of the war’s cost to the United States, certainly, but I have to say the doughboy faces on the WWI wall were more moving, even though that was only pictorial representation, and not a detailed accounting of individuals.

The Titanic Museum Attraction

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When you buy a ticket for the Titanic Museum Attraction in Branson—that’s its slightly odd name—you get a “boarding pass.” On the front the pass says “permission to come aboard” and gives the sailing dates of the doomed steamer, which sailed from Southampton to Cherbourg to Queenstown to Unwanted Immortality.

On the back is a short bio of one of the passengers or crew, but not his or her fate on Titanic. That’s the hook. To find out what happened, you have to consult a wall in the museum that lists all those who lived and all those who died, and wall is designed to be the last thing you see (besides the gift shop) in a normal tour of the museum. Of course, not quite every “boarding pass” has that kind of suspense. Another fellow on our press trip got Capt. Smith, and I’m afraid we all know what happened to him.

I got William Sloper, First Class Passenger from New Britain, Conn., who was a young stockbroker and son of a banker who’d just finished spending three months in Europe. A wealthy swell, in other words. I won’t maintain the suspense: he survived. Lived on until 1955, in fact, according to the Encyclopedia Titanica.

“When the Titanic struck the iceberg, Sloper was playing bridge with some friends,” the Encyclopedia notes. “Sloper was rescued in lifeboat 7. The lifeboat was one of the early boats sent away and First Officer William Murdoch was freely allowing men into the starboard side lifeboats when there were no women around. According to Sloper, he owed his life to Dorothy Gibson, an actress and one of his bridge companions, who got into the lifeboat and insisted that he join her.”

Luck was with him, in other words. Even first-class passengers needed some. But the experience haunted Sloper in an unusual way: “A New York Herald reporter identified Sloper… as having dressed in women’s clothing to escape the ship,” the Encyclopedia continues. “On the advice of his father, other family members and trusted friends, Sloper did not sue the Herald nor the reporter. He decided that the fuss would eventually pass [but] spent the rest of his life refuting the charge.”

On the outside, the Titanic Museum Attraction is built to look something like the ship, only smaller. I knew little about the place going in, and was prepared for a Disneyfied version of the disaster or worse. So I was astonished to find a first-rate museum inside, a fine blend of standard displays and written information with various kinds of interactivity. Besides actual artifacts from the bottom of the Atlantic, it features a wealth of photographs and other images, models, maps, period clothing and items and accoutrements, and a full-scale replica of the ship’s grand staircase, which is a functioning staircase between the museum’s two floors.

Since Titanic amounted to a floating city, it’s a large subject, yet the museum does a good job of illuminating the larger story of the disaster, which is hardly obscure, but also dozens of smaller stories. One story in particular caught my attention: the photographs of Father Frank Browne, a Jesuit who sailed from Southampton to Queenstown, and then disembarked with a large cache of pictures he made on the ship.

For some reason, I’d never heard about him, though I think I’ve seen some of his pictures. The better part of a room in the museum is given over to the story of the priest and his camera, and I’m glad I spent some time finding out about him. That’s all I ask from a museum: to come away knowing something new.

Branson III

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Since the previous BTST broke down, I’ve been a few places, worked a lot, voted in an election that a lot people believed important (and maybe I did, too), even watched “The Great Vegetable Rebellion” on a whim because I saw it was available on Hulu, and because it’s Irwin Allen at his best.

To kick off November, I took a trip to Branson. Not sure how the AP feels about Branson as a dateline, but I think it should stand alone: Branson, rather than Branson, Missouri, so famed has the place become. I’ve heard that I visited Branson when I was small, and when Branson was small, in the mid-60s, but remember nothing of that. En route elsewhere in 2001, we drove into town, ate lunch, and took away vague impressions. Mostly, I remember liking Yakov Smirnoff’s billboards lining the road between Springfield and Branson.

So this time might as well have been a first visit, even though it was my third. It was a busy press trip. Being Branson, that meant seeing more musical-variety-comedy shows than I might see in many ordinary years. In fact, I realized in the middle of my stay that when the variety show died out from television, it was reborn in Branson. The shows I saw included singing, dancing, visual gags, bad jokes, good jokes, sometimes lavish sets and costumes, adaptations of classic theater and movies and the Bible, and even an aerialist – who played violin during her aerial act, which I’ve never seen anyone else do, not even in a circus. We also met a handful of entertainers in person, namely a couple of Lennon Sisters, as well as a fellow whose act is a Neil Diamond tribute.

I noticed some relics, too. Saints’ relics aren’t what they used to be, since we tend to prefer celebrity relics in our time. At the Andy Williams’ Moon River Grill, the late entertainers’ gold records are on walls. That includes, of course, the LP Moon River (pictured), but also the Love Theme from The Godfather, among many others. That’s a movie I hadn’t realized had a love theme, much less one sung by Andy Williams. Its actual title, I’ve discovered, is “Speak Softly Love (or You’ll Sleep With the Fishes).” (Parenthesis added by me.)

Branson wasn’t all live entertainment. During my three full days there, I also managed to ride a train made of vintage railroad cars a short way into Arkansas, wander around the Silver Dollar City theme park, take the tour of Marvel Cave, and visit the surprisingly interesting College of the Ozarks – but not, unfortunately, see the Beverly Hillbillies’ truck, which is there. Branson also sports some museums, and I went to three of them – one about a maritime disaster, another about war, and a third, smaller one about Branson and environs.

On foot one day, I checked out the newly developed downtown riverfront and its attendant open-air retail space, and not far away examined a store that called itself a Five and Dime and had an usually large assortment of merchandise, over and above Branson-oriented gimcracks and gewgaws. Those can be found everywhere in great profusion.