Preserving the Past by Pat Mulso

Happy new years from your friends at the Freeborn County Historical Museum, Library and Village! Have you made any new year’s resolutions? With the start of my retirement I have decided to do one thing a day that I have been putting off, and then do one thing I want to do. So far I have started going through our storage area and shredding old records that we no longer need to keep. Then for a reward I have stayed up half the night working on research to get ready for the family reunion I am planning for this summer.

Monday morning I stayed in bed until 7 a.m. Am I getting lazy already or what? Last Sunday was my birthday and my 3-year-old granddaughter called and sang happy Birthday to me. She melts Grandma’s heart and I am anxious to have more time to spend with her, our other grandchildren, children, Arnie’s parents,  our extended family and of course, Arnie!

Thank you to all who attended my retirement open house at the museum on Jan. 2, for the gifts to the museum general fund and building fund in my honor ,and all the kind comments. I will truly miss being at the museum as the director, but we have a great person in place to begin the week of Jan. 18. I hope you will continue to support the museum and the new director.

The museum will host a special presentation by geographer/photographer Tobias Walther-Antonio at noon Saturday in the museum meeting room. The title of his lecture is  “The Road as Protagonist for Landscape Morphology:  Chronicling U.S. Highway 16 and Interstate 90 in Southern Minnesota, 1925–2015.” There will be a local focus on Albert Lea and Freeborn County. The research addresses how U.S. Highway 16’s significance has changed over the decades and how those changes interrelate with the physical landscape, the individual communities and their travel-related businesses, population, land use, and the overall regional development due to the introduction of Interstate 90. Through comparative photography, data graphs, maps, aerial imagery and historical and geographical facts from the communities, detailed landscape morphology will be illustrated.

The museum will host a four-hour AARP defensive driving refresher class from 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. Feb 6. The cost is $20 for AARP members or $25 for non- members, which includes the class materials and administrative fee. You must pre-register for the class and will need your driver’s license to do so. The refresher course is needed every three years after the initial eight-hour class is taken to continue receiving a discount on your auto insurance. Call or stop by the museum to register during our regular business hours. You will receive your certificate at the end of the class. The next class will be from 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. March 5.

The date has been secured for a bus tour to see Marion Ross April 2 at New Theatre Restaurant in Overland Park, Kansas. She is starring with Hal Linden in the play “Moon Over Buffalo” by Ken Ludwig. In this comedy, two fading stars of the 1950s are playing a comedy and drama in rotation in Buffalo, New York. On the brink of a disastrous split-up, they receive word that they might just have one last shot at regaining their stardom. One perfect performance is all they need. Unfortunately, everything that could go wrong does. Please plan on joining us for this great trip to see our hometown star live at New Theatre Restaurant. The trip is a go and we have seats still available, but you must sign up and pay your deposit by Saturday.

Please remember to send in or drop off your museum membership for 2016 by the end of the month to assure receiving the March/April/May quarterly newsletter. Thank you to all who have already renewed. We appreciate your continued support.

 

Pat Mulso is the executive director of the Freeborn County Historical Museum, Library and Village, 1031 Bridge Ave.