Guest Blog: Faith Currie

Faith Currie

Faith Currie is the Lead Museum Educator at the National Museum of the Great Lakes where she’ll be one of several knowledgeable and engaging guides of SS Edmund Fitzgerald specialty tours honoring and remembering the 50th Anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, she is a regular contributor to the quarterly journal Inland Seas, she is a certified nature journaling educator through the Wild Wonder Foundation, and an artist with public art in the city of Toledo. Currie is also the host of the Sunday night radio program The Great Lakes St. Lawrence Story System on WAKT community radio in Toledo.

“Compared with the usual fate of humans, we who are engaged in preservation work, daily in contact with what we most like and admire, are fortunate indeed.”
—Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage

I am “fortunate indeed” that my work days revolve around things that are fundamental to me—the Great Lakes and the myriad bodies of water, fields, forests, flora and fauna around and between them. And, that I have the native Rust Belter’s nostalgic pride in industry, and intrinsic appreciation for the utilitarian. I have been on the historic lake freighter I work on around 200 times and I have never not been impressed the moment I stepped on deck.

In his 1957 classic “Interpreting Our Heritage,” Freeman Tilden endeavored to define interpretation, thus:

For dictionary purposes to fill a hiatus that urgently needs to be remedied, I am prepared to define the function called interpretation, by the National Park Service, by state and municipal parks, by museums and similar cultural institutions as follows:
An educational activity which aims to reveal meanings and relationships through the use of original objects, by firsthand experience, and by illustrative media, rather than simply to communicate factual information.

I conduct guided tours for groups of all ages on the SS Col. James M. Schoonmaker. While those tours all convey much of the same information, I adapt each one to meet the group in front of me. If they are senior citizens who’ve grown up in Toledo, I’m prepared to talk about the S.S. Willis B. Boyer and answer variations on the question, “Why would somebody change the boat’s name?” If they’re farmers from rural Ohio, I know I’ll be reserving time for extra discussion in the galley and a visit to the engine room’s tool displays. One woman thanked me at the end of a tour, saying, “My son is in the Navy and I want to thank you for this, because now I know how important the Great Lakes are to our country. I have an understanding I didn’t have before.” School kids from Downriver Detroit might get an extra story about the J.W. Westcott Company which operates from the foot of 24th St. in Detroit. No two tours are identical. Kids from kindergarten through high school, and their grown-ups, get the best version for them.

When I take kids on the boat, I have two overriding interpretive goals. One is to make space for their questions and reactions to what they are experiencing. The other is to help them discover the relationships between what they’re learning and their own lives. Some things like the two-bed four-person Oilers and Wipers cabin are easy. While they look at the cabin, I tell them what Oilers and Wipers did. I talk about shift-work. I tell them about the working environment on a coal-fired steamship. Then I tell them about hot bunking. They are generally and delightfully appalled. I ask, “Do you think you would like to trade shifts and share a cabin like this?” The answer is always a resounding, “No.”

My favorite place to board is midship into the hold. When kids step through the door into the vast center hold they are awed. Not only is “awed” a good state of mind to start them off with, it makes for a breathtaking experience when they climb the narrow ships ladder and emerge on the deck facing the Maumee. As for relating personally from the hold to the deck, most of them have seen a freight train passing; oftentimes with open coal cars. I ask them how many coal cars worth of coal they think fit in the hold. When we get up to the deck, they can see the river, the city skyline, the double-leaf bascule bridges they’re standing between, and railroad tracks.

We walk down the deck and enter the galley through the crew mess. The galley is something they recognize, so the stories tend toward the roles of the steward, cook, and porter. Their eyes are as big as the saucers behind the fiddle rails in the metal cabinets when I tell them about the quality and the amount of food prepared for the sailors. We talk about scratch cooking, holiday menus, and Saturday steak nights. At that point, I like to ask who’s had a frozen microwave meal and every hand goes up. Now they’re ready for a story they have the life experience to understand. I point to the freezers installed by the owners in the 1970s. I explain how even before most families had microwaves in their homes, the same companies whose names we recognize on microwave meals today were making large frozen meals for cooking in ovens. I tell them how the owners wanted to save money by having less “home-cooked” food. When I get to, “What do you think the sailors thought of that?,” their reactions are similar to the idea of hot bunking. “You’re right,” I say, and tell them that the company went back to the old meals by the end of the season because the crew were threatening to go elsewhere next season. The galley staff’s cabins are of particular interest to them when they find out that families used to live in those spaces when a parent took the winter layup ship keeper position.

There are many spots throughout the boat to make these connections, and enough suitable ones to tailor to any group. A favorite interpretation I like to use happens in the engine room. When they’ve had time to adjust to the space and comment that it smells like crayons, I explain the steering gear, the two sets of linkage that run through the boat for the two wheels in the pilot house, and point out the engine order telegraph we can see across the open space a deck below. They are about to gain an understanding related to all of the questions they’ve been asking about steering and communication. I have them imagine one of their adults behind the wheel at the front of a long car or bus. I tell the kids they’re sitting in the last seat and they have the brake pedal. The driver is about to text them that they’re going to slow down and make a right turn in eight blocks. “Your job is to text them back and tell them that you got the message. Then, you have to operate the brake just right for them to slow down and make their turn.” Eyes get big. “The driver has to be able to rely on you to do the right thing.” After a pause to let them take in this huge responsibility, I remind them that every job on the boat is an important job. We then have the opportunity to talk about how advances in communication have also been advances in safety.

In the ways that I’ve explained here, and in ways of their own, because every guide has their own favorite stories and approach, our team strives to give not just a tour, but an understanding that the kids can grasp and hang on to. I want our historic interpretation to give kids the desire and confidence to share their experience and new knowledge with others. The experience should also serve to ignite the pursuit of their own interests. I’ll close with one of my favorite interpretation to real-life experiences on board. When we have kids from Southeast Michigan on the boat, I love to tell them the history of the J.W. Westcott mailboat and that Westcott still delivers mail—alongside, underway—to freighters in the Detroit River. I also give them the address to send mail to any freighter or a specific one. One classroom took that on as a class project and sent letters that were split up and delivered to several freighters. As it was fall, and the shipping season didn’t have long to go, they weren’t sure how their project would pan out. But when shipping resumed in the spring, the return letters started coming in. The kids received handwritten letters from deckhands, engineering staff and even a few captains; all picked up by the mailboat and entered into the land-based U.S. mail stream for delivery to kids at a school in Monroe. A once in a lifetime experience for a Great Lakes kid. And a once in a lifetime experience for a museum educator when they bring the letters to the museum for the staff to read.