Blog Entry 46

February 26th, 2010
Today was museum day. I went to visit a manuscript museum and the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural National Historic Site. 

The manuscript museum was rather a waste of time. It was apparently voted the best non-art museum in Buffalo by some magazine…but I was not impressed. About half of the museum was devoted to the establishment of the Boy Scouts, and the other half had some obscure documents about the Great Depression and the New Deal, probably only included because they were signed by Presidents Hoover and FDR.  

The Teddy Roosevelt exhibit, on the other hand, was pretty awesome; I got my own private tour. The tour started off with an exhibit about the Pan-American exhibition and then the it went along as a play-by-play through the events of President McKinley’s assassination and President Roosevelt taking the oath of office in his friend’s study. I think my favorite part of the exhibit was getting to see where Teddy Roosevelt penned his address to the nation that was to be printed in the newspaper. His original hand-written version seemed to have striking similarities to most of my early ALTA papers with a lot of crossed out passages and margin notes; I found it really cool to get that kind of insight into what must have been going through his head. The tour concluded with an interactive exhibit about Roosevelt’s time in office and a replica of his west wing office. In the west wing exhibit, you could pretend to be the President, sign and veto bills, and get your picture taken and e-mailed to you…obviously, I took full advantage of this. Anyhow, if you ever find yourself in Buffalo, I highly recommend it. 

I am hoping to be able to drive back to Detroit tomorrow so that I can get some stuff accomplished at home this weekend, although depending on the snow, I might have to stay another day. We currently have a winter storm warning, and although they have reduced their speculations, we still may be looking at a fair amount; we’ll see…