First Oral History Interview
With
Robert Staples and Barbara Charles
23-24 June 2011
At their home
Alexandria, VA
By David Thelen
Interviewer
For the American University Archives
Thelen: [Feedback] Now why does it doing that, is it because the mics are too close to each other? That
seemed to be…
Franz: That was one of the recommendations; I mean how far apart would you want them?
Thelen: it looks fine now. So we are sitting around the office of Barbara Charles and Bob Staples in
Alexandria on the 22nd of April of June.
[Laughter]
Staples: Where have you been?
Thelen: I am a historian my life's in the past. Ms. Kathy Franz and Dave Thelen and i should say do we
have your permission to record this?
Charles: Absolutely.
Thelen: And transcribe it to collect to go with the collection to American University and for use of
scholars or whoever subsequently.
Charles: Yes.
Thelen: Okay, Kathy and I have talked a little bit about how we think this process might work over two
days and we’d like to get your reaction and any ideas. Basically we will do a recording for a couple of
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days then we will transcribe it. Once there is a transcription we will all get copies and we would propose
writing follow up questions that occur to us. You might look at it and you might think, “Oh no, why did I
say that or leave out that,” and this basically puts you in control of the transcript.
It has been our experience that that way you get a much richer final product than with a literal
transcript. Or it may be that the transcriber will not be able to make out something. Anyway it becomes
a process and because we are not doing video at this time it may also and probably will also occur that
they will want to do video and that can become parts. So we are thinking of an ongoing process so we
are not stuck with just what we do these two days. Does that make sense?
Charles: Sure, sure. And we have our dog here.
Thelen: And I forgot to say Lottie, Lottie?
Charles: Lottie Laneya!
Thelen: Lottie Laneya, and who’s Kurt vile?
Charles: Well…
Thelen: Okay, we will not go there.
Charles: Or Mac the Knife.
Thelen: Or Mac the Knife, yes. So we thought that today would be sort of an overview of how you got
into this and the challenges you faced doing it. Then tomorrow we might really dig into collections.
Probably that’s too formulaic. Anyway that is a way to imagine the two days. I think that it might be best
just to start with a kind of, to approach how you guys got interested in this, in fact, wait, where you
came from. I would like to start this individually. You each talk a little about where you grew up, what
you now think were things in your past that, your parents or whatever it would be, that now look like
may have contributed to your ending up sitting at this table, doing this kind of work. Then ask each of
you to speak a little bit and how you got together and how you made a firm and so on. You want to start
Bob?
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Staples: Robert Staples, I was born in Seattle. I grew up in southern California. We moved around a lot
during the war and ended up in Hermosa Beach. I went to junior college at El Comino. [Feedback] Then
on to USC [University of Southern California] and there I met – I took industrial design courses from Sal
Meridio. He suggested, “Why do not you go down and interview for a job at with Charles Eames,” and of
course, I said, “who?” that was in fifty-seven.
Charles: I was not there.
Staples: Anyway I did go down, I did. Don Albinson interviewed me and I got hired. The rest is history, as
they say.
Thelen: But were there things in your background, classes in school, interests of your parents, hobbies
that now look like they may have been relevant?
Staples: My father was a marine in the First World War. He went in when he was very young and
became a bugler or something like that. He was not very well educated, dropped out of school and stuff
like that and went into the military. During the war, he worked for consolidated aircraft as a spare parts
analyst, which meant that he had to worry about where the airplanes were and if there were parts at
the airports for those airplanes to land.
We went to Dayton, Ohio and then we all as a family went to Spokane for a year after the war.
Then we migrated to southern California again I guess it was. This time we went to Hermosa Beach
because my mother had a cousin in Hermosa Beach. While I was in – I am never good at this stuff. The
one thing that is sort of unusual, while I was in school my father had a shopsmith. I do not know if you
know what that is, but it is one of those little power tools that can do everything. Drill press or
whatever. So all my projects….
Charles: This is high school?
Staples: This is in college, junior college. I think college.
Charles: At USC.
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Staples: All my projects. I ended up doing all projects around. I made a (inaudible)
Thelen: On this device.
Staples: I had this nice collection of round things. Orange juice squeezer, telephone, [laughter] a kitchen,
a dance kitchen. Anyway… I started at the Eames office as a model maker, a pattern maker and it was
right when the Eames Aluminum was in concept. So I worked for years with Don and Dale at the office
on the Aluminum group.
Thelen: What did the Aluminum group do?
Staples: It was a…it started out as an indoor/outdoor furniture line that was swivel chair, medium size
swivel chair, a large reclining chair, a dining chair and an outman. And this was a first web sling furniture
for (inaudible) and it was beautiful and it is still in production. They are finally…it ended up to be more of
an indoor use furniture just because of the cost and the Saran fabric that was being used at the time was
pretty limited. It was heavily affected by sunlight. So they gave up the outdoorness of it. But just
recently they have - technology has gotten better with how you coat the aluminum with a powder
coating and also a more advanced technical fabric for the sling. That chair the first of the aluminum
group. Then came the stable.
Thelen: The stable, one word. The one we are sitting around.
Staples: The one we are sitting around is my quote unquote invention. Obviously you do not do anything
alone at the Eames office. It is a whole a group activity, but the idea of the legs and the slipping and the
steel tubes locked and being bolted together with a central tension rod to the spider underneath was
my contribution.
Thelen: So you got used to working in teams on designing. Somebody would suggest one thing?
Staples: Well Charles would generally bring the problem into the office and then we would begin to
solve it.
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Thelen: So Bob, as you think back, I am hearing somebody interested in these technical challenges. Can
you remember back to before college when you might have had anything that would show similar
interests?
Staples: Well I guess it started in my junior college years as an engineering major.
Thelen: So presumably you wanted to be an engineer?
Staples: I did not want to be an engineer; my father wanted me to be an engineer.
Thelen: Now the truth comes, okay.
Staples: So I tried that for like three semesters. I was majoring in D’s.
Thelen: Oh, majoring in D’s. Yes, I know those.
Staples: So I did not do very well. So I came home one day and I said to my dad… [laughter]
Thelen: You have a chance, let us just make sure we understand this, you do not censor it now. If when
you see it you want to bracket some piece, you are in control of what appears in the transcript.
Staples: Anyway, I came home and I wanted to be an advertising designer. Advertising art, which was
the major that I could do in junior college. And my father, “What do you want to be one of those blankyblank queers,” “ No, dad that’s not exactly what I have in mind.” So I started getting A’s all of a sudden.
Thelen: In advertising art.
Staples: Right, I have a wonderful instructor there. I cannot remember his name now, but he had been
educated at USC. University of Southern California. So I went to USC after five semesters in junior
college and studied architecture and design. And then I got, I guess in my third year there I got this job
at Eames.
Thelen: While you were still finishing college.
Staples: I almost got fired because I would be away at school for a lot of the day and then I would come
back to the office and ask questions about what was going on and Albinson was a little short tempered
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about that and told me to knock off the questions. So I just became more observant I guess than vocal.
That is all on the history books.
Thelen: Now I am hearing….
Charles: I was just going to say the Aluminum group is broader than I heard you talk about. You talked
about the original Aluminum group and the table. But it goes on to be airport seating.
Staples: Yes, but same principle. Sling seat.
Thelen: So help me understand and maybe I got this wrong. I heard you say that you were getting D’s in
engineering classes and you somehow sensed that art with a particular audience in mind, advertising or
commercial art. Can you think back to when you might have found art? Did you find art in fourth grade?
Did you like to paint things or take pictures?
Staples: When I was in high school, I had a physics class of which you had to do in papers and stuff like
that and I got pretty good grades because I could illustrate them nicely. Not as artist but as illustrator. I
had some skill, latent skill there, but that helped me through my high school and then through college.
Thelen: Were there occasions as a kid you liked drawing or painting that you can remember?
Staples: Not, no.
Thelen: Or going to art shows, I do not know where it might be.
Staples: When I was young, I guess I was in junior high school the neighborhood, Hermosa Beach, had an
art show. And a young man and myself, we decided we would make a piece of art and slip it into the
show and not tell anybody. Of course it was made up of funky little pieces of copper wire and spokes or
wheels from a clock and things, you know. And then it was sitting on a piece of cedar and so the idea
that we snuck it in and set it on the table with a lot of other thing s and other people and stood around
and listened. And it was daring.
Charles: So what did they say? I have never heard this story.
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Staples: They wondered who did this piece and of course we did not fess up to it because we did not
want to get kicked out or whatever.
Thelen: Did they say get rid of it?
Staples: I do not remember, it was a very small object, something we could carry and set down on the
table, it was not very dominant. Maybe I was meant to be an artist. Who knows? But my father at the
time wanted me to be an engineer and there was a need for engineering.
Charles: And good jobs. Bob’s father always was chronically looking for work, just because of the
situation and the depression.
Thelen: So you going to college was probably an event? Were you the first in your family?
Staples: I am the only one in my family. My mother was born in Russia and migrated to, I guess it was
Portland, Oregon in the twenties.
Charles: No, no. I think more like the teens, 1905 or 8.
Thelen: Well there were various events in Russia; do you know what led her to migrate?
Staples: Her family came from the Ukraine and I think there was some Russian military action against
the Ukraine, so her brother who was older, called Henry, decided that everybody should just get out of
there.
Thelen: It was not like Pogroms against Jews or revolutionaries. Or service in the war.
Staples: I think it was more like that because my uncle Henry changed identities with his younger
brother and gave him the rights to the family, quote unquote; farm or name and then he migrated to
the U.S. and then brought my mother and her mother.
Charles: I think your mother and other brother. At least I have seen pictures; there are pictures of the
whole family.
Thelen: So they all sort of migrated to, well that was well before me. Anyway the war was interesting
from my point of view. Just because it was the military and I collected badges.
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Thelen: World War two now. I did so, so I recognize that.
Charles: And you collected pots and so on. Did you? Metal, did not you have to collect metal for the war.
Staples: Well, you collected newspapers and aluminum kitchenware.
Charles: And knitted little squares.
Staples: Right. As part of the USO kind of blanket.
Thelen: So your mom came from Russia and your dad came from Omaha, Nebraska.
Staples: Omaha, Nebraska and he had, I guess, three sisters.
Thelen: And he ended up is Southern California because of the war? Or was he an Okie?
Staples: Actually he met my mother in Seattle Washington and during that, during the depression. He
had been a salesman in Haberdashers store in Seattle. Then he lost his job there and then they migrated
down with me. I was born in Seattle. Migrated down to Southern California in thirty, I guess it was thirtynine. I think I was six.
Charles: You were born in thirty-three.
Staples: Right.
Thelen: Okay.
Staples: So then we migrated down my father just had any number of jobs. I mean he delivered laundry,
derby, pianist. Then it was milk. Just anything that was work. Then of course the war came, then he
volunteered to go in the service again, but he was too old. So he went into the military production
because there was a lot of activity in Southern California. So we moved to San Diego and he was then
transferred to Spokane. Then the war was over and we migrated back to Southern California.
Charles: Was it Uncle Henry that had the garbage trucks?
Staples: Uncle Henry was a very enterprising German from Russian who had been - his family had been
taken to the Ukraine to help educate or grow food because the Ukraines were more productive and
things.
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Charles: Yes, I think Katherine.
Staples: And, anyway when he came here it was during the war, he got a job as a garbage collector and
of course at that time, garbage was, there were no incinerators. There was just garbage or trash. So he
decided that all this good food in the garbage should have hogs so then he started raising pigs to eat the
garbage.
Thelen: That was clever.
Staples: He and several others would combine together as a consortium and bought some land in
Lakewood, which is interior of Southern California and they would dig a big hole in the ground and put
the garbage in or the trash in and the dirt would then become the basis for the freeway system. Then
when the hole was filled it would be sold as industrial property. Then you would have to buy more
property a little farther away and dig another hole, et cetera et cetera. So as the freeway spread the dirt
and spread garbage spread, so it became quite lucrative. I guess I cannot remember exactly.
Charles: Well your dad work for him at one point and you did too right?
Staples: Well, he…I do not know the exactly chronology of my dad’s employment, but after the war it
really hard to get a job and hold a job with so little education. So he became a garbage collector friend. I
mean it was Marie’s brother Jack who had the truck and then it was my dad went to work for him and
got a truck.
Thelen: So I am still kind of intrigued by going to college. So your father did not. Do you remember if he
really encouraged you to go to college or if you picked this up? Where do you think you got that?
Staples: It was a Korean War when I got out of high school and I was ready to go.
Thelen: Go to war?
Staples: Well I was in - many of my friends were going to war and I thought well I should go. I think that
was when they had the draft and when I was called down to take my physical and I had very bad
asthma, so I could not go. So the next thing after high school was junior college.
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Thelen: Did it just feel like a natural thing to be doing because your friends were doing it? Did it feel like
something your parents, one or the other, was pushing you to do?
Staples: Well, I suspect my father wanted me to be better than he was.
Charles: But your father by this point or a little later was mayor of this little town. He got into politics.
He was not always job to job.
Staples: Well, once he got into the garbage business there was profit to be made out in Lakewood. All of
these houses were being built for the returning GIs and stuff like that. So that was lucrative. Of course
he had to hire help to drive or pick up and one day his help ran over a child. It was very painful for him,
so he got out of that garbage business. [Background noise]. He had some good friends in Carmel,
California that had a gift shop and they tried to convince my dad to - well they did convince my family to
take over their gift shop in Carmel.
Charles: No but he had one in Hermosa before that.
Staples: Yes, you are right.
Charles: So I think the Spencers helped him start one in Hermosa.
Staples: Yes he started a gift shop in Hermosa Beach. My mother being a worker there and I worked
there.
Thelen: In the gift shop.
Staples: Then he became part of the Rotarians and the little civic communities.
Thelen: The things that lead you into politics.
Staples: Because he became a member of the rotary, then he was a mason. It is a network of people and
the shop was moderately successful I guess. When the Spencers decided to get out of their business up
in Carmel my family moved to Carmel. I did not go because I was out of the house by that time. So they
had that gift shop for a number of years and then he passed on.
Charles: Well he wanted you to take it over, the gift shop in Carmel, in the late sixties.
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Thelen: So you graduate from high school in like…
Staples: Fifty-one.
Thelen: Fifty-one, you did not go into to the army in fifty-one. You did go to junior college around fiftyone. What junior college?
Staples: El Commeno.
Thelen: Then you were there for three years.
Staples: Five semesters.
Thelen: Five semesters, so now we are around fifty-three, fifty-four. Now did you go straight to USC?
Staples: Yes, I went from El Commeno to USC. At USC my credits were from a junior college, so I had to
take a lot of things over again because they were not transferrable at the time. And that is when I was
introduced to Eames.
Thelen: So that would have been around fifty-seven. Then you start going to work for them. And you
worked there for how long?
Staples: Sixteen years.
Thelen: Sixteen years, wow.
Staples: Until seventy-three.
Thelen: Okay, I was just. This is great. This is really very helpful. What, if you were now going to tell your
story and you are because there is a microphone. Do not go by my question, what about this life
strikes….
Staples: It was very fortunate that I stepped from one stone to the next and I just kept going up.
Charles: But you had another job.
Staples: Yes, well that obviously. When I was, there were periods of time where I was delivering
newspapers and I was the only breadwinner in the house.
Thelen: In the forties maybe.
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Charles: I was thinking you had other jobs while you were at USC at the far company and so on.
Staples: My father wanted, I tried to get a job on my own, of course I did not have any experience so
you cannot get a job. How can you get experience unless you do get a job? So I interviewed at all these
industrial firms in the Southern California area that I could. And I could not crack the nut, so my dad
spoke to a friend who was, worked at this company called Fora Company and they made air filtration
systems for railroad engines. So they hired me as a draftsman. I was doing quite well there and then I
had to make a decision, well do I continue my drafting at Far company or do I go on an interview at
Eames? i did not know who he was or what he was, so I guess Merino helped me decide to go to a job in
the field that I was interested in, which was design.
Charles: But did not you have to take a pay cut?
Staples: I did take a pay cut.
Thelen: So that indicates to me, I do not know if correctly, that you were really interested in design at
that point. If it came to making more money and not pursuing design or taking less money and pursing
design? Am I misunderstanding?
Staples: I do not know if I was that bright to make a choice. I was following the hint of other people. My
professor at USC thought I had some smarts or whatever. So he said why do not you go down and talk to
Eames and so I did.
Thelen: But you yourself were interested in design?
Staples: I guess so.
Charles: I think Marindo, from what I have hear over the years, was very influential, Sal Marindo.
Thelen: In getting you interested in design?
Staples: Well, nurturing the interest that I had, I guess.
Thelen: Better, nurturing the interest you had.
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Charles: And directing you at Eames. He sent various, did not Sal Marindo send various people to
Eames?
Staples: Yes [feedback] Dick Dons for instance.
Thelen: So he had a kind of relationship with Eames.
Staples: Yes, I think so.
Thelen: And they probably trusted him.
Charles: In this new book that’s come out about furniture and the history of the design of furniture, the
Eames office there is a little section, I think actually maybe in the section about Bob that talks about Sal
Marindo and all the people that he sent to the Eames offices. I think he would have been one too.
Staples: A farm team.
Thelen: So how much was your pay cut?
I do not remember that.
Charles: I have heard that it was like one hundred and fifty to one hundred and twenty-five an hour. I
mean these numbers are so small. Something like that, maybe less.
Staples: One thing that was nice about it was that it was in Venice California.
Thelen: And you like the beach?
Staples: Well it was at the beach.
Thelen: Oh at the beach, that’s cool.
Staples: Just a block or two away from the ocean. [Feedback] when I was living in Hermosa Beach we
were always, maybe three or four blocks from the water. Of course I was not particularly sportsy type of
guy at the time. I did like the beach and my bum friends who played volleyball and that kind of stuff.
Thelen: So did you play volleyball?
Staples: Yes I did.
Thelen: Did you surf?
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Staples: I did not surf. At the time the boards were like twelve feet long and you had to be really strong
to move them. Deal with them so. [Feedback] so I did not do that kind of surfing. I belly-surfed and that
kind of stuff.
Thelen: You like that world?
Staples: Yes, sure. Well I did not know any other world. But I had a nice group of friends; we played
bridge and that kind of stuff.
Thelen: So I picture you now in college and you have moved over to Eames and you have started to get
involved there. At some point your lives are going to intersect.
Staples: Well Eames was a multitalented office. If you know the history of Eames at all, he did furniture
which is what he’s known for. But he did films and some architecture and that kind of stuff. He was
interested in furniture when I first came. But then his interest moved more toward information and
communications.
Thelen: While you were there, sixteen or seventeen years.
Staples: So I got more interested in the communications side and exhibitions and then we, he had a nice
long run with IBM as a consultant at IBM. Then we did a project called Mathamatica. I was responsible
for getting it installed and doing it. I did not do the design work so much as the physical.
Thelen: I do not quite follow can you explain that a little more. This project were you involved in a big
way with it? What was it?
Staples: Well it is a five thousand square foot exhibition.
Thelen: One more time, what?
Staples: Five thousand square foot exhibition, I am guessing at that I cannot remember now exactly. It
dealt with mathematics from the point of history as well as the playfulness of mathematics.
Multiplication cubes, (inaudible) train at ran, around both sides, minnow surface machine, bubble
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machine. My hand, I was pretty good so that’s where I moved to, from furniture to this exhibition
business.
Thelen: So help me, I would like to hear more about the transition. How did you go from designing
something like this table to doing Mathematica?
Staples: Well, when there was a very serious exodus at the Eames office just as I was coming up. Fiftynine I would say. The Moscow Fair.
Thelen: We are looking at a picture of the book on Eames of the Mathematica exhibit.
Staples: It was a trendsetter too.
Charles: It was before any of the science centers and there are two versions that still exist of
Mathematica up at Boston Science Museum and at New York Science I think in Flushing Meadows or
someplace like that. And Oppenhiemer who started the Exploratorium talks about Mathematica.
Thelen: This was sounding like the Exploratorium.
Charles: Very, that this was influential to him. I would also say that this was the first time I know of a
scholar, Ray Redheffer, taking his whole sabbatical to work on an exhibition. It is a very influential and I
think important exhibition. And a little amazing that now, fifty years old it is still viable in museums.
Thelen: Wow, so you were doing furniture design and you got to this. What were some of the things
that led to that evolution?
Staples: Well, I guess that Deborah Susman that was there when I was at the Eames office did most of
the graphic work, but I then made the graphic mathematic wall there, which goes from thirteen or
fourteen hundred to nineteen sixties. About the famous mathematicians through history and I was in
charge of the production of that and getting it installed. Once I was in the quote unquote exhibitions
side of his office, I just wanted to stay there. I did, in fact, do furniture off and on. Then we got a nice
project to do, Nauru exhibition, Nauru in India and I went there for. Again, well what happened,
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Albinson and Dale Bower and Peter Pierce all left the office about the same time. So I became number
one.
Thelen: In the late fifties.
Staples: Early sixties. And it was great, I really enjoyed it. I got to go places I never imagined.
Thelen: But India were not there two people they asked to go ahead of you. Can you talk about the
Nauru show and how you got involved in it?
Staples: Well I guess yes, Gore Nashville was one I think. Well I cannot remember who else. But they
finally ended up asking me if I would like to go. And I was going to go for two weeks and I stayed ten, in
India. We were going to build it in New York and they decided to build the show in India because of
economic issues. Then we put it all on a boat and shipped it to New York. Then I went back to New York
and engineered getting it in.
Thelen: But in India in Omnebod, you were responsible for getting it built again, dealing with all the
craftspeople.
Staples: Right, now speaking a word of Hindi. [Laughter] I was able through grunts and strains and
gestures get them to do what needed to be done.
Thelen: If I got this right, this is like four years after you entered the firm, here you are running the
exhibition side? Did I get that right?
Staples: It probably was not quite that dramatic. I mean I think that furniture was a diminishing interest,
exhibitions was an increasing interest and I was just in that cusp that I moved from one to the other.
And on the design side. There were people doing the research, but on the design side Bob becomes the
senior designer.
Thelen: Actually I would like to get kind of an overview of that. There is the exhibition section and then
there is design and what? Well, you go ahead. In this earlier period what it is like.
Staples: That was not any separation. I mean it was just you did everything. You made films, design.
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Thelen: Within exhibitions.
But Bob, Deborah Susman, was senior graphic designer. This was just like in my view, the way exhibits
are developed today. Ray Redheffer and I think was working with was Glen there. So Glen Fleck was
intellectual side. Very interesting side.
Thelen: What does intellectual side mean in this context?
Staples: That he did not do furniture. [Laughter]
Charles: He doesn’t get his hands dirty. Glen only has a high school degree. Very bright guy. Found
school boring, only graduates, according to his story, because he went on the school grounds every day
and read books outside of this building, but they could not call him a truant.
Anyway, so there is Redheffer the scholar from UCLA working on Mathematica. There is Glen,
there is probably other people, I was not there, doing research, finding parts [feedback] you know all
that kind of gathering of information. Then there is the 3D side, physically both designing it and is
Gordon there then, Gordon Ashby, Paul, Peter? Who’s doing the 3D side besides you?
Staples: Dale.
Charles: Dale Bowers on Mathematica.
Staples: Dale and Don were all involved in that.
Charles: So Don’s still there, Don Albinson.
Thelen: I cannot quite follow the evolution of the firm and because of that how that became an
exhibition. How it got from designing tables to making exhibitions. How it got from - I assume a
commercial process of designing and selling furniture, to a business of collaborating with a scholar from
UCLA on an exhibition like this.
Staples: By the time that Mathematica was built, Charles was famous. His line of furniture was
successful. Eames plastic chairs, wire chair, the lounge chair, all of those things were making Herman
Miller rich. Charles was getting royalties for all of this. Charles had a very interesting way of doing
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business. He would cultivate these major figures in the financial world, like the president of IBM or
Westinghouse, they would help build the things that he was involved in. it is kind of like the Medicis; you
have the people who pay for things and the people who do those things.
Charles: I think Elliot Noise is very key in introductions. Elliot Noise was an industrial design. And George
Nelson introduces Charles to Herman Miller. George Nelson, and I may be wrong on some chronologies,
but Nelson I believe was a design advisors to Herman Miller and that is the connection that Eames to
Herman Miller. Elliot Noise, I think at some point, is curator of design at MoMA [Museum of Modern
Art], but is also advisor on design to IBM and Westinghouse and places like that. I think Elliot Noise…
Staples: A conduit.
Charles: A conduit in here who is saying to somebody like IBM you know you ought to talk to Charles
Eames. Meanwhile Charles has worked in the film industry.
Staples: For Billy Wilder.
Charles: For Billy Wilder, so he gets into film, knows that end. Charles is just a bright bright guy.
Thelen: And responding to a lot of things around him.
Charles: Right, he’s in Hollywood and so on. He’s already playing with film. People do animations. I think
the first IBM project is….
Staples: Information machine.
Charles: Information machine. What’s information machine?
Staples: Dolores Connad.
Charles: No that’s movable airport. Is not Dolores Connad. Oh, information machine in 1956 for
Brussels?
Staples: You have to look it up.
Charles: Okay. No but I lost track of something here.
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Thelen: We are getting a sense of how this field is evolving. Or how you are evolving and the field is
evolving out of first a world of industrial, first furniture, then industrial design. It is moving with
Hollywood, with corporations.
Charles: And designers can do anything.
Thelen: Wow, I think that’s.
Charles: I think Charles would say that.
Staples: He did not like being a designer.
Charles: Or artist.
Staples: He was a problem-solver.
Charles: And a craftsman. He would use the word craftsman.
Thelen: So designers can do anything.
Staples: Says Barbara.
Thelen: I heard Barbara, but I am trying to think about the implications of that.
Charles: Well architects think they can do anything.
Staples: Well they do everything.
Charles: And Charles trained as an architect. So another connection is that he’s worked with Aero
Saarinen. But, no, I think Charles comes from a background that says that you address a problem and
you can solve it.
Staples: Charles went to Cranbrook and at the same time that Charles was there, many of the wellknown designers of that vintage were at Cranbrook. He carried on these relationships between Aero
Saarinen, who did the subway here? Harry Weise. It was a crossroads of bright people.
Charles: Florence Knoll.
Thelen: Is that the feeling you had as you were back here in the late fifties and early sixties that you
among a bunch of bright people, not limited by traditional lines and exploring different ways of design?
19
Staples: I guess so.
Thelen: I do not want to put words in your mouth.
Staples: Please.
Thelen: But how did you experience?
Staples: The thing that you know, somebody would knock at the door and it would be Gregory Peck.
[Laughter] it was just Charles had, you know, a large network of bright people. Bucky Fuller and all of
these.
Charles: But it was also a way, you know, the office was an in old garage in Venice. So people came to
Charles and while he did travel and went other places, this was a world in that building. And, you know,
the film cameras could be there, the furniture there, the graphics…
Staples: Aquarium.
Charles: Yes, the aquarium, stuff would happen and if you survived it, you know, you would be pushed
to wherever help was needed. I never did furniture, but I did have to do animation one time. Bob I think
did some of everything at various times. But go on sorry.
Thelen: No, I think this is really incredibly helpful; I am getting a great sense.
Staples: It is such a diverse place and as Barbara said, you had to do everything. You were not pigeonholed to be a designer of furniture. You would be shifted into intellectual areas [pause] sometimes you
would excel, sometimes you would not excel. But I could spin tops. One of the things that Charles
appreciated of my talents.
Charles: Spinning tops.
Staples: Yes, because he was fascinated by tops and he did two films about tops, one was Buddy Collet
us music and one I think was Velma Bernstein’s music. And it is all about the spinning; it is sort of
mathematical puzzle.
20
Thelen: Was the culture collaborative or hierarchical? When you showed up for work and you had a
challenge was this a place where everyone would go talking to everyone else, was it a place where you
worked in your cubical? What was the workplace like?
Staples: Well there were not cubicles but it was, it certainly had divisions. There was no questions about
it. The building was about the size of this building and not like the look of this building. The shop, which
was a sort of table saw and all of that stuff was in the back and Charles’ office was in the front and
between were these little fiefdoms.
Thelen: But there were fiefdoms?
Staples: Yes, I mean Glen had this little office in the middle next to the kitchen.
There was an area that was graphics, areas that were a little more research; I guess I worked in graphics.
Thelen: Was your basic memory of it that you were working by yourself solving problems on your own
terms or is your memory that you talked a lot with other people?
You never solved them on your own terms; you solved them on Charles’ terms.
Thelen: So in a way it was hierarchical?
Staples: Absolutely.
Charles: He weighed in on everything.
Staples: He did. Not always when he should of and not always as completely as he should have, but he
was there for every turn of the page. Ray, his wife, was trained as an artist. I think she went also to
Cranbrook.
Charles: They met at Cranbrook.
Staples: She was sort of the aesthetic eye, but she was not very good at making decisions, so it was
ultimately Charles who would make decisions. One of my classic examples about Ray, I do not know if
you know Fermayo, their house, but it is an industrial vocabulary. Its iron and glass and it is a box. There
are trusses up overhead and there was a ladder and Ray insisted that I tell her the three places this
21
ladder could be, of which there was only one logical place to put the ladder and I told her that one first
and then she insisted that I tell her the others. It ended up where I told where it should be, it was out of
the way, but it was still there. She just demanded irrational things, but she was sweet, but she could not
make decisions.
Thelen: So he would bring in the business, the tasks. And he would come to someone like you and say
we have a contract…
Staples: Sometimes it would not even be a contract, there was no, he was a poor businessman but he
was shrewd at his business.
Thelen: I am just trying to get a sense of the flow here. He would be the link to the outside world who
would bring in something from Westinghouse or Gregory Peck or whatever and then he would come to
you and say he would think you were the right person to take charge, or you and one other person to
take charge of a project.
Staples: Yes.
Thelen: And then you would do it, only from time to time, or it sounds like pretty often, you would talk
about it with him.
Staples: Yes, you would talk about it with him and one of the most gut wrenching periods was when we
were going to do a school seating system that was furniture for classrooms and stuff like that. The
university has these pits where people are…
Thelen: Lecture theaters or something like that.
Staples: So they needed furniture for something like that.
Charles: Herman Miller.
Staples: So Herman Miller had the need. Don had gone, left Charles in fifty-nine or so, maybe sixty-one
because he was at Mathematica. Unfortunately he left under bad feelings, went off and created his own
little design world and Herman Miller kept him busy doing problem solving in the furniture world. They
22
gave him the issue of school seating. Once the Eames plastic shell on this new seating system, then all of
a sudden Charles got testy, how can you call this Albinson furniture when you put an Eames chair on it?
Because Charles had so much clout with Herman Miller they moved the project from Albinson to the
office. We then spent weeks or months doing modifications to what Albinson had already done.
Changing the shape and contour of things, it was going to be die-cast aluminum. Charles did not like the
configurations that we had, fluff them up a bit, make them beefier looking, which is the worst thing you
can do with die-casting.
Thelen: Why is that?
Staples: The speed at which you make a product is where the profit is. Aluminum, when it gets thick, it
cools slowly. You have cross-section like that as opposed to like that - a thin rectangle as opposed to a
big fat oval. We had all of our drawings done and ready to go and we met Bob Blake who was Herman
Miller and I met Charles in New York City before he went off on one of his world tours and he just
trounced us. Back to the drawing board we went.
Thelen: Literally.
Staples: Literally, we had made arrangements to go to 3M Minnesota, a die-cast factor. Herman Miller
had sold some of these projects to universities. There is a lot at risk and Charles just did notthe truth or
he did not see the advance technology as being the solution. So he walked back to sandcasting.
Thelen: Even though it meant he’d lose money.
Staples: He did not lose any money. Herman Miller. So Herman Miller had sold some of this furniture
based upon Albinson’s practical configurations. So they didn’t…
Thelen: Why do you think he made that decision?
Staples: He did not like what he saw.
Charles: He did not like the aesthetic look of it.
Thelen: So it was aesthetic.
23
Staples: I am sure it was. I mean it has to be that.
Charles: It was structural issues.
Staples: So anyway that was the most annoying part of my job at the time. Was having this sort of…I
mean he said to me one time “Oh we need around here is a good furniture designer,” but at my desk.
Thelen: If only there were one somewhere.
Charles: When you were the senior furniture designer.
Thelen: Did you feel that they thought of you that way a little bit? Like they did not appreciate you.
Staples: No, I do not think that’s at all true. He just was frustrated about something and I do not think it
was what I was doing. His mind was somewhere else on other things. He would have a tendency at
lectures, he would start talking about something and he would drift into something else and you could
never follow a damn train, you know. It would get to the art and it would do this. Charles did the Elliot
lectures at Harvard and as far as we know they have never been published because nobody could follow
the transcription or they were not taped well. We know people who were there who said it was
beautiful and visual, but they are not sure what he was talking about.
Thelen: When you think back on it, I am trying to get a how you experienced rewards and frustrations of
working there. Did you feel that they did appreciate your essential role? Did you feel like you had the
chance to be all that you could be? If that’s even a relevant category. How did you experience that?
Staples: It was always like walking on eggshells.
Thelen: Was it?
Staples: It was always an issue of whether you were going to get there correctly or not. He was not, did
not hand off praise at all. He just worked on something until it was done and then moved to the next
one. It was, you know, on the aluminum group, which has a wonderful spreader on supports. I made
seven different shapes of that, all from carving the wooden pattern to casting the plaster to getting the
port aluminum piece that was the shape, getting it finished and putting it on a chair and then, let us do
24
it again. It was one of these kind of things where you have to go around the clock and you get almost
where you started, but now you know that that was a good idea.
Thelen: That sounds incredibly frustrating.
Staples: It was frustrating. It was certainly frustrating for Herman Miller because Herman Miller paid for
all of these options. But Charles’ chairs sold like hotcakes, so they could not complain. He was
increasingly less interested in Herman Miller’s problems and when he started getting into this exhibition
world.
Thelen: I am just trying to picture what it is like when you work with the sense of walking on eggshells.
What kind of adjustments a person makes.
Staples: You just grin and bear it, turn the other cheek.
Charles: It just becomes natural and you just do it.
Staples: I guess that’s how I lasted sixteen years; I mean others did not last very long.
Charles: It was a unique environment and I would say for both of us we did not know any other
environment. Charles hired young; I think he had a tradition of doing that.
Staples: And made us old.
[Laughter]
Staples: But he was great.
Thelen: But you were mindful, though he was intervening a lot, that you were in a creative place.
Staples: Oh, yes.
Charles: An amazing place.
Thelen: I am thinking we have been talking for quite a while; do you want to take a break? Or I do not
want to cut this off. Of course we will be here for two day and we can add stuff as we go along, do you
have some other thoughts about your experiences at Eames that we ought to talk about here?
25
Staples: Well, it was a…Barbara talks about the number of people that came and went at the office. It
was like a revolving door to some degree, but there was several of us that stayed on through thick and
thin and others came and went. I was certainly hired to do furniture, but then when Charles did not
want to do furniture, he wanted to do this stuff, and I did this stuff you know the exhibitions. It was - I
do not know how to say it any more than that. You go with the flow.
Thelen: You go with the flow. Was there camaraderie among those of you who stayed around for a
while? Or a rivalry or both?
Staples: I think there was, we did not socialize outside of the office with each other too much.
Charles: We were there twelve hours a day.
Thelen: You did plenty of socializing.
Staples: It was long, hard; sometimes it was just amazingly hard. Other times it was just wonderful.
Thelen: Kathy do you want to….
Franz: Maybe a break
Thelen: I was thinking a break might be a good idea for a couple of minutes.
Staples: Okay
Charles: Sure.
Thelen: I want to make sure.
Charles: Is it playing right?
Thelen: Its playing, we have actually been talking for an hour and ten minutes and four seconds.
Charles: Have you listened to it at all?
Thelen: I am going to do that now.
Franz: We did some tests.
Thelen: We did a lot of tests, pretty comfortable, but I am always, I think I just press stop. Do not you
think?
26
End of track one
Thelen: And now we are okay. So we left off, we got a beginning take on Bob’s life and how he ended up
in this area and now I would like to turn it over to you Barbara to explore how you got into this world.
Charles: Well, like Bob, I did not have a clue who the Eames were, but back in 1967, so ten years after
Bob got there. We are ten years apart in age, so we would have been essentially the same age getting
there, I was twenty-four. So I think that’s probably true for both of us when we got there. As we said
either earlier on tape or not on tape, I think Charles liked to hire young and kind of mold people rather
than get people that maybe already had other predilections.
Staples: And with nice legs.
Thelen: Oh, did he have an eye for that too? Or did one of the other employees have an eye for nice
legs?
Staples: Yes.
Thelen: Oh, okay. Can we go back even before there to earlier in your life?
Charles: I would say I come from an academic family and have the least education of anybody in my
family. My father was a scholar of Japanese contemporary politics, studied in Japan in the thirties and
was teaching at Pomona and was called by OSS just before the war went out to be the senior, at OSS
there is overt and convert, and on the overt side, on the research side, he was the senior Japanese
scholar that they hired. Was hired in September, initially I think just to talk to them about how to set up
the bureau, but then he was asked to stay. By forty-four he was head of all research for the Far East. I
think Julia Childs was actually employed by him. All those stories about Julia now.
My mother, they had met at Northwestern University, my mother was, I think the first in her
family to go to college, came from Colorado. She was actually studying classics and working on her PhD,
27
is all but degree in classics. So they met at Northwestern. My dad did all of his studies at Northwestern.
My mother was at Colorado College and then went to Northwestern. I was born during the war when
my father was in Washington with OSS. Then after the war they moved up to New Jersey because my
father was hired by the Rockefeller Foundation in the department of Humanities and it was actually a
probably a Rockefeller grant through the general education board that had taken them to Japan in the
thirties for several years. I guess first to Paris to study more Japanese and then to Japan. At that point in
the thirties there was no place in the United States teaching Japanese, but the Sorbonne was teaching
Japanese so people went there first.
So I grew up in a suburb of New York. Raeburn, New Jersey or Fairlawn, New Jersey but the
subdivision of Raeburn which was a very interesting early planned community that had then failed
during the depression, but some of it still survived and it was studied as a planned community when
people did things like Columbia here and so on.
Thelen: Levittown.
Charles: No, I do not think we were studied for Levittown; we were hopefully studied for better projects.
But anyways, some of my friends went off to private school in high school. But my mother got elected to
the school board. She did not think the schools were very good, was president of the school board, so
there was no way I was going to go to private school. So I graduated Fairlawn High School. Big class, you
know like five hundred kids. Half of them went to college, half of them went to running pizza parlors or
whatever you are doing in northern New Jersey. I went to Oberlin College.
I wanted particularly a liberal arts, relatively small school without sororities and fraternities
because we had actually had sororities and fraternities in high school and I had felt blackballed even
though - I was sort of a geek, but sometimes in the in crowd sometimes not in the in crowd I mean sort
of on the edge, but not cheerleader or any of that kind of stuff. I always, my mother, my grandmother
was a seamstress, my mother knew how to sew very well and taught me how to sew. From about
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seventh grade on if I wanted anything special the deal was if I would make it they would buy the fabric.
They being my parents, or my father went to the orient every year for two months and he would bring
back interesting things. So that was sort of an impetus too.
Thelen: Fabric.
Charles: He would bring back fabric and if I could sew it faster than my mother could sew it then I would
get the dress. So anyways that is how I learned to sew which became important because I made theater
costumes in high school and I made them again in college. I studied print making in college and I
majored in history, but I also studied art history. I think that I would have switched to art history, but it
was going to take another year and that would be five years and I kind of wanted to get out. I did not
have a clue what I was going to do.
When we later worked for IBM, I used to say well if you would have ever interviewed women on
campuses, I might well have ended up at IBM. In high school I thought I wanted to go into the state
department, but my father set up for me to have lunch with Dean Rusk, who had been the president of
the foundation and was just heading off to become Secretary of State. So I was sixteen, I went into to
New York and had lunch with Dean Rusk. He just said to me, State’s historically a very, I do not know if
he used the word sexist, but a very male-oriented place and you would have a very hard time advancing
and he did not recommend it. So that sort of put a quash on that idea.
I really did not know what I was going to do. I graduated college, taught swimming for the
summer. Decided - I had met a very interesting printmaker at Ohio State when I had helped Paul Arnold,
my teacher of printmaking to install a show down there and I am blanking on the professor’s name. I
called him in like August and asked him, any chance I could come and work on a Master’s degree in
printmaking? So I went down to Ohio State, I did not have a lot of the background courses that I should
have had. I was at master’s level in printmaking, but I was at freshman, taking certain freshman art
29
courses, to make up this deficiency. And I was living on, in a tiny apartment on fraternity row and doing
odd jobs. It was a little strange, my parents were in Japan.
My parents moved to Japan while I was in college, I should say that. My father left the
Foundation after Dean Rusk left, he did not like the new president and then Ambassador Rishower made
a superpost for him in Japan, so they were there for five years. So I lasted one semester at Ohio State,
then wrote letters to both Pratt, thinking I could go there and study printmaking, but I also had always
like theater and I had gone up to Stratford Canada with my family because the Foundation had helped
fund some of the early work at Stratford Canada. So I wrote a letter to, now I am blanking, the man,
Patterson I am going to say but I do not think Dave is the right name. Anyway who was the founder of
Stratford Canada, who I had met as a ten year old or twelve year and said, you know, “Any chance of a
job?” So I got a letter back saying basically that I could come for a two week trial run. So in February I
packed up my little MG and headed to Canada. And survived the two weeks.
I worked at Stratford as a designer’s assistant the first year, the first season. You are a gopher,
you have to make sure everybody’s shoes fit, you have got to find the right fabrics, you have got to do all
this stuff. The best advice I ever got, I think from almost anybody was looking for things and somebody
in that job said to me, if somebody tells you they cannot tell you what you want, do not ever leave
without asking them who can and where to go next. Always know where you are next steps going to be,
which was great advice, terrific advice.
I worked on the first North American production of Mongony and the designer, Brian, it is not
Brian Jones, I can look these back up. He wanted all the chorus people in striped fabric shirts, sort of
mafia-almost style. Well how many stripes can you buy? Well I saw that arrow shirts, I think, was making
pajamas with all kinds of stripes. So I called them up, they had a factory in Hamilton, Ontario. And
Stratford was a magic name, if you said Stratford, everybody wanted to help Stratford. So I said what I
want and they said, “oh come on out.” So four yards of this, four yards of that, I mean it was great. Just
30
kind of how do you find things, how do you do things. It was a great job. I worked that next season, that
was winter, that was like February to July, until the last shows opened.
Our shows were the last ones to open and almost all the fabric at Stratford was dyed. You would
buy fabrics close to the color but then to take the edge off them so that they did not look brand new or
sometimes you could only get the velvets in certain ways, so you would buy it and then you would dye
it. As Brian’s assistant I had to be sure all my fabric was being dyed in a timely manner and I had to get it
to the cutters so that they could make the costumes in a timely manner. Because our shows were the
last two to open, the dyer was backed up. I had cutters getting mad at me on one side, but a dyer who
would not deliver on the other side. So I asked him to teach me how to dye and I would go in at night
and dye the fabric.
The next year they invited me back to be the dyer, which was cool because I went from thirtyfive dollars a week to, I think, one hundred dollars a week. Between that I worked at Boston at the
Charles Playhouse as the cutter. A cutter is the person who is in charge of getting the whole costume
made. You might have people sewing for you, but as the cutter you are the one who is going to take the
designer’s idea and figure out how to make the pattern, get it all together, do the fittings and so on. I
worked Stratford sixty-five season, Boston winter sixty-five to sixty-six season, Stratford sixty-six, am I
off a year? No that is right. Somehow, by sixty-six I finished Stratford and I decided that theater was too
gypsy-like and in some ways as the costume people you were low person on the totem pole. Clearly the
actors the other people were stars and you are moving this season and that season and so on and so
forth.
One fun thing was our time to shine was opening night because the actors would look pretty
miserable once they get all their makeup off, whereas we had been sewing these elaborate dresses and
hiding them under our work tables the whole season. Anyways, I decided to go back to Japan, give up
theater, study printmaking. I went back to Japan, got involved in a course, did not do anything I thought
31
was very inspiring. But I, at a pub one night met a, a very funny place called Don Sokayo, which means
lower depths in Japanese and it was a bar/Italian restaurant and everybody’s wearing Russian outfits,
they sang Russian folk songs…
Thelen: And ate spaghetti
Charles: And ate spaghetti and they sang the Russian folk songs in Japanese. I got taken there once, but
then I would take other people there. I think Archie Green, the folk singer, came to Tokyo and my father
was head of cultural stuff and USIA, so people like that would come to our house for a reception after
whatever event. So late one night I said, “Hey you want to go to this cool place,” and of course he brings
down the house. And I had a friend, the daughter of one of the other embassy people who had actually
sung on Broadway and so I would take her there. So I got to know people there. I met a young student
there one time and he then invited me to go to the theater. We went and saw at the actors theater in
Brokayungy Brek’s Mother Courage in Japanese. It was one of the greatest theater productions I have
ever seen.
Thelen: What was great about it?
Charles:It was just the woman who play Mudocrag, is how they say it, was just good. I mean, even
though I could not follow the Japanese, I knew the basic story. It was powerful, just the whole way it
was staged and everything. It turns out that Sudacre, the head of the theater, had worked with Brekt
and was the main translator of Brekt into Japanese and the woman who played Mudacrag was his
longtime partner. He had this theater that certainly was on the left end of politics in Rotugy. I was very
fascinated by that.
At Strastford the summer before, two Japanese theater people had come through on some kind
of grant and I had met them. One was an actor working at that theater and the other worked at a
producer at the national theater in Kabukiy and so on. I had looked, re-looked up the Kabukiy guy and
see him and go see those shows and I mentioned seeing this incredible production. And he said so and
32
so works there, he is an actor there. You know, lights go off, you can write letters. So I wrote a letter to
Sendacraga and said who I was and that this actor and his company would know the quality of theater I
had worked at and was there any chance of working in their costume department? I guess I wrote it in
English, I cannot remember actually. I got a call from the head of the costume department and I did not
know enough Japanese to explain by that point that in about four or five months I was getting married.
So I just said yes, I’ll come to work. I met Sandacraya and it turns out we could speak pigeon German to
each other so that kind of work out. I worked in that costume department for about three months,
which was fabulous.
This is a very long story to say how I ended up at the Eames office, but we are going to get there.
When I was then getting married I wanted these great big Kabuky stamps for the invitations, they are
some of the most gorgeous stamps made and my dad said, I was getting married in Japan, my parents
had this fabulous house in Japan. One of the embassy entertainment houses, it had been built in the
thirties, it was sort of by a French architect who had once worked for Kabusea and then ended up in
Tokyo working for Frank Lloyd Wright on the Imperial Hotel, so it was a Corbusea style kind of place with
great land. It had been built I think for a mistress of one of the Kawasakis. We had a great place to have
a wedding. Anyway, I wanted this stamp. My father said, you are not going to get those, they sell out
within seconds, but Naomi Fucda who was the librarian at international house, she was a stamp
collector. My dad had known her for years, go see her and she’ll tell you what dealer you can get them
from and how to get them.
So I went to see Naomi, well what are you going to do when you move to LA [Los Angeles], that
is where my future husband was at USC and I said, “well I do not know, I have been doing this theater
stuff and costumes and so on”, she said, well, I think she actually wrote me a me a letter and said there
was a woman, Dorothy Cheekins who had had a Guggenheim and had stayed at International House and
why did not I look her up.
33
I got to LA and I needed a job and I on my own just tried to get a costume job. Camelot had just
been produced and was probably one of the last big on set shows in Hollywood, incredible costumes
and anyone in costumes was now out of work. So I was not finding much luck. But at Western Costumes,
I went there and at the very end of the interview I said, “by the way I have been trying to find Dorothy
Jekins”, whatever address I had was not working and this is well before internet and things like that.
Nothing I had. And the guy kind of goes, “oh you know Dorothy Jekins, why did not you say so?” “ I do
not really know her but I have an introduction to her,” and he goes “that is one of her Oscars up there,
she just left it here”. So it turns out Dorothy had done, I guess at that point, well Little Bigman, she had
started doing costumes in about forty-eight, through Billy Wilder and the Hollywood sort of scene she
had become very good friends with Charles and Ray Eames. She had pretty much left the costume
world, she was actually now the curator of costumes, she had left the movie world, she was the curator
of costumes at LA County Art Museum.
I went to see her and I recognized some of the drawings that are sitting there because she had
worked for Shakespeare on the Houotonic up in Connecticut and that was another project that the
Foundation had funded so as a kid I was taken around all these theaters, so I recognized her work. I ran
errands for her for a while, she was actually working on a movie, but they would not hire me.
Probably about six weeks into all of this, I got to LA in early March and I think this was early May,
she mentioned the Eames and Ray called and said, “Dorothy mentioned you would you come down?” So
I put on my one dress and you know you get your resume fixed up. The only thing I had read at that
point, somehow in Macall, some magazine or someplace I had seen like one little squib that called the
office something like Santa’s workshop. I do not think I have anymore. But I would never - I did not know
the furniture at all. I went down there and literally it was this grey garage building, it said nine-oh-one
on it, but very very plain. You would go in and the lobby had an Indian, one of these backdrops for a
street photographer there and this nice Eames furniture and so on.
34
Anyway, they were working on the aquarium project, an incredible project, I think probably the
best of all the projects in terms of putting all of Eames’ ideas together, it never happened. It is a national
aquarium and it was going to be here on Hanes Point and the building was being designed by Roach
Dicalu. When Eero Saarinen died young, he died at about fifty-two, the agreement with his key people,
Kevin Roach and John Dincalu was that they could use the Saarinen name to finish any projects that had
been started under Saarinen. So something like the Dulles Airport which was not quite finished is a
Saarinen project, but any new projects. Eero, I guess did not want people to be calling things a Saarinen
project that he had not worked on, so now it is the Roach-Dincalu office. So they had the contract to
design the department of interior of a national aquarium on Hanes Point, we could find it in there if you
are interested. Stuart Udall was the Secretary of Interior.
Thelen: The era of Camelot.
Charles: Era of Camelot, so this is 1967.
Thelen: Late Camelot.
Charles: Late Camelot, Kennedy had died. We are into LA riots had happened not the sixty-eight riots,
but there were the sixty-seven riots. I remember thinking a little bit when I first got to LA that I was
feeling like I was more in a foreign country than when I was in Tokyo.
Thelen: How so?
Charles: Well, I would never been in a black community a lot at all. And I was living downtown by USC
and it was a pretty rough area.
Staples: Black panthers were big.
Charles: Black panthers were very very big. So anyway they were working on the national aquarium and
they were working on a model that was a huge model on an eight by eight foot table. Parts of the model
- things would be made at different scale so they could be photographed. In the back of the office were
all these aquariums.
35
Thelen: An aquarium, like this?
Charles: Multiples.
Thelen: Whole bunches of fish tanks.
Charles: Fish tanks, but ocean. They had discovered or Charles had figured out that one of the staffers
that worked for Bob was really into fish also. Sam became - this is sort of what we were talking about
earlier, you would be called on to do whatever task they thought you were up to and if you were not up
to it you were in trouble. But you never knew what you might be called to do. Sam was now running all
these fish tanks and they had cameras set up so that if something interesting was happening they could
capture it very quickly.
This was all to make a film about the designs for the national aquarium, because Charles had a
concept that if he could get it all on film it would be much harder for people to misunderstand what he
was trying to present then if it was say a written report or a verbal report. It was an amazing, you know,
models to photographed this way to be photographed that way it would all come apart. You were
making the model right? Or figuring out the model, Lars Hanson was also making models.
My initial assignment - they had a model of this rooftop aquarium, a lot of this design ends up
in Baltimore, by Cambridge Seven. They had this big rooftop greenhouse, it was going to be the
Everglades I think. It had all been made out of black and white photographs, could I paint it…to look like,
could I put color on all these trees so that they could take a shot that would go from the real Everglades
to the model Everglades and then kind of back up. You say sure, I have never painted one of these
things. You have to say you can do it. All you can do is fail. So I did that for the first week and at the end
of the week, Charles left for Russia for three weeks. He’s gone.
But this place was fabulous and my marriage was not so fabulous so I started staying later at this
place. Then I started working on the model, I made a trout stream that you can photograph from above.
I worked for Lars who was a taskmaster, because I had to pick paper colors and he could make them and
36
apply them faster than I could pick them. You had to pick greys, Charles I remember saying he did not
want anyone to remember a purple wall. You had to pick from palettes of greys that would, when
photographed, make architectural distinctions. You have to get baseboards and walls and cornices, all
that kind of stuff. I spent a couple of weeks doing that. My recollection, did we get pay every week or
every two weeks?
Staples: I think it was every two weeks.
Charles: So my recollection of those next six weeks after Charles left, he was back after about three
weeks, but after my first success of painting that every time Miss. Poole handed out our paychecks,
somebody I was working with got fired. That went on for about three, and you are saying is it going to
be me next?
Thelen: And it did not make sense to you who it was going to be?
Charles: No.
Thelen: So you could not have predicted it.
Charles: I did not know why, I just knew people were going. That summer I made - they were working
on the little glass house for a carousel here on the mall. The office had started working with the
Smithsonian and Ripley and Ripley wanted to animate the mall. The Smithsonian had bought a carousel,
so I made a paper carousel to go in the model for that house. Eventually I got assigned to organize the
negatives. I think, my suspicion around this time, was hey she might be a keeper, let us give her some
other jobs, we do not have anything else to do for her to do right now, rather than let her go. So I spent
about a month organizing four by five negatives which was fabulous to look at these.
Charles had photographed the circus in the forties - there are just some great photographs of
the circus that have never been published. He had a friend Bill Balentine, who was one of the clowns,
the founder of the clown college for Ringling brothers. His wife, I do not remember her name, was a
showgirl. Charles had full access back, behind the circus. That fall - a designer I worked with at Stratford
37
then contacted me and said he had a job in Tokyo and since I knew Tokyo would I go out there as his
assistant for like a month or six weeks. I thought that was great, my then husband did not think it was so
cool. I talked to Ray or Charles that I was thinking about doing that and Ray actually took me out to
lunch to try to convince me not to leave at that moment. I later heard the next year that they were
talking about firing me because I could not get anything done.
If your project was not on the front burner you could really sort of wallow, flounder in that
place. You would not get any attention, you would not get any attention, you would not be getting
anywhere. I cannot remember, I went on the Photography in the City, maybe my problem was after
Photography in the City and before Computer Perspective, but there was a time, one long summer when
I was asked to kind of work on - maybe it was the early computer history and I was not getting
anywhere.
Sometime that first summer they were working on a history wall for Herman Miller. Deborah
came back, she was no longer at the office, but they asked her to come back to do it. Deborah taught
me how to do paste up, so I started when you used rubber cement and you had to cut all the type and
put it together and so on. I started working on that and then at some point, probably Ray or Deborah
said, “For this history wall we ought to have some non-Eames, Herman Miller stuff, we ought to get
some other cultural things.” I said “You know I know how to use a library, I’ll go over to UCLA and start
finding stuff.” I started doing the research and so they discovered I could use a library. Then I became
useful beside somebody who could paint and cut.
Then the office took on a project for the Smithsonian called Photography in the City and it
opened in June sixty-eight. By the fall of sixty-seven we must have started working on that. Bob was the
primary designer on it. I was doing research on it. I do not think Glen was very involved in that project. I
think Glen was working on some other stuff. I was doing research to kind of ideas Charles would come
up with. Glen was involved in the scientific part. Charles’ idea was that photography has helped to shape
38
cities in the way, when Housemen redesigned Paris. All of Paris was photographed and they used it to
think about what they wanted to do where you had people like Jacob Riese in New York using
photography for social reasons. Even before that in Scotland there was a whole project using
photography, that was kind of Charles’ concept. I think the Smithsonian had come to him and said we’d
like to do an exhibit about photography.
It became problematic because the curator of photography Austrof, Gene Austrof, he had his
dream hall he wanted to do on photography and he saw the money being spent by Charles to do
something at the A and I Building [Arts and Industries Building]. The Eames had made a film about the
Smithsonian a year or two before and that is how they got to know Ripley. That film is quite fun. We
were doing this show Photography in the City and I started calling institutions figuring out what we
could borrow. We did not use - we used some original photography, but a lot of it was reproductions
and big and so on. Trying to develop the ideas. One of the interesting things was I did little, I did notes,
like little sketches of a picture and then I would do notes about what it was. I had my outlines lines.
Thelen: Like a storyboard.
Charles: That were storyboards of the exhibit, but all of it by hand. Charles one day said he wanted to
take these back to review at the Smithsonian. I said “Oh I have got to really clean them up I have got to
type them, I have got to do this, do that.” And he said, “No, no, no, I want it just like this. It will make the
client think that is it is just a work in progress and they can have some input.” How much they would
have would be a different question, but they could think they could have some input. That show
ultimately opened. We were back, you had gone back east once before to work on, with Gene Balen
because you talk about the time…you had met Gene at the Smithsonian with Naru because the Naru
show went to the Smithsonian.
When Bob - but I thought for Photography in the City you had gone one time or maybe you were
there earlier than I was there but I thought maybe you would made one trip back to case out the site.
39
You tell your story about that woman, a woman saying how could her Eames chairs fit her body or
something like that. Maybe that’s a Gene Balon story, anyway. Ultimately, I think Bob was there ahead
of me, but the office began to decamp to Washington. I think there was ultimately you and Dave Olney
and Darrell Conabear possibly? Me, anyway, and Charles. Charles was writing the text and Charles had
not finished the text before we all had to leave for Washington and had about three weeks to get this
installed. So Charles ultimately was up on the balcony of the A and I Building.
Staples: In a secure office.
Thelen: Way up there.
Charles: Writing and dropping it down to me. Literally. I had meanwhile, the first day I got there,
Smithsonian had a typesetter come in and I got taught how to mark up type. I was now responsible for
getting all of the text done and produced while Bob and the other were getting the actual physical
exhibit put together. Bob mentioned the secure office because we kept our cameras in the secure office
and one day the desk disappeared from the secure office.
Thelen: The desk, but not the cameras?
Charles: No the cameras were in the desk, we never found the cameras. We eventually found desk, but
so much for a secure office. Prior to this trip to Washington I remember something, I do not really
remember who it was, asked me what is it like at the Eames office, what are the people like? Blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah. And I said generally everybody was friendly except this one guy in the back who did
furniture who would not talk to me, but I was working with him on this project. We are back in
Washington and I guess to make the story short, this guy in the back got very friendly, so a relationship
started probably when it should not quite have at that point, but it did.
Thelen: Why not? Why should not it have or do I want to know that?
Charles: Bob was married, I was at the end of a bad marriage, a brief bad marriage.
40
Thelen: I do not mean to pry. So that went on and off at the office for the whole time I was there. Which
was how much?
Charles: Four years.
Thelen: Four more years.
Charles: I was there from 67 to 71.
Thelen: So I guess we better fill in the details here. At some point you got out of marriage in one way or
another.
Charles: Yes.
Charles: I left mine when I went east to Washington. I had said to Nick my husband that I was not going
to live with him when I got back. We had had some a bit nasty stuff. When I got back I had to look for an
apartment. Actually at a fourth of July party at Bob’s house I was told there was an apartment available
above the carousel on the Santa Monica Pier. I was told kind of, well it was a woman whose son had an
apartment there and she said “go see Simon and Simon will tell you how to get it because they do not
really want women living there,” Or at least single women. I got - I told the people that my husband was
in Vietnam and he would be coming back sometime and so I needed an apartment. They gave me the
apartment. They never asked me after that, once I had an apartment there.
So I lived above the Santa Monica carousel for three years. That got me involved in carousels. I
ultimately left the Eames office to drive around the country to photograph carousels and make a census
of them. After Photography in the City we worked on IBM showroom here in Washington, I think that
might have been the next project. Then this very big important project, Computer Perspective, which is
this book ultimately published by Harvard, I was not responsible for the book although I do get a credit
for research. It is probably the first history, serious history written on the computer. It goes from Charles
Babbage to John VonNeumin. Again this was - Glen Fleck was the key kind of intellectual person working
on it, Bob was the senior designer. I was doing the research. I do not know who was doing graphics
41
actually because Deborah was not around, Paul, Paul Brewbier maybe. Very good graphic designer from
Switzerland.
Thelen: I am a little confused, was that still with Eames?
Charles: Yes, that’s all with Eames, all Eames. Again an IBM project.
Thelen: And you were involved with that too?
Staples: Yes.
Charles: He is the primary designer on that. For my time at the Eames office, because the aquarium
never happened, as we understood the story, Goldwater had more clout that Udall and Goldwater
wanted the Air and Space Museum. So the Air and Space Museum got built and the aquarium did not
get built.
Staples: Military industrial complex.
Thelen: There it is right there. The national mall, the vision of the military industrial complex.
Charles: And we worked on other things. There was a plan at one point for an IBM museum at Endcott,
New York. I think there is another little film about that. Again it was with Roach-Dicalu, that did not
happen. There was a plan for a while, Charles got involved with Annenbergs, and there was a plan for an
Annenberg communication center at the Met with Hogain. I think again there were some maybe a little
film done about how that might work, early computer stuff. Computer Perspective had interactive
computers in it, but of course we have got huge mainframes in the back room. The IBM 360 is sort of the
newest computer. No personal computers at this point.
It would actually be terribly funny if I went out to a party and got talking to people, I remember
one time somebody going on and on about how contemporary computers were. I am supposed to know
all about this, but I only know up to John Von Noymen, because the whole issue is what is a computer
and in this book we are basically saying when Von Noyman essentially outlines in a paper and then they
42
build the Ekneeact at Princeton it fulfills Babbage’s idea of a calculating, thinking, statistical. I mean
there is kind of three things we outline that have to come together to make a working computer.
If I could make a pitch for open stacks, that book would not have happened if UCLA did not still
have open stacks. They were slowly closing the stacks, but the whole science technical end had not yet
been closed. The office had a pact with - we probably paid UCLA probably a hundred dollars a year or
something to have library privileges. I would go over there to look something up, but I would look at all
the books on both sides and there is some wonderful things in there. Particularly some of the fun stuff
on early thinking machines or hoax thinking machines that we would not have known about.
Thelen: You did not know exactly what you were looking for and you needed the serendipity of this.
Charles: I knew I wanted this, but then I would find all this other stuff, so I would haul all these books
back and they were great.
Thelen: I know about open stacks.
Charles: And the sadness now you know how can you define something carefully enough to find
something and who knows.
Staples: Tell me what you want.
Thelen: Tell what, yes I do not know and worse I do not know that I do not know.
Charles: I do not know that it even exists.
Thelen: So this whole would not have happened without open stacks.
Charles: Well it would have happened, but there is just some wonderful things in that book that were
serendipitous because I would sit in the floor in the open stacks.
Staples: Did you bring RUR to the table that way?
Charles: What’s RUR?
Staples: It is a film.
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Charles: RUR is a film. No I did not bring RUR. I think it was more like the earlier stuff, the chess playing
machine. Early, early the 18th century chess-playing machines.
Staples: With the guy inside.
Charles: With the guy inside, the fakes.
Thelen: This is great. How does this work?
Charles: There is a guy underneath inside.
Thelen: Of a chess-playing machine, so obviously it is a big chess piece.
Staples: It is a chess board.
Charles: It is an automaton who can move things. And underneath is a guy. Actually I would have to look
through the book because we really started in more 1880s.
Staples: 1890s was Holoroth machine.
Thelen: So why were you interested?
Charles: Why was I interested?
Thelen: What was there about this new technology?
Charles: I was not interested I was assigned it.
Thelen: You were assigned it. I guess I knew that.
Staples: This is the curiosity of the Eames office. You get this project and all then into it like trying a fish
in water, trying to swim.
Thelen: So nobody said, do a computer perspective. Somebody was sort of screwing around.
Charles: No, no, no Charles had an agreement with IBM.
Thelen: That is where I am trying to go.
Charles: I said earlier I would really like to work on this. We do not know the genesis of some of these
projects, including that one. My guess would be that Tom Watson said to Charles in our main office at
590 Madison we would really like to have an exhibit on computers. It could have been that general.
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Charles meanwhile was fascinated by timelines, had done the huge Mathematica timelines, are they
around here? They are up there, we will get them out at lunch. There are these atlases that were put
out in the nineteenth century that are like twelve feet long of timelines and they take you everything
from the Bible….
Staples: Twelve feet, two and seven eighths inches or something. [laughter]
Charles: He found these things, Adams timelines. He got really into timelines, so you have the
Mathematica timeline, Herman Miller timeline. So this computer thing became a timeline.
Staples: Three dimensional timeline.
Charles: A timeline like nobody should ever have to understand. You can see it in the background here.
It is back in here, [feedback] here is a section of it [feedback] I suspect it was Glen’s idea, but somebody
had the idea that on the glass we could make a flow chart and that would have the text. Well nobody
really dealt with the issue that looking through glass and text and trying to read it could conceivably be
difficult. So there is a flow chart on the glass that has the major concepts in it.
Thelen: I see it.
Charles: Then behind that are objects and we borrowed stuff from the science museum in London, we
borrowed stuff from all over, including Claude Shannon’s mouth.
Thelen: This is a book called Computer Perspective and I am looking at it and there is some sort of clean
plastic or glass on the front. There are descriptions and behind it are various things including
photographs, but I want to say is it looks pretty.
Staples: Cluttered.
Charles: Impossible.
Thelen: Well, it might look those things, but what I am struck by is the layout has been adopted by a lot
of recent museums. Was this new, this notion of putting a story out here and then an artifact behind it?
Had this been done before?
45
Charles: I do not think so.
Staples: I do not know.
Charles: I do not think so. Wait a minute, we had seen.
Thelen: I am sorry I am distracting the story, but I am kind of intrigued looking at the picture.
Charles: Eero Saarinen designed the headquarters of John Deer in Molin. Alexander Girard did not have
the text on the front glass, it did not have any text, but he made on one huge wall, at least one hundred
feet long, maybe more, he filled it with kind of the materials of farm life. Bought things, whether it was
plows or canned goods, I mean all kinds of stuff and just made this artistic arrangement of it.
Staples: Behind glass.
Charles: Behind glass and we were sent to see that. Bob and I, a year or two before this happened, so
certainly that would have to be considered an influence on this. But this had an intellectual level to it
that is pretty incredible. Scientific American gave me credit for outstanding research on that book when
it was published. So this was, I mean, the challenge was, it was a big challenge. Glen was very bright he
was working on it, but there was also a guy, Lyn Stoler.
Staples: An IBMer.
Charles: An IBMer sent to work with us. He went native after that. He stayed in LA bought a little house
on the canal.
Staples: Corduroy suit.
Thelen: He did go native. They do not wear those in Manhattan.
Charles: But we went to the IBM archives up in Endicott and things like that. We also got into finding
other things to go with this. How does the general public know what time it is?
Thelen: We did have big numbers at the top, but when you are looking down at all the little stuff.
Charles: So we intermixed World War One stuff and a wonderful piece of sheet music called Dawn of
the Century that talked about all of the new inventions of the dawn of the century. One of our great
46
outings, the curator at the, history curator, we knew them because of working on Photography in the
City, Bob knew them and so on. We asked where could we get political stuff for every election. We were
sent to go see George Rislin in Allentown Pennsylvania. It was a track house looked perfectly normal
upstairs, but then you get to the basement which was his area and this guy ran a mail auction.
Thelen: A mail auction?
Charles: Yes, M A I L auction. He would send out a catalog of memorabilia. I mean this is sort of preEbay. You would send out a catalog and people would send in their bids, either call them in or write
them in. the highest bidder after a certain amount of time would get that piece. He had all kinds of
incredible stuff. We told what we wanted and he said some of these pieces, I mean I know what the
owners want for them. I think they were things that were not in the auction yet, I think I could price
them and just sell them to you. So in his house we laid out political campaigns from 1890 or so to 92
with Cleveland or 88 to 48 or 52 to be demarcations. And then we sort of said, well who else has this
kind of stuff we got sent to another guy, Pennybaker, what was Mr. Pennybaker’s first name.
Staples: I think it was Bill.
Charles: Bill Pennybaker, he was an elegant, very small man. Above Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and kind
of west of New Hope. Heartsville up 611. Lived in a great 18th century house. Well he had been an art
director at Philco. He had a great eye. He sold ephemera.
Staples: What is ephemera?
Thelen: I think I know someone who has an interest in ephemera.
Staples: And that is what got us started is this project got us interested in ephemera.
Thelen: First interested in ephemera the possibilities, oh that’s really interesting.
Charles: That it could tell things, that is what I gave my talk on Friday. I called it out of the closet where
does it go?
Thelen: I was actually looking at the piece you wrote on ephemera that you left for me.
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Charles: No I did not give you an ephemera piece did I? Oh the piece for Benjamin Franklin. Yes, that
was for ephemera society.
Thelen: So this was the moment when you came to see the possibilities of juxtaposing ephemera?
Charles: We were using it essentially what I would call its face value. Somebody could look at it quickly
say oh that is that period. It is telling time. What I actually tried to argue on Friday is that that is one
thing, but if you start looking really into pieces of ephemera, like a runaway slave ad or something like
that. They are sort of like one sheet stories. They almost ask more questions than they answer, which is
very different than just a flag or a political campaign thing that says “Vote for Ike” that is all it is, vote for
Ike, it is no more than that. That got us into ephemera stuff. Later on we have been called the clutter
school of design.
Thelen: Who called you that and in what context?
Staples: Context is evident. It started with that timeline.
Charles: I was called that, I do not think you were there. Gary Coolick was at the National Museum of
American History and I went up as an attendee, not a speaker I do not think, although maybe I had a
slight speaking role at a conference that became the book that I sent you from Joe Blady. Gary called us
the clutter school of design and inferred that we no longer were in business. I think it was done in a
context of there was this clutter school of design and we are moving past it. I remember waving my
hand and saying while no we are still here. Out of that came that piece that I wrote for Joe Blady out of
that conference. That was the first time I wrote anything about exhibits.
Thelen: Let us bracket that and come back to it.
Charles: So Eames, that was my last big Eames piece.
Thelen: So two follow up things, so I have it clear. Your relationship at what point you were working
together and you can describe this, at some point, I do not even know if you are married now?
Charles: We got married after twenty seven years of living together.
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Thelen: But you started living together when?
Charles: Well, okay.
Thelen: I hope this is not, if you feel this is inappropriate. You are collaborators so there is something
about your collaboration.
Staples: We started living together in seventy-three, but we had some affairs from seventy-one to….
Charles: No it 68 to 71 and I left the Eames office. In part because of that in part….
Thelen: To hopefully put an end to it?
Charles: Well, I do not know that it was.
Staples: She got burned out.
Charles: Burned out on IBM .
Staples: And so she wanted out of the Eames office.
Charles: And I got interested in carousels.
Staples: She had not ridden one as a child. She had not taken pictures at all to speak of until Charles
says, “well if you are going to San Francisco take a camera.”
Charles: What he really said, I was headed to San Francisco and he said take some film. I said, “why do I
take film I do not have a camera.” You do not have a camera. How can you exist? How can you think you
are a visual person?
Staples: It was, what do they call it? A hail Mary moment.
Charles: It was like Jesus Christ
Staples: Eureka moment, I am employing you and you do not have a camera. It was like anything you
can imagine. So I got a camera.
Staples: He loaned you a camera did not he?
Charles: No, I did not have a camera initially, but my father was still going back and forth to Japan so my
father bought me a Nikon. Maybe he was even in Japan. Somehow I got a Nikon within a month or two. I
49
was then going out with Mark Tribe at, who taught at Berkeley. Mark taught in the architecture
department, but he was a very gifted graphic designer. I should not use was, he still is. This is probably
sixty-eight and sort of, demonstration du jour, lecture du jour. He would make these great graphics and
they would just run on the blueprint machine. It did not matter if they faded in a week or two he had a
deadline.
I remember him just saying to me,” here are the keys to my car get out of here for a couple of
hours, there is a carousel up in Tilden Park go photograph it.” Well by now I did have a camera, so I
photographed it and there were one or two shots that were not too shabby. Bob went around with me
some Saturdays. They became a way to learn photography because they had daylight, they had action,
they had kids, they had interesting things to shoot. But if you blew it totally, you could go back the next
week, it was not like a sports event, you had that one shot and it was over, you could keep trying. So I
got interested in that.
One day I saw in the newspaper that some Illeans carousel figures were for sale. Pomona
fairgrounds had a great Illeans carousel. It said MC illeans and sona. You knew it was Illeans, it was all
marked. And it had these great nudes on the sides of the mirrors. I called up the people with the horses
for sale and said, “I do not want a horse but I would like one of those mirrors, do you have one of those
by any chance?” They were sort of surprised that I was that specific, so obviously I knew what I was
looking at. So they invited me to come over and it turns out that the husband in the family had been a
classmate of my brother’s at Pomona. These people were amazing, the Summits, they could look at one
of my photographs and just look at a hoof and say, “oh that's a Hersah Spilman or that’s a Denzel,” they
really knew their stuff. I did not know this stuff.
At that point when you visited a carousel, they would tell you it was made in Germany and they
did not know what they were doing. They became friends, so over a couple of years I got to know other
carousel people. This scheme evolved, I do not even know how it evolved or why it evolved. But I was
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going to once that opened, which was opening around December of seventy, either December or
January that I was going to leave the Eames office and drive around the country and photograph
carousels. I wrote to the International Amusement Park Association and said I wanted to do this and
they agreed to put a little postcard in their monthly newsletter that people could send back to me to tell
me what they had at their park. I had about fifty of those. I had been keeping a little notebook if I went
to a party or somebody said they had a childhood memory I would just write down. Anyway I could
figure out where carousels where. Now we have census on the internet, but I would write things down.
So some of this information was ten, twenty years old that I had written down, that I had because of
people remembering things. May one I left.
Thelen: Was this just a project you were doing for yourself?
Charles: No funding. I took whatever little money I had. I bought and old Ford Econline van and Bob built
an interior for it, a little place for me to sleep a little slide table, et cetera. Another guy at the office
worked on the mechanics of the van. The two were not talking often, so I would drive the van between
the two of them. Eventually it was a cute little van and I headed out. I left Bob, left the Eames office. I
had an intention originally of coming back that fall. It was a getaway.
Staples: Hiatus.
Charles: A walkabout or something.
Thelen: So you did intend to return.
Charles: I think so, I certainly hadn’t. I ended my apartment and so on, I did not have a destination other
than to go around the country.
Thelen: There is another area that, you were obviously a woman in this period.
Staples: Still is.
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Thelen: Still is as far as I can tell. So I want to get in that whole area. Was there anything, did you
encounter either problems or for that matter opportunities at any point and you have to mention
Oberlin, which I am guessing was a haven. My daughter went to Oberlin. I am guessing…
Charles: I mean theoretically supportive, but I was not sent on a single job interview.
Thelen; Go ahead talk about that.
Charles: Well, I think I was not so academically inclined or encouraged to go on in school. I was a pretty
solid B plus, but I got one A minus in my whole career at Oberlin.
Thelen: Do you think that that has something to do with being a woman?
Charles: No, I am just saying because I was not an academic star, I was not necessarily encouraged to go
on to graduate school. On the other hand, I know that companies came to the campus to interview
people for perspective jobs, but I was also never encouraged by anybody to go to those interviews. This
could have been my own myopia that I just did not know what I was going to do in my life, which I did
not. I also think that the companies were not particularly looking for women. I could be wrong.
Thelen: Tell them your IBM story, about Deers.
Charles: That is a later story after we had our own business. We were doing stuff for IBM actually. It was
not quite written dear vendor, it was really written dear supplier, vendor is a word I hate, but it was
addressed to me Barbara Charles. Now Barbara is not a name like Gene or other names like Leslie that
can go either way, it is pretty much always a woman’s name, but it was addressed after my whole name
to dear sir, then it went on to notify me that I could not as a supplier I had to know that IBM employees
that I could not give any gifts to an IBM employee or his family. So I wrote back and said….
Staples: Dear sir.
Charles: I wrote back basically saying of all the companies in the country we had done this huge project,
America on Stage for IBM I think it was around that period. I wrote back to the vice president that sent
this letter to me, and said of any company in the country that ought to be able to set up a computer to
52
differentiate between names to figure out if I am male or female, you ought to be able to do that first of
all. And you ought to be able to write a letter that is non-sexual, it could be and I think I even gave an
example, please do not give any gifts to IBM employees or their families. I mean there were clearly ways
to write this. I got a very nice letter back from a vice president apologizing that they would correct this. I
said there is no reason for you to assume that all of your suppliers are male-owned businesses.
Thelen: When are we talking about this exchange?
Charles: It would have been after Computer Perspective, it would have been in the seventies. America
on Stage, after America on Stage. A little story before that.
Staples: The bicentennial project.
Charles: When I was in elementary school, the boys got the gym field three days a week and the girls got
it two days a week, otherwise we had to play inside and if it rained so the boys did not get one of their
days, they got one of our days. I was probably in about fourth or fifth grade, so I organized a petition
and took it to the principal complaining. I think my mother was called about my attitude. The principal
actually was very sharp and I knew she and I had the same birthday. We got along okay. Anyway that
was my first foray. I will say I have never been very aggressive about this, but that was my first foray into
saying, hey. Essentially I do not think, other than [laughter] sorry.
When I first worked at the Smithsonian, after I left the Eames office I stayed in Washington
because I thought I could research carousels and I got a little freelance job to design and install for
fifteen thousand dollars a little exhibit of Sears toys. And other toys, some were mechanical and so. Bob
helped me long distance with some of the more complex design, et cetera. We had this one case we
were going to make mechanical toys and it was agreed that the Smithsonian model shop would make
the Mani maid, so that was cool. So I said after a while I would like to see what they are doing. As a
woman I could not go into the Smithsonian model shop. The model makers did not let you in.
Staples: A male bastion.
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Thelen: A male bastion, I guess they had something in mind.
Charles: Who knows?
Thelen: Who knows.
Charles: So I went to their boss who worked over at natural history, who I think condoned all of this
certainly. It turned out as a young man maybe he had run away, but at some point he had run a merrygo-round. So we talked about merry-go-rounds and he became sympathetic. So we negotiated that I
could not go into the model shop, but they could bring their work out into the exhibit hall and I could
critique it there.
Thelen: And this is?
Charles: 1972.
Thelen: 1972.
Charles: No 1971.
Staples: This is not the only place that was that way. Chicago had the same.
Charles: 1975 at Chicago Historical Society we were not allowed and none of the female curators were
allowed in the prep shop, where they prepared everything. The Smithsonian one is fun because a year or
two later there was a big effort to unionize all of these employees and one of the union issues was could
women work in the model shop.
Thelen: And did they want them to or not?
Charles: The women wanted to, the people organizing.
Thelen: Sometimes unions defended male privilege.
Charles: The model people were defending, but it was the employees in general who said if we were
going to unionize here are some of the issues is equality and the model shop was shown up as. The man
who had been the head who had negotiated my deal said well if he had to hire somebody I would be
acceptable. I was not at the union meeting, but I heard that. This was not uncommon obviously in
54
museums if we are running into it at the Smithsonian and at Chicago. I had been, my mother was
president of the school board, my grandmother was a leading Unitarian. I came from a family.
Staples: That did not take shit.
[laughter]
Charles: That never said women could not do it. My father had his PhD, but his two sisters did too. This
was women were women.
Thelen: Were people.
Charles: Were people. It was not, I think if you expect to be treated one way maybe you get trated that
way. I never expected to get treated that way.
Thelen: At Eames did you fin discrimination there?
Charles: As long as you wore your mini skirt you had no problem.
Staples: Well even the bookkeeper enforced those rules. Miss. Poole insisted that Barbara had a little
accident with her car and bunged up her knees so she came in in pants one time, slacks you would call
them and Miss. Poole got upset.
Charles: She came over, how come I had pants on. I said well I have stitches in my knee, so I had a one
week dispensation.
Thelen: Why do you think they had that, women should not wear pants? I can come up with two
reasons in my mind.
Charles: I think Charles liked the environment. I mean in college we wore dresses. I think that was not
uncommon.
Thelen: It was also what men wore.
Staples: Miss. Poole was a person of …
Charles: She did not do it alone though.
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Staples: Of course she did not do it alone. She was the accountant for several Hollywood stars and she
probably felt women should look like women. After World War Two many women were in slacks or
pants.
Charles: In World War Two sure. This was an office, but we did not dress office-like.
Staples: We never wore suits to the office.
Thelen: Did you ever experience a dress code?
Staples: No.
Thelen: You could have worn a T-shirt and jeans?
Staples: Well I never wore a T-shirt.
Charles: But you could have. I think people did.
Staples: Henry did.
Charles: And Carl did and so on.
Thelen: So it was not a rigid dress code place.
Charles: Not at all but, miniskirts were very very short and I will say installing an exhibit in 1968 at the
Smithsonian is
Thelen: A challenge
Charles: It is a challenge.
Staples: Especially when you drop things on the floor. You have to learn how to squat as opposed to
bend over.
Charles: I think we should go over.
Thelen: I was just going to say.
Charles: To the war.
Staples: I knew you would say that.
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End of track 2
Thelen: That is record, here we go. I guess what we want to do now is talk about your individual
backgrounds and how you were beginning to collaborate in the early days at Eames. I think what we
want to do the rest of today is talk about an overview of challenges you have experienced how you
contributed to building, making the field and experiencing the field and you are relationship to the field
whatever it is, because in a way you really are inventors of it.
Staples: We are participants in the beginning of it let us say.
Thelen: Alright let us put it that way.
Staples: How did we get together?
Thelen: Yes, let us start with that.
Staples: Barbara was here in Washington and there was an opportunity to do a design build project for
the Smithsonian. So Gary Harvey from New York, is a fabricator, and I made a proposal to the
Smithsonian on an exhibition called We the People. The We the People, not the Chicago We the People.
Thelen: That was for the Smithsonian.
Staples: Barbara had already gotten the contract to do the catalog for We the People, which was for
Peter Marzos, I believe.
Charles: No, Ben Lawless and Margaret Clapthorn. I had already done a catalog for Peter Marzos.
Staples: Oh that is right you had done the printing one for Peter.
Charles: This is more of the clutter school of design.
Thelen: Ah the clutter school of design. [Feedback] It is the clutter school of design.
Staples: Those are four big tubs in the hall of the, I guess it was the ground floor, second floor of the
museum of history and technology to represent America’s symbolisms.
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Charles: This was just before the bicentennial, but I do not think that we had any idea what was going to
happen with the bicentennial. That it was going to be big that there would be all kinds of work and so
on.
Thelen: So they came to you.
Charles: Ben Lawless, I had done, as I said earlier, this freelance job for toys. Ben Lawless, the head of
exhibits at the museum knew Bob’s work in particular because of the Eames office, the Naru show and
the Photography in the City. But I was, did the toy show, a little catalog for Peter Marz, I was doing odds
and ends, freelancing, you know, making ten thousand dollars a year maybe if I was lucky. Ben asked
me, said this big show was coming up, they had Congressional funding, did I know any designer, they did
not think they could do it inside.
I knew Bob was thinking about leaving the Eames office. So I said, “well Bob might be available.”
Ben was very excited about that. I do not know if anybody else submitted a proposal. At that point there
were not these formal RFPs, in fact, I think it was for the toy show. Ben told me how to write out my
letter of proposal. I typed it in his office and he walked me down to Tillinson, Bob Tillinson’s office, who
was sort of the treasurer, CFO in effect for the museum. Bob picks up the paper, holds it up to the
window and says “Ben you cannot have a contractor submitting a proposal on Smithsonian
watermarked paper.” We went back to his office, I went to the Xerox copier I got blank paper, we
retyped the letter, there is no computer holding it, I have to do it again and resubmit it. That is sort of
how casual you could, it was basically, Ben would say who he thought would be good to do it.
Ben Lawless was head of exhibits at the national museum of history and technology. He had
been the first designer. He had been hired there as a designer to design the initial exhibits when the
museum opened. So he had started at the Smithsonian in the late fifties and I think the museum opened
in sixty or sixty-two. So they had a design staff, not a very big one and they had a very good prep shop.
58
But they felt this was big enough that they should go outside. So as Bob said, Bob and Gary put a
proposal together.
Staples: It was a 15,000 foot show.
Charles: Huge.
Staples: It covered sort of the, well almost half of the second floor.
Charles: The whole east end of the second floor.
Staples: And it was soup to nuts. The tubs that you saw in the catalog there were the popular
symbolisms of eagles, flags and liberty. When it got into the beginning, it talked about the census, US
census, the first one being Holra, which was an IBM product.
Charles: The first census was 1795.
Staples: Well the first one in the electronic world, you might say. The electro-mechanical world.
Charles: It was all in a sense political history in a broad sense, whose participating.
Thelen: Just to back up a minute. The Smithsonian had been around before that and had been putting
things out for display, was there any sense that this was going to be anything different?
Staples: Political history always had some space there in the museum, but this was a major space.
Thelen: But there was no sense of what you were doing?
Charles: Was unique.
Thelen: Was different from what they had been doing before you were doing it. You see where I am
going, at what point do you become mindful, hey I am making up a new field.
Charles: In fact, Ben had done the initial proposals for this gallery. He had, for example, proposed
demonstrations on the capitol steps. We implemented it probably, arrogantly I could say, more
elegantly than it was initially conceived. I think Ben, if you said there was a concept proposal already in
hand, Ben had done it, the museum had done it already to get funding.
Thelen: Who did they get funding from?
59
Charles: This was mostly Congressional.
Thelen: So, Congress specifically appropriated money for this exhibit.
Charles: So we had big discussions, particular in this exhibit, where we are kind of picking quotes. This is
late end of the Vietnam War, this is ninety-three, seventy-three. There are demonstrations in
Washington on a regular basis. We in fact would go down and photograph demonstrators and then ask
them for their artifacts. This was collected on the mall. Some of this stuff was collected on the mall. This
banner with those people carrying it and so on. This was an old photograph. This was a merry-go-round
guy I had photographed the year before stepping off a merry-go-round.
There is a wonderful story about this lady. Eddie Mayo, who was the curator, she and I worked
on what all these quotes should be and some of them are a little bit on the edge. I think there is a
Ceaser Chavez one here when that was just all happening and so on. We were always nervous, would
Congress complain? I think maybe today they would, but then…
Staples: Well certainly Republicans would.
Charles: Then sisterhood is powerful , hell no we will not go, this kind of stuff. Am I not a brother, no
union with slaveholders, just different things that we thought made sense to talk about the whole
environment of political speaking out. The show was all done and I think pretty well received when all of
a sudden there is a huge panic from the lawyers because this woman in this photograph, who we had
photographed on the mall, her grandson was going to school at Georgetown and had written to her and
said, “you know grandma they really got your number, you are in the Smithsonian in this exhibit.”
Now her complaint was not that she was there, it turns out she was a weekend warrior, going
to every demonstration possible, but that we had given her a sign that said "War is not healthy for
business and children and other living things.” Her complaint was that war is very healthy for business
and that she would never ever have carried that sign. Of course the lawyers want to know do we have
permission from people to have their photographs in the display. We are going through all our negatives
60
trying to figure out what the context was. Finally, Eddie, smart lady that she is and said, “look you are so
wonderful we want to keep you in the exhibit, we will send you pictures of every sign we have, do you
have any of your signs, we would love to collect your signs.” No she did not have any signs that were
appropriate. Then Eddie sent her pictures of all the possible signs we thought she could carry from that
period and she picked a different sign, she was happy, the lawyers went away.
Thelen: If they should all be so simple.
Charles: I mean this was pretty amazing for a first, and we were not officially a firm, but we were a firm.
I think we signed all the projects Staples and Charles and got a letterhead and so on. We had not
incorporated.
Thelen: Did you think, we are now. I am just trying to picture, you see yourselves as Staples and Charles
now. You are bidding, Smithsonian. Where does, I am trying to picture how do you go from employees…
Staples: One step at a time.
Charles: You just fall into it.
Thelen: You just fall into it.
Charles: I wanted a job when I got the toy show job. I went to Ben asking for a job and he said I cannot
hire you. I had no concept of independent. But he offered an independent project, the little toy show.
Thelen: Which you did?
Charles: Which I did. Then after that I got word that one of the fabricators here, design and production,
a great big house, had a major Russian show coming in that had been designed by a Russian designer. It
was the first big exhibit out of Russia after the icebreaking with Nixon. It too was going to be fifteen or
twenty thousand square feet. The Russians wanted somebody on the project who had handled museum
objects, so I got recommended to them.
So I worked with the Russian designer at each venue, how do you want this set up. Then I would
oversee getting the fabricators to set it up and all of that. So I spent about a year on and off traveling
61
wherever it was going, I would travel out to it. I had my little catalogs and Bob came east and then we
were a couple, we became a firm. He applied with Gary and got that job. After that we now were a firm
and during that job we started signing drawings Staples and Charles, but Staples and Charles did not
hold the contract, Gary Harvey held the contract.
Staples: I was a sub to Gary.
Thelen: I see. Is there a connection, you must of, you obviously liked each other, but was there also a
sense that you brought different things to a collaboration.
Staples: We jokingly call ourselves hardware and software.
Thelen: Okay, explain that.
Staples: I am hardware doing the mechanical stuff and she is the software, the brains of the
organization.
Thelen: Did you have that sense if not those words back here in the 70s?
Charles: Sure, I was working more with the client on the content. It was a big day when I did my first
drawing, I cannot remember what it was but I remember I actually did an elevation and that was a big
event for me. We were figuring out the graphics and so on. Part of what was interesting on this project, I
jokingly earlier today said designers can do anything. At the Eames office when we did an exhibit we
worked with scholars. But we did the research, we wrote text, you know, we could do it all. Not
necessarily any one person, but between the three dimension design and the research and the graphics
and the filmmaking, we could do it all.
Staples: We could do it all for an exhibition.
Thelen: Well as opposed to what.
Inaudiable.
Charles: At the Smithsonian, I joked with Sylvio Badini, who was then number two, they had a tradition
that a curator would write the whole script, pick all the objects, I think practically say to the left you will
62
now see to the right you will now see I mean this whole walkthrough idea before a single thing was put
to paper. It often had no relationship to the gallery, but maybe it did. Maybe there were some sketches.
So I said, “what do you do? Keep the designer in a separate room and slip the whole script under the
door. How can you work in that environment?” I think I drove Margaret Clapthorn at least crazy because
I kept asking all sorts of questions, you know does it really mean that and what about this and should
not that be next to that?
Thelen: This may be interesting, the Smithsonian before had never thought it needed to do that kind of
planning.
Charles: I think designers were kept in a more traditional role of people who give it physical form and
make it look pretty.
Staples: Did not Productivity come before….
Thelen: What do you mean by Productivity?
Staples: It was an exhibition by Shermi and Guysmore, who were designers.
Charles: That was after us.
Staples: For Ben again and the Smithsonian.
Charles: And the subject of productivity. And Nations to Nations was also after us, the big Peter Marzo
show. So they started working with outside designers, but I do not think they had a tradition of a
designer taking an aggressive role is maybe the way to put it.
Staples: A big part of the intellectual development.
Thelen: Of the thing.
Charles: Right, I did not know any better. I came from an environment where that’s what you did, all of a
sudden I realized at some points that I was not very smooth on the edges, maybe.
Staples: She has been accused of that many times.
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Thelen: So somebody thought this way of having the designer playing a more central role may have
been new. It is not something, Oh my God I am going to invent something new. But at a certain point
people say you know what now we have to hire a different kind of people in a different kind of way.
Conceive of the division of labor in a different kind of way.
Staples: It sounds pretty trite maybe, but Barbara is really bright and most of the people who were
designers are very talented, but they are not necessarily bright and Barbara just in her tenacity in
wanting to make sure that she could go into the shop as a woman.
Charles: Well, that is different.
Staples: It is not, it is not. She just knows when it is right or when it is wrong and sometimes you have to
sort of fight for the rightness of things and Barbara’s a good fighter…
End of track 3.
End of card 1.
Thelen: Okay, here we go, we are recording now.
Charles: We are in the twenty-first century.
Thelen: This is a crazy interruption of a couple of hours to repair the equipment which we hope is now
repaired with some additions. We left off in the middle of a conversation, a great conversation about
how trying to parse how the relationship between the two of you was beginning to become a selfconscious sense of doing something a little differently than had been done before.
Staples: That is a pretty powerful statement.
Thelen: Help me get that one right.
Staples: I do not think we invented anything new, I think we just did it differently.
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Charles: I think what was happening at about this time was that some museums, in this case at least
American history at the Smithsonian [feedback] was moving from object - they had - what I want to say
is moving from object-based exhibits to idea-based exhibits. They were still object-based exhibits, but I
think that they were beginning to use, in a stronger way, objects to illustrate ideas, rather than objects,
just in their own right as a beautiful pot or a beautiful castanet or something like that. I think they had
done that a little bit before. There was an exhibit they did in the late sixties and I cannot quite
remember the name of it, but it was something about building the nation or something like that, that
was going in that direction.
I think that with We the People it was much more in that direction, trying to talk about the will
of the people, the electoral process. All of these kinds of actions and the history of them, protest in
general and so on, versus just, here is a lot of political memorabilia, although we used masses of it. I
think their next exhibit that Jeria Figuysmar did, which I think was Productivity if not it was Nation to
Nation, was also very much going in that direction. Using lots of stuff, actually Productivity was much
more, not using lots of stuff, very much ideas and cartoons. I think this was a changing point in how
museums began to approach things and we happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Thelen: We went from too strong a statement to you happened to be in the right place at the right time
with certain skills with certain partnerships.
Charles: I think that is true. We did not know what was happening when we were hired to do We the
People. We had done a computer show, we knew how to put stuff together.
Staples: We knew how to do everything.
Thelen: And we now know that designers can do anything.
Charles: But I do not think we were at all aware that this was a change happening in the museum world
at that moment, I think that would have been, had a kind of self-consciousness, hey we got a job, a big
cool job.
65
Thelen: Well, can you imagine at what point did you or the field, maybe through contracting or through
a different way of getting work or through different people you were working with have a sense of
becoming something different? At least the world thinks we are and are hiring us in a different way?
Staples: Somehow I think we did a lot of theater in We the People. The capitol steps were represented
kind of theatrical solution to an idea. I think we had several of these other landscapes that were not
nearly as big or dramatic as that, but they were in fact the inside of the airplane, the presidential
airplane, Appomattox furniture.
Charles: I think a really critical person is Ben Lawless, who hired us, who is hiring other people. I think he
was clearly setting an agenda at the museum or saying, “hey let us look at these in new more exciting
ways.” Disneyworld of course, Disneyland had happened, Disneyworld I am not sure when it happened.
At least ten years later there is a lot of talk about Disneyworld in museums and what does that mean for
us.
I think there is also, I think you mentioned Dave, that historians are beginning to look at social
history. I think historians also do not have jobs so they are moving into the museum world, so that is
there. It is a little early for NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities], but I have always felt that
when NEH started requiring both a very labor intensive application process that made you really think
through what you were doing and required scholars to be part of teams, that in fact, I think, I think the
Smithsonian was in the forefront.
I think once as a government agency that they could not participate in NEH, I think other people
started pushing ahead quite fast, scholarship wise. But historians are moving into the museum world, so
they are trying to look broader, they are not just object people. I think it is just a whole thing happening.
There is firms, not us certainly, although from the Eames office, it would be interesting to see who all
has worked at the New York World’s Fair in sixty-four and the Montreal Fair, I think certainly Woodson
Romarez in New York had worked on some of those, they were doing stuff not so much in
66
WVanishington but in New York, Jeria Minguysmar, maybe has worked on some of that. I do not know
what they had done before being hired at the Smithsonian because I do not know their history.
Thelen: And the humanities councils were also hiring…
Charles: Were they starting then?
Thelen: They were starting to hire humanists, scholars. Before the interruption here we were also
talking about developing the eye of the visitor or the critic or the tradition that you have had at Eames
where you would ask what are you trying to do here. Do not let me put words in your mouth. Maybe I
got this wrong, I wrote the note, what is at stake here is getting a visitor orientation, getting a sense of I
wonder how this will be seen? Am I making this up?
Staples: No I think you have heard that, but I am not sure.
Charles: The question is how to get the idea across. I was partly saying that particularly on topics we are
the original visitor and can play that until we know too much.
Thelen: I do not know, what does that mean?
Charles: I think I was using the example of Crossroads of Continents. We knew zilch about Artic people,
Eskimos, Artic life, all this ivory carving so on a project like that, where we do not come with much preknowledge, there is a period where we are sort of the first visitors, if the curators cannot get their ideas
across to us. We have to be able to understand it enough to design it and we cannot just take it at face
value. And we do not just take it at face value. [feedback] I am going to take her out of here. [feedback,
door closing]I think we are very comfortable saying, “we do not understand that, what does that mean,
what are you trying to say here, it is not getting across.” I think a different idea was the one that rather
than presuming that you understand what the ordinary visitor is going to get or not get.
Thelen: Which was the older way, you assumed you knew.
Charles: I do not know if it is the older way, but people would say I think that is really interesting, but I
do not know if Joe Blow will. I do not want, I want to say,” well you find it interesting, why do you find it
67
interesting?” I find it interesting, so and so finds it interesting, why do not we assume Joe Blow will find
it interesting. Why should we assume we have more inside knowledge or something. That having been
set up, now going to really put foot in mouth. I am not very confident with most visitor studies.
Thelen: That is a big statement, go ahead. In what ways?
Charles: (pause) I guess, I think they might be useful or are useful if you are trying to find out what
visitors know or do not know about a subject in terms of pre-evaluation or formative or whatever it is
called, I do not know the right terminology so that if you found out, for example that visitors really
believe the Civil War was not about slavery, but you want to get across that it really is about slavery, you
might double your efforts in the ways you develop the exhibit. What I am less confident in is the sort of
develop the ideas of the exhibit and then test them.
Thelen: Whether the visitor understood what you were trying to get across.
Charles: Part of the problem is they are developed to the sophisticated level that the final product might
be I think you can develop whether people can manipulate it, particularly on the interactives, whether
they are getting the right thing to do or figuring out the right things to do. I think it is very hard to…an
exhibit is, it is a physical experience of being in a space. It is not just about getting ideas across that you
could read in a flat panel. So part of what we are trying to do in a three dimensional experience that
absorbs you and that is very hard to pretest.
Thelen: Is the kind of study, the ones that you are uncomfortable with the ones that just test, did the
curators’ idea or the designers’ idea get taken on board. Can they list the three causes of the Civil War or
whatever, did they get it? But there is another kind of visitor study, and it is one of the pioneers in my
experience, someone named Deedee Hillkey at the…
Charles: We know Deedee.
Thelen: Okay, you know Deedee and what they were saying, we do not really care, there is not a lesson
to be got here. What we want to know is how do they process it. She would then do ethnographic kind
68
of studies of what happens when a family goes through the Museum of American History. And Conor
Prary does this kind of work too. Where the issue is not right or wrong, know or do not know, the issue
is how do visitors process stuff.
Charles: What is an example of how would they process it?
Thelen: Okay, we go through, let us say you have a barn. And over here you have a sign that says the
barn was invented in 1492 or whatever it says over there. An example would be, and I am going through
with my granddaughter, or better let us say I am going through with my daughter and I also grew up on
a farm in Ohio. I am saying, “hey Jenny remember when you were a little girl, they had things like this
called barns.” And Jenny says, “well yes Daddy.” And pretty soon they are talking about having dinner at
the farm with grandma. They are really interested in how does the exhibit get moved from there to the
interactions with the visitors. Lois Silverman’s work, I do not know if you have run into it…
Charles: Not really.
Thelen: Lois did stuff where she strapped a tape recorder onto people when pairs would go through,
mothers and daughters, lovers and so on and she would listen to what they say to each other as they
process it. She came up with the idea that they were using it to strengthen a relationship. So if people
have not seen each other in a while and they go to a museum of American history and they talk about it,
the interesting thing is how they make it theirs.
Charles: So it is not so much…
Thelen: It is not about the facts or the knowledge…
Charles: And it is not about changing this particular exhibit…
Thelen: Right, it is really about how do, you could call it market research if you wanted. Its really about
how people take on board what they are looking at, how they make sense of what they are looking at.
Charles: And that might influence how you do it later on.
Thelen: Exactly.
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Charles: That is much more interesting to me. I got very annoyed, I do not remember if it was our exhibit
or not. I think maybe it was a little test exhibit at the Renwick that Screvin did, was not that his name?
He was a very early tester. And it was all about ceramics and there were all these questions, who made
it and this and that. Basically you could have read the labels and not looked at the ceramics, whereas it
should have been a visual experience, to get excited about these ceramics. So that is the kind of stuff
that, at least drove me crazy when it was first happening then.
Thelen: That had the equivalent, and I do not want to interview myself here, but that had the effect
also, in testing, the testing world, can students repeat the, you know whatever fact that was being
tested and in fact it is still being used. But this other approach to visitors is the much more like the one
you were describing at Eames, which is you guys…does this make sense or not make sense, I saw one of
those grandmas…or let me feel it and see oh that feels real sharp or that’s hot or something. I am sorry
to be interviewing myself.
Staples: Do you want a job?
Thelen: I do not think I am going to get one.
Charles: So I am not sure how I got quite into that.
Thelen: So what I am asking is…it is taking the point of view, what we are trying to understand is what
shift in viewpoint about exhibits is taking place that is somehow involved in parallel to think as an overall
design. Let me ask it just bluntly, as someone thinking about design do you worry about visitors? Do you
worry about what effect it might have? I mean I think you internalize this stuff all the time, do not you?
Staples: I do not think I worry about the visitor, I worry about our solutions more than I would worry
about the visitor getting it.
Charles: But the solutions involve a lot of thinking, well on the physical side, we have worked, I think,
very hard to, I get into this a little in the topography piece. You know, to get things at the right height, to
make it easy to read things, things you can hold onto. I think a lot of the furniture, good quality furniture
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design is coming through in terms of how does this physical thing work and how does it last? Similarly
with topography, I am not sure where it all came from, but I think of topography.
It is sort of like the chorus line in a ballet, you want to have all their legs up at the same height,
you want to know where you can find the information. You want the visitor spending their energy, they
have only got so much time, on getting a good experience and not on trying to figure out how to read a
label because it was not written right or the type is too small or it is too low. You want to quickly say,
“hey that is neat or I can find out about it there.” You should not have to look all over and say, “oh they
put the label up there for that.” I think we physically work very hard to make the experience work, you
might say.
Thelen: Did you want to say something?
Staples: No, I was just thinking about the number of years that we have been doing this and the number
of solutions that we have done, we try not to do the same thing every time. We try not to make our
design overpower the objects, you know, the design is…the success of the design is to be quiet. The
objects are the stars, but they include the text too, which makes the objects meaningful. We got
through this struggle, if you are designing a case and you are going to put objects in it, where do you put
the labels? Do you put the labels in front of the objects, behind the objects, above the objects? For a
long time we did, reader-rails inside, so you would have the edge of the case and there would be a
sloped plane that would have some text on it and on top of that platform you would have the objects.
Charles: We may have been the first people to do that, now it is ubiquitous.
Staples: Now you do design where labels are outside the case. There are reasons for that, it is not
always defensible, but there are.
Charles: They are generally easier to read.
Staples: People cannot read them inside the case.
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Thelen: But I am thinking those are very much visitor-oriented, I have seen what you wrote about
topography to make an exploration like that a point of, I forget what you call it, a central dramatic point
consistency so it is easy to read. I find all that to be mindful of the visitor.
Charles: I was writing that at a time when graphic designers were putting things everywhere. The last
thing, it seemed, to be desired was you could actually read it.
Staples: It is like what happened to Vogue magazine, sort of in the fifties. It went bezerk and lost its
artistic value and just became a collage of type and cropped pictures and very strange, did not know
where to go, but it looked design-y.
Charles: There was a graphic period that was not just Vogue.
Thelen: Looked design-y, that is a good word.
Chalres: We are happy not to look design-y.
Thelen: In fact, you do not want to the success of design is that it not be noticed.
Charles: In this field. I wrote a piece that I will find and give you. We did an exhibit called Views of the
Vanishing Frontier that was for the Joslin, incredible bodmer watercolors, the whole trip up the Missouri
River, wonderful exhibit. It came here to WVanishington. At that time the WVanishington Post had a
column in the Style section about, it was called something like Firsthand, but the idea was creative
people talking about what they did. So I called up the Post and spoke to the editor and said, “We design
exhibits.” And the response I got was, “You do what?”
Thelen: When was that?
Charles: Eighty-three.
Thelen: Eighty-three, wow.
Charles: And I said, “Yes, they do not just go up on the walls, they do not just jump up there.” I wrote
the piece basically that we were stars until the moment it opened. We are the people making it all
happen, we are running around, we are making it all happen. The moment it all opens we disappear.
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Many people will not even know that a designer was involved, they will not even think about it, it is just
there. And that’s okay.
Thelen: I am interested that the Post would not even think that an exhibit got designed.
Charles: I was a little astounded. You know, the National Gallery, traditionally in art museums you had a
preparers, you had curators who said, “I think yellow is a good color for that wall and I would like the
church, Niagara here and I would like this here and this here,” and the preparators hung it on the wall
wherever the curator says. Gil Ramenell, who unfortunately died too young, was the graphics curator at
the National gallery, but they got a sense that he had more design sense than more of the other
curators or the other curators started asking him more to help them do things and I think in like 1968
before the National Gallery even had a design department. This is really a time when, I think the history
museums with somebody like Ben were in advance of this, because it is always been more complex to
install history or natural history than art shows. But it was not necessarily a field, nobody was teaching
it.
Thelen: Did you start to become, did you start to think, there is someone else doing something similar
maybe there is a bunch of us who have in common that we design.
Charles: When you lose a job to somebody.
Thelen: Well talk about that. So the first jobs you were in effect commissioned by this Ben.
Charles: By Ben and Chicago Historical Society, by Harold Scramston.
Thelen: By Scramston, okay. At a certain point the museums decided, oh there is more than one person
out there, let us bid it somehow. Do you remember when you started to be mindful. Suddenly it became
a competitive thing.
Staples: I think it always had been competitive, but not so many competitors.
Charles: Right, I think like I would say on Nation to Nation or Productivity, which Jeria Finguysmar got,
we might have had our noses, well why did they go to them and not us. But there was not a formal
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competition as far as I know. The first time I think about, we mentioned. The bicentennial we had more
work than we knew. We started the two of us and two more people came from Eames in seventy-three.
We did We the People that was in seventy-five, fifteen thousand square feet. We did Federal City, Plains
and Realities with Washburn in the Castle that opened in seventy-six. We did twenty thousand square
feet at the Kennedy Center, America on Stage that opened in 1976. Was that it? It was about forty
thousand square feet around the mall, more than Eames had ever done. It sort of like three years later…
Staples: Did you say America on Stage?
Charles: Yes, America on Stage, We the People and the Castle all opened. Plus we did a job out in
Chicago for Harold. We were sort of overwhelmed with what was happening and we got up to sixteen
people and then we had no work in seventy-seven and we slowly let people go, sold quilts Bob
mentioned earlier to make payroll. No work.
Then we got a call from Burlington Northern. We did a whole proposal for them that did not go
anywhere. I guess we were asked to go down to New Orleans and on the way back from New Orleans
Ben had told us that Coca Cola had been asking about a designer. Maybe he mentioned a couple of us, I
do not know. But we were coming back from New Orleans and so we called up and stopped and talked
to the Coke people and initially the guy was just going to meet us in the lobby. Then we talked and he
invited us up and then we missed our airplane anyway.
We eventually did planning work for Coca Cola, so we thought, everything is going to be okay.
We have got these two big jobs, Burlington Northern and Coca Cola, and we were are offered a jazz
museum, that is why we had been down in New Orleans. We turned it down because we did not think
we could handle it with these other two. Of course these other two disappear, jazz museum gets done,
but not by us. The first project that I consciously remember there may have been a competition, who
there were competitors and there was not a formal RFP was the Gerald Ford Museum in Grand Rapids. I
think they did invite several people out for interviews, but again I do not know who else. This whole RFP
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thing, I think starts happening in the late eighties or early nineties when there is the whole movement of
corporations being more responsible, not insiders. There was a whole government has to be really
contract things and bid everything. There was a movement in the air.
Staples: Views of Vanishing Frontier…
Charles: That was a competition.
Staples: I think that was with…
Charles: Applebom, that was selective competition.
Staples: Right, and we won that.
Charles: We won that and also the visitors center at Monticello.
Staples: And he won that.
Charles: He won that, but they still were not these necessarily formal documents the way you later
got…in fact those early ones, Views of Vanishing Frontier, the Lowell one, there were a couple of them
where we got paid to complete. You got paid some money to develop your ideas.
Thelen: To apply…
Charles: To develop ideas.
Staples: Five thousand dollars or something.
Thelen: Preliminary stuff.
Charles: And that is nice. I do not think people should do free design, not being paid. Although we are
dealing with that now in Singapore. I do not know where to quite go with this. By the eighties there
were certainly a lot more design firms around. Later seventies Ralph Applebom starts and there is just
more and more, maybe the West group out in California, now there is…
Thelen: People who name themselves museum exhibit designers. Not something else.
Charles: Not industrial designers doing exhibit design. Well there was DCM, there were other groups in
New York who were also doing a lot of showrooms, tradeshows, things like that, that are doing museum
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exhibits too. The presidential libraries are beginning to happen. I think DCM did the Lyndon Johnson
one. We did Ford, that was a breakthrough project for us.
Thelen: In what sense?
Charles: We did all the research and writing.
Thelen: Before that the curators would have done the research?
Charles: Well, on our earlier projects, like We the People, other projects that we had done, the curators
were…
Staples: There was no organization to do that stuff. We did the exhibit and the building which was to
show that stuff. There were archivists working for the National Archives, but then Barbara and two or
three others were used to do the writing and the research of stuff.
Charles: It was our project in the way the Eames projects and had been the Eames office projects. Does
that make sense?
Thelen: It does, but I want to probe it. How did you experience it that way?
Charles: We were making direct decisions with the client, i.e. President Ford versus working together
with a curator at the museum and then presenting ideas forward that, and it some ways carrying out
ideas that, had been directed by the museum.
Thelen: You had more of a sense of ownership.
Charles: Absolutely, absolutely.
Thelen: What you say is as likely to shape what gets presented as somebody else.
Charles: Exactly, that was true on Ford, its true on Coca Cola, true on SAB, Sixth Floor very much, that
was with Conover. These are projects outside of the more traditional museum world.
Thelen: That is interesting. That is very interesting.
Staples: Many of these jobs were not museums, they were corporations or collections.
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Charles: They are corporate museums, but they are not museums with all the hierarchical, who does
what.
Thelen: It is not the field museum or the Corcoran Gallery.
Charles: With the tradition of curators do this, designers do this, et cetera.
Thelen: That’s fascinating. Museum design might have begun in these niches, these places, these new
kind of sites.
Charles: I think in some ways, yes because it is coming also out of the world’s fairs. Those are much
more like to be a corporation commissioning a designer to get their idea across and certainly that even
goes back to the 1930s world’s fairs with Walter Darwin Teague and some of those people. As they say,
Computer Perspective was an example while it was at the Smithsonian, it was commissioned to Eames,
your ideas, you develop it. You are doing the intellectual design as well as the three dimensional design.
You are designing the concepts and so on. That was very stimulating, is still very stimulating.
Thelen: There was a point where maybe there were some places where exciting work in design was
happening and they were not necessarily the nation’s most famous museums.
Staples: Correct.
Charles: That is true, I think that is true.
Staples: Basically…
Charles: It was beginning to happen in science centers, we did not really work on those, but that was
happening. Designers were taking a lot more of the lead in some of those. Children’s museums. I think
all of this is happening in the seventies, early eighties. It was very exciting.
Thelen: So here is this moment, or whatever we are calling it. You are two people, how did you
negotiate who would do what? Is that the right way to put it?
Staples: Hardware, software.
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Charles: We just were doing the same things we did at the Eames office. It hasn’t changed essentially.
Bob designs it, has to get it built. I have taken on some financial role I never had at the Eames office, but
essentially it is the same.
Staples: And I do the cooking.
Thelen: And you do the what?
(laughter)
Staples: I do the cooking.
Charles: I pay the bills.
Thelen: And somebody writes the grant proposal, the proposals.
Staples: Well, she writes those.
Thelen: You write the proposals.
Charles: Yes, I have to do the response to the RFPs and so on.
Thelen: Do you have any role in that?
Staples: Not generally, but there will be a part in that needs some illustration for some problem that
needs to be solved. A good one is that, the Yale.
Thelen: How did that happen?
Staples: Yale is Louie Con building, what is its official title.
Charles: Well it is the Yale University Art Gallery and they call it the Con building of the Yale University
Art Gallery, opened in 1953.
Staples: Louie Con is a heavyweight in the world of architecture. He did the Kimble in Fort Worth, the
British Library in New Haven and then this design building for the Yale art collection. There he, Louie
Con, did the interior treatment initially. The pogo panels and the case work and blah blah blah. The
museum had been under various leaders after Louie Con left and the whole sort of purity of his design
was polluted and the current administration wanted to rebirth, rebirth of Louie Con’s building. Paulshek
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the architect did the building and we did the galleries in there. One of the things that we started with
was they asked if there was a new and improved pogo panel. They said that was one of the problems
the designer would have to solve.
Thelen: I do not know what a pogo panel is, sorry.
[Feedback]
Charles: Okay, let me go back here.
Thelen: It is just a…
Charles: Do you remember pogo sticks. There is pressure happening. So this panel, the concept was that
you would make movable panels that could go anywhere in the gallery. So you would have a free gallery
space with no columns. They have a little leg at the bottom and then they have, not attachments, just
pressure at the top with a spring inside.
Staples: See look.
Charles: So when they - I mean this was sort of a classic competition of what might happen today, if they
called us in 2003. First they are doing what I call the beauty pageants.
Thelen: The beauty pageants, what is that?
Charles: The RFQ, request for qualifications. They are calling, they are not quite putting it on the street.
They are calling lots of people and asking them to send in their portfolio. You want to do just enough
work to make the cut. You do not want to overdo it at that stage. Sometimes we make the cut,
sometimes we do not. In this case we made the cut to four, which was very interesting because we had
not done a lot in art museums. We had been called on by art museums when it was a unique problem,
whether it was puppet shows or something you could not…
Staples: Or the Joslin ones.
Charles: Or the Joslin bobners, you could not just hang them on the wall easily. When we made the cut
to four, then you have to get interviewed. Nowadays people would take it as a PowerPoint. We took it
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as great big boards like an architect might and a booklet. Well, I spent about two weeks trying to learn
about Con and everything to do this booklet. So this the booklet. First we are talking about ourselves
and what we have done, what other art museums. They outlined some questions, so we are trying to
answer the questions.
I think it was only about four days before we were going to present, I remember saying to Bob,
“do you think you could draw up the pogo panel ?” that is clearly their biggest concern. So Bob sat down
and we went into the meeting. We talked about the pogo panel, how it worked. We really tried to
understand how it worked on the ceiling, but Bob went it with a drawing of the pogo panel. How it
physically was going to get built. What we later learned was that the other three people said that is a
really interesting problem that is going to take us a lot of work.
Thelen: Wow, great story.
Charles: So we won the job. We designed their pogo panels. The sad part is that we did not win the job
to do the second half of the Yale University Art Gallery. But this was a wonderful project and I spent
time then.
Staples: We were highly thought of by the staff, but the administration wanted a new….
Charles: That is not true, we were highly thought of by a lot of the staff, but….
Thelen: As opposed to who, the administration?
Charles: A new star designer, who came from the Met.
Staples: Curator.
Charles: Curator, pushed having them hire somebody from the Met.
Thelen: Star designer, what’s that?
Charles: Star curator.
Thelen: Star curator, what’s that?
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Charles: He had very big name. He had been worked part-time at the Met and part at Yale and Yale
convinced him to come full-time. His name’s Larry Kintur. He really wanted a guy that he was very
comfortable with the Met and his galleries were going to be a major part of the new facility and so they
hired the other guy.
Staples: Part of it had to do with, Barbara had to choose colors for his gallery.
Charles: We had had some run-ins.
Staples: He did not necessarily enjoy her colors.
Charles: He never went with our colors .We did not have a good relationship. On top of that I will say,
they first called and said they wanted to hire us and then they called at the very last minute to do a
whole presentation about how we had done contextual design at other projects. We did not have that
many and we went up there, but somehow we did all kinds of other discussion but never did a formal
presentation. Then they had a formal competition, we worked very hard on it, but we did not get it.
One of the interesting things that I have never written up and I do want to write up, maybe
someday. We then worked on trying to talk about what Con’s aesthetic was, once we got the job, how
he had used the building. We did a lot of research on where the galleries had been in the original
building, how it worked, what the possibility was with the pogo panels, what angles everything would go
on to show the curators. We actually went through and found examples of different galleries. I looked
for type, I looked for all kinds of things. It was basically a goal and it worked to get everybody on board
that the old system was good, it was a good system, it could be flexible. You could stick with the Con
module and be able to do a lot with it. I think it was a very very successful reinstallation.
We set up a whole system of casework for them. A modular system that they are now using in a
lot a places, not just the galleries we worked on. It is a project we are immensely proud of. It is sort of
our art museum period because right after that Detroit called. Before Yale called in 2002, we had one
tiny job. Again it was kind of like, well maybe the industry is telling you something.
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Thelen: Had you tried to get other art jobs? Or did you stick with what you knew?
Charles: We have never been very aggressive.
Thelen: In what sense?
Charles: People came to us. We never quite have learned.
Staples: There are publications of business daily, something like that where they list all the jobs that are
available and you can apply for them.
Charles: Immensely unrewarding.
Thelen: You tried it?
Charles: Once or twice I responded to things. During this last downturn I tried again a little bit.
Staples: One thing we discovered is that it is not very pleasant to work for the government.
Thelen: Why is that?
Staples: Just the mentality of the people. Once they get in, many of them just suffer from boredom and
do as little as they can do.
Charles: I would not say that. I think that this whole contracting system becomes difficult.
Thelen: How so?
Charles: I do not want this to be a whine session, but…
Thelen: Why not? You get a chance. You know, you reflect on this stuff, you have experience.
Staples: I mean he is got to take the sour with the good.
Charles: You… First of all to get through the process of a very very formal RFP, particularly for a
government agency, it is just volumes of stuff you are filling out. You are saying how many hours you are
putting down and this many meetings.
Staples: Rights employers, whatever.
Charles: On and on and on. Unless we think…
Staples: Tell him the several categories that you believe you do a job for.
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Thelen: There was that. Go ahead and refer to it, I did see it. The listener to this may not have it in front
of them.
Charles: I should go find my copy, I will find it.
Thelen: I have got one, I have got it here somewhere. [pages rustling] it is very distilled, the voice of
great experience. Here it is, I have found it. You want to see it?
Staples: It is her…
Thelen: It is your list, I have found it. It is already ratty with wear.
Charles: First of all, we have always stayed very small.
Thelen: And we need to talk about why that is or how that is.
Charles: We like to be hands-on. I do not want to be an administrator.
Staples: We do not delegate well.
Thelen: You like to work on the whole project.
Charles: I like the intellectual challenge of talking with the curators or the scientists.
Staples: She doesn’t trust anybody. [laughter]
Charles: I do not know that that is true.
Thelen: Well, one person at least.
Staples: She does not trust me either.
Charles: I think you also really like to do the design. We have stayed very involved in every project. Even
though we have had people working for us doing things, we like to be very involved. So this little list, I do
not know why I first did it. There is been a number of variations of it, but essentially it is the same. You
really want to work on some interesting subjects.
Thelen: Interesting to you?
Charles: Yes, why not. We are not starving, we have not starved.
Staples: Not yet.
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Charles: So we have…I think we did not respond to the Wrestling Hall of Fame. I think my favorite one
that we did not response to was the Catfish Hall of Fame.
Thelen: The Catfish Hall of Fame. What’s wrong with catfish?
Staples: You had to provide your own catfish.
Charles: I had never eaten catfish, I did not know anything about the lore of catfish. Maybe I made a
mistake not to respond.
Staples: There are just some things that shouldn’t be museums.
Charles: You beginning to get…
Staples: We have said that any number of times.
Charles: If something comes through that sounds maybe interesting. You try to talk to the people, get a
sense that they are together enough on this. That is it is not just some wishful thinking, oh would not be
fun to build a museum, particularly if it is not a major institution. That it is interesting is really important.
We are going to spend a lot of time on it, so it ought to be something interesting.
Thelen: That is number one.
Charles: Well, yes, some of these are almost equal.
Thelen: I am looking at a list of six here.
Charles: Six or seven.
Thelen: Seven, sorry, I cannot even read.
Charles: The people you are going to work with ought to be really interesting. Now that is hard to figure
out in advance. Smart, interesting. Bill Fitzhue, who is the artic scholar we worked with on Crossroads,
he is a fascinating guy.
Staples: Marica Gallagher.
Charles: Marica Gallagher at Joslin was great. Susan Stein at Monticello. These are really - they have got
great ideas, they are very interesting to talk to, they are willing to listen to us. There is a really good
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shared, exciting - but we are going to learn from some stimulating people. The third one important
institution. All things being equal, if the National Gallery was asking or a very tiny art gallery was asking,
you would probably go with the National Gallery. There are just reasons to do that. On the other hand,
the Sixth Floor was not an important institution, but the subject was very important and when we met
the women organizing it, it was clear that they were going to do the project. So we kind of looked at
each other and said we are probably the best people to do, even if we did not think it was such an
exciting topic initially.
Staples: And some of our friends in the museum world said you should not do it.
Thelen: Well that is an interesting piece.
Staples: Because it…
Charles: Goulish, why would you do that its not…
Thelen: Goulish…
Staples: Just conspiracy theories and never really resolved.
Thelen: You are going to get beaten up for whatever you.
Charles: And just why would you spend time on that creepy subject? We quit telling people we were
working on it because you did not want to have to justify it to people. But there it was really the
colleagues, Lyndalyn and Conover, that were so persuasive when we met them that we took it on.
Challenging, creative or intellectual problems, that is part of interesting subject I think. I guess Yale
would be a very interesting creative problem.
Staples: Location.
Charles: Well, I have not gotten to location yet, that is a little further. But if there is an interesting
problem that has to get solved. Total control over design solution, that is a little aggressive, but that is
an issue primarily of architects.
Thelen: I do not know what you mean by that.
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Staples: Architects like light. Exhibit, costumes or paper, light is not good. Control light is alright, but if
you have floor to ceiling glass windows in a gallery that you are going to put stuff in, you have got a
problem and the architects do not understand it. You try to tell them, like the women’s memorial over
here in Arlington. We did this hemispheric al exhibition space that was excavated from behind
(inaudible).
Charles: Hemicycle.
Staples: Hemicycle, they dug out earth and then they built a secondary wall and covered the top with
glass so it was now an enclosed space where the women’s memorial, women in military service to
America. had all of this stuff and one of the things they were going to display is costumes, uniforms from
the Revolutionary War all the way up to today. The architects, who did a brilliant job I think, except for
one thing is that they let all of this light in right where these costumes were going to be displayed. So
the sun would come up in the morning, we took it upon ourselves to call for some help from a lighting
specialists.
Charles: We did computer studies to figure out where the light was coming, that they should have done.
Staples: Then we decided, we suggested to the General Wilma Vault that there be these canopies over
the cases to filter or allow the direct sunlight into this thing. Well the architects went ballistic. We cut
their space right in half by this sort of line of high-tech shutters overhead.
Charles: They finally accepted it and we in fact in that case did have pretty much totally control because
Wilma Vault, the general, had confidence in us. I was actually thinking about the one or two times we
have been a sub to an architect has been disastrous.
Thelen: I see, I see.
Charles: Because in the end, the way the whole system is written, we are only supposed to talk to the
architect and then the architect talks to the client. And the architect can veto our designs. That is a
serious serious problem. I do not think we have to have total control, with the client we want to share
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ideas. That is what I am saying that total is a little bit extreme, but control of design solutions is out
there. I jokingly say to clients, but I am serious too, if you want to have any say about the turquoise color
I am going to select then I can have a lot of say about the ideas and writing that you are going to do,
right? The goal is that the ideas are out here, the design is out here, that everything is out in the middle
of the table and you can talk about it respectfully. You are not taking it personally, you are really trying
to work together to get to the best solutions, that is that.
Thelen: Is that decisive client?
Charles: No that is a different thing, that is still on design solution.
Thelen: You want everything to be candid and open and nobody has got individual ownership.
Charles: And nobody says I have a PhD.
Thelen: Oh, I see. Now I get it.
Charles: I have a lot of inferiority because of never having a PhD.
Staples: But she has great hackles. [laughter]
Charles: I particularly do not like the “I have a PhD” if I have just had to correct the text and get it
grammatically right.
Thelen: There is a few doctors that you respect except for your pediatrician or your…
Charles: No I respect a lot of people with PhD. I am laughing a little bit on that, but there have been
times, I am self-conscious. The decisive client, you want somebody who you come to them and they say
that is really interesting and yes we can move forward with that. It is not I have to go talk to three more
people. Going back to controlling the design solution, what you want to avoid is, we are presenting to
you, you are middle management at IBM, that is going to get taken to the next level and the next level
and the next level. You are not even going to be in the room to defend what you are suggesting. That is
important too, that you are presenting your design ideas and you can defend them and hear the
complaints about them. But not have it have to go through so many filters. But a decisive client,
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somebody who can make decisions and has good ideas, et cetera, is important. Bruce Stark was certainly
that at SAB, he was great.
Staples: Bruce Stark came to our office when we were still on Capitol Hill, he happened to be in the
neighborhood. They had called for portfolios.
Thelen: He happened to be in the neighborhood of Washington, DC, Capitol Hill from Johannesburg.
Staples: He was in Hungary.
Thelen: Oh, he was in Hungary, right on the way, Capitol Hill.
Charles: We thought he was interviewing other people in the United States. It turns out it was not, the
three firms he was looking at was us here, one in Japan and one in England. I think they had already
decided that the Japanese one, the whole culture shock would not work, even though they liked what
some of the final designs were that they had seen. So he was kind of coming with a proposal to work
with us, but we did not find it out until about four in the afternoon. Terrific location. We said earlier, you
have got a project in Vietnam all the rest of this I will ignore .
Thelen: Conversely, if it is Detroit.
Charles: Detroit is good, but it has to be a good project.
Thelen: What’s not good?
Staples: Palm Springs, the Annendale project. That had several things about it.
Charles: I cannot really say there is an awful location, but terrific location we will try. If it is a great
interesting project in a potentially uninteresting location, we would go for the interesting project.
Staples: This Annendale thing is an interesting case in point, we interviewed or were interviewed. The
concept was to turn the residence that they had in Palm Springs into a conference center. They had lots
of art, which they had donated to lots of museums.
Charles: The Met primarily.
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Staples: They were going to put reproductions in the house of the art that they had given away. There
were three or four levels of administrative hoops that we had to jump through.
Charles: This was where you did not have any control of your final solutions.
Staples: We finally ended up saying no thank you. The project ended up being sixty million dollars.
Charles: I do not know what all they finally did, we have just seen it written up. At that point, they were
only open to thirty-five people a week or something.
Staples: It was ludicrous.
Charles: It was a tax boon doggle.
Staples: It was just ludicrous, there was too much money there and too little payoff. What they were
trying to do is get tax break on this property that the Annenbergs had that was designed by Quincey
Jones, an architect.
Charles: I think, Mrs. Annenberg really wanted this to happen and they were trying to honor her legacy.
Staples: It just got - it is too bad. They could have put that money to better use other places.
Charles: So that is my little list.
Thelen: Do you think at some point you folks got a reputation, certain strengths?
Charles: Difficult.
Thelen: You had a reputation for difficult, what kind of difficult?
Charles: Asking too many questions, asking…
Thelen: Wanting to control the project too much.
Staples: We wanted to be accurate and accuracy, some people means time and money, they will not go
away until you answer the question.
Charles: I was called difficult, also early on we were considered expensive. I do not think we are
considered expensive now. I think particularly initially when there were not many people working in the
museum world and somebody on a salary would say they are getting paid x-y-z which is a high number
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and has no idea about the overhead of an office and the staff members and all the costs of running an
office.
Staples: In this town there are a lot of federally employed designers and they often do things on the
side.
Charles: Freelance.
Staples: So they are undercutting you, so to speak, because they do not have the overhead you have,
the office to maintain. They do it in their garage or whatever. Then we become considered expensive
because the people in the museums do not buy anything to speak of. And you tell them how much it is
going to cost, they say, “oh my gosh, three thousand dollars for a case, I can get one for seven hundred
dollars.”
Charles: I think also for the amount of time for really trying to care for the content and the design. We
may well put more time in at a higher level. If we are going to build principal hours versus staff hours
they inherently cost more money at a higher rate. As they say, I think maybe back in the seventies or
early eighties we would have been at the higher end of pay scales, then say other firms like Ralph
Applebom are way beyond us I am sure and certainly what Ralph personally would charge. I do not think
that we are considered necessarily expensive, although if we cannot and will not bid a job on a financial
basis because we will not get it. If they are going to get low bid then it means they do not really care
about the quality and that is fine, go for low bid, but do not ask us to bid.
Thelen: Can you control that before you start?
Charles: You can read the RFP…
Thelen: And what are the signals?
Charles: If it says low bid is going to get it.
Staples: I mean, when you get an RFP and it talks about all these interactive devices they want in their
thing and they have got a hundred thousand dollars, you know right away, you cannot do all this for
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that. If you cannot do the building for that, then what are you going to do for the design, you are going
to ask for twenty five thousand dollars.
Charles: That is another way if the whole budget seems out of proportion to the scale of the project
they are looking for, it means they are looking for kind of a quick and dirty solution.
Thelen:So you can tell that when you first…
Staples: Sometimes.
Charles: You try and sniff around, you try and talk to people on the phone, try and see if people will tell
you their budget. A lot of people try to play it so close to the vest, I think, in fact, that is not smart. Most
of these people starting a project know what a budget is. It would be better, but they do not do it, some
do and in fact if a client was saying,” I have got three hundred thousand to build it, I have one hundred
thousand to apply to design or four hundred thousand to build it, a hundred thousand to apply to
design. This is the brief, this is what we are looking for, tell me what you are going to do for that.” They
would really make the judgment on what they are going to get for their money, rather than how much is
it costing them.
Thelen: That would seem like a good, would not it?
Charles: I think it would be a very logical way, but you do not get that very often. Sometimes you can
kind of get an overall sense of what the budget might be. There is a sense somehow, again I think
because of this whole secretive bid process that started happening. The client ought to be secretive and
try to get the people bidding to present everything, but it is hard to put together a really good package
for the bid. This is like a mini-marriage, a short term mini-marriage, both sides need to get to know each
other. Some people running these bid processes think that only they need to know you, you do not need
to know them.
Thelen: Have there been any, have you experienced any place, any bid process where you could
collaborate?
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Charles: I think Marica Gallagher on Views of the Vanishing Frontier when she picked two or three firms
and was willing to give five thousand to try out ideas and we could call her up and ask questions. She got
a very good sense of what it would be like to work with any of us, plus the museum can say they own
the ideas, that they have bought those. Nobody could come back and say, “you stole my idea because I
used it in a presentation.” Marcia was great that way.
Staples: We did many projects with her. One of the nice things our past is that we have had a few clients
over and over and over again.
Thelen: That must be very gratifying.
Charles: It is, it is great.
Staples: It is. You develop friendship as well as cooperation.
Charles: Coke we did a lot of stuff.
Staples: Chicago history.
Charles: Chicago history we did a lot. Now Monticello, hopefully Montpellier. No these are nice projects.
But these closed bids are difficult. We going through one now for American Revolution Center.
Staples: In Philadelphia.
Charles: We made it to the final four, but we do not know.
Staples: July is not here yet.
Thelen: But soon.
Charles: Yes, supposedly we will find out, but they’ve been very close to the vest and you respond to an
email marked design.
Thelen: Do you know whose paying for it?
Charles: No, not really. There are some funders, but they do not have all their money. We do not know
who the other three are. One email let the other names came through, only once. You can look at that
and see who they were first talking to. And I know through the grapevine some people who are not in
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anymore, but I have not been able to figure out who is in. the five architects do know who they are
because they had to go to a site meeting. I think it is unfair that the architects know and we do not.
Thelen: Woah, that’s amazing.
Charles: That would be an interesting case study, just of the process and so on.
Staples: That was one that we had to do a reasonable amount of work to make the presentation that we
did make.
Charles: Well all of these presentations take a hell of a lot of work. They put a challenge to each of us,
which was very interesting.
Thelen: Which was?
Charles: They own George Washington’s tent, or one of his tents. You had two hours and they wanted
you to present one hour about yourself and how you would work with them, how you would stay on
budget and all of that. The other hour was how would you present George Washington’s tent. So we did
a lot of work on that. It is huge, just the scale and the building. What do you do for conservation?
Staples: It is not so huge, it is like an elephant, just bigger than a breadbox. Conservation-wise it is not
structurally sound, light-wise you cannot expose it to light much. You cannot go in it because of issues.
Charles: I think we made a mistake, we did not make one of these booklets. We were very late getting it
all together. We did a verbal presentation with a PowerPoint, but the screen was little and so on. I wish
we had been able to leave a booklet in hindsight. We sort of went home at four AM and got in the car at
seven so. It was worse the second round. The first round you just had to do the beauty pageant. Then
we made it to eight.
I thought, we are never going to get it. You know we are selling our house, all this stuff is going
on, this was all this spring. I do not think I started what I had to turn in until Wednesday, and it was due
at noon on Friday. I missed FedEx on Thursday night, I worked until like four or five in the morning. I
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went home and got on an eight o’clock train to Philadelphia and hand delivered it. I almost gave up
saying, “we are not going to make it so why flagellate yourself?” But then we made the cut.
Thelen: In this kind of a case, other people have bid, other people have sent them ideas. You have not
seen those ideas, but they have. Have you ever run into the case where they say, we liked what you
were doing on A, B and C but look what this other competitor said on E? Can you adapt to that or when I
hire you, do I hire only your work or do I hire the chance that you might engage what a competitor has
actually done? Or you might not know it, but the client will say, I wonder what would happen if you
turned the tent upside down as one of your competitors might have suggested?
Charles: I do not know that I can think of a…
Thelen: If it were me and I am hiring…
Staples: It is not very moral, I do not think to pick two pieces out of thing and put them together.
Thelen: But if you have a plumbing problem and you ask two plumbers to come or carpenters or
something. I would handle it by doing this way or I would handle it by doing that way, I do not know
maybe I am just an immoral person, but I would say to one what the other had suggested and say, why
is your idea better?
Charles: I think it happens, there is no question…
Thelen: You just do not know it?
Charles: We might not know it. I do not remember ever being shown somebody else’s proposal.
Thelen: Well you never know where they might have come up with it. I do not want to makes this…
Charles: It is pretty rare that, I think we were saying earlier maybe, doing the drawings for the tent, that
was a rare experience of having to do a design thing for a competition that was a real design problem
without being paid. The Yale one was our choice to do the whole pogo panel without being paid. It is not
often in our experience that you are asked to do some kind of design upfront or if you are that should be
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another thing on the list, sounds like a project to avoid like the plague, except we are now going to do it
for Singapore because it would be fun to go back to Singapore, or Vietnam maybe.
Staples: It is cheaper to take a vacation to go there.
Charles: That is what Bob has always said.
Thelen: So do you get a reputation, you were talking about being difficult and being expensive. What
about other designers, Applebom, and say, “well I have this sort of impression of what his outfit does,
what they do well, what they do not so well, what they do similar to what we would do?” You in a world
of other people…
Staples: Do we plagiarize are you saying?
Thelen: No, just the opposite. What is it like to be in a world where there are people who are doing
similar work, in fact you are maybe competing with from time to time, but you think have a certain kind
of strength or think you have a certain kind of strength or weakness.
Staples: I do not know how to say anything about that.
Thelen: How do you think you are viewed, let us try it this way. Do you think if we got some other
designers in here, oh there is those guys they tend to be good at this or not so good at that?
Staples: I would be afraid to be critiqued by others, I guess.
Charles: I think…I think we are respected for very very careful design. There is a book around here.
Staples: We have a friend, Harold Scramstein, who started at Smithsonian, went to Chicago we did
several project for him.
Thelen: I do, he is the reason that the book Presence of the Past got written because he was on the NEH
council.
Staples: You know how he is a very very thoughtful and wonderful friend. We have had many years of
family-ish friendship with him. He is, once he left Chicago and he still dabbling in the museum world we
have never had any contact with him.
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Charles: That is not true. He left Chicago and went to Henry Ford and we did Popular Mechanics at
Henry Ford.
Staples: Okay, I beg your pardon.
Charles: And he did recommend us for the Jewish Museum in Philadelphia initially. So he has
recommended us for things. But not for some projects we would have liked him to recommend us for.
Thelen: So what so you make of that?
Staples: I do not know how to answer that question. I mean, maybe he feels that he served his time and
does not need more pain, but he’s now out of the business I believe, officially. We have never discussed
it with him.
Charles: Our friendship is too dear, so we do not want to discuss it with him.
Thelen: I can see that. Do you have any friends, well do you see him in the field of design?
Staples: He was an administrator.
Charles: He was a client who became a very dear friend.
Thelen: I mean do you have some friends within the field itself.
Staples: Yes, Phillip…
Charles: Well, Ben. Well, Phillip Brady who worked for us.
Staples:For nine years.
Charles: Has a small office in Washington. Ben Lawless who we have talked about. Ben jokes that he is
our founder because he found us. He works a lot with a guy named Jerry Osterhold. Once Ben left the
museum he started doing freelance work and he did a job out at Boystown in Omaha and Jerry was
young designer in Kansa City who worked on that project with Ben, so Ben does a lot of work with Jerry.
I would consider Jerry a friend, very much so and Ben.
Staples: Well certainly Jerry is a competition to us.
Charles: A competitor.
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Staples: I do not think Ben is, he’s been a consultant to us several times.
Charles: On SAB for example.
Staples: And on Coke. Some great times with Coke on that stuff.
Charles: I think Jerry is probably the only one that we would day is a good friend who we also compete
against. I am always amazed Jerry finds out about jobs I never even know are out that. It is much more
out looking for things. We are much more reactive of people looking for us.
Thelen: That is an interesting distinction.
Charles: I think that is because we started with people coming to us and we have never gotten used to
the fact that we have to work hard to get jobs.
Staples: We ran an ad once in the Museum News or something like that.
Charles: Yes, the AAM. We ran it in 1977, only ad we have ever run.
Staples: And we listed all the projects that we had done around Washington.
Charles: And what these projects have in common. And we had a cute little Uncle Sam toy that we
owned, no other rights for anybody else. Federal city, Smithsonian, We the People – Smithsonian,
America on Stage – Kennedy Center, a little asterisk and at the bottom it says “designed by Staples and
Charles.” We spent seven hundred dollars that we did not have, full page. We got three responses.
Somebody wanted a job. Somebody wanted a catalog for all the cases that we manufactured and the
third which I think I found and it will go to AU was a letter from the legal counsel of the Smithsonian
telling us we should not have used their name.
Thelen: Oh my God. So much for advertising.
Staples: We have not tried it ever since.
Charles: And when people call us to do an ad, I tell them that story.
Thelen: One other thing I wanted to ask about at this point. Maybe this is just a few minutes.
Charles: We are fine, but you have to be downtown at seven you said.
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Thelen: When do I need to…
Charles: Soon. Alright, it is almost six.
Thelen: I do not know how long it takes.
Charles: If we get you to Braddock Road by six-fifteen, six-twenty, you are going to have to change.
Thelen: That is okay.
Charles: You are going to Dupont, right?
Thelen: No, I am going to the Portrait Gallery, Galleryplace.
Charles: Oh that is easy, yellow line.
Thelen: It has to do with when the field became one that had critical, formal criticism, obviously
because of the Journal of American History was one of the first history journals to do that. I wonder how
you experienced these people who were scholars. And I presume it was being reviewed in other…
Charles: There was never much good review. If I would find the early, oh we had a great review. Oh,
God.
Thelen: That is right, well newspapers that is a good example.
Charles: The only time our name I think has been in like the Washington Post for exhibition reasons, or
maybe even any place, I do not know. Anyways, 1978 maybe, little exhibit, not much bigger than this
room, Aspects of Art and Science. We had all these individual people, objects. It was based on a concept
by Serril Stanley Smith I think I found the book the other day, out of MIT, about how discoveries of
materials could then transform how objects got made.
Staples: Some of the first uses of a material would be as an, well not as an art object…
Charles: But some of it became art objects. Processes…
Thelen: Using something for a different purpose.
Charles: Or how you would be able to hammer a tool. Like a beautiful sword, the whole issue of
understanding once people making Damascus swords or Japanese swords understand that the more
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they fold it and yield it, they can make it sharper and sharper and stronger. It is was those kind of
examples of ah-ha moments in discoveries of materials. A great idea of how to install this. This was
overdesigning.
Staples: Again it was Ben Lawless who said, he asked us to do this show and he wanted a sparkling
jewelbox. And it was several glass cases that existed in the Dimner Library foyer at American History.
And these pieces were all different sizes and all different materials. There was nothing really, you might
say, to hold them together other than this concept of materials.
Charles: And they were arriving at the last minute, so you do not even know if the measurements you
are getting are going to be right.
Staples: The idea, we had little things and we had some pretty good sized things. You had some very
early things coy Plates. I came with this idea of two aluminum tubes all of varying heights and varying
diameters that these pieces would then be mounted on to be displayed. You would come into this
gallery and there would be these objects sort of floating because the cases had a low base and we
wanted them up at eye level.
Charles: We could move it around once all the stuff was there. Maybe this one is better on this pole or
this pole. It had a lot of merit.
Staples: It had logic behind it.
Charles: So anyway the place opens, Paul whatever his name, the art critic for the Washington Post
comes.
Thelen: So is that who they assigned, the art critics?
Charles: In this case. He think, almost the last line in the review is, the exhibition was designed by a local
firm, Staples and Charles, they have a lot to learn.
Thelen: Woah. Wow. I cannot begin to imagine the thoughts.
Charles: You are excited because you are name is in the newspaper, but then you are not so excited.
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Thelen: In a case like that, can you call. You have to take it.
Charles: Turn the other cheek.
Thelen: Turn the other cheek, right. I mean, did it have any effect. Do reviews have any effect?
Charles: I think now somebody like Rothstein of the New York Times is really writing very insightful
coverage. I do not know that it has effect to the extent of, oh I read about that show in Rothstein
because he never says who designed. Occasionally he does, he actually mentioned Jerry. He has
reviewed a number of our shows and always been very positive, but we have never been listed as having
done them. But I think enough to put it in our booklet, a quote of positive comment from Rothstein to
mean it is very high praise.
Thelen: So you will use it?
Charles: Absolutely. The Wall Street Journal for a while was doing very interesting reviews. Phil Kenecut
here does write interesting reviews. I have not seen his byline so much lately. He wrote a very nice one
of the train station at Montpelier. The Washington Times actually has done some very good reviews in
the past I do not know they are doing now, they are not a newspaper I read. We have had some good
reviews out of Newsweek and things like that. They are reviews for the project. If they are cognizant at
all about the design, they are very good. You started to ask about academic reviews.
Thelen: That is another category.
Charles: I have not looked at the reviews we have had or even the one for We the People, I ought to
relook at it. The academic reviews in general that I read tend to focus more on the content then how it is
delivered.
Thelen: That is interesting.
Charles: And so they are less likely to focus on what we are doing. At least that is my perception, I have
not even - I do not even know what we have done that has been reviewed lately in an academic context.
Even Curator Magazine, and the DIA is partially responsible for this, they did a whole issue on the
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reinstallation of the Detroit Institute of Art, but did not focus at all on the design. The ideas, the big idea
and that kind of stuff. It is nice if somebody thinks what we did is good, but it is not like it is going to
make it or break us like a New York show review or a review of an actor or something. But we do have
Paul, at the Washington Post. They have a lot to learn.
Thelen: So does the Washington Post have a lot to learn. That is interesting. So it is not really a central…
Charles: It is central to the client, let me put it that way.
Thelen: So how would that matter? So if you had good reviews…
Charles: Good reviews would make the client feel.
Thelen: Would make the client want to hire you again?
Charles: Sure. Monticello, it was, as we were actually working on it, I remember a discussion where
Susan Stein said, “I wonder what Ed Rothstein is going to think of that?” It is very important for the
client to get good reviews. So that would put us in a good light as key players.
Staples: But we have only had one bad review.
Thelen: And you can trace additional business to the client feeling happy about everything?
Charles: I do not, I mean I think it would be more likely…
Staples: I think the Montpelier review was in fact what helped us the next level.
Charles: I am not sure I would say that. I think that they were internally extremely pleased even without
the review and that Tom and we worked very well together.
Thelen: Is that the feature I read in a Washington paper?
Charles: Yes, Washington Post, could be. A half page or so.
Thelen:It talked about how you had framed, segregated. I did read it.
Charles: I could look for it, if it was in the Post it was Phil piece. We were not mentioned, but it was a lot
of it about the guts of Montpelier doing it at all. A few segregated sites surviving.
Thelen: I mean that was risky was not it? For you guys to say we are going to feature segregation.
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Charles: Not for me. For Montpelier, I had heard through actually through an AV group that we know
that had heard about the job and thought it was going to be a much bigger job and Salvi had actually
tried to pitch them. Salvi actually told me about it. Then I met Lynne Hastings at a conference and we
were on the same panel and I asked a little bit about it. And she said, “we cannot afford you.” I said,
“yes you can because I want to do it.” I think its important little, well I did not say little to her, but I think
it is an important project. So we agreed on price to do it and we did it. I think a negative review would
probably be much more harmful in terms of repeat business, but either you get a good one or a bad one
and we have essentially gotten good ones.
Staples: Or none.
Thelen: That is good. I know how rarely they review any museum exhibits.
Charles: So that whole review thing. Who was it from Indiana who was heading up the reviews?
Thelen: It depends. There are different teams on different times.
Charles: There was a guy we met who I know was at Indiana that I liked a lot.
Thelen: When was this?
Charles: Back when you first started doing this, so early eighties, late eighties. I will have to look it up on
a list.
Thelen: The way we did it, the Journal of American History had what we called contributing editors and
so they managed that.
Charles: So who…
Thelen: Who were the contributing editors who managed reviews, you are asking me, I only appointed
them.
Charles: I will have to look it up.
Thelen: I will think of this.
Charles: Who then asked me periodically to let him know when shows were up.
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Thelen: Could it have been Edmund?
Charles: No. because he’s (inaudible) I do not know who it was. I did for a while have a list of to give
people.
Thelen: Tom Sharlif. That’s who it was.
Charles: Tom I liked a lot.
Thelen: The first one. He’s terrific.
Charles: For a while I had a list of what journals, if a client had a list of besides the WVanishington Post
and the New York Times who should I be sending information to about the show? I had a list of your
journal and other ones, try to get the word out.
Thelen: This has been great. I am sorry for all that confusion.
Charles: Do you have enough memory left for tomorrow? Do you want me to download that just in
case?
Thelen: We can download it.
Charles: But I will not take it off.
Thelen: But we will not know.
End of Track One.
Thelen: Start, start. Natural. We were talking about historical empathy. Whether, in what ways Barbara
feels she might have put people, you might have imagined putting people in the shoes of the past, like
Sally Hemings. I remember at an earlier time you talked about looking up what Jefferson had said about
her at dinner parties.
Charles: Well he says almost nothing about her.
Thelen: Well that is what I meant.
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Charles: He says virtually nothing. I do not think, to the extent of literally reenacting and so on, we have
never been involved in that. Trying to [pause] it is a very interesting question because if we have tried to
use empathy it would be more in, I think, the choices of stories, who do you try to talk about.
Thelen: And why?
Charles: And why. Maybe an example is, and it was, you know, a group decision, I cannot say it was so
much mine. Is that your coffee?
Staples: It is.
Charles: Would you bring me one? Do you mind?
Staples: Now you know what a Mexican standoff is like.
Charles: At Crossroads, Monticello of course has the great man Thomas Jefferson there. One of the
three areas that, as we worked with them since the late 1999, we were first asked to look at a visitor
experience and think about it. [background noise] One of the three key areas is the plantation and the
people of the plantation and how to convey that these are individuals, these are individuals with choices
and who they are, not just monolithic slaves. [excessive background noise] And certainly at Monticello
you have interesting collection of people.
Thelen: You do.
Charles: And quite well defined, increasingly written about of course by Annette Gordon-Reed in
particular. Sally is the one everybody gets interested in. but Sally is part of a huge family, the Betty
Hemings family, let us call it that. In the new visitors center one of the things we decided to do, and
when I am staying we here, it is very much Susan Stein, Elizabeth Chu, Justin Seriphin when we are
working on dependencies.
Thelen: Who are these people exactly?
Charles: Susan Stein is the senior curator at Monticello and vice president for Museum Programs.
Elizabeth Chu is curator. Justin Setiphin is Associate Curator, I think is his title now. And the fourth
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person would be Krista Destada, who has, is working now on Mulberry Row, on an assignment and
worked on the visitors’ center.
Thelen: I am sorry I distracted you.
Charles; But that is important, I think. At the visitors’ center in the exhibit To Try All Things, Elizabeth
Chu was the curator of that project and it is the idea that Monticello is an experiment. It is actually
called Monticello’s Experiment to ‘Try all Things’ is a Jefferson quote. In that one, we wanted to get
across the slave community and Jefferson’s relationship to it. Within the exhibit we have fourteen or
fifteen different people that we have done little bios on, probably about two thirds of them are slaves
and others are a granddaughter and a couple of other people visitors and friends and so on. There when
we had a picture and only in a few cases we did, we included a picture. When we had a signature of
somebody like say John Hemings who is literate we used his signature to make the point…
Thelen: That he is literate.
Charles: That he is literate. Isaac they have a picture of, so we have a picture of him. We used quotes
when we could or quotes about people when we could not. The first choice was always be from their
own words rather than Jefferson’s words, if we had that choice or somebody other than Jefferson
commenting, if at all possible. And within that exhibit there are two family trees, one is the Jefferson
white family or as I think now the descendants say, the family of the daughters of Martha and then the
two daughters, Martha and Maria. And the other is a family tree of Betty Hemings, of Betty Hemings and
her descendants were eighty enslaved people at Monticello over the years. Betty and the ones who
were alive at the time were inherited when Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wales dies, and they come to
the plantation. And I guess one or two of them, Betty Brown, Betty Hemings oldest daughter, actually
comes with Jefferson’s wife. Sally is one of the fifteen people that we talk about in that exhibit. There is
very little documentary record about her. In another part of the exhibit we do have some of the
cartoons, one very vicious one of Jefferson and Sally illustrated…
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Thelen: At the time.
Charles: 1801. I would have to find it, but it is not very nice. To me, as much as, we have a lot of
archaeological pieces. What was actually very interesting in the archaeology was a household like Betty
Hemings’ household has finer china than the white free workman’s household and china that is not from
the main house. There is no overlap with the idea that pieces as they were chipped were handed down
and went to the slave families. The slaves are buying their own china for themselves.
Thelen: Let me ask you the question that always interests me. Would Jefferson say he was in love with
Sally? How do we standing now, deal with the possibility that there could be love between a plantation
owner and a slave? Or between a slave owner and a slave? And if that question is hard, if you want to
change the question do it.
Charles: I think Annette Gordon-Reed says there is no reason to be doing that. I do not want to be
putting words in her mouth. Sally is a half-sister of Jefferson’s wife.
Thelen: Okay, I think we are going to Mr. Freud here.
Charles: She was reportedly very beautiful, she is certainly legally a slave, although after Jefferson dies
she is neither sold nor officially manumitted. To have been given her freedom officially I think had issues
about having to leave the community and so on, could well have. Although some of the men did not, so I
do not quite understand that. So Sally is allowed by Martha, the daughter, to live out her life in
Charlottesville on her own, well with family in Charlottesville.
Thelen: Did she ever reflect later? Obviously she well might have, but we do not know.
Charles: Not that is documented. I do not believe that the writings - I have not, it is either Estis or
Madison, one of the sons writes about the relationship. I do not believe that I have ever read about the
quality of the relationship.
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Thelen: That is what I guess I am asking. So you, as a designer of an exhibit, would you raise that
possibility at all? Would you invite the visitor to think about whether or not, or in what ways this might
have been a love?
Charles: I think that is going…I think if it was in an exhibit, maybe in an exhibit about relationships of
masters and slaves because I do not think I would necessarily do it at Monticello. I think there is just too
little evidence and it would be taking speculation in ways. There are many examples, obviously, of
relationships of masters and slaves and I even read recently of a novel that a woman has written and is
based on something she read about a resort near what is now Wilburforce Ohio, where masters and
their slave mistresses went to this resort even though it is in free country, but it was away from where
they lived. They all knew what was going on. In that case, is it that much different than a paid mistress of
another decade?
What we did go further, I think, Monticello of course, given who is the owner of this house
originally and so on, has walked carefully, but I think very honestly and forthrightly in trying to deal with
this whole issue of paternity and relationships. So it was a big step in To Try All Things to just put this all
out there. And say, “here are two family trees and Jefferson’s on both of them.” And in an exhibit it is
very hard to say probably, possibility.
Thelen: I was wondering about that.
Charles: When you have to draw family trees, he is either - he is there or he is not there. And you can
either do a dotted line or a hard line, and we did do some of that. We did dotted lines for particularly
the relationships when it was not one hundred percent certain who the father was but the relationship
for Jefferson on both, a hard line was used. The text is, in effect, most historians today and based on
historical documentation, DNA et cetera believe that Jefferson was the father of either four or six
children with Sally Hemings, so it is pretty straight forward.
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The next exhibit was after the visitors’ center opened there is a new small exhibit called
Crossroads. We have always talked about over the years, as we have worked on the dependencies which
are the areas underneath the main house. There is the kitchen and the washroom and the privy and
different things. The way that the house is laid out, everybody is crossing at this center area there. The
kitchen you have to bring the food to get up and the wine has to come this way and the wash has to
come down. Not only that, if you, if Madison came he would be dropped off at the east door. His slave
horseman would bring the carriage around or his horse if they had ridden around put them in the stable
underneath and certainly would have come in and talked with the slaves who were all working in the
crossroads. This had to be both a place where it is a crossroad for the Monticello based slaves, but
where all the outside news and so on is coming in.
We had the opportunity after the visitors center was done to do a small exhibit in this area. It
had an old archaeology exhibit they took it out and so on. There for the first time we talked about
specific people and we had illustrations drawn of specific people for whom we have no photographs, no
portraits. One is Martha the daughter for whom we do have a portrait, but the other five are slaves,
including Burwell who was the maitre’d and the senior slave in the house who controlled keys. We had
Aunt Pricilla Hemings who was John Hemings wife. We had Betty Brown, the oldest daughter of Betty
Hemings. We had Isaac, a young boy who was about ten. We had picked a date, probably 1909 when
Jefferson is back from the White House. Isaac works for Burwell carrying water, wood et cetera. And we
have Harriet Hemings. Harriet is Jefferson’s daughter. Harriet, and I am blanking on her brother’s name,
but the two older children who survived that are Jefferson and Sally Hemings’ children were in a sense
given their freedom. They were given money and they were sent North. As hard as everybody has
worked to try and figure out what happened to them, there is no evidence about what happened to
them. There is a presumption particularly for Harriet, but maybe both of them that they passed into the
white world.
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So we had drawings done, we decided the age, what they are going to look like, what clothes
they are going to look like. We used archaeology pieces that may or may not have belonged to these
people. For Isaac he is carrying a bucket of water and we have a bale handle. Let me go get the pictures.
[far away] Bob are you joining us?
Staples: Yes.
Thelen: This is an aside, Barbara has gone to get pictures of the materials they did for the exhibit on
Hemings and Jefferson at Monticello. This conversation began sort of spontaneously as a discussion of
empathy. Here come the pictures back. The pictures.
Charles: One of the goals in picking Isaac and Harriet was to get two children. And get children that
visitors could walk up to and visitor children and say, “oh that person could be me.”
Thelen: Is not that empathy right there?
Charles: I assume so.
Thelen: Are not you thinking whatever word you are using, I want something where kids visiting kids can
identify a little more likely with.
Charles: Here is a final picture. We decided to do these a little bit like late nineteenth century posters
with these flat colors. This is Martha, this is Burwell. She has got keys, she has handing them off to him.
This is actually in the exhibit. This is Harriet and Betty Brown. I think Harriet’s hair got changed to brown
because red is a regressive, is that right, trait. In the end the scholars felt that they had no real evidence
that she had red hair.
Thelen: Who are the scholars?
Charles: This would be Susan Stein.
Thelen: The ones we were talking about.
Charles: Here is a bunch of them as we were working on the setup. Here is Pricilla, here is Isaac. Those
colors, they are not quite that yellow. Here is Pricilla again, here is Isaac. They are life-size, we have had
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them all mocked up here at times. Pricilla took care of the white children, these are the drawings we
were working from. Pricilla has been whitened. One of the things we did - here is the Martha drawing,
Burwell -is we had to discuss skin color.
Thelen: I remember, yes, that must have been hard.
Charles: Well it was a fun discussion. I actually said to the artist, “we are going to get nailed badly if we
do not get everybody at Monticello, the key players at Monticello, to agree on skin color before these
are finished.” We were there with paint swatches and everybody was showing their skin and ultimately
Harriet was made the same color as Martha. Now Harriet presumably has some black blood…Sally is
either, I think it is eighth or possibly sixteenth, so it is pretty miniscule blood quantums, if that is what
you want to deal with.
There were discussions of how slaves were described in this period, whether you are bright or
mulatto. There were discussions also that John Hemings as Sally Hemings’ brother would have been
quite light skinned and it would have been unlikely that Pricilla, his wife, would have been too dark.
These were all part of the discussions in trying to decide how to illustrate these people. This was a major
step for Monticello to illustrate people that they did not have physical descriptions…
Thelen: They must have been ambivalent about that.
Charles: No they initiated it.
Thelen: They said we want to do mock ups.
Charles: We have been talking, we have been working on the dependencies with Monticello since ’99
when we did this visitor study. Over the years we have talked about how do we get people in here. It is
like baby steps. Finally this seemed the right time to do this area.
Thelen: Hang on, you said visitor study, what was that?
Charles: We did a study for Monticello, we were hired in 1999, I think we completed it in 2000, maybe
March of 2001. It was to look at what the visitor experience should be at Monticello. They were
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beginning to plan for a visitors’ center. They did some exit interviews primarily with visitors to say, “why
did you come here, what were you expecting, what were you hoping to do.” They found out that people
were not staying. People felt they were not getting as much of an experience that they wanted. They did
also other interviews with people who some of them had been to Monticello, some had not been,
where they found out that people were willing to pay considerably more if they got a better and longer
experience. There was certainly a feeling as one person put it, “it is a little hard to talk about liberty
when you are looking over Jefferson’s bed.”
Thelen: That is a good way to put it.
Charles: How do you get this broader story across? So in the process of that study, working very closely
with Susan Stein and others, but primarily Susan on the content part, that was also based on earlier
work they had been doing internally. The goal was to come up with three main themes. The question is
whether I have got them here or I am going to paraphrase them.
Basically, one theme was about Jefferson and the ideas and ideals that he gave to the nation,
certainly in drafting the Declaration of Independence and so on that have expanded, the Freedom of
Religion Act in Virginia, that had expanded and influenced people around the world. The second is about
Monticello particularly the physical Monticello that is a world heritage site and the only home in
America that is a world heritage site. Dealing with the whole architecture and significance of that house.
The third is about the plantation and the community of the plantation, the whole people of Monticello,
the families of Monticello. The plantation and that this was an economic entity and how does that all
work.
Thelen: Did Jefferson think of them as the family?
Charles: He - in 1776, there is a little list where he on one hand is listing on the left who were getting
beds and blankets. Betty Hemings gets a bed and who gets blankets and so on, but on the right of the
list is - he entitles it the souls in my family. He lists the free souls and the slave souls.
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Thelen: The souls in my family, singular.
Charles: In my family.
Thelen: So if you were thinking of presenting the families of Monticello and you have him calling it the
family, how, I see a difference there. How to present that to visitors?
Charles: We did not interpret it. We label it. We have an area [pause].
Thelen: It is on, I could stop it. It is a very good question, I would think.
Charles: I do not think that everything has to be interpreted. I think this To Try All Things exhibit I would
say that at least one of the design philosophies of it is that; it is not unlike what you might do as a
historian. Things are there and we hope the visitors find them and absorb them and we hope that we
have put them in interesting juxtaposition to each other so that people make the connections and get a
big picture.
If you tried to do - the show has a lot of text, I will not say it does not, but if you try to interpret
every single piece, maybe that is just plain overwhelming and gets down to some small details while
missing some much bigger ones or much bigger views. I am trying to look for a picture of - okay. There is
an end exhibit area, which is here. It is down at one end of the exhibit, but these are cases with artifacts
in them, Betty Hemings’ house, farm quarter, Stewart house, you are not seeing the artifacts in them,
you are seeing the humidity controls, but the background here is what I wanted to point out. These
cases come up in front of there.
Staples: Showing him the section to the left there.
Charles: We took - the most detailed information about the slave families at Monticello is in Jefferson’s
farm book and it is almost the only place where Sally is mentioned, in just lists of slaves. We took these
lists and took four of the ones we thought were the strongest and made them huge. One of them in the
front here is the Souls of my Family one, where he literally counts them.
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We were struggling in this exhibit, we had so many little pieces and how do you tie all these
little pieces together. An idea we came up with, if I can find another picture, is to do these huge
background murals. This is one for one section, there is another whole wall, but I am not finding Bob’s
floor plan which is kind of interesting. One long wall talks about agriculture, no his garden, his
agriculture, his industry, and his house, all of which he is doing experiments. We are talking about the
kind of Enlightenment experimentation and ideas he is bringing here. You have all this little stuff and
lots of text, so to tie them together we came up with this idea, these great big background murals.
[inaudible]
Charles: It is also covering up some windows that the architects put there that drove us crazy. The slave
ones are in effect doing that at this end. We actually came up with the idea of doing the slave ones. It is
one of those things that you kind of hope, you are a little afraid if you say - how do I put it? Rather than
suggest in advance we might do this, we just decide let us do it, see what it looks like, we thought it was
going to work. Then we presented it to the client to say “hey here is an idea of how to sort of get slavery
front and center without pushing it in everybody’s face.” It is there equal to all this other stuff that we
are doing in this great big way with these great big lists. They loved it, they thought it was great. It was
one of those days that you do not know when you are going into a meeting how it is going to work.
Staples: By that time we had a comfortable relationship with Susan and everybody.
Charles: We had a great relationship.
Staples: So you do not feel like you are going into a corporation board meeting, you go in with an
opportunity to discuss.
Thelen: You are going to have a conversation.
Charles: Absolutely, it has been a fabulous relationship.
Thelen: That would be sort of a model of what you hope happens. When it happens it is pretty nice and
it does not always happen.
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Staples: Occasionally you have to back up to go forward.
Charles: Susan, it is an interesting story. I thought I brought some napkins, or I had them on the tray, but
you took the tray away.
Staples: The tray is out there.
Charles: We had interviewed, we were talking yesterday about interviewing for jobs.
Staples: I hope you can explain this awkward discussion.
Thelen: Note, Barbara is now eating a muffin, end note.
Charles: It is very good.
Thelen: It is very good.
Charles: I am going to put it down. In the early eighties, I would say eighty-three, eighty-four, we were
asked to compete on the Joslyn project, which was Views of Vanishing Frontier, the Bobmer exhibit
going up the Missouri River and we won that competition and Ralph Applbom was another competitor. I
know we all bring up Applebom, he is sort of the big gorilla in this whole exhibit world, has a huge firm
now.
At this point we were all about the same size, about seven people I would say, or under ten, I do
not know exactly how big his office was. We won that one, but I think a year later was the interviews for
the first visitors’ center at Monticello. We had known Susan when she was at the Octagon here in
Washington. She had invited us to be one of the people to compete. We lost that to Ralph and that was
always a little bit of a disappointment, but Joslyn was pretty cool so we could not complain too much. In
’99 when we were invited to look at a visitors’ study, planning for a big visitor’s center, again the two
finalists were our office and Ralph’s. Interestingly, the day of the interviews was the day that they
announced; I think it was Nature Magazine, wherever the article came out about Jefferson’s DNA. It had
come out that morning. I cannot say people were totally focused on the interview given the press that
was swarming.
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Thelen: Although it may have given a certain sharpness to the interviews, I am guessing.
Charles: We were selected to do this study. Following that, that was very interesting to me. It was really
looking at not only what a visitors’ center could be and what the overall experience could be, but they
had hired Jack Robinson and I cannot tell you the exact name of the firm, but I can correct that later, to
do a whole study of the mountain top and where the visitors’ center would be and how that impacts
what else you are doing, how long are people on the bus, what direction are they coming from, et
cetera. They explored putting it at Chadwell from the east, they explored putting it, they finally settled
on a site down at the bottom of the mountain. They were quite determined not to put it on any
Jefferson land.
Eventually their site away fell, did not work out with the university. I think in the end it was
good it did not work out. They put the visitors’ center on the old site of the old visitors’ center. So in a
sense some land that was already polluted and that presumably if the architecture was kept low-level
enough you would not see it from the view shed from the mountain. They picked an architect, Air
Saintgroves. Our visitor interpretative study was given to the architects, we received a call saying, “you
will be on our team,” which I probably mentioned yesterday that being under an architect is not the
happiest place in the world.
We work going to continue to work on Monticello, that was exciting. We were already doing
work on the dependencies, we had already done the Indian Hall. Then after a while we get a call from
Susan saying that Dan Gerdin, the president, feels that they ought to, that they like Staple and Charles,
they like our work, but they think that this is a very important project and they ought to be interviewing
for it and not in effect make it a fate accompli. So we are one of the finalists. And Ralph Applebom was
selected. We would joke we are on top on the mountain and he is down at the bottom of the mountain
because we were still working up on the dependencies. That hurt, there is no question that hurt.
Thelen: How do you deal with that? I do not want to distract you, maybe find a glass of wine.
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Staples: Exactly. You have to get over it, move on. Turn the other cheek.
Thelen: That must be tough. That sounds like a particularly tough one because you had…
Staples: A vested interest.
Thelen: And these were friends, so to speak or people that you had relationships…
Charles: Susan had always been great with us. In fact on this visitor study report, I really worked hard
writing it and she called me one day and she said “Barbara, this is not your best work.”
Thelen: Well she is a friend in a certain way.
Charles: She is a great editor and we just knuckled down and went over the areas that she was
concerned about and rewrote and rewrote. That was in September and I did a couple more drafts. That
was the millennium New Years Eve and we were invited to Ohio and we did not go because I had to get
this thing done. I am very proud of that report.
Anyway we heard, I think it was very early 2003 that Applebom was selected. Part of the
archives will be our proposals, that we did not win. Then it was like April 2005, I got a call from Mike
Merium who was heading up the project, from the point of view of getting it constructed and trying to
figure out budgets and so on. He said, “can you update the budget you gave us a couple of years ago.” I
said, “that does not make any sense, I do not have a clue what is going on.” He said something like “we
do not either and your numbers are as good as anybody’s.”
Thelen: I see, that is how business is conducted in this world.
Charles: I do not know, I think every case is different. Everyone has to be very different. Do we have a
fan not on in here?
Staples: It is not hot in here Barbara.
Charles: It is hot in here. Anyway, so I just said “all I can do is say if we think the inflation is five percent
every year or seven percent, whatever numbers you want to use, I can just run the numbers again.”
Monticello works very much on an April and November cycle when the board meetings are. This was, I
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am sure, around board time, what is the report, where are we going? I was actually in New York and you
got the call from Susan. What did she say when she called?
Staples: I do not remember exactly what she said when she called, but the gist is, we would like you to
come back. Jordon had, I guess, given Applebom notice that he was no longer to participate in this
because of the lack of output or something. We got back on the case.
Charles: We have never seen, but Ralph did. Nobody talks about it.
Thelen: There is not a layer of Applebom in what I would see.
Staples: I do not think so.
Charles: Not in any of the exhibits, possibly in the architecture. In terms of influencing, but the exhibit
was tabla rasa when we came in.
Thelen: Could I go back to the details of that visitors study? Were you actually interviewing visitors or
were you imagining what visitors might experience in the future? What do you mean by visitors study?
Charles: Give me one second to see if I can find one.
Staples: Did you read that book already?
Thelen: I finished both volumes.
Staples: Good.
Thelen: I read the part about Robert Charles, pretty awesome. Who wrote it?
Staples: Marliyn Newheart. She was the wife of John Newheart. He was a graphic designer.
Thelen: Also a writer?
Staples: Not so much. He is more of a graphic artist. He worked, he was employed at UCLA as a
professor.
Thelen: It is a pretty awesome book in terms of giving me a sense of the Eames world, the pictures, it is
really a nice book.
Staples: If you are interested in the furniture, it is a nuts and bolts kind of thing.
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Thelen: But it is also human beings and their having lives, I was pretty impressed. This is another
footnote here, we are referring to a two volume book by Marlin Newheart and John Newheart called the
story of Eames furniture. It is a beautiful set of books that illustrates the furniture and the lives of the
people making it. Sorry, we are back to Monticello.
Charles: This is really imaging what the visitor experience could be.
Thelen: That is what I was hearing.
Charles: There were interviews, not by us, but I benefited from them. Exit surveys of what visitors were
expecting. There were also some interviews with what one calls study groups…
Thelen: Focus groups?
Charles: Focus groups, about, from different places, New York City, Washington, would you come to
Monticello, what would you want, et cetera. This is more, and we benefited from that, but this is much
more trying to project what a future visitor experience could be and who all the visitors might be. What
we certainly did learn and I actually spent a couple of days trying to figure out who is coming when.
They had never collated what hours of the day people are coming, when buses are coming,
when families are coming. It is quite different during April and May, there is very heavy school group
traffic. Summer you get families so it is a different kind of experience, people coming with their families.
September is, I think this is true in almost every museum that has group tours, is one of the lowest
months of the year because the kids have just come back to school so no bus trips have been organized
yet. It is trying to think about how you are moving people through here and what should be the
relationships of the spaces. We did bubble diagrams of the relationships of spaces, ideas for exhibits. At
the very beginning are the three themes that we were talking about.
Thelen: That raises a big question for me, themes. In this article that you wrote in the Bladdy book on
the Past meets the Presence. You talk about one of the key ingredients being the story and now we are
talking about the theme.
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Charles: Are they the same?
Thelen: Well, no, that might be the answer. In most cases I can imagine having lots of stories and lots of
potential themes. In this case you are talking about cars, so the car in the twentieth century. The
possible things to talk about a car in the twentieth century are large. The possible things to talk about at
Monticello are large.
Charles: Let me find them and then I will try and talk about how that affects things.
Thelen: Just in a general manner.
Charles: I think it is important that you…
Thelen: Maybe it shouldn’t be a general manner.
Charles: I think you figure out what should be your main messages and you are basically using those as
markers to check yourself against. Are you - is what you are now proposing working for that or is it now
doing something else? If you were trying to talk about an exhibit on the evils of slavery, you would then
want to find out whether - look at every example you are giving and whether that is supporting what
you have said you want to do. It may not be what you should be doing.
Thelen: So there are two issues.
Charles: These are the three themes: Thomas Jefferson creating a nation, Monticello building an
American icon, and Monticello discovering the plantation and community. Obviously this second one is
done fairly well up on top of the mountain top with the house. In doing the visitors’ center, while we
have a temporary exhibit about it, it was not intended to be the story in the visitors’ center. In the
visitors’ center it was more important to get across Jefferson outside of Monticello, the whole influence
on the nation, the world, that is done in the film and it is also done in the gallery we call liberty.
The plantation one we wanted to - one issue was to get across just even the breath of the
plantation let alone the people. The people we have been talking about earlier. We had a huge bronze
model, we designed it and suggested who could make it and so on that everyone can stand around and
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get a sense of Monticello house is that big on this six by nine foot model. It is really great and on it, sorry
to keep walking away.
Staples: It is on the size of this table.
Thelen: A little tiny corner like size of a couple fingers.
Staples: Monticello is like that much.
Thelen: That is brilliant.
Staples: We have all the contours and the textures change for forest and fields.
Thelen: How do you, through what eye do you think of that? Do you think most people would expect
that if you are doing something about Monticello that you focus on Monticello. Somehow you or you
with the curators, let us take a sky view and see the whole plantation, where they are growing tobacco
and where people are living and whatnot. How do you get to that perspective?
Charles: I think it is twofold. One is that they have a very extensive archaeology department, so they
have been focused on the whole Monticello.
Thelen: So the client is focused there.
Charles: So the client is focused there, the challenge for us is well, that is great, how do we illustrate it
and where do we illustrate it? I think it was really our idea to make this model. First to do the model at
all, do this huge model. Then, secondly to - its position too. It is bronze, so it can be outside. These are
the roundabouts. Those are his roads. Those are his road systems, that is Monticello right there, the
building. That is Mulberry Row. This is the East Road, Chadwell was down over here. This is Milton the
little town on the river that everything shipped out of, this is the Rivena River. Charlottesville is down
over here. Everything that is light was land he owned now. Some of it obviously extended down here
and up here, but all the fields that actually were tended are within the model.
Thelen: Do you know what was grown in the various places?
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Charles: Oh, they do. They started out with a lot of tobacco and then go into wheat. They have done
very very extensive studies. The model is fabulous. I mean people love it.
Thelen: I can see why.
Charles: You can get a whole school or group around it and then we can say if you go down that road
that is how to go to Charlottesville. If you want to go to Washington or Richmond you take this road.
Down this river you can get to London. So those are all really fun. The archaeology guys are great to
work with.
Thelen: I am coming back to the theme or the perspective. So the client came up with the perspective.
How did you get that theme?
Charles: They had been working around these themes for quite a while. At one point we actually had
four themes; we had Jefferson, we had Monticello, the plantation and the people. Then we combined it
to three themes. This was really working with Susan and Frasier from archaeology would be around the
table and other people and so on. Sort of the inner intellectual powerhouses down there. You do not
often have a client that has the depth of both on staff research and just a subject matter that has been
researched for two hundred years.
Thelen: Right, good point.
Charles: It was felt we had to have some place that really gave you an overview of the plantation. Our
idea was let us make this huge plantation model. Once you start saying well what scale should it be and
so on and how big is it practical to actually make it. It is positioned not inside, it is positioned outside, so
our hope is even if people do not go in the exhibit gallery they see this thing near the café and they get
interested and hang around it and see what it is. You can touch it and so on. The only mistake we made
here is people do not know where they are. We should have thought about a way and we could still
potentially drill something. The visitors’ center is about here. People want to know that. It has been very
well received.
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Thelen: Stepping back, the question of theme and story, the story, the theme.
Charles: I think there is a lot of stories, but you do need to say what is your major theme or your major
ideas you are trying to get across. [background noise] In planning with the team there what went where
in the visitors’ center, we kept saying, “Okay we are covering this topic here we are covering this one
here, we are covering that one here. We are overlapping, we are covering this one and this one here.”
But try to get a sense if people went to each of the stations of the cross, that they would get all this
perspectives.
Thelen: So if I were, if I came along and said, “no I think the perspective we need or the theme we need
is this person or this slave who lived there tended this tobacco field.”
Charles: I would say that is a pretty small picture.
Thelen: Not for him.
Charles: If the site is Monticello…you mean if you want him?
Thelen: What I am really trying to do is understand how a theme gets surfaced, discussed and decided
upon. I am being hypothetical here. Let us say I was trying to talk about slavery and one world of
mircohistory. One way to do that would be to take the viewpoint of a slave or a particular slave family
and what they do from day to day. They have nothing to do with Jefferson, well they do of course.
Charles:But they may be living some place very different.
Thelen: It is a potential perspective, it is a potential theme. I am not pushing this theme, I am just trying
to understand. Well maybe it would be useful to talk about a debate, should we make this a theme or
that a theme? Should we talk about this story or that story? You are saying a theme or a story is crucial
to the design. You have to have that before. Maybe it is good to talk about how you come up with those.
Charles: Theme to me is the bigger subject. For example to pursue one slave, the discussions of who
should be the people in To Try All Things, who you should focus on, why this one over this one, who do
you pick for our six people down in Crossroads?
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Part of the issue, of course, is who do you know anything about? Some slaves are much better
documented. John Hemings who is literate and who is writing letters to Jefferson from Poplar Forest
while he is down there finishing the interior woodworking is a pretty compelling character. And is he
freed. That is another issue, who is freed by Jefferson and he says kind of why and so on versus who is
not. Some do not live long enough, who runs away or is sold. There were a lot of discussions of who you
pick and this is a discussion that at least for us has been going on for at least ten years because each of
the areas in the dependencies, like when we first did the cook’s room in 2003, they picked the Faucet
family. It is a very small room, not as big as this room. It probably has John Faucet, who is an iron
worker, his wife Edie who is a cook and they had ten children, but maybe only five are still living with
them in this space. We had already done the Faucet family, so do you do them again or do you do
someone else? That has been one of the issues, they really have the riches of knowing a lot about their
slaves because they have been doing all this research for so long.
We have been trying to pick different people different times. Burwell who is so important, is the
maitre’d. He almost had to be in Crossroads because he is controlling the keys, he is the key person
down here literally. Who is going to be saying now you get that done, we are doing this up here. He is
also one of our important people upstairs. He is both a painter and the maitre’d. He is given his
freedom. He is the only slave who buys things at the Monticello auction. He buys several things at the
Monticello auction and they have the receipt for what he buys. You have got wonderful stories. Some of
them, like Sally, it is much harder to make a story with them. Even though there is this whole side with
Jefferson and we talk about that, when we are trying to actually show the documents which we usually
try to do or have quotes, there is very little to show.
Great George and Ursula, Great George was the only black overseer, so he is an important
person and he is near the plantation area. If you want to develop a story on somebody, I would say part
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of the real issue is what do you have to work with. I think increasingly what is really exciting that is going
on is people are not using hypothetical information. They are trying to use real evidence.
Staples: Just the facts ma’am, just the facts.
Charles: As they are archaeology at the sites and they know where people lived, it is very interesting to
see the quality of things Betty Hemings has or they found slates and pencils at Betty Hemings’ house. As
far as they know, she is illiterate. But it does suggest that she is taking care of kids and the kids are at
here place and they have got their little homework to do, maybe not official homework, but somebody
is showing them how to do things. So there is just a richness here that is terrific.
We did a little work at Stratford Hall, they know much less about their slaves. Now partly they
have not been doing this work for twenty, thirty years, but there also just seems to be a lot less
documents preserved. Jefferson must have kept every piece of paper he ever wrote on. The documents
are his documents, so they are from his perspective.
Staples: In his hand.
Charles: In his hand, and that becomes a problem. We have had at times a number of discussions about,
we do not always want it to be Jefferson’s quote about somebody. How do you make it their
presentation of themselves? I think these six figures downstairs go a real step forward to say, “I am who
I am. I am a real person. I am as big as you are. I lived.” And so on.
Thelen: I was going back to another thing we were talking about. Jefferson says my family, our family…
Charles: Souls in my family.
Thelen: Souls in my family. To frame, to illustrate what you guys now want to talk about, the Hemings
and Jefferson. [background noise] You decide to do the families or two families.
Charles: I am not sure I would…
Thelen: Maybe I am misunderstanding.
Charles: Let us go back to that notebook.
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Thelen: What is at stake here is the view of the participant and the view of the scholar or designer. The
outside view and the inside view.
Charles: The view of the visitor when you say participant or the view of Jefferson?
Thelen: The participant, the person at the time, in this case Jefferson. Maybe there is contradictory
evidence where he says families. I have my black families and my white families.
Charles: No I do not think there is that. I think this is, as far as I know there is only one document like
this, so it is seventy-six. It is certainly very paternalistic, it is these are all the people I am responsible for.
Thelen: So that is how he is defining family at that point?
Charles: It seems to be, at least a way I am reading it.
Thelen: It makes sense to me.
Charles: That he is saying, these are all the people I have to, whatever quality of life I am giving them, I
have to give them blankets, I have to give them food, et cetera. So he is listing them all as the souls of
his family. It is the people of Monticello. Certainly in the exhibits today I do not think we would say all
these people are one family. There is a real effort to talk about families and they know who is related to
whom. I do not think that we pursued it to the degree at the time that you are pursuing it now Dave.
The soul of my family’s quote is here. The two Jefferson families, the Hemings family is here and the
white family is over here.
Thelen: This is all in one room or one hall.
Charles: This is one big case area at one end of a gallery about the plantation. We talk about living at
Monticello on the kind of archaeology evidence that they are finding out on the site. This was a place to
show the kind of material culture that is being found. And to put some names and people and kind of
give us the extent of particularly Betty Hemings family, but just the numerical differences and
interrelationships.
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There are multiple families, when we did the signage at the graveyard, the black graveyard, the
people are grouped to the extent that they are known familial relationships, rather than just say in
alphabetical order. There are families. There is no text here that will say, “Jefferson paternalistically will
say all the souls of my family, but in fact there are many many families at Monticello.” It is not that
open, hit you on the head.
Thelen: I do not want to pursue something that is not, well anyways. The question is and it is really a
question of and if there is a better example or a better case we should be talking about, let us shift
cases. The problem of identifying the theme. I do some work with the park service and they have to
have interpretative themes for the same reason you do, what is going to be included and what is not. I
could readily see a tremendous debate about meaning of family in different eras for example. Here is
my problem, I really understand why you want to talk about two families in the case of Jefferson. I
understand why you would put him at the top of two family trees.
Charles: He is not at the top.
Thelen: Well in the middle.
Charles: He is just wherever he showed up.
Thelen: He is an intersection point in two, but you are presenting two families in this story and I
understand why he is featured.
Charles: He is same type size as everyone else.
Thelen: I understand why he is the same type size. But you have constructed two families. He had
constructed one family, in this one quote. We are interpreting and calling it paternalistic and all that. He
may never have thought of the word paternalism. That is what tripped off his pen and he wrote words
off his pen, we will give him that. How - this is a big issue, these multiple perspectives and controversy.
How to deal with different ways of understanding something as important as family. What we would
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think it is what maybe somebody else on those two families did see it that way. It would be interesting
to know if his sons and daughters on side saw there being two families and on the other side…
Charles: That is the problem nowadays as to who is - there are reunions at Monticello and it is a very
contested issue at Monticello.
Thelen: Whether to see this as one family or two?
Charles: Oh yes. Or there is only one family, the white family. From descendants on one side.
Thelen: So there is clearly an issue.
Charles: Oh it is contested turf.
Thelen: Real contested turf. So as designers, let us come at it, how do you decide to deal with the
contemporary controversy or to ignore it?
Charles: Well this was probably as strong a statement - I am going to back up on that. Monticello has
accepted the DNA evidence. Monticello as an institution has accepted the DNA evidence and the
supporting historical evidence. There are a lot of other studies that go with it. When is Jefferson at
Monticello, et cetera. That Jefferson is in all probability the father of Sally Hemings, as they say four or
six children, four survive, somehow I think there is six. I am not sure. That is an institutional position that
has been accepted and I would say over the years we have been working on this project, the wording of
how they accept it has gotten stronger. From possibly to probably, et cetera. Certainly Annette GordonReed’s book has supported that also.
Monticello as an institution has to deal with the annual gathering of the white descendants and
a few of whom have invited black descendants. There have been big controversies. Sometimes the black
descendants come and some of the white descendants are there. There is clearly, there are people who
do not accept this. There are parts of this particular exhibit that probably via docents who had advance
documents, were leaked and there was a fairly anti-, small column in a Richmond paper, somebody that
they pretty much understand will always write against their position, that did write against this before it
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came out. What we did here, of basically putting it out there without a lot of editorializing. There is this
family, there is this family, we put all of the people of Monticello in one case, in one area. The black
people, the white people. Betty Hemings is the matriarch of the black community gets her own case,
partly it has to do with what sites have been excavated. This was a statement to say, “this was all a
community. These are all the people who are living here.” I think it is also saying that there are separate
black and white families.
In that sense, while we put the souls of my family front and center and it is probably my choice
because I find that piece fascinating. And there was debate about it. At times I was pushing to have that
as a quote, as a big quote in this area. It is not there. That was not other people’s view. This is, this was
seen as a forceful statement at the time that it was done, illustrating Harriet was another step in that
direction, a big step in that direction. Mulberry Row, while it will not particularly focus on the Sally
Hemings-Jefferson relationship, while Sally may have lived in one of the houses, is a continuing effort to
bring the non-house on the hill households forward. All the work forward, to try to convey to visitors
that this is a whole community that is a working establishment, that is more or less economically
successful. Sometimes less economically successful and a lot of the stuff that Jefferson is trying to do is
for economics, with his nailry and different stuff. The discussion, families was not a topic, per say.
Thelen: That is to me interesting.
Charles: What the topic really was the people of Monticello and how to convey them. Those people live
in families and there are two major families on this hill, Betty’s family and Jefferson’s family. So we have
tried to convey that there are two major families on this hill. The title here is Living at Monticello, it is
not the families of Monticello.
Thelen: I do not want to pursue this too much.
Charles: I find that document amazing.
Thelen: I do too.
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Charles: The souls of my family.
Thelen: I find it extraordinary. Almost as extraordinary as something else he wrote in 1776.
Charles: And because it is 1776. There is no question that if I can find the big version of it, you can
actually read it. Anything that is 1776, you tend to pick. [papers shuffling] This is the first list, where he is
listing who is at Monticello. This is seventy-four, Betty has come, but I do not think the children, I think
that is the Betty we are thinking about. This is Great George, that is the first list that is available. I love
these names. Jupiter is, this is a topic I do not think anybody has worked on, but I think they should.
Jupiter is exactly Jefferson’s age, grows up with him, probably as a playmate, goes with him to William
and Mary. Then comes back and becomes a stonecarver and other things. James Madison, there is a boy
Sonnie, exact same age, playmate, goes with him to Princeton. Now what are these slaves learning at
college. What are they doing at college? I suspect that every one of these kind of first sons of families
that were sent off to college, that a slave went with them.
Thelen: I know there has been work done on the ones at Harvard. The Southern kids that brought their
slaves to Harvard.
Charles: What are the slaves doing?
Thelen: What are they learning? Fantastic question, great question.
Charles: This is the document. So it is headed blankets, beds, et cetera given to slaves. So Shoemaker
Phil gets a blanket, Betty Hemings gets a blanket, Lucinda Ned-Gamy blankets, blankets sent to Bedford,
that is another plantation and to John’s wife, Black Sal, Sam blankets, Black Sal, Doll, beds. So here,
number of in my family in Albemar, that is Monticello as given in this year. Males of sixteen years…
Thelen: This is interesting too. His first category is not free and slave, it is male and female.
Charles:Here is free and here is slaves.
Thelen: Free and slaves. So he saw his family as having males and females and free and slave.
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Charles: Males below sixteen, females below sixteen. Number of free and slaves and number of in the
whole.
Thelen: Fascinating document.
Charles: This is not just, I mean the free would include his family, but also the white workmen, anybody
on the mountain top presumably.
Thelen: I am not sure, I think maybe the best way to talk about themes and stories is case by case.
[background noise] There is no general, you do not have a general. You have clients to deal with, you
have sources that are available for a person. Maybe it will be more productive.
Charles: I just would say the theme ought to cover the whole exhibit. Then there are subthemes or
stories for different parts.
Thelen: Combining that with the question about empathy. Historians and museum exhibitors,
historically, were the eye of God announcing the truth.
Charles: The curators and so on.
Thelen: Exactly, and the text on an old museum thing would say, this is the truth. This is our authority.
Historians would write books in that way. In the last, basically your time as designers, very much
questions, come up with alternative voices and alternative perspectives. Multiple perspectives becomes
a way of thinking of it, empathy becomes - there is just a whole bunch. I would be very interested in
your general thoughts about it. If you do not think that is a good way to go, we can just deal with it case
by case. To me it is a revolutionary change in how a museum or a site presents itself.
Staples: I think one of the things that is obviously happened in our careers is that the big man idea has
disappeared.
Thelen: And that is part of it, the big man has disappeared.
Staples: Right, and you are interested now in the little people who make the big man what he is.
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Charles: I think there is a cycling going back. I hope and I think it is happening. I am going to use
Montpelier. They have been struggling with what is their theme.
Thelen: Other than the Constitution.
Charles: No, that is the issue. This house is important because of the Constitution, I think that everybody
agrees. Monticello on the other hand could be very important even without the Declaration.
Montpelier had really been struggling and we have been working with them on how to get the idea that
the seed and germ of the Constitution was written at Montpelier in the idea of the Virginia Plan and that
Madison is very responsible, not only for the ideas going into the Constitutional Convention, but
lobbying very hard to get Virginia in particular to vote for the Constitution and pass it.
I think particularly for historic houses or historic sites, trying to struggle with why is it even here
and I wish more of them would even ask that question and what should we be getting across? I do not
know if you what Catherine Kane has been doing up at the Stow Center, which is Harriet Beecher Stow’s
house.
Thelen: I do not.
Charles: They are doing wonderful work on social issues today. It is a site now for discussions and all
kinds of things going on about, not only looking at Uncle Tom’s Cabin in new light and so on, but really
trying to talk about today’s issues and so on. I think that she has done brilliant work with that. I think
more houses - if Edison’s house is saved because he developed the electric light bulb, why do I have to
look at living room suites?
We have tried to advocate totally unsuccessfully that more spaces in houses ought to be exhibit
spaces about topics rather than furnished spaces. I think they do that more in Europe than in places
here. We tried very hard to advocate for the Martha Mitchell apartment in Atlanta and we were fired
from the job. I am not sure we were fired for this, I am sure there were a number of other reasons. They
only had a very few artifacts, but of them was her typewriter which was pretty cool and they had a few
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other things and the rest like a lot of houses, they were going to get the bed that looked like or the lamp
that looked like. You do not even know what the wallpaper is, why do not we paint this whole
apartment in shades of white and gray, enough so you can differentiate where furniture is and you get
spatial sense, but only the typewriter, only those things that are absolutely real have color because they
are real and they are there. We have never gotten anybody to buy that idea.
Staples: I mean maybe Montpelier is the closest thing we have come to that. The solution of the diners
around the table.
Thelen: Talk a bit more about that Bob.
Staples: I think Barbara has got some documents. They have created quite a nice little package for this
brand that they have gotten in a study period that we are participating in is to get them, to get the grant
that they want.
Charles: They have had a little NEH interpretative grant, not a lot of money. The idea was how to get
ideas into this place. They are doing some great work. This is actually their slave site, where they are
beginning to rebuild buildings. And they have very exciting archaeology programs that you and I could
go down there for a week and do archaeology and they bring in kids. It is a very aggressive program. This
was a whole slave housing site and a kitchen in view from the house. When I was down there they have
two of these buildings up now, they are going to do all of them. With the money after many discussions,
it was decided, and it has to do with the tour also…
Staples: Peopling the house.
Charles: Peopling the house. One idea was right when you first come in to get visitors aware that there
are slaves in this house, it is not just Madison. This was a little idea to get Sonnie and young James
Madison working together bringing furniture into the house when the house first gets built. It is right
when they first come in, when visitors first come in, this is in the first room.
Staples: This is their table, right?
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Charles: That is Nellie, the mother’s real table.
Thelen: This is an actual table.
Charles: It is a real table.
Staples: It is not a simulated table, it is a real one.
Charles: They have carefully, Williamsburg was great, lent clothing. James has slightly better clothing,
but they both have their sleeves rolled up, but his is better quality. He has buckles on his shoes, just the
coloring. It was really nice. Just decided the simple eggheads would say black and white, we did not have
to go to ten thousand dollars for carved figures. Visitors see it immediately, they cannot miss that there
are slaves in this house. A little farther in, and they are now going to do visitor studies. The guides
already love it. It has given them a whole new way to do the tours. When you come to the dining room,
we did a hypothetical.
Staples: The walls of the dining room have been restored.
Charles: That is the real wallpaper.
Staples: But that table that they are sitting around is a loaner, it is not the table that was in there.
Charles: It is from Williamsburg, but we put a tablecloth on it.
Thelen: Is this living history? Is there going to actually be actors sitting there?
Charles: No these are just drawn…
Staples: By the same woman that drew the ones at Monticello.
Charles: These are all people who dined there. We had big discussions, should we make it a real dinner
or should we make it a hypothetical dinner? I think it should have been one dinner with people they
know were there together. This instead are more famous people who all were there at different times.
We have Lafayette and Jackson and Jefferson. I mean Jackson comes after Jefferson is dead, so it is not a
possible dinner. The idea, Madison sat in the center of the table, not at the end so he kind of carried
forth talking to everybody from his central position. Dolly they know always sat at the end closer to the
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kitchen, controlling things. We have Sonnie, it is not Sonnie, it is Jennings standing up as a waiter at the
end of the room. I do not know if he is in that picture?
Thelen: He is not.
Charles: That is another experiment there, is to just, you are not just looking at a dining room. You are
trying to talk about what is happening in this dining room. They have not a real discussion, but noise
that is going on in here.
Thelen: So is part of that to illustrate a dinner or is part of that to talk about a dynamic out of which the
Constitution or some, what does that have to do with the Constitution as a theme?
Charles: It has more to do with Madison post-Constitution sharing ideas, talking to people. He is very
involved up until his death to get his papers in order and I think to keep conveying his ideas to people
and he is supposed to be a great raconteur. So it is more about how the house worked and the
entertainment and the number of people that came here and who would be coming. The idea that other
presidents are coming here to get his ideas and check on him and so on.
In a stairway, here are two of the slave people. This is Sonnie standing there. Then in the
stairwell as a different way of getting people in, we photographed Lennie Sorinstin, she is the black
interpreter from Monticello and we have her in costume bringing food up a stairway. That is going to be
a little bit of a discussion, I guess, with visitors, I hope. Had do you feel about having photographs of real
people there who might have been a slave?
Thelen: So they have got some ideas here and they are now going to bring in visitors and say what do
you think of this, what do you think of that.
Charles: They are studying them all summer long.
Thelen: In other words something is set up now, but it is not the final.
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Charles: It is not necessarily the final, it is all ideas. On the dinner table we have taken one of these
drawings from the nineteenth century and just drawn plates. They do not have all the china, but said
they have got lobster, and they are based on foods they know they had.
The key issue on the Constitution was how do you get that in? They have changed the tour. The
tour used to only be the first floor, but the room they always thought the Constitution ideas might have
been drafted in was the second floor room, they do not know. They know this room was a little later
than that, called the old library. When the new library is built where he does his final work, there is a
place called the old library on the second floor. They have assigned that to be the Constitution room for
better or for worse.
In there, when you first come in and you just are sitting down, quite large on the walls are
quotes and the idea here is that Madison is reading like two hundred books in seven languages, but he is
getting ideas from Aristotle, from Montesquieu, from Cicero, from John Adams. Our people that we
work with at Montpellier worked with the Constitutional scholars there to pick pairs of quotes to say
here is an idea from Montesquieu, here is a Madison quote.
Thelen: Which he might have taken. So they might have the books underlined or something like that.
Charles: I do not think they have that, but I think the scholars working on it can pretty much say, they
may have underlined. I do not know what the basis of this is. To get across this idea that in this library
you are reading ideas, this is not coming out of his head, just blossoming.
Thelen: It is great, it is constructed.
Charles: That you can read, they are quite big. Again, just in our process, we designed it. They had an
idea of an hourglass. Here is all the stuff going in, here is Madison, here is all the stuff coming out. I
could not figure out a way that the public would understand it, I could not understand it. I could not
graphically think of how it could work. We were in a meeting one day and I said” what if we did quote
clouds is what I called these. What is a quote cloud?” So you do a sketch on the wall and say, “well this is
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the idea, here is our wall.” Pick three, pick five, pick seven, I like uneven numbers. Come up with them
and so we laid it out. Then we mocked up them full-size and took them down there for everybody to
look at and sign off on.
In the same room, they do not have all the books in bookshelves. But then they made a little
video about making the Constitution, they made it a little quick and dirty, but it will get improved. We
just drew - I think Bob had the idea of drawing a bookshelf, so the video was in a bookshelf again. Saying
the books are the genesis of what you are going to see. In the video it says in this room more than it
should, but I think they are going to change it to say in this place so it is a little more ambiguous whether
it is this room or another room. He is reading. He holes himself up there for seven months or so and is
just reading and reading and reading.
Thelen: Is that so?
Charles: I think that is right, a lot of time. Jefferson is sending like two hundred books back from Paris
for him.
Thelen: Sorry, that is fascinating.
Charles: The script, they are saying, “concerned for the survival of the country, James Madison returned
to Montpelier in the winter of eighty-six in search of an answer to a question, how best can we govern
ourselves.” Then they are saying he reads and reads and reads. “Was here sequestered, aided by books
sent by Jefferson that James sought out wisdom of the words of great men reading more than four
hundred books in seven different languages.”
Thelen: And presumably very much guided by tariff disputes between Maryland and Delaware and all
the other kind of things around him.
Charles: Yes, that is going on. That is a little test, I am not sure what I was answering at that moment.
You were talking about the dining table?
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Thelen: We were also talking about the themes of the Constitution. When you have a guided tour, this
has had huge discussions, how long should a guided tour be, can we really get people through all these
rooms and upstairs. I am concerned, one of the rooms they are going to restore is the room he dies in.
They know when the bed was bought, they know what bed it is. It had like thirty yards of red satin
drapes it is one of these beds with all these drapes above it.
Staples: Well you can tell their taste by the dining room wallpaper.
Charles: It is bright red flocked wallpaper on another room. This is all based on evidence that they are
finding. I am very concerned that this last room which has a wonderful quote from Jennings, who is his
slave, manservant, who is there when he dies, who talks about his death. It has another soundtrack that
they can use, the guides, that they want from Nellie, not Nellie, Dolly. A quote from Madison kind of
words to my country and his kind of last ideas his wants people to know and it is very touching.
Right now it is a pretty bare, Spartan room, what happens when it is red satin? We will see if
people, what the mood is. I think this issue of decorating houses, versus the meaning that you are trying
to get across.
Thelen: In this case they one of, if not the definitive, will be the visitors this summer who go. Will they
have a choice of one side of the room in red satin and the other side is…
Charles: That is not done yet.
Staples: The interesting thing about Monticello or Montpelier is the words. Both of the men were
wordsmiths. When you have to do an exhibit about words, it is difficult. How do you conjure?
Thelen: Well that is a really good question because you are dealing with abstractions.
Staples: I think that the solution that Monticello came up with is the liberty gallery, we call it. It is a very
very complicated multiscreen slideshow that goes on too long, but it is beautiful.
Charles: People love it or hate it.
Staples: It is really talking about the idea of liberty and any manner or method of doing it.
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Thelen: In the case of Monticello, it is…
Charles: This is an elaborate multiscreen. We were part of the whole process of deciding to do that. This
is getting back to this theme, this gallery is dealing with this theme.
Staples: The one thing that we were not parties to, is the decision of the architect to build the complex
the way they did.
Charles: That was done by the time.
Thelen: We are back to the architect now. The difficulty of working.
Charles: We like them, we work well with them.
Staples: The mandate for them was to not build an edifice. Let the house be the edifice. What happened
of course is that we ended up little rooms.
Charles: Here is the complex.
Thelen: Looks nice.
Staples: It is nice. It is a gathering place around the pool, the cafeteria, the eatery is there, the restrooms
are there, the ticket office is there, the gift shop is there and the museum is there. The museum is two
stories, two levels, one big room on the top floor and two rooms.
Charles: This is the gallery building.
Thelen: Let us go back to the issue you raised which is an abstraction, liberty. Let us say that we are
going to somehow think about that with Jefferson. Some scholars point out that a lot of what Jefferson
put in the Declaration was basically lifted from a variety of other declarations going around at the time,
Pauline Myer’s book for instance. When you are taking an idea, but it comes out of, pretty clearly,
comes out of other sources, there is another layer. The Madison idea was to show the word and then
put quotes it might have come from or that are consistent with it. I suppose the same thing could be
done with Jefferson.
Charles: I think it could if you were doing an exposition on the Declaration.
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Staples: I do not remember anybody saying that Jefferson plagiarized.
Thelen: I did not say plagiarized.
Staples: I know you did not.
Thelen: I do not mean plagiarized, but the burden is that there were a bunch of declarations of
independence.
Staples: There was a lot of history had gone before him.
Thelen: He was mindful of the declarations from the different colonies, mindful of the French and
English and so on.
Charles: This is not - Montpelier is specifically about or I would say the goal was the whatever. Madison
is writing his ideas here and that he is sourcing them. He is reading all these sources, that was the
theme.
Thelen: I actually see that clearly.
Charles: This is actually a much bigger theme, of which parsing Declaration is not or could be a very very
small part of it. It is a much bigger theme. First trying to get across the idea that we were all Englishmen,
we were not all Americans. Why are we even fighting this revolution? The Declaration is a part of it, but
it is a bigger story.
I think that it, I think here also part of it has to do with what medium you chose. If you chose a
medium that is moving fast like this, you might get one sentence in about Jefferson read these. It would
be one or two screens in a small area. If it is something somebody really has to study, then maybe it has
to be done in a different way, if that is what somebody wants to get across.
Thelen: What I am hearing you say that one of the challenges is “okay there is a Constitution, here it is,
words in the moonlight,” whatever you want to say. Here is this place where it got written. Actually, of
course, Monticello is not where it got done, but let us just forget that and say a human being wrote it
who happen to live here.
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Charles: The Declaration.
Thelen: The Declaration. How to present, how to connect the words written to the place and the person
who wrote them? Probably this is not an abstraction, this is case by case.
Charles:I think that is a bigger issue with Montpelier. I do not think the general public - the connection
of Madison to the Constitution is not as strong in the public memory, knowledge as Jefferson and the
Declaration. That would be my assumption. They are trying very hard. They have a slogan, thank you Mr.
Madison, you gave us the Constitution, thank you Mr. Madison. They are really pushing that theme.
Thelen: Nobody is writing curse you Mr. Madison.
Charles: No. the real goal of the Montpellier room was to make that connection. Madison is writing it,
he is writing in this building so this building is important to save and revere. You are on hallowed
ground. That was not so much a goal with this. This was more trying to put Jefferson and what he did in
the world context.
Thelen: Let me try a different way of putting this and then I am not going to deal any more with my
hang-ups. At Gettysburg it is quite possible that there is a direct connection between Lincoln and slavery
at Gettysburg, not at the battlefield, but at the cemetery. Right? Where Lincoln writes the Gettysburg
Address.
Charles: Where he delivers it.
Thelen: Where he delivers it or down the street where he writes it. There is a definite connection
between where he was staying and where he delivered it. I certainly think an interpretative theme
would have to do with how Lincoln made slavery into a cause of the war, into this is now a war over
slavery to give a new birth of freedom to Jefferson’s words.
At Antietam where there is no connection, no similar kind of connection with slavery except
that the North not losing that battle gave Lincoln the excuse to write the declaration, to issue the
Emancipation Proclamation. So the Park Service interprets in a major way, the end of slavery to the
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Antietam battlefield. There is nothing there that has a connection to it. Maybe that is like Jefferson and
the Declaration in a way. The question of how do we link? I am really back to the issue what I thought
you were throwing out, how do you deal with an abstraction at a site. Gettysburg I see it, it is a pretty,
you can ground it. I see Montpellier.
Charles: Even Gettysburg, I would have to reread the Gettysburg Address, but I do not think he
addressed, mentioned slavery per say in the Gettysburg Address.
Thelen: That is a good point. He talks about a new birth of freedom. We interpret it as…government. He
says we are coming up with a new interpretation of these words Jefferson wrote. These men fought to
make and historians do a lot about that. New birth of freedom, they think it is about slavery. It is a good
point, we do not know whether Lincoln had that in mind.
Charles: I think at that point he certainly does. It is after the Emancipation has been issued and so on
and so forth. Antietam is before.
Thelen: I am just, I think probably this is not best done in the abstract. The question of, you say this
actually or in this book, Glady’s book.
Charles: I better reread that.
Thelen: It talks about the problem that you are raising, Bob, about ideas. How do you illustrate an idea
and objects.
Charles: I think at Antietam or I guess at any of these battle sites and I know the Park Service is really
pushing the slavery story and is getting a lot of push back from the interpreters from at least what I am
hearing on the street.
Thelen: It was, I think that it is less true now.
Charles: On the push back?
Thelen: Yes. But it did.
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Charles: The historian up at Gettysburg told me that they have been very astounded by the visitor
comments about their exhibits there. The visitor comments they are continually getting even from
people in New Jersey is that the war was not about slavery, it was about states’ rights. So what is, I guess
the question is could a guide taking you on an Antietam battlefield, I do not know how you, do you tour
it on your own or do you have a guide?
Thelen: I have done both.
Charles: If you had a guide, they certainly can probe with questions to the audience, what do you think
the battles were about? At least get discussions going. I think that you would have some audiences that
would be very difficult with and others that it would not be so difficult with. I am quite interested in the
Civil War, even at a place like Gettysburg where so-called no blacks fought. There certainly are blacks at
Gettysburg that are not well documented. All of the teamsters are probably black, the cook are probably
black. There are manservants we know that are on both sides. You have got blacks around this place.
You have got the townsfolk who are black who have fled and there are some interesting readings about
their comments. If you were trying to develop characters I think that you could develop some characters
of which certainly at least one and maybe two could be black, both the North and the South, but
probably in secondary roles, or a townsperson and somebody else and get it across. At least that slavery
is a very conscious issue and that blacks are aware at Gettysburg that if they get caught they could be
taken back into slavery.
Thelen: Very fearful of it.
Charles: Which is sort of a serious issue. And at Antietam too I assume that even there there are
probably blacks on the North side that have that fear or they are crossing lines. Are they also crossing
lines?
Thelen: I am not sure at Antietam.
Charles: At Fredricksburg certainly they are crossing lines.
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Thelen: I am assuming it, but we have good stuff on Gettysburg.
Charles: That is a toughie.
Staples: The Park Service has, I think, in the past been spending its time talking about Pickett’s Charge,
the generals, Lee here and Sherman there. What Barbara was trying to do in the Civil War project that
we were briefly involved in was to try to talk more about the people. The stories that were untold.
Charles: Another character that is interesting, I think he may even be at Gettysburg, is a guy named John
Cuddy. His papers are at Dickinson. There is a beautiful letter on classic Civil War stationary. Liberty and
Union flags, that he talks about, he writes back to his family. “We are here we are doing good, we are
going to fight for the Union. God willing if we live, we will fight for the Union” and he is very very
positive. Later on there is a letter he writes, like a day or two after the Emancipation is officially issued in
the first week of January, which in effect he is saying that Lincoln did a bad thing and we are not fighting
for those niggers. It is a very interesting story and a lot of the soldiers, and he is from Pennsylvania, they
really feel they are fighting for union and not for slavery. Once the Emancipation is issued, in the white
Northern ranks there are some really concerns.
Staples: He probably was not a Quaker.
Charles: If he was a Quaker he should not have been fighting.
Staples: If he was a Quaker he probably would not have called them niggers.
Charles: Well, I am sorry I said that. I am not even sure if that is the right word. I can find the letter.
Thelen: I think that is cool.
Charles: That is an interesting problem for sites is to how do you get the unknown, but the something
without physical presence into the room.
Thelen: And as you were saying turn the story, the themes, we are back to narratives and stories, how
do you turn it to the story Pickett’s charge and the defeat of Lee’s army to a story of blacks being afraid
of being kidnapped, the everyman. I have to say this, you are known, or I have read somewhere, that
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you have a reputation as being interested in the social side of these things. When you just said Bob the
big men or they used to talk about the big men and now you said, actually I think you said Barbara was
interested in the little folks. Did you ever think of yourselves that way? Would you recognize that
statement as a characterization of your work?
Charles: What I would recognize would be…
Staples: I think we do not have any prejudices.
Charles: What I was going to go at it, I think that we have a reputation or I think we would be known for
delving in, in, in. why are we talking about this? What is possible here? And in that sense not almost
allowing a client to get away with being superficial about it. We had twenty slaves here. Well who were
they? Tell me you have Sal, Mary, Jane. We have had the benefit of wallowing in a lot of this stuff that I
know that stuff exists, so a place like Monticello they know it exists extremely well. For some sites we
might work at, they might not know that they ought to be able to find that type of information. If they
would just really look for it. I would be interested to know where you heard that or read that.
Thelen: I am trying to remember, I think the phrase was social history. We will all have a chance to look
things up after this interview. Maybe I made it up.
Charles: We certainly…
Staples: I love it.
Thelen: Somebody did say it, damn it.
Charles: We certainly have been involved in not only history, but all I would say the exhibits back to
Chicago Historical Society.
Thelen: It might have actually been somebody referring to the Chicago exhibits, which were
transformative in the field of history. Would not you say? And they were transformative in part because
they were social history.
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Charles: Certainly Chicago history galleries about the history of Chicago, although they now all have
been redone.
Staples: Well, metalsmiths and ceramics. I mean we talk about the people.
Charles: They were all specifically about the people. Sharon was a brilliant. We have had the pleasure of
working with some very brilliant people.
Thelen: It does not mean that you get the ideas out of the moonlight.
Staples: We try that too.
Charles: What do we get?
Thelen: I remember you citing Break Montagony and something of who built the pyramids, a poem of
you are interested in the workers and metalsmiths.
Charles: Yes and Kimberly saying who dug the big hole.
Thelen: There you go.
Charles: Trying to confront people a bit.
Thelen: The question is if we will say this is a fair characterization, in some way you ask questions that
lead to those approaches, you work with people who have those approaches. I think Eric Foner was
involved in the Chicago a little bit, at that point he was fairly distinctive.
Charles: But certainly Al Young was very…
Thelen: Al Young a better example.
Charles: Totally into people. I would say even though we knew who all the craftsmen were, Al was the
one who probably really pushed that forward.
Thelen: That was going to be my question, where do you think you got this orientation? Was there
anything in Eames that would lead there? Was there anything in college? Was it the accident of working
with Al Young? Are you Marxists?
Charles: My favorite classes in college were what were then called cultural history.
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Thelen: What did that involve?
Charles: It was not just looking from politics. It was looking at the literature, at the art, at the whole
breath of what is happening in these periods, so it is sort of inherently about, not so much the worker,
but the people. You are not only listening to the literature, but you might know something about the
writer who wrote them. It was sort of a broader view of history than a political, geographical history, let
us put it that way, that I liked that a lot more than just the political history, per say. I do not know, we
are just curious is about the best I can say. I love reading this stuff.
I would have to find it for you, but one of the slave broadsides I used in this talk last Friday is
from St. Louis, is from 1847 it says at the top, “Five negro slaves.” So the first question is why do you
have to say negro, are not all slaves negro? Well in St. Louis there are Indian slaves. Whereas Eastern
runaway slave ads do not always say negro, it is five runaways, it is inherent what they are. This is a
family, they describe the five people. The father, what he looks like, the mother, the three kids about
how old they are, what they might be wearing. It goes on to say, they are likely headed to Chicago at
night with a white man in a wagon. Talk about your classic Northern Star story. It goes on and it has you
can deliver to one of two people. You can imagine one is the owner , the other one, it says they have
been with this other one for five years, they probably have been leased to this other family in the city.
The very last line is that the father of these five is likely carrying an ivory handled cane, which is really
sweet. You can just, this is like a little story. This is what I call a one page short story. You can just
imagine, you can do a lot with that broadside in an exhibit. You could draw the people, you could have
them in their wagon. Who is the white man? You could probably do research and know who the owners
and leasers were. One little piece like that could be an incredible illuminating story to the public.
Thelen: In your mind. I am just trying to draw out. Now I am holding up the article on ephemera, maybe
do you have an instinct that looks one or both of you that tends, you just illustrated what I am going to
ask you, where you look for this kind of thing, let us call it lived experience, where you look for
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something that evokes a story where you picture the guy with his ivory handled cane or you picture
what he looks like. You are interested in who he is travelling with and where he might be heading, in
other words what is coming out of here is a human being living an experience in the situation with other
people which I would basically call social history.
Charles: I will read every single thing a curator gives us to put in an exhibit. If you say to me, this is the
Declaration of Independence, we are going to put it up here and I start reading it and say no this is
actually a broadside against the Declaration of Independence. It happens to say Declaration of
Independence at the top, but when you get down to the small type it says the Declaration was the most
demonic document ever written. That is just a habit, if it is going to be there, I am going to read it and
say is it really doing what we are saying it is going to do.
Thelen: But I have also heard you say you go through manuscript collections and you look at broadsides
and here you look at that.
Charles: Yes, it is personal pleasure.
Thelen: You turn them, would it be fair to say, I think we talked about this yesterday, you put a lot of
ephemera together and you get a picture?
Charles: If you can and if you are allowed to by the conservators.
Thelen: But your instincts go that way, among other ways. I do not want to be…
Charles: The clutter school of design.
Thelen: It is the clutter school of design, there you go.
Staples: I am going to bring in examples.
Charles: It is what I was saying earlier, I think it is very good in To Try All Things at Monticello. By putting
these different pieces there, hopefully we have not been the God to say look at all these people who
were here, look at this, look at this, look at this, look at this. It is hopefully saying you look at, but you
know to look at it. I do not have to lead you by the hand and you might only read three things here, but
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hopefully the juxtapositions have led your eye from here to here to here. You have as a visitor an Ah-ha
moment. Oh look at that, that piece of pottery matches up with that piece of pottery.
It is trying one I think to treat the visitor intelligently. And let it be a bit of a discovery, rather
than having to be always so one went to two went to three went to four. Sometimes we do not know
what actually did. You somehow know there is this stuff and this stuff and this stuff and this may have
been an outcome, but you do not know the root. We will certainly air on giving the visitor more than
less.
Thelen: And trusting them.
Charles: Yes, they have trusted us. They have come. They have put money and miles on their feet to
come to this thing. I have written maybe there or other places, this is like a scholarly book and a
Broadway play.
Thelen: I remember your account.
Charles: It has got to have the accuracy of a scholarly book, of a good one, it ought to have the kind of
intellectual curiosity of all of that. This is show time too and big bucks involved, not to the degree of
Spiderman certainly. You are doing a lot of these things in isolation and hoping that when the whole
thing comes together it works. You do not have the benefit even of a dress rehearsal. At a dress
rehearsal you can start rewriting scripts. For us by the time it has come together, well that panel only
cost a couple of thousand dollars so are you really going to rewrite it and tell us to do it.
This is sort of like Alice in Wonderland. I have really felt that at times. For a long time you are
bigger than this whole thing. You might have a model of the exhibit, drawings, everything is in a quarter
scale. You are kind of controlling it like a puppet master. You are trying to put your parts together. Then
it goes out, other people do things, it comes back in, but you are controlling a lot of that, not all of it.
Then you walk into it. Is it what you expected when you walk in? We try to control it pretty tightly. We
want it to look like our drawings and we do a drawing down… we joke that Bob will tell you whether a
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screw is horizontal or vertical. He has sometimes. We really try to be sure that everything we hope is
there is there in the end.
Thelen: Does that set you apart from some?
Charles: I think so. I think part of it is Bob’s background, that incredible furniture background of drawing,
making patterns. The story he told yesterday eight times. He knows his materials, he knows how this all
ought to come together. Fabricators have incredible knowledge and they usually know the most up to
date materials probably better than we do at this point. At the same time, we do not want them making
changes without us.
Staples: [laughter] You do not need to see the whole thing.
Thelen: I am looking at an extraordinary…what is this? This is the exhibit.
Charles: This was done for the Ephemera Society, it is a one panel exhibit.
Thelen: It is fantastic. It is called Coney Island, the People’s Playground.
Staples: These are all ephemera from…
Thelen: Coney Island.
Staples: Right.
Thelen: Postcards and letters, letterhead.
Staples: Timetables.
Thelen: Timetables. Is this a, oh the park! The horse, oh this is amazing!
Staples: This is a photograph of Coney Island, behind here.
Charles: It is Tulu’s Place behind it.
Thelen: Wow, this is a great illustration of…
Charles: this is Bob’s collection.
Thelen: You both are kind of interested in ephemera?
Staples: No question about that.
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Thelen: So this piece of it that is trusting the visitor, you are going to let me make whatever connections
I want to make out of this, right?
Staples: Yes, you have to.
Thelen: I have to. You are not going to say you should look at the railroad timetable here on the second
board, and then the concert, oh who is playing? The Russian Hasar band is playing and these guys
strolling along, what is it a boardwalk or something?
Staples: Yes, it is Coney Island. Here is the Steeplechase.
Thelen: Here is the map.
Charles: So all of these guys are your ticket that you would have worn if you were riding that. I do not
know that we would ever do this in a client’s exhibit.
Thelen: Why?
Staples: I mean this is We the People.
Charles: Yes, a long time ago. Now it is very hard to do this in a permanent exhibit because of the fading
of the documents.
Thelen: There is not a technology that can cover it? Or is part of the point that it is not…
Staples: Well, it is light that is the damaging factor.
Charles: You would have to reproduce everything and part of what we like is the real stuff. But, yes, we
are a little crazy for this stuff.
Thelen: Well the real thing, so there is also an assumption about the real thing.
Staples: It is more interesting. You cannot duplicate this and get the sort of sense of texture and time
out of it.
Charles: We would, going back to that exhibit of the Souls in Our Family and those slave documents.
[phone ringing] our tendency would be not to reproduce something at the exact size of the original and
imply to people that it is the original. Even if you put reproduction…
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Thelen: Why is that?
Charles: I think people come wanting to see [water pouring]. You come to museums not just for ideas,
but to have a real experience. It is different than what you can have on your computer screen. [phone
ringing] If you need to take it you can.
Thelen: I do not need to take it.
Charles: But I still love these things, a feeling is, our feeling is if you take a document like those slave
documents from Jefferson’s farm book that is only about this big and blow them up eight by ten feet.
One they can make a powerful statement, but there is no illusion that that is the real thing there. I have
done it on fabric. Increasingly I have been thinking about things like if you wanted to do something on
the Constitution, but you could not have one of the very first printings, but I find the newspaper ones
just as important as the one at the Archives because this is how it got out to the people. [phone ringing]
Or even to bring attention to it. Go ahead and take the call.
Thelen: No, I will call back.
Charles: If you blew it up big and maybe had the real in front of it, but you could blow it up big and put
arrows to the three-fifths clause or the things you want people to read. Then you could put the real one
in front of it to genuflect in front of.
Thelen: [phone ringing] Aie-yi-yi.
Charles: Just take it.
Thelen: No, I am not going to do it. How do I turn this off?
Staples: I have no idea.
Charles: Dave answer it.
Thelen: No I am not going to, this is ridiculous.
Charles: I can probably figure out how to turn it off if you want to.
Thelen: Maybe if it is open then…
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Staples: Then it will not.
Charles: It will still ring.
Thelen: It will? Oh, I know how to turn it off? Hang on. [beep] There, I am not as dumb as I look, what do
you know. Kathy I think this call was from you, so I will call you later. When you listen to this
transcription.
Charles: This issue of the real versus the reproduction is an issue.
Thelen: Let us talk about it some more.
Charles: I think it is as much as anything a planning issue. This might lead us into travelling exhibits. If
you are planning an exhibit where you want to focus on some original material that you know you can
only have out for three months.
Staples: Like the Franklin show.
Charles: Like the Franklin show, what do you do? It is a design problem if nothing else.
Thelen: In what way?
Charles: Well, you have just decided to put up a show for three years and you have got a key document
that you can only have out for three months.
Thelen: I can see now that that is a problem.
Charles: What do you do when it is not there? That was part of what I was saying, if you enlarged it very
big. If it is so important that it is a major statement in the exhibit, you have to figure out techniques to
keep it in the exhibit.
Staples: This is the elephant and the mouse again, you know. You want that mouse to be important.
Charles: It could be enlarged anyway, so and that might deal with it if you had it big and you had the
original and then the original has to go away. I do not, I personally do not like to walk up to a case or a
frame that is saying in the way it is presented, I am real, it has all the protection, it has been dolled up
like a real piece and then it is a fake inside. It is just something that I do not like and I think…
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Staples: She is not just interested in the message, she is interested in the medium.
Charles: I want to see the real thing. If you are going to tell me there are only twenty-five Dunlap
broadsides in the world of the original printing of the Declaration, if I am looking at one, I would like to
believe I saw the true cross. I think there is a problem with the public if, some people say, do not worry I
will just put reproduction. I will tell you it is a reproduction and then you will understand. But I think as
the visitor keeps going through and says reproduction, oh reproduction, oh reproduction, this is all
reproductions, where is the real stuff?
Thelen: I came here to see the real stuff.
Charles: I think that it devalues the exhibit or the presentation in the visitor’s mind.
Staples: That is where we are moving to, because the conservationists have become the gorillas.
Thelen: Really?
Staples: They do not want the cloth, the paper out overexposed.
Charles: Because it fades.
Staples: Light is cumulative, it is irreversible the damage. They would rather not exhibit the real piece,
they would rather put it in a drawer.
Thelen: If we go downtown and we see those lines going outside the Archives to see the true cross.
Those are the real things. Would they be going, would anybody be going to see if they were
reproductions?
Charles: I do not think so.
Thelen: I do not think so either.
Charles: At Gettysburg for instance, you are doing a lot of work at the park. Almost every piece of paper
that you see in those cases is a reproduction. It has been reproduced to the original size. [phone ringing,
answered by Bob] It is just not something that we would do, let me just put it that way. We would do
anything we could to avoid it. Part of it, that is a visceral statement that I do not like it when I see it.
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Thelen: The book that Roy and I did based on interviewing fifteen hundred people that discovered that
museums were institutions that people trusted more than any other for history. [phone ringing
answered by Bob] Basically what they said was it is the real thing. What I heard in that is that so people
know if they are in touch with the real thing, then they can imagine it could be something else. Other
words could have been written, a different hat could have been worn and they connect with it. I think
that I am, what I am doing is that we found exactly that visitors do thing that way, which you also think.
That somehow becomes part of social, your vision of what you want visitors to experience or what you
expect visitors to experience.
Charles: I want people if they are coming, I want…in one way I want they, maybe this is a very populist
view, we have had the pleasure of seeing the real thing of handling the real thing, you want them to
have that pleasure.
Thelen: And it is a different thing than seeing a reproduction.
Staples: Remember Wood Washburn.
Charles: When Wid was into holograms. Why would you even have to keep a real thing?
Thelen: Well I just read something.
Charles:We had so many arguments.
Is not there now a kind of movement, the artifact list museum?
Charles: On ideas and themes, sure, no question. This was one of the great moments of our lives. This
was a book we designed and Bob and David Allison who was working with us were doing all the
photography.
Staples: I think that might have been Rick Stedphy.
Charles: You think it was Rick, seventy-six? Maybe. Bob called one day, I was at the office, he said “get
down here.” They were down in the reception rooms at the archives. They had, these are the minutes of
the Continental Congress out on a table set up like this with the books and so on to take this picture.
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Tipped into the minutes, they are no longer there. For conservation reasons have been separated. But
tipped into the minutes at that point was the Dunlap broadside. These minutes say, “the Declaration
being again read was agreed to as follows.” That is the moment that we are a country. Or that we have
declared our independence. We just as follows, I mean read again as follows, you know. So they have
been working overnight, they have agreed on things, they have gotten it off to the printers. We know
now because of different printings, they did a couple of press runs to correct typos. Now they have
brought back the document and they have put it in here. I love this.
Thelen: I can see that. I get it. It is amazing.
Charles: This is just such an incredible document which is not together anymore. It says everything.
Staples: While you are there go to the Emancipation Proclamation.
Charles: It is Thursday July Fourth et cetera. [papers shuffling]We were talking about Emancipation
Proclamation. You tell your story Bob.
Staples: That is the Emancipation Proclamation on the Lincoln desk in the Lincoln bedroom of the White
House. Now you see how beautiful that multipage document is with all the ribbons and stuff?
Charles: So Bob and Lee Tyson and the photographer took it to the White house to photograph it.
Staples: We had to get it delaminated. Do you know what that means?
Thelen: Well I know what laminated is, I assume delaminate.
Staples: Right, laminated is putting plastic on both sides and squeezing it. It was laminated and Lee
asked to have it delaminated, free it up so that we could shoot it like that. We thought that was the
salvation to this document. We returned to the Archives and they laminated it again.
Charles: It is now been delaminated again.
Thelen: It is very hard to read, by the way, in the Archives.
Staples: Nonetheless, it is real.
Thelen: Yes, it is the real one. Well, laminated of course. Did not Lincoln laminate it?
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Charles: A placemat.
Staples: It looked just like Howard Johnson.
Charles: Anyway that book got us into a real thrill of real documents.
Thelen: Touching the real documents, thinking about how to present it.
Staples: If you look at the upper corner of the page, I think. There is a small little inch square picture, a
detail. We did that on every document and that is the table of contents in the front.
Thelen: Here? Oh, I see. So finding some little snippet that is…
Charles: The key point.
Staples: An indicator of what document you are looking at.
Charles: Is her window closed?
Thelen: There is some stuff coming together here about ephemera about the real thing, about
unmediated, about lived experience.
Charles: I am going to show you my favorite piece of ephemera, we are getting off exhibits, but not
really.
Thelen: Not really, I mean this is a key.
Staples: It has certainly been a key part of our lives.Well, we started out with Computer Perspective at
the Eames office and I met all these dealers and these collectors and then we each became kind of
focused on one particular point of view and here we are.
Thelen: Here we are.
Staples: Ephemera has been a big part of our lives.
Charles: Took me ten years to finally get to own this.
Thelen: Let me see what it is. The flying circus. [paper russling]
Staples: This is something that Barbara genuflects over.
Charles: Well, I coveted it and spent a lot of money on it.
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Thelen: Daniel Hurtzog, I see it is there, I also see German. [pause]Born without wings by the above
means, flying.
Charles: Running a carousel. He owns this carousel and he is touring it and he is probably sitting on his
little table playing drums. This is the horse that is taking it around. It is Bucks County 1848. Here are the
little Pennsylvania Dutch guys with their little flat hats.
Thelen: Look at that.
Charles: Some of the other things I know these little horses have no legs. That is a traditional thing with
traveling carousels so that they would not get broken, they are just made without legs. When I first
heard about this long before I owned it, I got his death estate records from the county. This presumably,
this merry-go-round is sold for twenty-five dollars, his drum set is sold.
Staples: And his thrashing machine?
Charles: Yes, it cost more, like fifty.
Thelen: He is displaying this at the house of somebody.
Charles: I need to do some work, I understand that this may have been like a local tavern where he is
displaying it.
Thelen: Is not this interesting, he writes Friday F-R-E-I, he writes, Fritag would be the German. He has
kind of mixed English and German here.
Charles: But born without legs, I mean talk about…
Thelen: To support himself by the above means.
Charles: What I know, just because of what I know about carousels. I do not know of any earlier image
of an American carousel. There are earlier German and French ones and English. I am quite sure that this
is the earliest image of an American carousel. I would be astounded if another one came forward. Here
is a guy with no legs operating a carousel. This cannot be unique. I mean somebody without legs is not
going to go into this business. It has got to be a fairly common business.
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Staples: Like Sears Roebuck ought to carry them.
Thelen: Amazing. Just amazing.
Charles: What a story one could create on this. You could recreate this carousel. I tried to talk to Old
Salem at one point, that they ought to have a carousel, why not, based on this one. Now people talking
about people with handicaps, how did people support themselves?
Thelen: It truly is great.
Charles: Who is travelling with him? He cannot be doing this alone. There is a lot, I mean, I think I will
not say in every case, but in most cases, you can tell more of a story with the documentation than with
the artifact. You might have the most beautiful pot and I would love to have the beautiful pot to bring
people in, but if you have the information about the glazes, if you have the information about the sale of
the pot, who bought the pot, what is the marketing. There is a lot of richness that can be developed or
in a case like that, I think that broadside would tell more than one of those horses if it survived.
Although the more collectible thing would be to have the horse that survived.
Thelen: That is fascinating.
Charles: I have said to friends who collect individual figures, I have admitted that I have spent more on a
piece of ephemera about a carousel than they may have paid for a figure.
Staples: You must be crazy. [laughter]
Thelen: You just said, Bob just made sense to you. This comes out of your experiences at Eames.
Staples: I did not say it makes sense.
Thelen: Right, you did not use those words.
Staples: Ephemera has been a big part of our lives since, I would say since computers.
Charles: Since Computer Perspective.
Staples: I did not even know the stuff existed, all this little itsy-poo crap.
Thelen: How did you find it? Or who found it?
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Staples: Through this business, or this step by step. Bill Ridens to Charles Grey to Penny Baker.
Charles: We wanted to mark time. I think we talked about that yesterday.
Thelen: Right, we did. You were going to display these things. Is that the first time? I guess we did say
that yesterday.
Charles: It marks…
Staples: It was not the first timeline that we did at the Eames office. It was the first time that we did a
timeline in 3D.
Charles: And using most of this kind of stuff. This kind of stuff, it was made for a moment.
Thelen: Well, there you go, it was made for a moment.
Charles: So it talks about that moment. I think one that really brought it home to us at Chicago history in
the history galleries originally we did a case on the Haymarket Riot. The guys we organized the riot were
put on trial, I guess some of them may even have hung. Right, for instigating a riot. I think part of the
defense and I am making this up a bit because it was a long time ago we worked on, was that no they
told everybody to come peacefully, there was nothing that said to come with your arms. In fact, one
broadside, I mean there were a lot of broadsides that look all alike, one of them said at the very bottom
in small print, bring your arms or arm yourself. The Chicago Historical Society has a copy of that
broadside and it is real. So for two things, one there was here is evidence that maybe even was used at
the trial that no these people wanted to arm themselves and were told to arm themselves. Secondly for
historians today, the fact that that one piece of paper survives where all the other evidence was people
were not going to be armed at this or were not told to be armed is very very important.
Thelen: It is very important, yes, I am kind of shocked actually.
Charles: I will confess that we did not put it in a strong enough position in the case. We put the real one
up. Today I would probably be tempted to make it huge, that is the point.
Thelen: When you are looking at the ephemera, you are looking at a moment.
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Charles: And often one line, like this guy has no legs. When you walk through as a viewer because
visitors to exhibits are, I mean they are being presented with enough to read for eight or ten hours and
they are going to try and do it in a half an hour or an hour. One of our jobs is to help clue them in as to
where to spend their time or to make it easier for them.
Thelen: How does that relate to ephemera?
Charles: For instance, this Haymarket broadside, if I was to exhibit it today I would make it big and
maybe even put a little red arrow towards that one line. Try and clue people in to, look at me! Because
that is the important thing to read.
Staples: What we do generally, or often do, we put large type up above everything else that says,
Haymarket Riot, when you are approaching this thing, you get a sense of what it is because you are
going to see several titles and you are going to be more interested in one than the other ones. Maybe
you will go to all of them, but that is the thing that sort of guides you.
Charles: But then within that how do you get people to look specifically at things. It is an issue when you
want to display a lot of stuff and sometimes you should not display a lot of stuff despite what you have
seen us do. When we make a mass of it, I almost said mess of it, mass of it.
Staples: It is never a mess, it is always very orderly.
Charles: That is because Bob does it. It is really because the mass is important. It is all this red, white and
blue. You are getting an idea that it was not just once, people did it again and again and again. For
instance, I maybe have used this before, Navajo pottery has all these wonderful patterns to it. I would
be tempted to put up a whole lot of it, rather than just one piece so you are seeing kind of the diversity
of design. If one piece is so important that you ought to focus on it, like the Haymarket Riot one, then
we have an obligation as designers that sometimes we succeed at it and sometimes we do not, to make
you the visitor understand hey I really have to look at this piece. That is background, that is giving me
context, but I have to look at this piece. That is a design challenge.
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There is, not one of our exhibits, thank God, one of Eric Foner’s actually, there was case of
letters, Civil War letters, Lincoln letters probably, one of them, I think was giving the order to proceed
with Sherman’s march to the sea, but it is sort of like one line saying so be it. I think it is a letter to him
saying we are going to do this and Lincoln writes so be it or do it. That is a major piece. Nothing was
done to make you understand, if I have got time to read only one letter, read that one. This could have
been huge behind this case. Maybe the other letters should have been thrown away.
Thelen: Put away.
Charles: Part of our job as designers is to try to, when everything is neat and interesting, have some
sympathy for the visitor and say what is really neat and interesting and how do you get it across.
Staples: To some degree ephemera has been underrated for many years. In Chicago for instance we did
this band of little odd stuff that was everything from envelopes to first issue of Playboy magazine and it
gives you a quick view as to how diverse Chicago was that you do not get in a single object. [paper
russling] Not every institution has a Mona Lisa.
Charles: This is what I would call ephemera for face value, you see it, you recognize it. It is telling you
beer, Playboy, you do not have to find that single line like the Haymarket Riot one. It is a different kind
of use of ephemera. We did several of these kinds, Bob did just beautiful layouts. There is one back in
the book, the We the People book in there. This was the first one. I will find it in the back. That we got
known for doing these things. We will probably tend to air on the side of putting more in rather than
less in. I think that it is, we need to - I think that we are increasingly working harder to really focus on
what is really critical. We are working with Missouri right now and we have about four hundred objects.
I have got to really start working on thinning it down.
Thelen: That is the Missouri Historical Society?
Charles: But this is the first one and this was like forty-five feet of this stuff.
Thelen: This was in the Chicago exhibit.
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Charles: No…
Thelen: This is at the first one, We the People.
Staples: Here is Washington. It went to George Washington to Nixon I guess it was.
Charles: Ford, maybe Nixon.
Thelen: Basically if we are calling this exhibit sort of your transition to history, you have been doing it
from the start, using ephemera.
Charles: This is a half size about reproduction. It starts back here with Washington.
Thelen: What a great collection of sources!
Charles; It is incredible stuff. You cannot do this if a museum does not have the stuff.
Thelen: There is an implicit difference, maybe I am picking up what we have been talking here. If you do
say, look at this, if you put the arrow or you blow it up or something, you are making sure they will see
what you think is the important thing. Whereas if you leave it like that the visitors will go to whatever
they go to.
Staples: Some will pay attention and look at the whole thing. Others will look down and say ah what is
this?
Thelen: Well there is a view of visitor experience in that, namely that they are diverse.
Charles; In here we are also saying - well we made choices in what was picked to be here. Bob had the
pleasure of looking at a lot of stuff and saying, “this is cool and I am going to put in Jefferson’s,
Roosevelt’s teeth and so on.” I think we are also saying no one piece is more important than any other
piece here. Whereas the Haymarket example, one piece is very significantly more important.
I would argue that even in all the drafts of the Declaration of Independence is in the end the
more important one. We need to try to say that to the public too. When there is something that is
important, when all things are equal, when we are more just trying to give you the mood of politics. But
if we are saying this particular thing, Nixon’s abdication or whatever we ought to do you a favor and hint
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to you one way or another that this is one you really ought to in the amount of time you are going to
spend with us today, try to at least read this one. That is an obligation we have is I think to help you. Just
the way you put a table of contents in a book, rather than just throwing all these pages at somebody.
Thelen: Let us stay with the Haymarket for just a minute. We have that choice or Albert Parson’s diary in
which he describes how he feels as he has been in his view railroaded. Now how do we decide which
one to feature.
Staples: We did not have.
Charles: I think that today I would try to, what you are talking about is the prosecution versus the
defendant basically.
Thelen: I mean he is sitting there and he is writing the most anarchist view of the criminal justice
system, being railroaded, we might say he is innocent. I think there is pretty good evidence if I
remember about him. One way to think about it is the prosecution said they not only used, they used
the anarchist newspapers that said use dynamite, dynamite is the best stuff to blow the cops up and the
cops got blown up. And he is saying it is the class system, blah, blah, blah.
Charles: I think if you were, I think today if we were working on it you would try and figure out how to
get those voices in. Could you have some audio track that you pick up and listen to key passages? Could
you have some way that you could listen and have a computer thing and you could turn the pages or
maybe there is a reproduction of his diary that you could be turning the pages and be listening to it.
I think certainly increasingly we are trying to get voices and authentic voices rather than
hypothetical voices into exhibits. There was a very interesting discussion. Bob mentioned we worked for
a while with the National Constitution Center. We are actually now separating on that project. I have
been in discussions between the Constitution Center and Minnesota and Missouri about theater.
Increasingly people are doing theater in exhibits, to bring these people alive in stories that do
not come across so easily. I think that Minnesota and Missouri both feel very strongly that they ought to
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be real people and based on real documents and you ought to be able to find those people and create
them. The head of the theater program at the National Constitution Center said, no, she prefers to
determine the point you want to get across and then create people. That is a very interesting
philosophy. I prefer real people. Maybe I am not so creative so I find it inherently interesting to use the
real stuff.
Thelen: What do you mean by real people? In the context of theater, right?
Charles: Is it based on Mr. Jones’ real diary that he has written or is it based on maybe what he has
written what historians have written about a working class person what somebody else has written. You
take the assemblage of that and write a character like you would in a play. It is are you doing a
biography, is it a biography of a person who lived like you slave down at that corner of the plantation or
is it any slave? Is it everyman? Generic slave.
Thelen: Both of the institutions you mentioned, I assume it is the Minnesota History Center you are
talking about.
Charles: Minnesota History, Dan Spock said he really likes things based on real stories. Missouri also,
history museum wants real stories. Whereas the woman in charge of the theater program at National
Constitution Center. It was an interesting discussion, particularly I was less in it, but between her and
Matt Pincer, the historian we were working with. He wanted it based - he said, “look I can come up with
so many different people, I want you to use one of these.” Historian versus theater. I do not know,
where would you come?
Thelen: I know where I would come, definitely with the real people.
Charles: They are so rich.
Thelen: They are so rich. It is also on the matter of empathy, I can more readily imagine empathizing
with, the more I understand somebody, the more authentic it is, the more it is in their handwriting, the
more I see their face, I just find it much easier.
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Staples: I think an interesting thing came to my head, the Gerald Ford Museum and the number of
letters you put in the case to represent the fors and the against.
Charles: That is a good story.
Thelen: What did you do?
Charles: The Ford Museum, I think we mentioned yesterday, I think was actually a very important
project for us in many ways. One of them was that we were able to work directly with President Ford
and we were kind of doing firsthand research in some ways as well as interviewing and proposing things.
It is very, it is a different situation when you are doing something for somebody who is still alive versus
writing or doing an exhibit about somebody who is long dead. They obviously have a say in what is
happening in this.
Staples: Should have a say.
Thelen: And probably want to have a say.
Charles: These presidential library museums are typically developed by supporters of the former
president, who have been fundraisers, who have been cheerleaders, who sort of right or wrong, he is
my guy. Our very first meeting, when we first were presenting ideas, after we had the job, we talked
about of course, there will have to be a section about the, what is it called for Nixon?
Staples: The resignation?
Charles: Not the resignation, when he was…
Thelen: The pardon?
Charles: The pardon for Nixon. I do not know if we had a sketch or just described it we said that based
on the letters coming into the archives there will be ten against or nine against and one for. Well his
older brother, or younger brother, because he is the oldest, who was very active on this committee was
kind of, that puts him in a bad light.
Thelen: Ford’s younger brother?
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Charles: Ford’s younger brother, but I think he is of, he is younger but the oldest of the other brothers.
Oh that is you know going to put the president in a bad light, you cannot do that, blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah. And we tried to talk about, well that is the facts man. What are we supposed to do? We got to talk
about the pardon. So finally almost in exasperation we said, “well if the president says it is okay, is it
okay with you?” Because we knew we were going to be meeting with him. Well, of course, what does he
say, he has to say yes.
Thelen: He does?
Charles: You know, the president trumps.
Thelen: Oh, I see. The president trumps, I see that part.
Charles: I said to the brother, if the president says it is okay, is it okay with you? So he has to back off at
this point and let us…
Thelen: Or you do?
Charles: Or we do, but we do not. We say we are going to take it to the president in effect. Then we can
get off that topic and keep going with the other parts of the exhibit. So this one area has been left
without approval, but everybody knows that we are going to talk to President Ford about it. We have
our meeting with President Ford and this is so classic Jerry Ford, he says, “well yes I understand that you
have got to have that, that is a very important thing, but you know, if you would take your reading
instead of the first week or the first few days, if you take it at the end of the month the odds are a little
better, they are only seven to three against me, do you mind taking a longer view?” So we said, “of
course.”
Thelen: So that is how you resolved it?
Charles: Yes.
Thelen: That is cool.
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Charles: He was fabulous. When we very first met him and I do not remember when all he said that, I
know it was the first meeting, he said look there is a least two sides to everything in politics, so as long
as you tell the story fairly, we are going to do fine.
Thelen: Wow, wow.
Charles: He was fabulous, really fabulous to work with.
Thelen: Now I am really kind of curious, were the two sides where you just gave a wonderful example
maybe.
Charles: We got into a whole discussion and I am not going to be able to do the details well about how
are we going to write about the Vietnam War, the pullout. You know, why did we pull out? And he said I
think you better go talk to Brent Schocroft and Kissinger because they have got two different views. And
I was sent off to go. Schocroft was great, I met with Schocroft, we talked a lot. Kissinger never did meet
with me, but one of his key people did.
Thelen: And they did have different views? So how did you resolve it?
Charles: I would have to find the scripts now to find the final.
Thelen: Would you have tried to have both views?
Charles: I think we talked about both the military perspectives and the peace discussions going on in
Paris at the time and so on. He was a real prince.
Staples: Another project, which I think is more worth mentioning is dealing with the Kennedy
assassination.
Thelen: I actually really want to get into that one. I am kind of wondering if we should take a break.
Charles: And go to lunch or order some sandwiches?
Thelen: Order some sandwiches or something and then get into exhibits as exhibits. This has been a
great conversation and Bob if you think it flows we should just keep going at this point.
Charles: Let us at least get an order in for sandwiches.
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Thelen: Okay, let us get an order in for sandwiches. Let us take a quick break and at some point here I
have to get another one of these things.
Charles: Why do not we go do that? Bob, let us, I will place the order while you take and Dave go get
another…
End of track 2.
End of Card 2.
Thelen: I think it is working now. We are sitting around here eating these delicious lunches. [paper
crumpling] It is Thursday afternoon around one-thirty. I am just going to ask you if there had been any
exhibits you had particularly admired, done by other people, that might have been influential?
Staples: That is really a tough question to answer. I mean we have seen some shows, we do not know
who did them always. The In Fact show was…
Thelen: Where was that?
Staples: Up in New York.
Charles: No I think we saw it in St. Louis or Colorado. It was a touring show, the one with the fabric?
Staples: We saw that in New York.
Charles: Really?
Thelen: What did you like about it?
Charles: It was - first of all, it was a traveling show always has its own problems. [feedback] It did not
have any real things, at each site, maybe people were adding in examples of her books or publications,
printed versions of her diary. It was all fabric [background noise] I mean we must have seen this thirty
years ago, a long time ago.
Thelen: What do you mean all fabric?
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Charles: It was all printed on fabric, somewhat translucent and it traveled so you could set it up in
various configurations being this piece of fabric. Where we saw it was sort of like a big oval. They had
lights inside of it to light it up that traveled with the short. Pretty low budget and could go any place, you
did not have to worry about ceiling lights. It was very powerful, just the quotes and the photographs and
the story as you walked around it.
Thelen: What made it powerful, you think? [background noise]
Charles: The quotes and the photographs. [laughter]
Thelen: Alright I asked for that.
Charles: Sorry.
Staples: You want to start over again?
Thelen: Yes, let is try.
Charles: I would say - we have talked at times about a Jewish museum. It was not so much the exhibits,
Bob in Amsterdam? Three synagogues from three different periods were put together to become a
Jewish museum.
Thelen: I know that museum.
Charles: What we really liked were the glass breaks between the buildings. You connected them in a
very modern way that often is not allowed or encouraged here with historic preservation. It seemed like
a very creative way to put that together.
Staples: The Europeans seem to have a much easier time translating a building from one period to
another.
Thelen: In what sense?
Staples: They just interrupt something with glass or mirrors or stainless steel, you know statements. The
restrooms in the museums are always more interesting than the ones here.
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Charles: They did some glass restrooms. There was an exhibit I saw, Bob did not see it, I want to say
about, I am trying to think about trips, but I think it may have been as early as eighty-two, it leads into
where we are going to talk about next. It was at the Stot Museum in Munich, Munster-Stot Museum and
it was about death.
Thelen: Death, um-hum.
Charles: It used a lot of artifacts, but it also was very theatrical and I just had not even seen or thought
about this kind of theatrical stuff in an exhibit before this. When you first came in there were three gray,
four gray figures sitting in chairs, prop chairs or chairs they had made. These figures were sort of
abstract, one is maybe like this, one is like this, the next one is like this, clearly something is happening
to this body. Then there were little views you could get. You could look through a slot and just kind of
see the end of a bed in an emergency room or an intensive care room. You have a sense there is a body
in that bed and something is going to happen.
Staples: You could see toes, was not it?
Charles: You could see the toes and so on.
Thelen: That is clever.
[background noise]
Charles: I do not know that you saw the real ones, but you certainly saw the shape of them up under the
sheet. Then near that would be real paintings of - death paintings. You know the kind of things that
traditionally would be done of a dead person in their bed. They also then, you then kind of - it was like
the whole show was a transition. You went on to funerals and planning the funeral and it included early
documents about how much you would pay for the mourners to come to your funeral. They compared
that with contemporary costs, and historic coffins and contemporary coffins. That was all kind of real
artifacts.
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Then they had an area about untimely deaths. It was like an accident scene, again a little more
theatrics. They had an area where you had to walk through a cemetery and they did have some real
crosses and so on from things. They had the whole sense of memorializations. They had some of these
skulls that they borrowed from a local cathedral that are all decorated with people’s names and so on in
a very Catholic way. It mixed this theater with objects and then at the end it now had four empty chairs.
Four white empty chairs. And it had a section about memorialization and then four white empty chairs.
Thelen: Wow. Wow.
Charles: Well then it had a book to write in. It was the first time I had ever seen a book in an exhibit. I
spent as much time with the book as I did in the exhibit. In part because my German is not great, in part
because I am so fascinated by it. There were things like long writings to somebody’s dead father. There
was a rant about how could you do this whole exhibit and leave out Jesus. They had had a little bit about
Dachau but maybe not as much as somebody else wants.
This book was not just people signing their names. This exhibit have obviously very emotionally
gotten to people. And they were writing incredible things at the end of it. It was a very very powerful
exhibit. Very interesting kind of theatrical approach.
Thelen: I know you think in terms of design and theater. How do you mean it in that sense? What made
it theatrical?
Charles: Well the settings, they were not artifact-based, like peering into the death room. Instead of
doing a big room that you could walk in, only having this slit that you could peer into and imagine. It
made you imagine what is happening places. It was really well done. Even just these figures, these kind
of sculptural figures. They were not perfect mannequins, they were more abstract. It just made you
think. It was a wonderful wonderful exhibit. It was one of those one - it was called De Lester Lyza and it
was really one of those ones that makes you, “God I wish I had done this one.” Those books we put
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books in the Sixth Floor and I do not know if other people were putting books in exhibits before that,
that was the first time that we put books in and we took that idea directly from De Lester Lyza.
Thelen: Did you ever read what people wrote?
Charles: At the Sixth Floor. Oh, they are great books. There should be a publication of the books, we
have talked about it, but never done it. Some of them are, some will be where that person was on the
day, remembering where they were. Some were reporters who were there at that time, coming back
and writing again, coming back later. You some will be kids just saying oh this is foolish or I hate Oswald.
Thelen: Awesome or something.
Charles: Yes, but there is enough really pithy good stuff in there. They have been saving all the pages
and we designed the books so that you could take the pages out. It has some very nice area where we
have the books. It was carefully designed to encourage you to use the books.
Thelen: Do you have any you remember Bob? I wait until you have your mouth full with sandwich and
then I ask you. None in particular?
Staples: Nothing comes to mind.
Thelen: Is it a field where you pay a lot of attention to what another person has done? Applebom or
somebody, oh that was a clever way to do that or that was a stupid way to do that.
Staples: Well, you measure what you see by what you do, in some respect. Applebom has a tendency to
make text run, a single line of text run three feet. You cannot read that. Maybe you can read one line,
but you cannot read ten lines like that because the starting point and the turnaround point are too far
apart. It is something we would not do. Also, I think even though we are known to be expensive, we do
not generally use materials because they are rich and famous. We have done things with stainless steel
and that kind of stuff, Applebom’s tendency is to use glass and stainless steel a lot.
Thelen: And they tend to be expensive?
Staples: Generally they are, yes.
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Charles: We are not even very good about going to museums.
Thelen: That is interesting.
Charles: I mean here in Washington we have not seen the Spy Museum, the Newseum or the Capital
Visitors’ Center.
Staples: Nor I have been to the top of the Washington Monument.
Charles: I have, when I was twelve. [pause] It does not interest me enough to say, “on this Saturday that
is what I am going to go do.” I went to the Marine Museum twice now. Once because Jeanne, our friend
Jeanne Opalwat from the Eames office was in town. She is very good about going out and seeing
everything that is new, so she wanted to go see that. We went to the Air Force Memorial which I was
interested in seeing because we know the general who worked on it particularly and the Marine
Museum. That was good to go to. Then we went back and saw it again. I mean, maybe it is crazy, but
museums are not necessarily where I want to spend all my free time.
Staples: Or spend all day.
Thelen: Now that invites, where would you like to spend?
Staples: Carousels.
Thelen: Carousels.
Charles: Well right now unfortunately it is getting moved and trying to catch up with things or you are
always working, trying to catch up with things. We have actually never even vacationed very much. We
have had the good fortune of traveling a lot with projects. Even there we are more likely to go out and
have a glass of wine with our colleagues when we get a little bit of free time then go to see another - no,
I like art museums probably. I do like, I like going to museums, I should not say I do not. It is not to say,
“oh I have to go see what Ralph just did or I have to go see what Patrick Gallagher just did,” that is not
so interesting. I mean we do what we do, we know we are going to lose a lot of jobs to the big boys and
that is the way it goes.
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Staples: We mentioned one exhibit that I have always liked and that is the John Deere wall that
Alexander Girard did in Moren.
Thelen: What did you like about that?
Staples: It just was layered stuff I guess. It was nicely done. That was one of the first that we have seen
with that kind of…
Charles: Sort of the texture of history. I like the exhibits, again Europeans more than us, Americans I
think will attack, tackle more difficult things like death. We saw a fabulous exhibit about AIDS in Sweden.
We did make a point to go see a new museum in Sweden we were interesting in Bodenburg. It tackled
AIDS [background noise] kind of, if I remember five or seven stages of AIDS in a very creative way that
included real people and real people’s stories and artifacts that people made about having AIDS and
film.
I mean the artifacts were just one of many ways to get the story across and I think that is
increasingly what is happening with museums. That was a very interesting show, it should have traveled
more widely. I do not know if anything has happened with it. There was a show [pause] now I am
blanking. Bob what is that picture that you have of me at the doorway in Austria, in Graves? Is it arrows
and…what was that show?
Staples: I do not know, I have the poster over there.
Charles: But it was looking at love and sex and things like that, but using…
Staples: Classical stuff.
Charles: Classical stuff and a historical pallad in Gratz that was all decorated with the Mars room and the
Neptune room and all that kind of stuff. It was really fun and kind of different exhibits in these different
rooms talking about different subjects. A much more fun way to use a historic house or a historic place
[phone ringing] than just the art itself.
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A friend of ours [answering machine in background] just hang it up it is garbage. A friend in
Europe, Ula Hies, that we worked with briefly on a coffee museum did an exhibit called Café, but it is
really coffee she is meaning erotica, that was a very nice exhibit. The whole when you had coffee and
who you might have had coffee with…
Thelen: The experience of coffee.
Staples: And the big lips or something.
Charles: Did she have big lips in that? Just funny, fun stuff. I do not think - I do not know if it is a funding
issue, I do not know what it is. [paper crinkling] But I do not think that American museums tend to either
tackle either really difficult stuff. Other than I remember the drug exhibit that was many many years ago
at the City Museum of New York that caused a lot of controversy. It is not too often that people really
take on stuff and you know as they say, whether it is funding…
Oh I know a great exhibit I saw in Berlin. Again Bob did not see it. It was two temporary exhibits.
One was called the Perfect Body and it was all like Greek art, what is the ideal, the classical ideal. It even
had a Monticello model there. It was all kind of what is the ideal? The other exhibit upstairs was the
Imperfect Body. It was all about handicapped issues. It had phenomenal interviews with handicapped
people and what their lives were like. Different ones, one was in the theater and different people. It
dealt with the Nazi approach to how you deal with handicapped people. It was a great exhibit on its
own. I think that exhibit was done by the Health Museum in Dresden and had been brought to Berlin. I
do not know if the museum in Berlin had the idea of pairing them then to do this Greek classical one.
Thelen: Sounds neat.
Charles: Really really good, wonderfully challenging ideas. Either we have never been asked to work on
one, but I cannot even think about much of that idea in American museums.
Thelen: Did you ever get to the Flandersfield Museum in Heeper, Beligum? That was amazing.
Charles: Again, why?
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Thelen: Because it reconstructs - it makes you think about how can there be war and in particular there
is an exhibit there is one piece of it that focuses on the December 1914 truce between the two armies,
well it was not between the armies, it was between the soldiers. They illustrate four mannequins.
Charles: The Christmas Truce?
Thelen: Yes, the Christmas Truce. On one side are the two British fellows and on the other side are the
two German fellows. You could recognize the uniforms and so on, but they are all covered in mud, the
whole thing is mud, and they are shaking hands. Then they give you the song, they give you
reenactments, replaying of things people actually said. “No shoot us, we friends.” Then when they break
out singing Silent Night. Then on the other wall are the generals. I remember the British ones in
particular, down to the lieutenants. Down the chain of command rather saying you must permit this to
happen, the next thing you know the soldiers will take us out of this war and we cannot have that
happen. You must interfere to stop any more of these fraternizations and then there are pictures of
them fraternizing and playing ball.
Suddenly you are in this whole room, you are sort of, “oh my God.” It is the soldiers actually had
something to do with whether there was a war. In the next room they have a gas mask, talk about
artifacts, one of those horrible World War I gas masks and they are in columns about this wide and
every once in a while gas rises in these columns and obliterates the mask and you look over your
soldiers and there are three of the great poems that came out of the war. Of course the one in
Flandersfield, Where the Poppies Blow. The one over here that I remember is Wilfred Owen saying and
so, it is a beautiful poem and he says and so they make us do this they make us do that, but when all this
is over, let it never ever, we must put an end to the biggest of all the lies, dolce est decorum est … it is
honorable to die for your country, never again. Tough issues.
Charles: Tough issues, but approached creatively.
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Thelen: Very creatively with artifacts and with hard ideas, so that you are left, oh man. There are scenes
of that incredible trench warfare, one hundred thousand people die to move the line a foot or two. It is
probably the strongest anti-war museum I ever saw.
Charles: I would love to see that.
Thelen: Well if you are ever in Belgium, it is not far from Amsterdam, it is not far from anywhere in that
part of the world. It is really worth the trip anyway. We should go back to.
Charles: To Sixth Floor.
Thelen: Let us make sure that, well we are actually done with eating. Go to the Sixth Floor. We actually
have been talking about some of the exhibits we were going to talk about anyways, like Monticello, but
let us talk about the Sixth Floor. How did it happen? How did we get there? Who were you dealing with?
What were the attractions that first? What kind of challenges did you face?
Staples: The biggest challenge was should you do it or not do it.
Thelen: Okay, let us talk about that first.
Charles: Lyndalyn Adams who has been president I think of every historic group around Dallas.
Staples: …queen.
Charles: She is a SMU belle, very elegant lady.
Staples: She does not sweat.
Charles: Her husband was a doctor at Parkland Hospital.
Thelen: On that date?
Charles: Yes. I do not think involved with Kennedy. She actually - there had been a demonstration
against Stevenson, Addly Stevenson, earlier that year or the year before or maybe a couple of years
before, right wing people. She was actually involved with that. She believed and other in the historic
community that they had to deal with the schoolbook depository building.
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Long before we got involved, I think in 1976, they got an NEH grant to study the building and
think about what could happen in this building, interview people and all that kind of stuff. They - part of
the outcome of that or maybe this was after the county bought it. The county in the seventies bought
the schoolbook depository building.
Staples: Which is seven stories tall and this incident took place on the sixth floor, presumably.
Charles: The county, I mean the county needed office space, the building was available. It also was a
way to keep a wax museum or keep something else from going into this building, which was a very
smart move. The county was putting in plans to put in their office space and they put them in most of
first, second, third, fourth, fifth, through fifth, sixth was saved and seventh was saved separate. Long
before we got involved, the Hertz sign from the roof had been taken off for historic preservation
reasons. It was a very heavy on the roof.
Staples: Structural problems.
Charles: As they had worked on the county offices they saved the lunchroom from the second floor
because that is reportedly where Oswald was seen, in the lunchroom. We got involved in, I think eighttwo. We designed a puppet show, which was just a fun show, interesting design problem, which we
have encouraged AU to take it for the design aspect. The puppet show was in Dallas.
Staples: Fairpark.
Charles: Fairpark at the historical society. You are having drinks at the opening of the puppet show and
Lyndalyn Adams and Conover, we had met Conover once or twice before, Conover Hunt.
Staples: Was Shirley Cowill?
Charles: No it was just Lyndalyn and Conover that first time, I am sure of it. Conover says she has
somebody she wants up to meet, so we meet Lyndalyn . Then they start talking about the sixth floor.
They want to take us up on the sixth floor. Sort of an incongruous environment.
Thelen: Meanwhile with a couple glasses of wine.
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Charles: And you are at a happy puppet show.
Thelen: Yes, let us go to the sixth floor, okay.
Charles: I remember being surprised, but we agreed to go. We went up to the sixth floor when it just
was sort of as it had been left. The books had been taken out, but the sixth floor was just an empty
warehouse space.
Thelen: Was that how it was, I have forgotten.
Staples: It was empty when we were there.
Charles: When Oswald was there, no no no, sourrounded by books.
Thelen: Surrounded by books.
Charles: That was one of the ways he could have been hiding up there.
Staples: Supposedly.
Thelen: Right, we will stipulate that on everything you are going to say.
Charles: So it was very powerful and they wanted us to work on a study about how this could become
an exhibit. It is about, what, ten thousand square feet up there and it has these columns, fourteen feet
on center and so on.
Thelen: Remind me what year was this we are taking about?
Charles: About eighty-two.
Thelen: Okay, continue do not look it up I did not mean to distract you.
Charles: I have been trying as I find things to stick them up here for AU. No, I thought maybe I had the
Sixth floor report.
Thelen: So about twenty years later, plus or minus.
Charles: In that sense, possibly even they were planning to make an announcement in eighty-three, but I
do not remember it having to be so tied to that. We worked with them about six months on plans for
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this, we built a model. We worked with Gene Georgia, preservation architect, really brilliant guy. I think
Bob may have first said, let us, we will just keep the whole structure, we will just do our signage.
Thelen: Now you are already talking about building it. How did you decide to do it period?
Charles: I will be arrogant.
Staples: We came home and we discussed this thing quite a lot. Then we talked to people like Earl
Stramstead about it. Then afterwards we had second thoughts and said, “well if it is going to get done,
we ought to do it.”
Charles: They were determined, it was obvious.
Thelen: They were going to have a museum.
Charles: They were going to do it.
Staples: They were going to do something with the sixth floor. It was still the schoolbook depository,
there was not really the sixth floor.
Charles: No, it got named in the process. We felt we would do as good a job as anyone else and that
they were determined so we sort of had an obligation.
Staples: And we liked the people.
Thelen: You liked the people, so did the historical moment.
Charles: Interesting topic, stimulating colleagues. Not an important institution at that point, but
challenging. Real intellectual problems, it sort of fits. Pretty much control of the design solutions, not
totally, but pretty much. I mean there were architects involved, but it was clear we would be responsible
for the exhibits. Good client, decisive client.
Thelen: Was there something about that event or that place that was particularly, was it a generic
challenge? Was there something, you know all of us of our age have some engagement with that
moment somehow? I assume you guys did too.
Charles: I do definitely.
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Thelen: That might have been triggered, oh my God I am in the place where. Talking about reality as we
were earlier. I am putting words in your mouth.
Charles: The decision to me was really that, there was sort of two choices. Not our choice, but on this
project, whether you say, “you should not do anything, you obliterate the sixth floor, just make it into
offices” or you do what they were determined to do and that was to make Dallas - to give Dallas a place,
a public statement and not we are the place responsible for the assassination, but what people said to
us then, Lyndalyn said it, Shirley Colwill said it. If they traveled anywhere at this time and they said they
were from Dallas, it was you are the city that killed Kennedy.
Thelen: I recognize that.
Charles: That was pretty horrifying, they loved Dallas, they loved their town, but they also knew it was
the place that Kennedy got killed. This group of women had really determined that we have to talk
about it. We cannot put our head in the sand.
Staples: We cannot keep ignoring it and think it is going to go away. So that is what they were
determined to do.
Thelen: But you guys are not from Dallas, you do not have to buy into that.
Charles: But you knew they were - we were the right people to do it. We felt we were the right people
to do it.
Staples: We bought into the women’s argument to keep it.
Thelen: You wanted to help them find a way to express the sentiment.
Charles: We could not think of any other designer to tell them to go to that we thought would do a
better job than we would. That is a fairly arrogant statement, but it is true.
Staples: We had to deal with the architect on record there, who was a Texan who had to create the
solution, how do you get the public from the ground up to the sixth floor without disturbing the courts
and all that stuff. They had to build a little, what he calls a hyphen.
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Thelen: A hyphen?
Staples: It was a tower with a little bit of connection to this building?
Charles: Have you been there?
Thelen: No, well yes, but not since 1982. I was there shortly…
Charles: You have not seen the exhibit.
Thelen: The last time I was there, there were glasses and people put little wildflowers so it must have
been a few - not very long after. No I have never seen it.
Staples: Anyway there was some architectural issues. If you are going to create a public space on the
sixth floor, how do you get them up there? And there were historic building issue, not to destroy the
sixth floor building, which is Delee Plaza and so I cannot remember, Hendrix.
Charles: Jim Hendrix.
Staples: Jim Hendrix is the architect who did the, they call it a hyphen, to mask it through the various
committees. Once you got them up there what is the travel, everybody wants to go, you assume, to the
corner window and you are entering the back of the building. Then you have to think about the story
you are going to tell and you have only a few feet between the entry point at the back of the building to
the corner window. You have to get a certain amount of the story told before you get to the window.
Then from the window you can tell another part of the story, which is Oswald and Ruby.
In the process of doing that you have to establish Kennedy as the president, the White House,
the trips to Dallas, the meetings et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, we plotted out the story and we set about
the process of doing it. We called on a graphic designer, Kevin Osburn, to help us establish a kind of
look, textual look of this show. The fact is that most of show is black and white photograph of the time,
sixty-four, you know color photography is certainly there but it is not as prevalent in the news business
as it is today. So the idea is that it is a reportage show.
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We established it from the historic building’s sake we wanted to disturb as little of the original
texture of the building, the columns and the ceiling, but there are all of these issues that have to be
taken into account. There are sprinkler systems now that you have to add, you have to have elevators
and you have to have air conditioning systems and ducting and all that stuff.
Charles: This is some of what it looked like, either when we first saw it or when we came back in eightyeight or eighty-nine. We started in eighty-two or eighty-three and just did a study. Then they could not
fund it.
Thelen: So there was a gap.
Charles: About five years or so, maybe more.
Thelen: Gestation period. Sorry, I cut you off Bob.
Staples: The point is that this space then had to be accommodated, has to accommodate a public
gathering space, so HVAC and DEX, Dallas is important. There was a lot of huffing and puffing about
where do you put all the equipment, what kind of ducts are you going to do, how much of the fabric are
you going to destroy?
Charles: Gene Georgia was great in that.
Staples: Well, Hendrix, who was good too because he had to make stuff work within the space. I do not
think you are going to isolate him, even though he was a little bit cantankerous.
Charles: Gene really, we had…
Staples: I do not know who.
Charles: Gene George was the historic preservation architect who basically was responsible for
preserving the fabric of the building. Gene is the one we talked with - he may have even said, “what if
we just brush this wood, let us not paint it, let us not do anything.”
Staples: Let us just clean it.
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Charles: He was good in turn I think we had to get all the duct works flattened so they would fit up in
the eves. Gene as an architect could talk to Jim Hendrix and make it all happen and so forth. We pick a
color that we called brindal and I had to define it recently for them because they had to repaint. We kind
of went around and picked a color that blended in with all of this to paint walls like this in places that
were clearly new that had to get put in. they had to put an elevator in for example.
Staples: So we control the crowd by creating a path, like a mouse path. Between columns, going
between columns, but not always to the floor. Sometimes the columns would be just floating and you
could see feet on both sides of them.
Charles: What I walked off to look for was a floor plan. I cannot find an overall floo rplan.
Thelen: I do not think it is important.
Staples: I mean describe, what I was trying to do is describe the intellectual part of getting from the
entry and the Kennedy years to the corner window and what you have to go through.
Charles: Do you know where a floor plan is?
Staples: I do not.
Thelen: You do recall more or less the challenge of getting to the window.
Charles: Absolutely, absolutely.
Staples: One of the things that I think I might have done. There is something in there, something.
Thelen: I do not know what that came out of, but it was sitting here.
Charles: Let me get these papers.
Staples: One of the things that we had to do or take advantage of was that there was a lot of
photograph of him going through the city and the event itself. There then were people in the grassy
knoll or on the grassy knoll in the plaza in the greenbelt between. You had a sort of group of views from
the left side of the road and one group from the right side of the road. What we did right before you get
to the corner window, we wanted to sort of darken it up, so we had a series of panels you had to walk
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around to get to, but the ones that were here on the side we then put little tiny pictures of down both
sides leading towards the event.
Thelen: Why did you use little tiny pictures?
Staples: There were a lot of them and it just seemed like you could get this sort of, dun dun dun dun.
There had been reasons to do some big pictures other places, so you change, hunker down once in a
while.
Thelen: Then when you open it up, you really open it up.
Staples: Exactly, exactly, when we open it up by the way you step past the last picture and you are now
in the corner window and it was very dramatic. We have…
Charles: This is not the best thing to be looking at, but I think it is useful [paper rustling] and I am going
to take your lunch. We should turn this around the other way. [background noise]
Staples: You are entering there at the, no.
Thelen: Here is the elevator. Here I come off the elevator over here.
Charles: You are going to go back out that way.
Thelen: And you are going to lead me like this.
Staples: Right.
Charles: Yes, we sort of lead you - this is where this big first picture is. No it is not shown here. It is the
sixth floor with all the boxes.
Staples: The way the FBI found it.
Thelen: Okay, oh I see.
Charles: These are little panels, but basically you are supposed to go this way and learn about the early
sixties and what was life like then. One of the differences between the plan in eighty-two to eighty-three
and when we came back in [feedback] eighty-eight and then we opened in February eighty-nine is it was
felt there should be more of the early period. Really understanding what the period was like. We also
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had the lunchroom in the eighty-two plans. It had been taken out and put up here. By eighty-eight we all
felt that was artificial to move it like that.
You had early sixties, you had sort of what is going on political, you are kind of setting up, not so
overtly, but setting up, who might have done it. We have a Cuban missile crisis going on, we have got
segregation issues going on, kind of what are all the issues that have, stakeholders you might say that do
not like Kennedy a lot. The Russians, Mafia, the brothers are taking on the Mafia. Then you come down
in here and we start, it is the trip to Dallas. There are some absolutely brilliant films that were made and
working with Conover we interviewed several filmmakers. We outlined what the goals were and the
Mondells just did brilliant films. This one about before they get to Delly Plaza and this was the
filmmaker’s idea, they just captured real clocks that he passes, so you are kind of keep watching this and
you know what is going to happen.
Thelen: Brilliant.
Staples: I do not remember that that was there.
Charles: No that was here, it was the trip to Dallas. Then you get to, I think this is before your little, this
is a really old plan, this is oh-one, what the hell is going on? Is the corner window just that one window
or two windows, one window I guess.
Staples: It is one.
Charles: Okay. It is here, I guess those are those two lines maybe or something. It is in this area that you
go through these little photos, or you think they are here?
Staples: No they are there, from here to there.
Charles: And when were they, these three shots of light, I guess they got changed?
Staples: No, they are three panels that sort of have bigger pictures.
Charles: And then they are on both sides?
Staples: Yes.
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Thelen: On one side Delly Plaza versus the other street. These are the little ones that you come into.
Staples: And we painted the walls dark.
Charles: Yes, the rest of the walls are kind of this brindal grey and they get darker as you get in here.
Partly with these panels, Bob is blocking your view down to the window. One of the problems with this
physical layout - every exhibit you are dealing with a physicality of a building, sometimes you can
influence the building. In this case, that is the window Oswald is supposed to be at. We had to kill him
before that, we had to kill Kennedy before the visitors can get to this window.
Thelen: Why?
Charles: Why? Well would not it be weird to see the window where Oswald was supposed to be, but
Kennedy is still alive?
Thelen: Well, if I took Oswald’s perspective no.
Staples: Well who is going to take that?
Thelen: I guess that tells you something about me. [laughter]
Staples: It does, it really does.
Charles: You are waiting, stalking. Anyway that was our approach. We felt that if we were telling this
story in a somewhat linear fashion, Kennedy has to die before you get to the corner window. The public
does not even know about the corner window until somebody reports that they have seen a gun up
there. The press runs up there.
There is all this excitement after Kennedy, it is like who did, what happened, what is going on
here? They know something has happened there. We said that there were two evidential areas in the
museum. One of them is here, is the window. One of them is back here, is the stairway because back in
here is where a gun was found, back among boxes. Those areas became our artifacts. We actually had
an agreement early on that there would not be any artifacts in here. The artifacts…
Staples: Well we had the teletype machine.
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Charles: We had one - well we do have the teletype machine. Other things we did not really go for. They
have since been collecting some and it is okay. It certainly did not need artifacts. I mean this was a story
that…
Thelen: This is an enormous artifact.
Staples: Reportage.
Charles: Then you come around and we have an area in here where you, we talk about - I am sorry I
keep just looking at this plan. This reflected ceiling plan, no wonder I cannot figure it out. These are all
our ducts, but at least gave us the overview. Anyway, around in here we have an area which is about the
three days between Friday when he is killed until Sunday when Oswald is killed. It is sort of this
incredible weekend. I spent that weekend in the student lounge at Oberlin College riveted to televisions
and just remember the news layering. You got another piece of evidence, I mean my God what is
happening. This was like being in a murder mystery except it is lasting for three days.
When we were writing the specs, Conover and I were writing the specs for the films - Conover is
a little bit younger than I am. This was my perspective, I said, “that film has to be that layering with real
reports,” which they did a brilliant job on. Then we kill Oswald here. Then back here is a bigger theater
where they did a beautiful film about the funeral, no narration, just the music and it was the real music.
They collected footage from all over the world, all the tributes. So you can cry in there. Then we kind of
bring you out and now you kind of have to go through who did it, all the investigations. You can stand
here and talk about the grassy knoll, what is that evidence?
Staples: The conspiracy theories.
Charles: Who are all the conspiracy theories. There is a film back here with Walter Cronkite about you
know what is the legacy et cetera, that is back in here. You sign your books back in here. It has been
incredibly well received and by museum people too.
Thelen: You are looking surprised or am I misreading you?
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Charles: We did not have a clue.
Staples: You did not think you had done.
Charles: I am not sure we…
Staples: Tell him the Sammy Davis story.
Charles: Throughout this whole thing I would say I am not sure either of us - I am not sure we ever
talked about is this going to work or not. You know, you are just kind of doing the best you can, making
the best decisions you think at the moment. Conover and I had sort of agreed to share curatorial
responsibilities. She led all the research in the Texas area and we led the research here at National
Archives, it was a great great partnership.
It went on hiatus. Conover and Lyndalyn could raise the money, not that it was ever that
expensive. The county commissioners are called county judges. So a new county to be the head of all the
county judges, Judge Judy, I think his name is Judy. That is television, that is not right. Anyway, got
elected, young guy, late thirties, Republican, in his inaugural speech in January he says, “it is the county
building, we have to finish the sixth floor, this is not acceptable, Dallas needs to tell this story.” Now you
have a big man saying we have to do this, he has got backers. Next morning the Dallas morning News
says we have to tell this story. The Times Herald says we have to tell this story. Within a day we got a call
from Lyndalyn saying we are back in business, you guys have to come back we are starting again.
We had to rethink all of our ideas. I would say about two-thirds of it is the same or similar to
where we were and about a third really changed. Then it was quite quick, it all got designed, built researched, designed, built in a little over a year. I do not remember that we ever discussed between
ourselves is this going to work. We were installing the show and I am down there, you were not there I
do not think, we were kind of going back and forth depending on who had to watch over what things,
and Lyndalyn in her white suit, the rest of us are filthy in this place, comes in and has Sammy Davis Jr. in
tow. We are a couple of weeks from opening, but the graphics are not all up, the structures are up. I
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think that I was working with Protoproduction to get the graphics up and kind of laying them out and so
on.
Lyndalyn and I give Sammy Davis Jr. a tour, but we are describing it, here you are going to see,
now we are going here, now we are going here, you know, now you are coming through this little area,
you are coming to the window. He was getting it. It was clearly working with no graphics, but the ideas,
he was really getting it. He said that he came to Delly Plaza every time he played Dallas and he
happened to be in town with Liza Minelli and Frank Sinatra when that trio was kind of going around
doing things. He, on his own, always came to Delly Plaza, every time. Lyndalyn had seen him and she
had gone out and grabbed him and said, “come on in.” It is really cool that he is getting it, et cetera.
That evening Lyndalyn drives me to the airport and I said to her, “I think it is going to work.” She almost
drove off the highway, she said, “you have not thought that it was going to work?” [laughter]
Thelen: Visitor response.
Charles: Right. You do not - you are doing the best you can on any of these projects you just do the best
you can.
Staples: In the time you have to do it in.
Charles: You hope that you have enough innate understanding of this process.
Thelen: But to get to that point clearly there must have been discussions, even arguments between you
about any one of these pieces of it. In your mind as it is about to open, what if we had done it this way?
Or do you just…
Charles: At that point you are working fifteen, sixteen hours.
Staples: I do not think that there were any arguments, there were just discussions.
Thelen: Well, okay, I meant discussions.
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Staples: Because there was never a heated revolt that one had to put down. It was just nuances,
softening it, making sure that the words were as accurate as could be because we were working with
these guys, the conspiracy people.
Thelen: Well, for example, that is right, what if we characterize this way instead of that way, a
conspiracy.
Charles: Well I had said to Conover and this was part of the discussion about, well and it is part of a
much bigger discussion of who is in charge. I have played that one out in a couple of those writings. You
know, dance partners and so on, who is leading and who is doing other things. One of our arguments
was in this particular exhibit where it is all graphics, we can make anything any size we want. Making
Oswald huge is one statement. Making him little is another statement.
Thelen: Indeed, good example.
Staples: We had his handprint .
Charles: With his fingers.
Thelen: Taken off by the FBI.
Charles: It was his police card. We had a photograph of it.
Staples: We had it initially sort of five feet tall. That drew kind of negative responses.
Charles: We reduced it down. Well, before we opened. All of our discussion.
Thelen: The hand was five feet tall?
Charles: Yes, all of our discussions were very much group discussion. Here design, design is controlling
the story almost, not quite but it is surely taking a very big lead in the story.
Thelen: Explain a little more.
Charles: Again what size you make things, what colors you make things, do you try to change the mood?
How you are going to go through this space. We all agreed that with the idea that we ought to - that
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Kennedy had to be shot before we could get to that window, despite our interviewer. The whole
storyline was a whole discussion, how do you have this story and this story and this story.
Once having done that - and we agreed on what the topic of every panel would be. We would
come back with layouts for every panel, just something like this, what is in it, what is big, what is little,
what is a text. We also had said philosophically design wise and everybody agreed, this was like a
newspaper, this was like a documentary film. If it was going to be a film it would be black and white.
That was a conscious decision.
Everything is gridded carefully like a newspaper, it has a very strong grid. The graphic designer
we worked with would keep me on grid every time he would review a layout and say, “Barbara you
cannot go off the grid, you have to stay on the grid, you are going to lose it.” It is a fairly tight design in
that sense, but scale makes a difference, where you put big pictures, little pictures, again where you are
focusing people. The color, there are a few color photographs but mostly the only color is a little logo
that says the Sixth Floor. I do not know if you can see it in one of these pictures. Yes, here, this little logo
shows up on every panel.
Staples: Which is seven stripes basically.
Charles: It is seven stripes for the seven floors and that one is grey. Kevin Osborn is the graphic designer
we worked with and he came up with that. One of his early designs had the crosshairs of a gun, that was
not accepted. This is the red brick, so that color shows up, but the rest of the show is very very
monochromatic, very consciously.
Thelen: Like a newspaper.
Charles: Yes, like a newspaper of that period anyway. Keeping the design simple, leaving the structure. It
is just a very simple design. I heard a story once from John, the guy in Annapolis who does visitor studies
and has written a lot and so on, I am forgetting his last name. He was one of the leaders in early visitor
studies, how we think about museums and so on. I do not know if I have one of his books?
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Thelen: Not Drieking.
Charles: No that is a woman, Dieking.
Thelen: Lynn Dieking.
Charles: That is Lynn Dieking, but Lynn Dieking and John. (Falk)
Thelen: That is the John, I am putting them together. I know who you mean.
Charles: I think that he told or somebody was at one of his sessions told me that one of the things he
would say to museum people, “what exhibit have you felt is most powerful or has caught your attention
or whatever the most in the last year, last five years, last ten years?” to get discussions going. At least
for probably the first five years or so after this opened, maybe even ten years, the Sixth Floor continually
was one that museum people.
Thelen: So he was surveying museum people.
Charles: And they were responding that it was the Sixth Floor. A year or two after it opened, whenever
the AAM [American Association of Museums] was in Dallas, no it was in Fort Worth, the Dallas museum
community set up a bus tour of museums to Dallas, organized by the art museum, they would not
include the Sixth Floor.
Thelen: They would not?
Charles: No.
Thelen: Well, why not? I mean, if you know.
Charles: Was not a museum? I do not know, whether they were embarrassed of it, it is not high art? I do
not know. It was not included. Despite I think the Sixth Floor people tried to be included, but they were
not included.
Staples: It is not a museum, it is an exhibition.
Thelen: Is that what people said, or are we speculating?
Charles: We are speculating, but it was not.
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Thelen: That is amazing.
Charles: But it was not on the tour. I was out there because there was a session about the Sixth Floor so
I was out there to participate in it. I also had some deadlines back home, so I was mostly staying in my
room trying to write. I found that when I would go out and people knew I had been involved - people
were renting cars and driving on their own to go over there. Then they were cornering me and wanting
to talk about it. You kind of go, “I have done this for eight years, I do not know that I want to talk about
it.” That is a true story. It was not on the AAM’s agenda for the tour. The people controlling it from the
Dallas end did not include it on the agenda. People find it extremely powerful. I am glad we did it.
Staples: We are now into an audience that has no connect to the event at all. They are still coming.
Thelen: Do school groups go?
Charles: I think some, it probably would be hard to get funding in this agenda for that. I do not know
how many actual school groups they get. Initially got a lot of police people. We were very concerned
initially, it had very high security. It was the first kind of museum we had run into before Joburg where
you had to go through metal detector and that kind of stuff. They have taken all of that out, that is no
longer a problem. We had long discussions of being afraid that somebody would try to get their gun out
or take a gun in there and so on, that has all come out. It has been there twenty-two years and they are
debating now what to do, it needs some refurbishment. We have - it could all be refurbished exactly as
it is if they want to do that. We still have people who can silkscreen who can redo it all. We are not sure
what is going to happen.
Thelen: This leads us into the question of an exhibit is life after you put it up, most of them do not last
twenty-two years.
Charles: They are like your children, you send them off to you for adoption. You hope the kid behaves
well and hope you take care of it and that we raised it right. [laughter] It is great that it is still there.
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Then it has been very very well taken care of, it is very gratifying. Exhibits do not last. Here you end up it is great that this is going to AU because here is a whole career that will disappear.
Thelen: That will otherwise disappear.
Charles: Other than a few writings. Literally.
Thelen: I think this is the first collection of designer stuff, museum designer stuff that is going to be
preserved.
Charles: As far as we know other than in an institution’s own archives.
Thelen: How do you deal with - I guess, how do you deal with the reality that you are solving the
problems you are setting it up. Some days are you really proud, you were not until you were going to
the airport when you said I think it is going to work. There is a moment where you conclude it worked or
presumably some where they do not work as well or do you fix it until it does work.
Charles: No, we rarely fix something. Most of them, I think most of our projects work quite well. This
one, I do not know that we ever, Conover or Lyndalyn or us, ever outlined the goals. I do not think that
there is ever a document that talks about the emotional goals or what do we want visitors. I would have
to relook. There is this report from eighty-two to eighty-three, we should look at that. I think the goal
was always just tell the story, tell it honestly.
We did have to agree, I mean there are books there that say the martens did it. I mean you
could have anybody and their brother doing this. We sat down and agreed what were the books we
were going to work from, that everybody would agree. Well, if you just even use the official books, the
Warren Commission and there is another Senate Commission, there are three or four commissions, you
get every viable conspiracy theory in there because they analyze them all. That lets you talk about all of
those, but it does exclude the martins, so you have some parameters on what you are going to work
with.
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We stopped production at the very last minute when we realized that one map over here which
I think was the one of what we thought was Oswald’s route versus another map of maybe what is the
timing of Kennedy, anyway one way or another we realized that in different places, maybe it was even
two different Oswald things, we did not have the exact same down to the minutes or seconds
information. We then realized, we had to - I called Proto, said, “you cannot screen that we have to look
at our artwork.” What book did we take if from, well this one was done from this book and this one was
done from this book. Then we had a conference call, what time are we going to use, should we make up
a new time? [laughter]
I do not know where I was quite going with that. I was starting to say that we had not
consciously talked about mood or experience. I mean we did not talk visitor experience that I remember
as to what we wanted the visitor experience to be. I think that we just wanted to solve this need for
Dallas to face up to the story and the event.
Thelen: So that would have been the theme, not the theme, but the effect.
Charles: The goal.
Thelen: The goal.
Charles: Yes, I would say. There were some wonderful newspaper articles when it first came out to that
effect, that Dallas can talk about it. If you cannot talk about it yourself, you now have a place you can
take somebody to.
Thelen: That is pretty inspiring.
Charles: That it really affected a city, affected a town. I mean it was - there has been a lot written about
it. I have a couple of drawers of articles on it. They did two days of press stuff. One day for the
newspaper, written press one day, for media. They were very conscious of trying to allow the press
media to see it without other cameras all in their faces and dealing with that.
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The Sixth Floor people are interviewing people not only who worked on the project, I mean who
were involved with the event, but also people who worked on the project. Conover was brilliant with
the conspiracy people because the conspiracy people had expertise. Some of them specialized in still
photographs, some specialize in video, some specialized in the boxes at the windows, so she knew who
they all were. The guy who actually was one of the best on the video has been hired for the Sixth Floor,
he had been there many years now, he is the curator. He was an advisor to us about how to get the best
quality for the video pieces.
The box guy, there are so many photos of that corner window, the boxes are in all different
places. You can imagine the police coming in, pulling the boxes apart, looking for evidence, the press
putting the boxes back, taking pictures. There are a lot of photographs, so this guy has made a specialty
of analyzing the boxes. We got copies of the boxes, we went down to National Archives and got Xerox
copies of the boxes. We got new boxes made with all the right markings on them to give him the boxes
to put back there.
I was - Conover had a dinner because she is very good at having dinner. She had one dinner
when some of us were in town and she invited some of her key advisors who were some of the
conspiracy people and theorists and so on. I was late, it was an icy day, I was coming up from Waco. I
walk in, drinks are in the kitchen go in the kitchen. I go get a drink, here are these people talking and I
am kind of listening and they are arguing. I said, “is there anything that you all agree on.” One of them
looks at me and says, “some of us agree that Kennedy is dead.” [ laughter] It is just a great, we are proud
of a lot of projects, but this one is pretty high up.
Thelen: Partly because it allowed the city to comes to terms with this, basically. It accomplished its
number one goal.
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Charles: It really accomplished its goal. People have responded incredibly to it. It has a simplicity to it, it
is not overdesigned, I think is important to us. It is graphically well done. It is just a good job kind of
thing.
Thelen: It is still there, there are other ones that are not still there. I guess that that is just what you do.
Charles: You know people who are actors or performers, if they are in film the film is there, but if they
are on stage, it is not there anymore. I remember seeing Ethel Merman in Get Your Gun, but that is a
memory. [creaking door]
Thelen: Do you take pictures of an exhibit?
Charles: We have a lot of pictures. We are not as systematic about it as we should be, particularly if it is
farther out of town, so we do not get back. You cannot photograph at the openings obviously and just
before the openings we are still busy. We do try to take pictures and that will be part of the archives
going, I have to get them all numbered and so on. One of the problems now is so many of our projects
the pictures are all slides and they have not been converted. The only ones that have been converted
are if I needed them for our proposal booklet. We are not as good as we should be about it. We have
pretty good ones of Monticello now and we probably should go back and get some more.
Thelen: When you say should be, why should be?
Charles: If nothing else, it is important for marketing to have decent pictures. It is very important and
that is the digital problem now. If there is something we want to show somebody, but I have to get this
proposal out tonight. I have not learned yet how to convert slides. We sent a bunch out to be done
once, they were not done well, so I want to get a digital converter. I think it is important to document.
We talked earlier about Charles being so fanatical about photography, we are not fanatical at that level.
Photos in a sense and these notebooks are the only record when it is all gone.
Thelen: Do you refer back to any of these things? How did we solve this problem? Do you remember
how wide it was, it was four and a half or six or whatever.
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Charles: Oh yes.
Thelen: So this is a working…
Charles: Archives.
Thelen: What is an archive is also a working.
Charles: I am a little concerned about what happens when - like Franklin we still refer to. I got a call the
other day, I heard there was a cool device and so I was trying to look up that drawing. What happens
when it is at AU and not here? But there are a lot of the projects where the pictures are adequate or
what we have got is adequate or I can go back to AU I guess if I have to at some point.
Thelen: A metro ride away.
Charles: We consciously made two full closeout notebooks of Monticello Visitors’ Center because at that
point we were beginning to look for a place for the archives and I thought that is an ongoing client. I do
need those. We do have one drawer where I pulled this out of which Bob has always called projects that
are still standing so that they were quickly available. Some people never call us.
Thelen: What do you mean?
Charles: Never call us back. You know something has to be done on some of these exhibits, but they will
never call. The Sixth Floor always has been good. In fact their registrar came here this spring. I said to
her, “you know these are all going over to AU” and she said, “well I am definitely coming before that.”
She went through - we had consciously - it may have been one of the early projects that we
consciously gave the client a good set of material, I thought she had everything. It turns out we had
done four smaller exhibits here afterwards and it turned out that she did not have any of those records,
so we had not been good about sending those, so we made drawings and sent that to her. We also sent
her three of the notebooks and she is supposed to be copying them and I said they had to be back by
this summer, but it was the notebooks that said what colors things should be and things like that.
Monticello on the other hand, they are putting one little case in the exhibit, how high should it be, what
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should it be, which is great. It is a reason I was worried about the archives, it is a whole career that could
just vanish.
Thelen: Well, it will not be.
Charles: Which is great.
Thelen: Which is great. I did want to talk about travelling exhibits. I think that that was something Bob
also wanted to talk about.
Charles: Yes, I will get Bob back.
Charles: I had another question, we talked about who you are looking for, who you look forward to
working with, but there are also the times when they are not successful. They kind of illustrate the other
half of your experience of work where it does not go so well. Could you give a couple of examples of
that? You mentioned the Indian Museum for instance.
Charles: The biggie, the Indian Museum is probably the biggest. We also worked on Science in American
Life at the Museum of American History that we were terminated for government convenience. That
was actually - that one the project manager Claudin, I will have to look up Claudin’s last name, she was
terrific. She was very aware it was not working, we were very aware it was not working and we actually
had gone into the meeting with a resignation letter and she said, “let us make this for government
convenience.”
There are whole legal reasons, either you can be fired for not fulfilling your contract, which is a
real disastrous thing to happen because it has all kinds of legal implications and financial ones, et cetera,
et cetera. On the other hand, if you are fired for government convenience, I mean the government
rightfully can stop any project. I mean if there are reasons not to go ahead with a project, they have to
contractual have a reason to be able, I mean or an ability to stop a project. Maybe they do not have
funding, maybe the building just burned down. There can be all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do
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with competence. In this case, we just were, our vision and other people’s vision was, this is the Science
in American Life, just was clashing, it was clear it was clashing.
Thelen: Was that the problem, the problem was there was just disagreement.
Charles: We seemed to be unable to come up with a design approach that others were happy with. It
would be very interesting to hear Pete Daniels take because he was one of the curators on this. One that
I was in some ways clashing with a little bit. He was not certainly the major clash.
Thelen: Do you recall what dimension, was it aesthetic?
Charles: Some of it was aesthetic. It was also - there was a guy, Mike Corrigan who was the head of
exhibits. He did not like our design approach. We looked at this, we thought it was about science and
that we should use primary colors, we should use like lab materials. We were trying to make it feel like a
science lab when you went in and he did not like that at all and why were we not using natural wood
and so on. Bob said, “what do you want a California fern bar?” [laughter]
Clearly a different vision of what this whole show should even look like. We were on it for six
months maybe. Simultaneously we were working on the Seville World’s Fair which we had to get a
whole exhibit built. We started in November, it had to be on a ship in February and it had to open at
Easter. We parted ways in March on Science in American Life. I had shingles during this. They stopped
when we parted with Science in American Life even though we still had to get Seville open so you kind of
know which one was doing it. A much smaller one, I mean this happens to everybody, we have taken
over jobs from other people.
Thelen: Is there something to learn from that? Was it just, okay this is not working, bring on the next
one or do you say, hum we should never have pushed primary colors or we should listen to curators
better? Or oh, damn. How do you take that on board?
Charles: I think it is a serious question. These big shows are often by committee. In this case different
curators had different bailiwicks. DeeDee was on it, DeeDee Hillkey was also part of this, there is a big
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educational team, there is us, there is the head of exhibits with his aesthetic vision. That may have been
an example that just so many players it is very hard to come to a cohesive vision. It was at the height of
all these discussions about making teams and developing everything by teams. I think that can be very
problematic. I think a show has to have a clear vision. It does not mean it has to be one person’s vision,
but somehow a vision has to coalesce, it coalesced at the Sixth Floor, it coalesced at Monticello. It just
was not going there.
Thelen: You knew that.
Charles: We were very aware of it - that we just, we could not, we certainly were not the force that had
the ability to make this. However hard we tried we could not make this show take shape that made any
sense to us. It is better to let somebody else have a stab at it. I think at Longwood Gardens we took over
a little project, someplace we took over a little project from Jeria Finguysmar and then we were fired
too. Some of these projects, I think sometimes it takes several iterations for maybe even the client to
figure out what they want.
Thelen: Do you think that is part of it?
Charles: Sure. I have some idea that may or may not be feasible. So that that can be part of it. It can be you can have a designer-client clash, whose vision are we dealing with here? Which vision is viable if
they are not coming together. Clearly in the end the client is still going to be the client so the designer or
the guest curator or somebody else is going to go by the wayside. It is not pleasant when it happens, it is
particularly unpleasant when it is a major show, like the Museum of the American Indian.
I mean it is not only not pleasant, it is financially a disaster, particularly for a little firm like us.
Now you have a very major project that you are kind of counting on this income and you have not
sought any other projects and all of a sudden on Friday you find out that you do not have a job anymore.
Not only do you not have a job, but you have to do accounting for the last six months to justify whatever
you may have been paid. Come to some agreement, you have to pay some lawyers and get it all settled
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out. It is not something to encourage, but on American Indian I would get so frustrated I would just go
out and walk by the river for an hour or two.
Thelen: What were the frustrations?
Charles: I think that it is fairly well known, at least on those who were working there, that the curatorial
department under Bruce Burnstein and the exhibits department under Jim Vulker were clashing and not
seeing eye to eye. We were caught between their visions. Also whereas all the literature when we
applied for the job was that you are a key member of the team this is what we are going to do and so
on. I felt that as the designer I had certainly things that I thought were important to try to express or say
what we thought worked or could not work and so on. The curators basically disagreed with me. We
could not come to a consensus as to what could work on things. I am not a wallflower. I am unlikely to
just say that is fine, whatever you want, we will just do it, we will just physically solve it even though
intellectually it does not make any sense to us.
Thelen: You do not do that?
Charles: I cannot do that.
Staples: That is it, snapshot of the IBM.
Charles: Oh, that is Computer Perspective. We saw that in the book too, we looked at the end pages in
the book too.
Thelen: We were talking about the challenges in your work of getting fired to put it bluntly. We were
talking about how things do work.
Staples: We always have a parachute on our back, so we can jump out of a project.
Thelen: Have you ever fired a client? Do you ever initiate the conversation?
Charles: We are now with the National Constitution Center.
Staples: I think we fired the science project.
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Charles: Well I said that we had a letter in our project and Claudin helped negotiate the government
ending it.
Staples: Our director of the museum looks at the drawings that we had presented and said they look too
scientific and you are doing a scientific show, I think there is no way we can work with that dumb dumb.
[laughter]
Thelen: Barbara quoted your comment about the colors, what is California what?
Charles: I think you said to him, “what do you want a California fern bar?”
Thelen: Technically maybe you did not fire them.
Staples: There was obviously a fork in the road right there.
Thelen: Let us talk about the Constitution Center.
Staples: Because that is more relevant.
Thelen: You are dealing with it right now. Is this enough to say we do not want to do this anymore? How
much should we insist on this.
Charles: The Constitution Center is an interesting project and obviously these tapes will not be released
for a while.
Staples: The Constitution Center is a little bit like this. [background noise] We are here and they are
there. If we should get another project, this can do this, but one of the things for survival.
Thelen: There is some water in that other one.
Staples: You have to do this. So you do not want to get too far from that.
Thelen: I can imagine that, you are depending on income.
Charles: Let us back up. With the opening of Monticello, with the opening of Detroit, since then in the
museum world, things have been tough, at least for us. In the fall of 2009 I was very flattered to receive
a call from Steve Frank who said they have been working on this idea for an exhibition about the Civil
War, but really about Civil War one fifty, the war is not, unfinished business, the Lincoln quote, making it
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go one hundred and fifty years. He particularly was calling on us because he wanted some designers
who would really - he knew we would think about the problem, we would get involved in the subject
matter.
I went up to a meeting and Janet Cabien was working with them at the time and a lot of
different scholars and so on. I went away and said, “from everything I have heard let me see if I can
outline the show.” My outline will be a one line outline, not text outlines, you are trying to see all the
little parts. So I tried to do that and came back with some ideas and they liked those ideas. They had a
scholar, Matt Pinscer working on it, he is still working on it. I was really beginning to act really as
developer of the exhibit as much as designer and they did not have any staff person assigned to the
project, which was a problem. I said to them from the beginning, “you need a fulltime person on this.”
And they got a new president. So you had to rejustify the show and Steve Frank’s position has
changed and a different person is head of exhibits. We worked last spring with a part-time, I mean a
fulltime person from the Constitution Center assigned part-time to this, Maryjay Taylor and we - I looked
at different collections, we looked at collections and we got a certain way by July last summer. Then it
was put on hold with all the changes happening at the museum. well, we had time last summer, but we
had other projects starting this winter and we had our house to get on the market and we got this office
to move and we have an archives to move, so AU came in, so different things started coming in. Plus
Missouri was going to start in January, Missouri Historical Society and Monticello got their NEH grant
and Montpellier got their NEH grant.
The time that we really had to move this forward was last summer and last fall before
everything else started happening, but it did not move forward until beginning about this March. They
have now hired a fulltime person, two fulltime people on the project as of May. We just had kind of - it
is a very interesting project, but looking at everything else on our plate, it is the one that now
particularly that they have fulltime staff - and I like Erin a lot, I think she is really good. We cannot do
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everything and that seemed to be the one that was the most problematic. Both time wise because it had
slipped so badly, but also maybe harder to pull off.
There are these other projects that you have at least some feeling that you have some traction
with, that you can get them going. I said that we could go back on the design after August 15th, which
would be after Missouri Historical society. The other issue NEH had is that they had funding to be spent
right now. I could not - we could not put enough time in it and deliver what they were asking for in this
compressed timeframe, since we had lost all last fall and summer. I tried to send the letter. They said,
“oh Barbara sent us a Dear John letter.” They have been very understanding, I think, at least to me. I
tried to send the letter in a timely enough manner that I felt that they could move forward with the
funding issues they had and so forth, so in May I sent a letter.
Thelen: Can we go back to the Indians for a second? So they had kind of a distinctive approach to
curators, using people that who were on reservations, teachers, auto mechanics and so on. Did that,
was that…
Charles: That was fabulous, I loved that.
Thelen: I mean frankly I did too.
Charles: No, I mean I loved working with them. I was - one of the ways they would work once they
identified teams, I mean we had like twelve or - first we worked Craig Howe, did you ever meet him? He
had been at the Newbury, he was brought in to be, he is Sioux, to be, I think he is a trained architect
actually. He was the curator for our peoples, which was the gallery we were working on.
Thelen: The upstairs one? The one with the pods?
Staples: Second floor.
Charles: Yes, it has pods and now the gold right through the middle, gold and guns right through the
middle.
Thelen: What is the one with each of the tribes, Sioux, I thought that was the top floor.
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Charles: That is probably our peoples. They all are done in pods like that because they worked with
community groups throughout. The first one is Our Universe, they have the little theater you sit in, the
object theater. Then you go to Our Universe which is about world views.
Thelen: We believe the sun rises here and beaver does that.
Charles: The second one is Our Peoples, which is the histories of different tribal groups. The third one on
the top floor is our Lives which is more about Indian life today, contemporary Indian life today.
Thelen: And the one we are talking about, okay you go ahead.
Charles: Ours is our Peoples, the middle one, the history one, potentially the one most fraught with
issues. I think in part we were chosen for that because we are known to do history stuff. We had actually
competed to work on the overall vision of the museum and I think we were the runner up on that. I had
been tracking this collection. I saw it in New York as a kid. Docksteader came to our house when I was a
kid and told me stories. I remember pieces from the museum in New York. The minute it was the idea
that the collection is going to come here. I mean I have a file of newspapers clippings following this
project and really hoping to get involved. So it was really exciting to be selected for it.
We worked with Craig to work out this idea that this is like a river and we are going to stop at
different places along this river. The museum picked different groups for balance, I mean North America,
South America, but also groups that they had good relationships with, that was one of the key issues is
that they had to have partners that would work with them.
We worked, I am thinking of the groups that I actually talked with people, we would have long
phone conversations. These groups had come to the museum to help pick out artifacts. Some of those
had happened before we got going - I think that I did meet one group in Washington when they came.
Then we would have phone conversations, we would send drawings, send outlines. They would
interview them, they would go out and interview them, then we would have phone discussions with
them. So we did phone discussions with Kiowa, the Blackfeet, the Eastern Cherokee, the Apache, the
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Otomamoto, is that what they are called? They are down on the Arizona-Mexico border. I think the
Seminoles, at least six, I am not sure about some of the other ones, but we worked layouts for some of
the others. Some were sort of in advance of others.
Then the plan was that we would go out to the reservations to present their area. We did, we
were supposed to go out to Blackfeet. Then I think that they were beginning to get nervous about us or
something. Anyway the Blackfeet trip was cancelled, but we did go. Then after that we developed, I
went but we developed the whole idea for the Kiowa and we had a huge meeting with everybody, “is
everybody at the museum comfortable with Kiowa presentation, yes we are comfortable.” We did blow
up some text. So I went out with the curators to Kiowa. I thought that the meeting went great. I found it
fascinating, talked with people. I tried to get other design ideas, et cetera. I found out later that the
museum had a meeting afterwards, a debriefing meeting to which we were not invited.
Thelen: Is that unusual?
Charles: I thought it was highly unusual. I mean, I was part of the trip, I was part of the presentation.
Staples: We do not know if it was unusual or not because of the system and the way it was working. We
do not know how many meetings they had without us.
Charles: We do not know if by then they were already deciding that this was not working so no reason
to need to include them. I went out in September and they did not cancel the contract until November. I
found that strange. Bruce Burnstein came to see us without Jim Vaulker. He made some comment about
the meeting had not gone well. I said that I thought it had gone very well and I talked to the people and
so on. He made some crack, well they are not, what do they know.
Staples: What do those Indians know?
Charles: Well he did not say Indians, but they are not, they do not know about museums, what do they
know? It was very difficult.
Staples: You did explain about Vaulker and the two-edged sword, double-headed dragon.
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Charles: It was just strange - it is like being, in some places increasingly this idea, which I am going to use
vendor, which I think is a terrible word. You are a supplier, you deliver what we ask for. Whereas, we are
not vendors, we are not toilet paper sellers. I mean vendor means peddler. We are not peddling a
product. We are professionals. We present a service. You have hired us because we presumably have
some capability that you do not have that you want us to bring to the table, so let us bring it to the
table.
Staples: What you are talking about is you are basically vendor, you are literally selling.
Charles: I am being treated like a vendor in my view. My intellectual opinion, our design aesthetic is not
important or that they do not like it or whatever. A really rough example was that I - this whole design
concept of going down the river would only work if we had fabulous photographs of the landscapes that
these different groups were in so that we could visually take you down the river. That means, one they
have got to be very high quality, two they are site specific and they have to have perspectives that work
together. You have to be able to see them all as a group.
We were being given one or two choices for each site. We said, “we would like to see everything
you have because we have to work out how this is going to work.” And we were told, “no the curators
make that decision, they will give you the one that works.” I thought I had an agreement that I could
look at what the other ones were, so I went over to the museum to look. Bruce Burnstein kept me
waiting two hours. He said, “you do not have to look at that, it is not your decision.” I said, “I do have to
look at it and I have come here to look at it and I will stay here until I can look at it.” That was sort of the
beginning of the end of the relationship.
Staples: That was when the crack came.
Charles: But this is bizarre. How can you do a physical, visual, three dimensional environment if you
cannot have some control over it?
Staples: They were perfectly happy to take any image off the web and say that is it.
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Charles: That is what I finally found out, I said to them, “who are you hiring? Have you gone to National
Geographic, have you gone here, have you gone here?” I found out that some of these were coming
directly off the web. They were not hiring people. I was being led to believe that they were getting the
very best photographers to do things. I was upset that we were not having input as to what was being
shot. It turned out that was not even true.
Thelen: Oh, oh.
Staples: And again, part of the problem is that they do not understand the difference between an image
and a quality image, there is a great deal of difference. One you can bring up this big, the other one you
can bring up that big.
Charles: That is something we learned at Eames. When it is huge you ought to still be able to see the
dots in that picture. It was really rough when that ended. First of all, you know, financially but also at
international meetings people knew we were doing the Museum of the American Indian, that was very
important. I had been to a seminar, the Salzberg seminar and talking about it - then all of a sudden you
are not doing it, the Museum of the American Indian. It potentially can be a career-crusher with
something that prominent collapses.
Staples: You know the military have stripes on their arms for services.
Thelen: You have a few of those.
Staples: We have got a few.
Charles: Then you get a, well we had a reputation before that for being difficult to work with, but then
you really have a reputation for being difficult to work with. After Science in American Life we applied
for one of those quantity, you know, the museum, you may not know. So that every project would not
have to open bid every project, they have made prequalified people. The contracting office and I think
other institutions.
Thelen: They are the government or the funder?
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Charles: No, the contract office of the Smithsonian about every five years calls for portfolios, you submit
your hourly rate, you do all this kind of stuff. Your goal is to be a preferred supplier, preferred vendor.
They either, now, initially they had five exhibit designers and five fabricators, it might be ten and ten
now. The idea is that if this museum wants to use it and American Indian did not - if this museum wants
to use it, they go to this list. They know that they are okay, everybody has vetted them and now they
can within that list either ask all of them to bid or talk to a couple of them, however they want to do it.
We did not apply the first time to be on that list, I do not know why. Second round we did apply
we made it to ten but not to the five and the only time in our career I think that we have ever asked for
a post-bid debriefing, some places will do that, was for that. I asked for it and it was not that long after
Science in American Life. Even though we had had a fabulous relationship on Crossroads of Continents
not, just a little before that and on Java C, both Smithsonian projects, but we were determined difficult
to work with.
Thelen: That is what they said for the science project.
Charles: That is what they said for this quantity.
Thelen: Who did the determining?
Staples: Well, Margolis.
Charles: Caroline Margolis, she was not the only one. They had a committee of people who review your
portfolio and we presumably talk to people that you have worked with. Called references or they know
all the projects so they call people on the projects. We were told that we did not make the list of five to
be preferred suppliers because we were difficult to work with.
Thelen: There is nothing you can do about that?
Charles: No. so AU has a collection from difficult people.
Thelen: Do not go there. [laughter]
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Thelen: Well one area you have clearly done some - and another bouncing in a different direction. I am
thinking of traveling exhibits and you have done a number. I would be curious to hear the challenges
they present and why you enjoy them.
Staples: I mean the difference would between traveling and non-traveling is that you have to fit into
many different spaces. Where a single source or a single place allows you to take advantage of heights
or adjust to the lowness of something. When you go on the road, it has to fit every place. The doors are
not always in the same relationship with each other, so you have to have kind of a flexible scheme to get
out of the gallery. Some of the shows that we have done that have traveled have been smaller enough
wads of pottery or whatever that you could arrange it without any problem anywhere you wanted to go.
When you have something that is complex like Franklin where you have room settings you might say.
Charles: Eight thousand square feet.
Thelen: That is pretty big, is it not?
Staples: Those became difficult to keep in order. Again you have to sort of, some places have one big
room and you can do it all. Another place like the puppet show went to Copper-Hewitt. It is a bunch of
little rooms, you know. It breaks it up into funny packages. That is the main issue about traveling shows I
think. The weight of everything becomes an issue.
Thelen: Could you give a couple of examples?
Charles: Well, Puppets is a good one. It was a low budget traveling show.
Staples: Well, Puppets and Crossroads are very much a pair.
Charles: Quite different.
Staples: Because you have the front of the case and then you have the back of the case. In Puppets you
went through a trapdoor, an amazing hidden door and serviced the case from behind.
Charles: Let me back up. Puppets looks big like it is a whole wall. It is flats and corners. that is all it is,
they all bolt together.
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Thelen: So they could be unbolted?
Charles: You take it apart, travel, put all the corners together to travel, put all the flats together. It all
went in one truck, a very big show. Then behind that opening is a very clever design by Bob, it was not
on the AU list, but because I think it is a simple enough design that students could really understand it
and maybe use it.
Staples: It is a little bit like dollhouse or a puppeteer’s showroom. Punch and Judy is behind a little
screen with a little window and you are doing your punch and Judy.
Charles: They would have a way to put a curtain there and a way to put a little stage that would hinge
up because they have got to travel it flat too. We took that idea. The bottom of the case hinges up, has a
little stick, you put your little wire up here, you hang your curtain you clip on your light, they are little
stages. Very simple design, not very expensive. It looks like - then you could open one of, there is a door
at one end that you could get behind. So you are dressing everything from behind. I think that that was
a very creative design for a travelling show.
Staples: This opened at the Corcoran. We had virtually the whole first floor of the Corcoran, two major
galleries and then the courtyard or center court. We had some puppets that were fourteen feet tall.
Charles: Fourteen or eighteen. This picture, this puppet is four feet tall. I do not know if I have the
catalog.
Thelen: I always think of puppets being small.
Charles: Oh, exactly.
Staples: There were all kinds of puppets, there are some of those too.
Charles: This took us into a world we knew nothing about, it was wonderful and great people.
Thelen: Did you know where all the places were that it was going to go? Did you know the physical
challenges that you were going to face at the Corcoran and then wherever it went after that?
Staples: We did not know all of them.
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Charles: This is that puppet.
Thelen: Oh my god look at that, it is huge.
Staples: That if you are ever up in that neighborhood in the summer.
Charles: Bread and puppet theater.
Staples: That is an experience that is worthwhile.
Charles: We went to see it - that is our picture. It was wonderful. I think in that case we knew a few
places where it might go.
Thelen: So you sort of knew what were likely to be challenges.
Charles: Right. What was very nice on this project was that the client hired us to do the layouts for all
the other places.
Thelen: So you did not only know, but had to deal with them.
Charles: We had designed a lot of it. It was built before we knew all the places. We knew the problems.
Staples: We had floor plans of places that it was going to go to, but nobody told us that it had a
mezzanine floor in that space.
Thelen: Oops, well.
Charles: Now you put in this big puppet. I remember after that show because we had that problem, so
many places do not have good floor plans of their own buildings that we really thought that
architectural students or something. There ought to be some program the AIA [American Institute of
Architects] could underwrite to get all these museums to have decent plans. Dallas History Center was
off by a number of inches that once you try to install this place says oh yes we did not tell you that we
put a balcony in since those plans were done.
Thelen: I understand that that even happens to people’s apartments they are building.
Charles: Or houses they are building. A different kind of - another favorite traveling show, big show.
Where is Imperial Austria? This was one of Bob’s more brilliant designs.
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Staples: This is from an armory in Gratz, Austria. It is not just the king’s armor, but it is the everyman’s
armor.
Thelen: Well, every man who was permitted to have armor.
Staples: In Austria they have a lot of armor because of the [doorbell ringing] Turks. [pause] This is the
bottom. [Barbara talking in the background]
Thelen: It is really cool.
Staples: We did not do that picture, but that is the equipment that we travelled.
Thelen: And it was going to travel all over Austria?
Staples: No, it traveled in the US and Canada.
Charles: And Australia.
Staples: And Barbara gave a lecture in German, not a lecture, but a speech.
Charles: At the opening. Well, we then did another. We traveled this show and installed it back in
Austria. Then we also installed - they asked us - this is another view there, I do not know if Bob showed
you that. They have fourteen thousand pieces. The idea was that the Turks are coming so every
landowner had to send so many men, they would get there stuff, they would head out. When we first
went, it did not have any lights, you just opened the iron shutters. Now they put in some lights. We then
did an exhibit in the Kanownhala on the first floor there also and that is when that talk was. This was a
wonderful show to travel. It is more of an art show. It had platforms that people like this went on. Did
you describe how this was designed?
Thelen: No, it is very arresting to me. It looks like it is in motion.
Charles: You would come around a corner and here are sixteen guys with their pikes coming at you and
they are not as close together as they would in real battle. In real battle they would have been shoulder
to shoulder.
Thelen: They are pretty fierce looking to me.
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Charles: And the pikes would have been a little more straight at you, we could not quite do in the
visitors. It is just the helmets.
Staples: It is a tubular structure, it sort of goes into the platform and is up the leg and branches out to
be a second leg, then branches out to be a torso, then branches out to be arms. Then you dress them in
the field.
Charles: They would have to come apart for every venue. They have ethafoam donuts we called them,
around the arms to hold the armor and the legs and so on in place. They have got tape here that goes
around and back up and locks back in here. We had another group of them that had real guns open,
outside of a case, but they were well secured. This was a fabulous show.
Thelen: So designed that way, they could almost fit within any spaces that people would have.
Charles: Yes, the platform could be reorganized.
Thelen: You could put five in one row, three in another, whatever you needed.
Charles: That picture alone has probably gotten us more jobs.
Thelen: Oh my God that was my reaction, holy cow.
Charles: The rest of the show had platforms with these guys. It had casework. For traveling the rest of it
was not as unusual as how do you deal with this and how do you make a show out of ordinary armor
when people are kind of wanting that stuff, the king.
Staples: The Smithsonian exhibit central, who staged the first.
Charles: It opened in San Francisco.
Staples: But we did the staging here. Then we sent it to San Francisco, those mannequins.
Charles: It was a very interesting project in that it was organized out of Austria.
Staples: They had the goods.
Charles: They had the stuff. Analea Hoclofer. Werstyermark and Gratz is its capital. We used to joke it is
like the Texas of Austria, it has got the industry, the muscle, but it does not have Vienna and it does not
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have Stalsburg. It has this beautiful Baroque city, but only two percent of tourists at that point would go
there.
Analea has great music, a whole lot of stuff. She was assigned by the governor of Styermark to
come to the United States. She had an office in New York working out the cultural center. To help
develop projects for Styermark and put Styermark a bit more on the map. We had met the head of the
Yonam, this is one part of a consortium of museums. He had told them, her to, Fritz Fyaker, look us up.
She called and we were just finishing Crossroads at the time. We said, well come down to Washington
let us go to Crossroads, go to the opening, get a sense of a big traveling show in the United States.
We kind of talked to her, wooed her. Eventually it was agreed that a show could actually
happen. We introduced her to Peter Marzio. We were trying to think about - they had to have an
American partner. Do you know Peter, did you know Peter? He unfortunately died young, just died this
year. He was head of the Houston Art Museum, great guy. We had known him from a very early project
here.
Staples: Started out at the Smithsonian and then got Houston.
Charles: He was one of Dan Borstein’s bright young men.
Staples: Same period as Skramstad .
Charles: When they both were young. Peter had gotten his PhD at the University of Chicago. A double
degree under Joshua Taylor and Dan Borstein. Anyway, called Peter and talked about the show. I said,
“you know Peter if any show is Texas.” He got it immediately, he said “Texas would love this.” Peter and
Analea got along great, so Peter then started working with her to help find other venues.
Staples: Peter is the one who insisted on adding art to it.
Charles: He wanted to add art and he got along very well with Peter.
Staples: The other Peter.
Charles: The head of the Zogous who was an art historian, we will fill it in.
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Staples: Peter Kryn.
Charles: Peter Kryn. Basically a consortium was made of museums and each one would provide their
own expertise. I am not quite sure how they developed it financially. Houston would be the registrars
and they also organized the publication of the book. San Francisco, where it was going to open, San
Francisco Museum of Fine Arts had a really good conservation department so they took on making the
mounts, any conservation issues and the show was going to open there, so objects went there early to
get there mounts made. It went to the IBM Center in New York and they had a big publicity department,
so they worked on the poster, the brochure, organizing publicity, that kind of stuff. Smithsonian had the
model shop, so Smithsonian agreed to do the mannequins that were needed to hold this armor up. It
was a great sort of team effort.
Thelen: Do traveling exhibits usually have that subdivision of labor?
Charles: One usually organizes it and sells it to the others. I think what happened here is that Houston
and San Francisco could apply for NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] for funding or NEH for
funding. I think that they got some funding. Smithsonian could not because it is the government and
IBM could not. As I say, I am not sure how all the funding worked. We were hired in effect by the
consortium to be the designers. I do not even know if we have a contract.
Staples: How did it get to Canada?
Charles: Then Canada heard about it. Once it was all done in the United States it sort of belonged to
Austria. I think it was understood they could have the cases, they could then do anything they wanted
with it. Analea was aggressive and Canada heard about it. It went to two places in Canada, the Museum
of Civilization.
Staples: Ottawa.
Charles: First in Quebec and then to Ottawa. Then it went back to Austria for a while. It had to come
with a whole crew to mount these things. Then it went to Australia for three venues. Then it came back
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to Austria. Then there was, well, Starmark has been paying for this, supporting this, why are not we
seeing it in Styarmark? Then they asked us if we would come to Austria and install it in a castle. So we
put it in a castle in Austria. It was a wonderful when we worked with them on and off.
Thelen: It sounds like a dream sort of synergy.
Charles: It was a fabulous project. I had been an AFS student in Austria in high school so we would go
see my Austrian family when we were back there.
Staples: Analea became then a legacy. Not a legacy…
Charles: Liability?
Staples: Liability.
Thelen: Because?
Charles: There were questions about how much money she was spending or not spending and
investigations and so on. I think a change of government as you can imagine. She was very much the
person of one governor. When another government came in - because of being involved throughout the
show all this time, as I say, they did invite us to do a permanent exhibit there. Then we put in the
temporary one. This is the permanent exhibit down in the cannon hall of this same building that had
been emptied in the Napoleonic wars because the cannons were sent off to fight Napoleon and never
returned because they were considered archaic. Bob came up with, you cannot see too much of the
steel here, but sort of your Sarah wall.
Thelen: Your what?
Staples: One artist, there is an artist that does big pieces of steel. I did little pieces of steel. Mine are
quarter inch thick, his are an inch think. The idea was a very long narrow gallery, you enter here and you
exit here. You had to go all the way up here and all the way down. It was very narrow so we could not
afford a lot of furniture in there. We created a kind of curved, quarter inch steel wall that was held
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vertical and secure by some constructions at the end that had cases and stuff like that. We had this steel
rolled, it was nice.
Charles: It is the kind of thing, I do not know, who suggested steel? I mean, it turned out…
Staples: I do not know, but there are these moments, these sort of ah-ha, eureka moments that, for
instance, the pikeman was kind of a eureka moment. You were able to describe it and do it and it works.
The steel of this cannon hall is another one of those moments.
Charles: Well, what I was going to say is the Zoghouse is a treasure to the people of Styermark and
Gratz, so everybody wanted to work on it. It is only three thousand square feet, but we had three
different carpentry firms and a glass firm, I mean we had all these different contractors. Earlier, before it
was designed, I think probably Bob and Tommy talking. Tommy was our project manager who mostly
speaks German and Bob does not, but they get along great. Somehow all I just remember and all of a
sudden Tommy and Bob are heading off to the steelmill.
Staples: Steel fabricator.
Charles: Gratz, Styermark has one of the biggest steel mills or important ones in Europe. Let us see what
they can do. They knew exactly how big they could roll, what kind of radius they could roll, what kind of
thickness they could roll.
Staples: And the rest is history.
Charles: That is kind of, I think a trademark of ours is what is important locally. Who are the craftsmen,
what are the skills you have here, let us put it that way. We learned that at the Chicago History Society
under Harold. We are doing our first show, who is going to build it? Turns out a place named Walbillig
were fine fine cabinet makers and they had just done the whole interior of the Playboy House. Well that
is great. Who is the best graphics firm? How do we marry them? We do not have to go out to an exhibit
house that is going to tell us to use.
Staples: Chicago had several great exhibit houses. They mostly did trade shows for farmers.
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Thelen: What is an exhibit house?
Charles: They build exhibits.
Thelen: I mean what would be an alternative to an exhibit house.
Charles: What we do. Find a carpenter, find a graphics house, you are being a general, you are the GC a
little bit or the museum is the GC.
Staples: Here our firm is design and production. They not only draw and design it, they turn around and
build it. We have always tried to maintain the idea that we can draw and design any technology that we
want because we do not have any equipment. We then select the right kind of equipment or right kind
of person to build what we think is going to work. Whereas if you go to the exhibit house, they have a
technique or stable of extrusions that they use all the time. You say, “I want to do this”, and they, “say
well why do not we do this, we have lots of this.” You have to sort of, it is an adaptive use. We just did
that with Monticello. Again they are down there in Charlottesville. The best houses are up here in the
Washington area.
Charles: That is not very far, these are houses that work all over the world, you have to understand.
Staples: But down there they have good carpenters and they have good graphics people. We got those
two people to work side by side on the project and bang you have a nice little show.
Thelen: I am guessing that you have more control over the second.
Staples: You have a little more control, but you also have suppliers who are there to fix some locally. If
your museum is in need of help you can just pick up a phone and in a couple of hours you will get some
service as opposed to coming in from Chicago.
Charles: It also means we are more likely working with the owner of the firm, they are smaller firms, we
have more control. Craftsmen, Bob to craftsmen so and so is important. Here it was steel was the event
here. Chicago first got us into this. South Africa we start asking, “okay, if we design it who is going to
build it?” They said…
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Staples: This is where Bruce came in.
Charles: Bruce said,” we understand in all these changes that South African Broadcasting, SAB…”
Thelen: Brewers?
Charles: Not the brewers, it is the broadcasting, the T.V.
Thelen: S-C-B-C.
Charles: That SABC needed to privatize. They had to go out and find some other jobs and so on. They
had great studios that build sets. We went to see them and what can you do and so on. These are sets
that only the actors are going to be on. The public is not going to hit them, it is a different structural
issue than their sets, but incredible skills. We probably had more sets in the Brewery than we might
have done someplace else because…
Thelen: They were there.
Charles: Yes, like Bob’s lathe. We talked about it. Now we have got set builders, incredible set builders.
In Singapore, again we were asked to do a big show at Emperor’s Place. Who is going to build it, what
are we going to do? They had one trade show house, big one. Peco, works all over Asia. We knew about
them. We are not big firemarket people. You get a sense - we are not so fond of tradeshow houses.
We asked around and this guy we were working with who advises hotels said, “you know we
have some people here, they do not build exhibits, they do hotel interiors.” They send them to Europe,
they send them everywhere. They know how to build furniture, they know how to do glass, they know
how to do locks, fabric, they know how to do all of this they just have never done an exhibit. We said
great let us go see these people. We had a funny morning where Peco picked us up, we went to their
place, we were taken to the conference room. They showed us their film about everything they do, they
flipped the film, “oh there is the bar, do you want a drink at ten in the morning.”
Staples: You can just see the sequence.
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Charles: So I signed the contract. They offered to take us, “where do you need to go now when we were
done.” We got them to take us to one of these furniture places. They were astounded where we were
going. It was a factory in some factory area. We walked up some back stairs and you know what are we
getting into. We have just been with all the suits, this guy now has his sleeves cut off and so on. Chinese
guy, speaks very good English, had studied in industrial design I guess in England.
We go in his little tiny office filled with stuff and he sits us down and he said, we can make
anything you can draw or send us a picture of. You want Louis the fourteenth we will make that chair.
Anything you want we can do it.” Then he says, “but for fabric I cannot give your Jack Lennor Larson, but
if you will take Jim Tompson I can get you all the” …so course my bag is filled with Jack Lennor Larson
and Jim Tompson so it was heaven. We got the client to pursue more of these kinds of places. They
opened to the tender and you went out to see all these different places.
Staples: Some were in just literally a garage. You had to look at somebody who was going to build ten
thousand square feet of exhibit and whether they could do it and where they could do it. The first few
that we saw were just plain, they were entrepreneurs that were trying to take any job that they could
handle or not.
Charles: We ultimately, one of the groups that bid, I guess you saw them, I did not go there, was like this
other one. They were furniture people that did hotels and so on. The client agreed not to go low-bid and
in fact agreed that the garage guys even though they did bid would just be eliminated. Peco I think
actually turned in highest, but two of these groups that did major hotels both responded and I think the
one we chose was a little under the Jack Lennor Larson, Jim Tompson guy. He did a fabulous job, just a
beautiful job.
Staples: They were wonderful to work with.
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Thelen: Now I am guessing the exciting part is the control and choosing them and working with them.
The frustrating part, I am guessing, would be having to design to construct the relationship in every
detail with a whole bunch of vendors in a place you have never been.
Staples: That does not seem to bother us.
Charles: That is a new challenge.
Thelen: Okay, it is a new challenge. You do not call up somebody and say give me a this, alright and
coming in tomorrow.
Staples: It is tough sometimes. When we went to Singapore to do things, who is going to make the
brackets to hold these priceless Chinese pieces?
Charles: What is a bracket?
Staples: Then you say, “well, we do not have anybody that could do that. Do you have the material that
could do that?” So I ended up making the brackets. You get me the material and I can do it.
Charles: You actually flew in with material, which got lost in the train. Then we want Bob to have…
Staples: Some assistants.
Charles: He is back here, I am there trying to negotiate help for him. And tools, he had to send pictures
of the equipment we wanted and so on and so forth. We want assistants. Eventually we got you two
Chinese assistants who spoke no English and they called Bob boss, I was boss partner. Now that is fun.
While he is making brackets in Singapore I was heading off to get all the type set in Chinese and English.
Thelen: Actually that was something that I wanted to ask more broadly. When you start a project, you
automatically know who is going to be doing what?
Charles: No.
Thelen: At what point do you know to do whatever it takes to get brackets?
Staples: Oh, it does not come off immediately. For every exhibition there are similarities, but they are
not all alike. I mean they are definitely not all alike.
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Thelen: You do not have a process where your part goes first. You are the one who writes the grant
proposals.
Charles: I write proposals.
Thelen: Then once you get it.
Staples: I am the chauffeur that drives the brains around.
Thelen: But then there is a point where you sort of go off separately.
Charles: We are dealing with it now with Missouri. We have talked about ideas for what the cases and
panels might be like. Bob is supposed to be drawing them up and is not right now, but needs to be
drawing them up for the NEH application. What should have happened by now is to have a really decent
floor plan, but we have three times as many objects as we can deal with. I am behind my part which is I
have to work with Caroline Gilmore, who is a brilliant curator, to really negotiate some as to what is the
nature at least of the objects that were are going to say are in, so that we have a better sense so we can
design big cases or different things. We had a really good meeting out there.
Staples: What they have done over the past couple of years is find every piece of paraphilia that you
could think of that relates to the story that they want to tell. They have this endless list of sources and
these endless number of pieces.
Charles: Eighty museums they visited here and in Europe.
Thelen: What is the theme again?
Charles: It is called American Revolution on the Frontier or it may now be Land and Liberty.
Staples: Within all of this mess are some very big great early pictures of George the second.
Charles: Third, they are paintings.
Staples: Then there are a few costumes. Now if this show is supposed to travel, which it is, maybe two,
three places, we have to know if these costumes are going to travel with the show or are they just the
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kind of costumes that were worn at the time and we cannot have them, but we know what they look
like.
Charles: They have not decided.
Staples: They have to go out with their loans.
Thelen: What do you mean loans?
Charles: They are borrowing material from all of these places so they have to go out and make their loan
requests. They really will not know exactly what they are getting.
Thelen: And they are not asking you, we need six dresses of this kind?
Charles: No, no, no.
Thelen: You are not involved yet.
Charles: Well, we are involved right now we are working on it.
Staples: They have not done, they have not found six dresses that can go to three different places for,
you know.
Charles: You understand the problem, just light - that on the big traveling show we have to rotate
things.
Thelen: Well, maybe I do not, explain that. I think I know.
Staples: I think the Franklin show is the best one.
Thelen: Well, let us use that as an example.
Charles: Well, for Franklin one of the goals to make the point of our boy Franklin is that he is the only
American who is not only negotiating, but signing what are considering like five great documents of
American independence from the Albany Plan in 1750 to the Declaration of Independence to the Treaty
of Amenity to the Peace, Paris Peace, to the Constitution. That is a pretty good run.
Thelen: What a coincidence, he was in a lot of places.
Staples: So now we have five documents.
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Charles: We want the museum to go to five locations. So we want five copies, well we want to be able
to show the Albany Plan to five places. But museum X says our copy, New York Public Library, we will let
go to two places. It can only be under light for this long. Maybe the Library of Congress says their copy
can go to two more places or three more places. For the Declaration of Independence we had to have
five separate ones, for the Constitution, et cetera.
Staples: And they are not always the same size. One will be this wide, one will be this wide. So you have
to sort of conjure those flexibilities into the cases.
Charles: At least with those documents you know there are multiples. There is always the hope at least,
if you push out a wide enough net and maybe you will allow the second printing of the Declaration of
Independence and not just the first printing, you can do it.
Costumes are not so easy. There may only be one great British Revolutionary War soldier
uniform that you know was in the West and not at Lexington available for loan because the other two
are on permanent display or something like that. There may only be two different very rough American
long knives, kind of rough shirts that you know are pre-1800 that you are confident enough to put on
display. We do not have enough, if you want the British soldier, you want the long knife, you want the
lady, the French lady, you want this.
We are pretty sure from seeing the costume list that we do not have the rotations, there is not
enough depth there to say you are going to have that many cases. I think that we are going to develop a
strategy and we have not presented it yet, but what if in venue A you get the long knife outfit and in
venue B you get the British soldier and in venue C you get the French lady so that we might only travel
say three cases instead of nine cases.
Thelen: But create new cases for each.
Charles: We would create a minimum number of cases.
Staples: But they would have multiple duties.
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Charles: In the layouts, that case might be in section one in the first venue because it has got this outfit
in it, that same case in the next venue would have a different outfit in it for a different subject. It is one
of the strategies of traveling this show that we are thinking about.
Staples: Then you have to consider if this big case leaves this group is there anything going in its place or
do you just push the group closer together.
Charles: But how do you make that point, how do you still give presence to that actor and that place. So
traveling shows in that sense when they have real artifacts are really like a three dimension chess game
that you are trying to figure out what can go where.
Staples: In a couple of places we made these banners or tapestries that are three feet wide and eight to
ten feet tall. If you should take that case away you could put a banner in its place, which would have an
illustration from the period and you have to change the label or conjure some kind of intellectual
connections.
Charles: Or we have to figure out some way so that when something disappears it does not look like a
hole because all of these places are paying real money to get this show.
Thelen: Speaking of that, which brings me to Renaissance of Islam.
Charles: Your stretched fabric, oh Bob’s favorite design technique. We are still on traveling shows, we
have not ventured too far. Da, da, da. These cases do not have those usual boxes that you put things on,
they have sand dunes.
Staples: They have mounds like this. Then you have this fabric, this tu-tu material and you have it and
you throw it over the top of these two things and you pull it down until you have a tight surface here
and a curve that goes to here and then you put two pieces on here. The rest is sort of magic.
Thelen: That is what you are trying to convey.
Charles: No, you are not trying to convey that.
Staples: The next venue you take this one away so that now there is only one.
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Thelen: I see, I see what you mean.
Charles: This is when Bob first did it for Chicago.
Staples: This one was an overload situation.
Charles: We had hundreds of pots. How can you possibly wrap and make a hundred…
Thelen: This is Chicago ceramics?
Charles: And glass. This was only one case. So that is when Bob first got this idea.
Staples: That is the reason, that looks very calm.
Charles: There were some cases, big cases.
Staples: There was a case, maybe this size and it would have fifty pieces. Again we just
Charles: And no money, no budget.
Staples: Very low budget. This was a Harold Skramstad job. I suggested this to Harold and he said, “oh
Jesus.” He sort of bought into it. We worked hard and got it all done and the model shop just took
tubing and cut it off.
Charles: Tin cans - anything could be underneath there. To get the fabric, it has to have a very good two
way stretch. I had worked in the theater and I knew a designer who did all of the ballet costumes. I
called him up and I went up to see him and he kind of showed me some samples of what I was looking
for in New York and showed me where to go buy it. He said, “you are going to have to get it dyed and
this is where you get it dyed because you are just going to get it, it will come in white or skin color,
depending if they are trying to make people look nude, or get it dyed.” I buy all the fabric, however
many yards, I mean we have oodles of it still around.
Staples: Then we had to buy buttons.
Charles: Well but then I have to get it dyed. I leave all my fabric, I have it all addressed, yes we will ship
it. It does not come. I call the dye place, they said, “we have never received it.” I call the fabric place, “oh
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yes, yes we will ship it.” I call the dye place, they do not receive. Finally turns out, these two firms had a
feud a number of years ago and fabric place will not tell me that they will not ship.
I flew to New York, picked up my fabric, took it to Long Island to be dyed and came back. Then
Bob says he wants buttons with a shank, do you know what I mean by a shank? It is the little metal piece
under a button. But it has to all be integral because he is going to put it under a lot of pressure, tension
so it cannot be two pieces that will come apart. A lot of buttons have a metal bottom, maybe a plastic
top.
You go down, this is going back to my theater days, do not let anybody tell you you cannot find
something. I go down to the button area of New York - I mean New York has all these little areas. So I go
to the button area again I think probably some costume people told me where to go and you buy
buttons by the gross and you send those out to be dyed to match the fabric. It worked great.
Staples: The reason for the buttons is that if you should put three things out here and you stretch this
fabric, you want to get some definition on the inside surface. You want to pull this piece of the fabric
down. So with a button, you pull that down and now there is a valley here and it does that. Food for
thought.
Thelen: It is. It is.
Staples: We also did that same technique on a Saudi Arabian costume show. [pause]
Charles: Here is the young designer. The young designer at work.
Thelen: His work after he is done. Wow.
Charles: Yes, so that was just a little, every once in a while somebody will call me to say how did you do
that?
Staples: We did the same thing at the Textile Museum for a Saudi Arabian costume show, where we
instead of little platforms we had some sizable platforms. We did it on a landscape that was as big as
this room. We took the fabric which is like six feet wide and you can stretch it to nine feet or something.
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Charles: What was that show called?
Staples: It was not Palms and Pomegranate?
Charles: It was Palms and Pomegranate. Oh, are you good.
Staples: There we made a platform out of this, not in a case. It was a platform with maybe a half a dozen
costumes standing on these little platforms within this.
Charles: Here are they. No, you cannot, well you can just see them back here. Very low, gentle, none
were more than about eighteen inches high, but like they were out in sand dunes, people standing out
there. Well some idiot reporter at the opening tries to step on it.
Staples: To go up from the carpeted part of the room to get a closer view of something, so he puts his
foot down and goes, “ooooh.” [laughter] Nothing was hurt, but it was a sort of an alarming moment for
him.
Thelen: Did not quite run into the resistance he expected.
Staples: I kept wanting to do this again, sometime because it is too good to give up.
Charles: But you have not done it for twenty years.
Staples: Yes, I know, but the point is that it is not something that should be forgotten, I have not seen
anybody else do.
Charles: I have gotten a couple of calls, somehow people remembering it…
Staples: Really?
Charles: Yes, I would tell them that you have to get a specific fabric and it has to have a good two way
stretch and you have to get buttons.
Staples: And you have to get Bob.
Charles: And I do not think that anybody does it.
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Staples: I think that that is another eureka moment. You are searching in your head for a solution for
institution that does not have a lot of dough, but has a lot of pieces. We had to do it on the cheap, so it
worked.
Thelen: I am trying to think of other. Did we talk about the Franklin?
Charles: Not too much.
Thelen: In retrospect, is there anything particularly intriguing about that?
Charles: Yes, Franklin is good. I am going to get a glass of water to give me a break or something.
Thelen: I would like a glass of water too if I could.
Staples: What, water? Got to rest your pipes. Look at, speaking of pipes. [paper moving]
Charles: What is this? What is that? What is it?
Staples: That is Foley’s system.
Charles: In our place?
Staples: Not in our place, but that is what is going to happen in our place. We have decided in this
building that we are doing we are going to have a radiant heated floors on all the new construction. It is
going to be done by solar energy. Panels on the roof that are going to get hot, hot. That water will then
circulate down into a hundred and nine gallon tank and then it will be boiled, I guess, when it needs to
be boiled, if it should not be hot. The hot water then circulates through the pipes in the floor to give you
a warm room without forced air furnace.
Thelen: That is pretty awesome. I mean I have heard of people trying to do solar.
Staples: That is what is going to be in our little room of eight foot or so. We have, our fourth floor
apartment will be solar. Then the third, the second and the garage will be solar warmed.
Thelen: Wow. Cool. Wow. Do you have to go out and hire, do you have to find a certain kind of
contractor who will do that kind of work?
Staples: The guy has been divine up to a point, wonderful.
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Thelen: The same one you are talking about now?
Staples: Now he is a bit of a pain in the butt.
Charles: You are on mic right, are we off mic right?
Thelen: I can turn pause on, so we will start the recording back up at four-thirty Thursday. I mentioned
the essay on how exhibit design is like theater using Aristotle’s six categories and you think it is the best
thing you have written.
Charles: I do. I think it is more analytically. I think it is talking more about the player. Exhibits, [pause]
unlike movies and theater where there is a well-known structure of hierarchy and job responsibilities,
i.e. producer, director, designer, script-writer, actor. Exhibits do not have that. It is one of the things that
one might say that we have either struggled with or done well with. I have sort of explored it in a couple
of other writings.
If you say take the theater comparison, you could say the director of the museum or whoever is
doing the fundraising, whoever is setting the overall agenda, they are the producer. They are hiring the
other players, they are finding the funders, they are the one who is going to take the heat or not if there
is great success and so on, so they are the producer. We could be compared to the designer and in many
ways we are playing that role. The curator could certainly be compared to the script-writer. Whoever is
producing the show could be the production manager, not producing, but the technical director, you
know, there are all those people.
But who is the director of an exhibit? Who is really calling the intellectual shots the way a
director calls the intellectual shots of a play? Who is setting the aesthetic agenda for the designer and
saying this is the mood I want? Who is the one talking to the script-writer and saying this is the point of
view we want to get across at this point? Who is that person? I would say historically one could say it
was the curator. The curator wrote the script but was also kind of thinking the big picture and even I
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think yesterday I talked a little bit. When we first looked at the Smithsonian, the script might even say,
to the left will be, to the right will be, next you will see.
Thelen: Really in the first days?
Charles: Yes, it was really like a theater script. Actress will cry here. Increasingly on exhibits that is just
not true. It is always an interesting part of making the project work for everybody is working out
explicitly or inexplicitly, how this is going to happen. It is not really who gets the final say but it really is
kind of whose vision is this. Certainly for Crossroads of Continent there is no question that it was Bill
Fitzhue’s vision and to some degree Sergey Rootinoff’s vision.
Thelen: And they were who?
Charles: Bill Fitzhue was the Artic curator for the Smithsonian. Sergey Rootinoff was a great Artic scholar
at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. The two of them had worked together over a number of years
to talk about would it be possible to do an exhibit combining collections. Just by history some of the
great American Alaska collections were in Russia because of Russia owning Alaska. Some of the great
Siberian collections were to some degree at the Smithsonian, especially at the American museum in
New York and in Canada because the first major anthropologic survey was done by American
anthropologists and they brought the material back or they split collections. There were even some
situations where the tunic of an outfit might be in New York and the pants of an outfit were in
Leningrad. The idea was then - could you do an exhibit and bring these collections back together. So
Crossroads of Continents represented four North American tribal groups and four Siberian area tribal
groups. It was a great collaborative project and just a wonderful project for us to work on.
Staples: And establishing Bering.
Thelen: I am picturing that almost.
Charles: But that is an example where we are really working for Bill Fitzhue and trying to think about his
vision, their vision, how to best get this across. Sixth Floor wa,s as I said earlier, much more
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collaborative. Conover was the project manager, there is no question. She is doing a lot of budget stuff,
a whole lot of stuff. On the curatorial end, we worked together and then we were the designers.
A lot of projects, it is just more amorphous and you just hope the relationship is really good, that
that role just does not exist. The other problem is because of the traditional role designer and whatever
limitations that has on it, one would never publicly say that the designer is the director of the project.
Whereas the curator could be the director. There are certain just roles that it is assumed you are in that
you may or may not be in.
Thelen: The payoff of making the analogy of the theater and the director, where there clearly is a
director, is to open up the question of - well on the one hand the role of the designer and the other
hand, who is in fact assembling this?
Charles: And to say in effect, our artifacts are actors and how do we make them come alive and how do
we make this whole performance happen around them. The audience is not just looking at a pristine
view also - they are wandering in and through it. I still think it is a fair analogy. I wrote it because our
good friend Oscar Poush, who was the director of the theater museum in Vienna was retiring and as the
Germans do, they were doing a festrif. I asked if I could write a piece for the festrif. I sort of set out the
challenge for myself to write it.
Thelen: Whoever is listening to this now or transcribing it, look for this paper it is really really good. I
hope it is somehow going with the stuff.
Charles: Well, copies will go with the stuff and also a printed copy of it in the book will go with the stuff.
There are some other articles in this festrif in English, mostly it is in German. I was very honored too that
they would accept it without all the degrees after my name that it should have.
Thelen: Frau, professor, doctor. Never mind.
Charles: Well that was the fun, anyway.
Thelen: We have to do Chicago.
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Charles: Absolutely.
Thelen: On state street that great street.
Charles: This is why we are here. I am now looking at a review, volume seventy-six, number one, June
1989, the Journal of American History.
Thelen: Oh my gosh, look at that.
Charles: And Dave Thelen was the editor of this journal. At a party that Pete Daniel organized, Dave
Thelen told me, you know it is in the usual Washington, what do you kind of question. Well, he had been
Journal of - editor of this journal for many years and once he found out we did design work he said,
“what was the first scholarly journal to ever publish a review.”
Thelen: Which was not true, but anyway close enough. It is a story, make it up.
Charles: I said, “oh, what was the first exhibit.” And David Thelen said, “it was We the People at the
Chicago Historical Society and the scholar in charge was Al Young,” turned out it was a show that we had
designed, so we bonded over drinks.
Thelen: We did, over drinks and with Chicago in all of our minds. This exhibit, I cannot remember the
review.
Charles: Did you see it, the exhibit?
Thelen: Oh I did, yes I did.
Staples: He reviewed it, but did not see it.
Thelen: Well, I did not review it. I mean I published the review. I do not remember, who wrote the
review?
Charles: The review is by - I do not know some parts are cut off. Let us see who signed it.
Thelen: Oh my goodness, we certainly want to know, it should have been written at the end.
Charles: Bernard Megin sent it to me. We the People, permanent exhibit - no it is not cut off. Barbara
Clark Smith, I think. Wait a minute, let me see the end of this. Yes, Barbara Clark Smith.
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Thelen: So whoever did the review, you guys did the exhibit. Now let me say as I think we have
established earlier in these conversations that this is an important exhibit for a number of reasons which
are the emphasis on social history, ephemera, but you had been doing all this before. In history, I do not
know what the reviewer said, but in the history world this drew a lot of attention as a new kind of
history exhibit.
End of track 1.
Charles: She had worked at the history museum and she was hired to work with Al and I think help do a
lot of the day-to-day run interference or whatever else.
Staples: Well she had to do all of the sort of in-house curatorial stuff.
Charles: Make all the arrangements for loans, et cetera. Al certainly after it - I think for Al it may have
been a transformative experience. He was very excited. I know he did a lot of talks and some writings
afterwards about the experience.
Thelen: He did, I mean he was a crucial player in getting scholars to think about what are the rights of
curators and it played later into the Enola Gay. In that period from this exhibit, he was - he talked a lot
about what it was to be involved in working with you guys to start with.
Charles: We have not seen these writings. Interestingly, a week or two before I met you Dave, I was up
in Carlyle talking to Matt Pincer, the historian working on the Civil War project, and he said that he had
been, when he was in graduate school at Oxford, he had read an article by this person Al Young and
doing an exhibit called We the People and how it had influenced him to think about exhibits. Again I
have not seen Al’s articles, we probably should collect them, try and get them for this archive.
Thelen: Yes, I think so.
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Charles: You know, because it is interesting from the academic point of view that this is a very pivotal
exhibit.
Staples: A seminal work.
Thelen: Yes, but it is.
Charles: It does really - you know it did really focus on individual people and working people. I think that
it is the first time in one of our exhibits we ever did little bios. Fifteen people were picked, sounds a little
bit like Monticello, why did we say fifteen?
Thelen: I am trying to remember that, remind me.
Charles: Portrait of Patriot we called them. Some of them you would say, “is that really a patriot,” but
that was a good issue too, I think. For each of them the museum had to have an artifact. We may or may
not have a picture of the person also. For instance…
Thelen: Sounds like Monticello.
Charles: Cuffy, the black ship owner, captain who actually helped repatriate, not repatriate, but take,
colonize slaves back to Liberia. He was one of them. They had a print of his ship and of him. The Prophet
was one of the them, Tecumseh’s brother, the Prophet. I am blanking. The black woman poetrist, 18th
century and her picture, her engraving is on, no I have a notebook of all of them.
Thelen: We do not need to go through each of them.
Charles: In each of them there is a little write-up about the person.
Staples: Paul Revere was one of them.
Charles: Paul Revere was one of them. They had one of his pieces of silver.
Staples: His print of the Boston Massacre.
Charles: Was it the print of the Boston Massacre? They had a guy, so-and-so, his pike, let us say John
Smith, but it was a beau-Revolutionary War Pike.
Staples: Powder horn.
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Charles: Powder horn all with carvings. They did enough work to research it to be pretty sure they had
the right guy and who was he and so on. These were scattered throughout the show. I think what we
found particularly fascinating was for the opening was they invited descendants of these people. I think
they found direct descendants of about eight of them. There was a pile of Cuffys there, even a couple
from Liberia. That was cool. Bob says do not cool, a stupid thing to say.
Staples: I know, I know.
Thelen: Alright, you should have told me that a couple of hours ago.
Charles: That probably was the first time in an exhibit that we worked on. I mean we had focused on
people. We had people in America on Stage as performers and so on and so forth. This was different the
way Al wanted to present them.
Thelen: Did you talk with Al about all this? Would you meet with him?
Staples: I imagine that we.
Charles: We met with him a number of times. Sharon was not involved.
Staples: Not Sharon, but I meant Terry probably spoke more to him about this.
Charles: They worked daily. We just met when we came in to work on the show.
Thelen: Was there a sense of this being…
Staples: I do not know who was the genesis of the idea, I do not know that.
Thelen: It emerged.
Charles: I do not remember, it was not our idea, I do not think so.
Thelen: It sounds like it could have been Al’s, but as you say it depends on what is in the historical
society, in the museum. What about Skramstad ?
Charles: If you say that is part of your challenge. He was not there then. This was under Ellsworth
Brown. Harold had left in the early eighties and gone up to the Henry Ford Museum, Greenfield Village
and he was the head there. So this was Ellsworth. I think they specifically hired us for that job just
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because they knew that we dealt well with documents and history stuff and all that kind of stuff. They
had more of a design department than they had had previously. Their design department was also
working hard on a Civil War exhibit, that was the one Eric Foner was working on with Libby. So that
whole show was sort of a balance between, it was, I mean it opened for the anniversary of the
Constitution.
Staples: It was a transition to that gallery in the back.
Charles: Well, that was the Civil War gallery. This was really, the first half I would say was Revolution and
up to the Constitution and the second half was really Federalism and the young America you might say.
Who are all these people making the young America, building the young America.
Staples: Was that nice New Orleans picture in there?
Charles: It is a great view looking west. Under all things man shall free - anyway it is an eight foot wide.
It was painted right after the acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase. I know Al loved - we had a
workman’s leather apron that was very rare to have a worker’s leather apron. You know it is interesting
that this show is so important for probably non-design reasons.
Thelen: It is important because scholars.
Charles: It is a turning point for scholars and scholars’ involvement in museums.
Thelen: Of course, you all had been working with scholars.
Staples: I think it was my suggestion, maybe that is too bold. When we got to the Civil War, they did not
have much.
Charles: We did not do the Civil War.
Staples: In that gallery we had that frieze.
Charles: That is the Revolutionary War.
Staples: Okay, the Revolutionary War. We did that frieze of battle scenes from like…
Charles: They were all nineteenth century reenactments.
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Staples: Right, right because they did not have enough stuff. We took the top four feet of the gallery and
made big photo blowups of conquest or conflicts.
Charles: I think, I mean. I will confess that until - when we were first hoping where this archive stuff
might go. We had a little short list of maybe ten exhibits with the hope that maybe someplace will take
this little group. Then when first Matt Pincer mentions this show and you mentioned this show, it was
not in the ten. I think from a design perspective we were more in love with Crossroads of Continents or
Imperial Austria.
Staples: This was a far more traditional show.
Charles: Because?
Charles: It just was.
Thelen: You are just putting pictures on the wall.
Staples: Yes, pretty much. We had to draw a group of people that were the people, We the People.
Charles: In the front we had people.
Staples: These were made up people, but from illustrations within that period of time.
Charles: It was the first time that we had to do major casework for a Declaration and a Constitution so
we had solved some very high security issues that we had not faced up to before.
Staples: We got pretty tricky because we put the preamble or something like that in the glass and when
you got up to read the document, it disappear and you could then see the document.
Charles: The lights, we did not want any lights on the document if there was nobody looking at it. We
have got the lights working, you are setting them off. It was good design in that way, but it was
traditional looking. It had very nice wood handrails. Again Wallbigig can do beautiful woodwork so you
are not going to do metal, you are going to do beautiful wood.
Thelen: And this, but this was from your point of view also important because you used local
contractors?
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Charles: Well we had used them before. I was certainly aware of the importance of Al. I always called Al
the poster child for NEH. I knew he was going out and campaigning after this, which I think was very
important. In terms of initially trying to look at the archives and say, well… First - also we thought it was
more likely to go to a design place than a public history site. It was sort of a well - design wise what are
the piece you want to go. I do not think the show is still up, I am sure it is not still up, but it was up for a
long long time.
Staples: I do not think it is probably up either because…
Thelen: They have gone through a big change.
Staples: A very big change.
Thelen: A very big change. I do not recognize the stuff they were doing before and now.
Charles: Well, here is a nice quote, this is sort of very Al Young, “the Declaration of Independence is
displayed alongside the reminisces of a washerwoman who saw the British surrender at Yorktown and
Elizabeth Ferguson’s petition to the government of Pennsylvania for the return of land confiscated when
her husband sided with the British. Irony runs high. Visitors approach the elegantly display copy of the
Constitution by way of the 1798 cartoon congressional pugilist, which depicts Matthew Young’s spitting
tongs welding brawl in the House of Representatives and the Bill of Rights is around the corner from a
poster advertising a thirty dollar reward for the return of Arch, a slave of yellow complexion who talks
sensibly and artful.”
Thelen: This sounds like this is from…go ahead what is this?
Charles: This is Wall Street Journal. A good review. I am happy to, I will make you copies. That is when
Wall Street Journal was doing very good reviews. I am not sure they do it anymore.
Thelen: The conclusion of this review by Gail King is “We the People were and are a diverse bunch.”
Charles: Message got across.
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Thelen: Message got across, exactly. It is crucial in that way too. So if it is not so interesting from a
design point of view we should move on to something that is.
Charles: Well, I think working with Al - you commented Dave that we had worked with scholars. You had
worked with Redheffer on Mathamatica. I vaguely remember the fish guy coming in and out on the
Aquarium, but I had not personally worked with him. I am not sure prior to this we had worked with a
university scholar compared to a curator. [phone ringing] I think that separation is not so strong now.
[phone ringing]
Thelen: Say that again, I am sorry.
Charles: As more and more history scholars moved into museums as an area to work both before and
after this time, the separation of the difference of working with a university scholar versus a museum
curator is maybe less different than it is now. It is also just so much more common that on different
exhibits a scholar with specific expertise would be pulled into the project, nowadays. I think that we
were very aware that this was a bit unique, having Al on this project. What I do not really know is when
that essentially became a requirement of NEH. Having just said that Perry Dous, we worked with Perry
Dous from the Chicago University, not, University of Illinois at Chicago on our very first project at
Chicago in 1976. Al was not the first one, but he certainly was the one who campaigned.
Staples: He was the memorable one.
Thelen: He is the memorable one, there you go.
Charles: Perry was memorable. Perry knew all the pubs, kind of local bar history. It is a good show and it
is good that you all started reviewing them. This whole, I mean, having more serious reviews of exhibits.
Over the years we have talked a lot about that problem and how should they get reviewed and do
people understand if they are - maybe it does not matter but there certainly has been a lot of discussion
about do reviewers understand the process or do they need to understand the process or does it only
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matter what the final result is? I think that that is true. It only matters in the end what your experience
is when it is all done.
Thelen: But still there is a question of what criteria should you use. Oh my goodness they have the
wrong color buttons on that Civil War uniform. Accuracy, small points versus theme.
Charles: Or even cost, materials, appropriate materials, et cetera. I do not know where to go much more
on this one.
Thelen: I do not know either, so we should go somewhere else, Franklin or where would you?
Charles: Well, Franklin, I think for us, Franklin is particularly interesting, the process was interesting. We
competed - we talked about Imperial Austria being a consortium of museums. This was also a
consortium but only one of them potentially was going to receive the exhibit. It was a consortium of
Philadelphia institutions to organize a show about Benjamin Franklin. It was the Library Company, the
Philosophical Society, the Franklin Institute, the PMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Archives of
the University of Pennsylvania. Three of the institutions Franklin is involved in founding and two others
have major holdings.
They formed a tricentenniary commission to organize a major exhibit on Franklin and other
events. The show was going to open at the Franklin Institute. It was going to be a big traveling show, like
eight thousand square feet or so. There was a competition and we were ultimately selected. It was
obvious from the beginning that they were not quite sure what they wanted. When the two finalists are
Staple and Charles, who some people would consider more traditional museum designers - I do not
know that that is a fair description - but the other was Ed Scholberg of New York who is almost all
interactive and AV and so on.
Thelen: What does that mean? What do you mean Bob?
Staples: Nothing.
Charles: It means that the selection committee…
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Thelen: Was perhaps divided?
Charles: Yes and ultimately was divided I understand on the vote. I think we were selected by a split
vote.
Staples: The way presidents get elected.
Charles: Because it was going to open at the Franklin Institute and initially it was going to go to mostly
science museums, like the science museum in Boston, there was a real pressure to get a lot of
interactivity in this exhibit. We have not done a lot of interactivity. Conover, who did not survive the
project, but was great early on, organized a major meetings to brainstorm these ideas to get people
coming in from the possible museums it is going to go to, to brainstorm these ideas. What do they
expect with interactive exhibits? So the show ended up with having thirty of forty interactive, AV or
interactive things in it. I mean a lot of things.
Staples: Some successful and others no so.
Charles: Not so successful. I think overall it set a high high bar for a history exhibit. What all could you do
with history? This stuff just does not have to be in science museums, one. Two, it can be absolutely
based on the real thing when you have somebody like Franklin. I think our office, Conover, not Conover,
Paige Talbot, the really great curator to work with, Ross Reamer who ultimately took over for Conover.
We are all brainstorming, bringing ideas to the table to make things happen. I think a good example is
that Franklin loved magic squares. He writes a letter - and where is our booklet - to Colingsworth, I think
the guy’s name, in England, one of his buddies. He sends him a sixteen by sixteen magic square.
Staples: You know what a magic square is?
Thelen: I am trying to picture it.
Staples: It adds up in all directions.
Thelen: You have to go across sixteen letters.
Charles: Numbers. You have to make everything in all directions, even the diagonals,
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Staples: Have to add up to the same number.
Charles: The same number, like a hundred.
Thelen: Oh, I see. So you have like, one, eight, four and all of them have to, wow.
Charles: When you know how to do it, I guess it is not that hard, but it certainly looks hard.
Staples: It is not something that is easy to do and if you can do sixteen that is really something. When
we did Mathamatica at the Eames office, we did three by three.
Charles: Franklin writes like, we have this quote, “Is not this the most magical magical square that a
magician has ever made.” He is - Franklin is just too funny. So we said, “let us make somebody do this.”
This was before Sudoku happens, about a year before Sudoku happens. So here is our little magic
square, it was a three by three. You could turn all these dials, this is electromechanical, not computer.
You could turn all the dials, but went you get them to add up to fifteen, out the speakers it says,
“Hazzah!” then there was a little video about how a magic square works. This show had a lot of these
kind of things in it. We read about Franklin’s amazement when he first looks through a magnifying glass,
not a magnifying glass, a…
Thelen: Microscope?
Charles: Microscope. He writes a great piece in his newspaper about everything you see. You see the
fins on a fish, you see this on the feathers, you can see this in wood, it is just a lovely piece. We made a
device where it had here a video readout of the microscope and you could dial it under, we made a disc
that had all the different things he says he is looking at. We found the real ones and we were able to do
that. It has an audio track, it tells you kind of what he is listening to and you can turn it and it is his voice.
We worked very hard to find, to make.
Staples: Not his voice, it is his words.
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Charles: His words, a new actor. To - it was somebody like Franklin who is into everything, to find things
that you could engage the public with, get them to get a sense of his genius and playfulness and you
know different things.
Thelen: Like the thing you showed me on the computer screen, the bed with Adams.
Charles: Franklin and Adams in bed. We had about four animations like that, based on real things. One
of them is swimming, Franklin talking about how to swim. Gout is another one. We had this interactive,
the microscope. We had some other electromechanical ones where you, you know, guess and fish. If
you turn and you get that, then over here you have to turn and get stink in three days. They have got
aphorisms. I do not speak well. If you could get three all lined up to be right, you would get huzzah, you
would get electric lights happening.
We had based on the idea that - we met with Lamay. What is his first name? He has died
unfortunately, a great Franklin scholar. Louis Lamay at Delaware, Paige and I did. He just said, “you have
got to get his writings in. His writings are really crucial. You have got to figure out some way to get those
across.” Then we asked him, “well which ones,” and so on. Silence Dogood of course is a classic, where
he is sixteen and he does this middle aged lady.
Staples: Curtis Lamay.
Charles: No, that is a general. That was a transformative day, talking to Dr. Lamay. It sort of made us say
- some other things we had to try and get into the exhibit. So for Silence Dogood based on a little
metamorphic that we own, here is a lady. We had artwork done, who is Silence. She is reading her story
and she is talking about these boys at Harvard or wherever it was written. If you turned the handle on
the device the window would open, this lady opens the window, and now you have got Franklin as a
young boy behind there and the voice would change to a young boy’s voice, so it went back and forth.
They were really fun. Two of them that we wanted to do we could not do for political reasons.
Staples: What kind of political?
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Charles: One of them - there is a great metamorphic, you can turn a dial around and faces change.
Based on that idea, the very last thing Franklin wrote was about slavery and he writes a great piece
during the Constitutional Convention. Essentially paraphrasing the words of one of the Southern
senators who has just given a great speech about why it is natural for blacks to be slaves and who else
could work these hot lands, and on and on and on and on. Franklin writes a piece and he signs it so-andso Mohammad, I think it is. It is clearly this guy is from Tunisia let us say. He goes on and on about, “you
know, they do not believe in Islam, they are Christians. Of course they can be slaves and who else can
work this desert land,” and he paraphrases the whole thing. We wanted to have this Islamic guy ranting,
you know, you could read the document but you would have the voice, but if you turned it it becomes
Franklin. Well in this day and age with all the concerns, 2004 it was not considered politically correct.
The other one, which I still do not understand why we could not do it. Franklin plays with
electricity. There is a great story of a picnic along the river where they are sending electricity current
across the Sucoal. They are using their electric battery to heat up drinks or make hot toddies or
whatever. They are barbequing chicken, they are doing their whole bit. There is a Franklin piece that he
writes at Christmas time that he was trying to - he felt that electricity would give you the best flavor for
killing a turkey. It would be instance and it would have this great flavor and so on and so forth.
It turns out he gets this battery, gets a big turkey, in the end Franklin nearly kills himself. He
writes he is on the floor, he has been shocked and knocked out by trying to kill this turkey and that the
turkey survives. We were working with Salvi who did the Franklin and Adams in bed. Salvi worked out a
story board. Here is Franklin and he is cranking up his generator or whatever it is, but in the end the
turkey walks away and Franklin is out flat. Well, the PR people decided that they would have the PETA
protesters. You know the P-E-T-A, the cruelty to animals, the people who protest the circus for cruelty to
elephants. I think it is called PETA, P-E-T-A that they would protest the exhibit because Franklin is killing
a turkey.
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Thelen: But the turkey wins out and Franklin is not.
Charles: Exactly, plus we all eat turkey.
Thelen: Plus we all eat turkey and somehow they die before you eat them. Well that is interesting.
Staples: It is irrelevant.
Thelen: Well maybe it is not.
Charles: No it is interesting what - people think you can put in an exhibit and what you cannot put in an
exhibit. What is actually in very interesting, I think, particularly about the Islamic story, is that you are
talking about history three hundred years ago, but you inherently are dealing with current sensibilities,
current political issues. The whole treatment of the black and white relationship and slavery, the
treatment of protests, who is the funder? Will the funder object if we put XYZ in here? The concerns
Eddie and I had about the quotes we were putting up in We the People because it had congressional
funding. They are very current and you really often are talking about current issues when you make
selections and choose your point of view even, what is the theme, et cetera. That is very interesting.
Thelen: And you experienced that a few times?
Charles: Oh, yes, sure.
Thelen: That must come up all the time.
Charles: It does and you do not quite know it is going to come up, but sure it comes up. It is annoying
when you think you have a great idea like the turkey and you cannot - you have invested a fair amount
of energy trying to develop it and then you get told no.
Thelen: Were there other kinds of challenges with that exhibit, the Franklin exhibit?
Charles: Well, I would say getting all the interactivity in was probably the major one. That was fun, it
became very very good. It is a huge show to travel - probably we built some of it too heavy.
Thelen: Has it travelled? I do not know the story.
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Charles: It did not open at the Franklin Institute, that is a separate issue, it opened at the National
Constitution Center in the end. It went to St. Louis after that. Then to Houston or Denver. Anyway it
went to St. Louis, Houston, Denver, Atlanta. We did preliminary drawings for each of these to just give
the institution a guidance for how to develop it. Then they did drawings that were sent back to us. Then
parts of it went to Paris. We got to go to Paris and that was great because I had never been to Paris. We
got to go three times. I mean the continuity of it and seeing it in each venue is very rewarding. I prefer
that kind of traveling show then just design it once and send it out, lose track of it. I think it was a very
interesting show. Harold said to - Skramstad said to me he did not like it, but I have never understood
quite why.
Staples: It was not scholarly enough or something.
Charles: I did not get that. It had certainly - Constitution Center - you know people judge how long
school kids stay in these shows. Do they just run through? So it had good staying power that people
wanted to stay. It had some wonderful interactives that Savli Regeni had done with Fred Brink. A
printing one where you could kind of - it showed you how you lay out type and so on. It had another one
about discovering the Atlantic, it is not the channel, the current. What is that current called? It is the
current that all the boats use.
Thelen: I have heard of it too, but I cannot remember it.
Charles: We will look it up when we get to read this. Anyway, Franklin was one of the first people to
identify that current. We had an interactive about how do you find the current, what are your clues?
When you see certain fishes or whales, things like that, the temperature, there are various ways. The
Atlantic current, is it not Bob?
Staples: Sounds good.
Thelen: Let us call it the Atlantic current until we can think of it.
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Charles: That was the second one. The third interactive, and Ros had particularly worked on some of
these issues of apprenticeship and so on, you are a young man, you are in Boston, you have finished
your apprenticeship but there are no jobs in Boston so you have to find your way somewhere else.
Where do you go? You have so much money, you had - how do you get around, what do you do and so
on. Just some lovely things in the show. It had a lot of - you would regularly see a father with some kids
or family, everybody getting to do the same thing.
Thelen: Well that is great.
Charles: I hope we with that one set some standards for other people, not just hit a button. It was a nice
show.
Thelen: I think we better.
Charles: We better wind down.
Thelen: Is there anything more we should say at this moment. I would like to think of this as an ongoing
process.
Charles: I hope so, this has been.
Thelen: I am trying to reach over to you. [pause] We have covered a lot.
Charles: Thank you for the opportunity to mouth off.
Thelen: Well, thank you for mouthing off, I think there has been a lot fantastic stuff that has come here
and that you have created a gift for all the people at the intersections of these, making of history and
art.
Charles: I will just make a pitch. We hope that, I hope that it is not just the first time we talk about it. I
really do hope that the students at AU and other people who come will ask more questions. You find
something weird in here.
Thelen: You know where to go.
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Charles: Come ask us. I cannot quite imagine actually looking at the documents at this way and never
having seen the exhibit. Even though I think this is for something with Franklin is as complete a picture
as anyone will get because we will have the videos, we will have the scripts, we will have everything,
photographs. It was very well photographed. But you are still not there. This is a physical thing you are
walking through and you are picking and choosing and looking. You know, so, if you are using the
collection, it will be very interesting for me I think to see what do people get out of it, what can they get
out of it.
Thelen: Actually I hope people do come and talk with you about them as they are looking at these
various documents, these incredibly rich documents. Trying to make sense of how - what kind of
problems they are solving.
Charles: And why?
Thelen: And why and how.
Charles: Or do they influence anything. You know that is another whole question. We talked about
exhibits being totally ephemeral. If they are ephemeral, one how do you what it influenced because
anything it influenced is not there either.
Thelen: That is a very good point.
Charles: And does it matter.
Thelen: Well that is the big question. Maybe there is going to be some kind of an exhibit about you folks
as exhibitors and that would be a nice way to link.
Charles: Try to put some ideas together.
Thelen: Try to put together the challenges that you are facing that would focus on the creative parts
that you guys do. I am hoping that will happen too.
Charles: That would be fine, that would be interesting. Talking heads in our own exhibits.
Thelen: Talking heads in your own exhibits. Well I will turn this off, stop seems to be.
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End of track 2.
End of card 3.
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