[ARC5] [Milsurplus] New Homes for Old Warriors

[hwhall at compuserve.com]

There's truth to museums selling/trading artifacts donated to them or purchased by them.  No museum is an infinitely large warehouse for things people loved and want preserved.  And probably no museum lasts forever.  If you find a museum that "promises" not to sell/trade, that's a policy that is surely subject to change as operating/survival requirements dictate.

But what are the alternatives?  

1. Give them to someone who loves them.  That might work IF we can find enough folks to absorb all the stuff we all love so much.  But we know how hard it is even to find someone for just part of one person's collection.  Even if successful at it, what does that person do when they lose interest, lose money & storage space, or get too old themselves?  Back to square one with an even smaller population of interested folks.
2. Flog it on Ebay.  Similar problem to item 1: dwindling population who want the stuff & if someone does buy it, once again what happens to it when they cannot keep it any longer?  Assuming it survives the shipper's loving care.
3. Donate to the local ham club.  See items 1 & 2.  IF we can get them to take it & do for us the work of finding it all new homes.
4. Send it to the scrappers/trash heaps.  Wait... that's what we're trying to avoid, right?
5. Put it on the curb and hope for the best?  It might end up in among the end results of 1, 2, 3 or 4.
6. Give it to a museum.  No better guarantees of long-term survival than in 1, 2 or 3.  But it has a chance of being seen by people who will have be given an opportunity to understand it or how it was relevant to history.  Choose the museum carefully so it has a chance of lasting longer than the other choices.  Then again, any museum THAT good may not be interested in our beloved almost-but-not-quite-museum-quality items or examples-of-how-hams-did-it-back-when.  Also, museums typically aren't interested in just everything that is old; we need to find one where our stuff kinda "belongs."

Disclosure:  I volunteer doing electrical/electronic restorations at a WWII themed museum.  It strives to make things work instead of dust-collectors; all the airplanes are flying examples.  For this museum even busted & hacked-up stuff has worth because there's likely to be something restorable if we just had some missing parts or samples to make reproductions from.  I like being there to make stuff work like it used to. 

Wayne
WB4OGM
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