The American Doll & Toy Museum will open the first week of December!

After a lifetime of planning, it has finally happened!  more details will follow as the doll drama unfolds, but The American Doll & Toy Museum will open the first week of December!  This will be a smaller version of our collection because of space limitations, but there will be representative dolls from prehistory to the present, and a nice selection of doll houses, miniatures, toys and related objects.

Many of you also follow our main doll museum blog, Dr. E's Doll Museum, and you know that I am Dr. E and this is our unofficial name.  I started a new Facebook Page called American Doll

In and Toy Museum, and will follow up with a Twitter, Pinterest, and other social media accounts to spread the word.

We'll have a small book shop selling doll related objects, vintage paper airplanes, licensed merchandise books, and perhaps some small antiques from the shop behind us. We also have a GoFundMe Page for donations.  https://www.gofundme.com/manage/ellen039s-campaign-for-american-doll-and-toy-museum

There will be special events and give a ways.  We'll celebrate each season and holiday, too. There will be rotating displays of all kinds.

I plan on have a doll trinket to give to each visitor as a memento.

Many of you have seen  the displays of my dolls at various museums. I've collected since age 3, and have been planning this museum since grade school.  We will join a small neighbor hood near one of my alma maters called College Hill, which hosts other events and houses several antique stores, a cafe, a hometown bar and grill, a hometown barber shop, sports apparel shop and more.  We will be contributing to small business and to our community.

We welcome everyone; we aren't just for doll collectors and dealers, and we hope by embracing the general public, that we will also encourage young collectors.

Below are some of our citizens, and there is a YouTube video with more.

Doll Museum Video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_TLGmyLKIw&t=158s

Just sent; Holocaust Teachers Institute; all Invited

Dealing with the Past in the Present: World War II and the Holocaust in Sweden

Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois

Thursday, October 24 Olin Auditorium

4:00pm Screening of documentary film Harbor of Hope

Saturday October 26, 2019 Olin Auditorium

Session 1: 10:00am –12:15pm

Lecture 1. Sweden and World War II—An Overview

Lars M. Andersson, Uppsala University

Lecture 2. Sweden and the Question of Jewish Refugees

Karin Kvist Geverts, National Library of Sweden

Lecture 3. Remembering WWII and the Holocaust today

Ulf Zander, Lund University

Session 2: 2:00pm – 3:00pm

Presentation by Göran Rosenberg, well-known author/journalist/public intellectual focusing on his award winning book Ett kort uppehåll på vägen från Auschwitz (A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz).  The book deals with his family’s story after his parents came from the camps to Sweden after the war. For an interview in English with Rosenberg about his book, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k84zhmlM8zU.

Session 3: 3:30pm – 4:30pm  

Panel Discussion:

Andersson, Kvist Geverts, Zander, Rosenberg, and a representative of the Swedish Embassy in Washington D.C.

Topics: 

1. Can/Should historians be moral judges of the past?  

2. The contemporary situation in Sweden and Europe with regard to racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism.

Concluding Words: 4:30pm

Dr. Thomas Tredway, President Emeritus, Augustana College

Skyward September 2019 by guest blogger Dr. David Levy

Skyward

September 2019

The AAR lives on!

About a year ago in this column I wrote about the final Adirondack Astronomy Retreat (AAR) that Wendee and I held in the Adirondack Mountains near Lewis, New York.  We had a special program with lectures, a banquet featuring, among other VIPs, my brother Gerry and his partner Duane, and President John Ettling of SUNY Plattsburgh.  We even presented to Dr. Ettling the first Starlight Night Prize to celebrate the University’s commitment to keep this wonderful place as dark as possible.   We concluded the week by burying a time capsule. 

Much as we tried, the enthusiasm for the event was too strong just to end it.  Now, under the direction of Patrice Scattolin from Montreal and his family, AAR is continuing.   With his high intelligence and brilliant sense of humor, Patrice ran the event with an efficiency and alacrity rarely seen.  Laurie Williams, with the assistance of daughters Clara and Sophie and son Marc, kept the indoor portion running smoothly.  And this year the weather helped “big-time.”  We had four beautiful nights, and good portions of two others.  Using the camp’s Meade 14-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain called Aart, a 26-inch reflector dubbed Enterprise, and Carl Jorgensen’s 8-inch reflector named Pegasus, I did almost 25 hours of visual comet hunting.  This total is possibly a record for this site.    When the sky is at its best here, I can glimpse Messier 33 with the naked eye and I did that almost every night.  The International Space Station made a nice pass, and we saw several bright meteors heralding the onset of the Perseid meteor shower.

The purpose of this particular retreat was and still is to recharge our astronomical batteries, and to remind us why we became amateur astronomers in the first place.    While last year we had plenty of down time to enjoy movies and singalongs, this year the night sky occupied pretty much all our time.   It was truly spectacular.  

While the site may be superb now, we chose it for our star party because of the memories that flood back every time I revisit it.  It provided my first serious dark sky experience decades ago, during the summers of 1964, 1965, and 1966.  I loved it so much back then that I asked Dad if I could attend SUNY Plattsburgh the rest of the year.  In one of the few mistakes Dad ever made, he resisted, preferring that I attend Montreal’s McGill University instead.  I flunked out of McGill twice.  But I have never forgotten the pristine beauty of SUNY Plattsburgh’s Twin Valleys campsite, with its unparalled views of the “forever wild” Adirondack mountains.  May this priceless spot continue to remind future generations of how beautiful the mountains are, and how beautiful the night sky remains far above their lofty peaks.