Museum of Discovery, an Arkansas treasure
September 23-29, 2024
By Jay Edwards
For an old guy like me, recently stepping into the magic of Little Rock’s wonderful Museum of Discovery was like stepping back in time to those carefree days of my youth. One of the great things about being a parent, or more apropos to me, a grandparent, is you get to relive bits and pieces of your childhood as you feign the part of a responsible adult. But I didn’t have to do any acting on the day we visited MOD, because my visit, along with my copyeditor Kathy (aka spouse), was to gather info to tell a story.
We had been invited by one of MOD’s newest hires, Chief Marketing Officer Becca Bona. Becca and I have a history, going back to when she first came to work at the Daily Record as a 19-year old intern from Hendrix College. I was fortunate to hire her full time after graduation a couple of years later and she stayed and flourished and, most importantly, always made me look much better than I had a right to. She would eventually, as smart young people tend to, leave for another opportunity, but not before becoming an award-winning writer and photographer.
Becca greeted Kathy and me on another late August afternoon, welcoming us out of the heat to the large open space of the museum. We followed her deeper into the building and were soon greeted with sounds of squeals and laughter from delighted kids. I looked ahead and saw two of them right in front of me, crawling through a large clear tube Becca called the Climber, which is two stories and three towers connected by tunnels. Becca told me the Climber was mainly for kids five to 12, but if I removed my shoes it would hold a big kid too. I bent to begin untying when a firm grip from copy editor(aka Mom for an hour) steered me in another direction.
Becca said that the day they opened the Climber for the first time attendance skyrocketed in anticipation. She said it is a great way to observe how kids interact as they climb around and discover all the passages inside, figuring ways to best solve a problem or difficulty and helping others who weren’t as advanced.
“See,” I told Kathy, “those kids would help me through it.”
The next great area we came to was Discovery Cove, and we would have loved to have spent more time with the Whoosh, where you drop a colorful silk scarf into a clear plastic tube and it is whooshed rapidly through before shooting out through an opening, where, if you’re in the right spot, it floats into your hands.
Next to Whoosh was the bed of nails, and while Kathy wasn’t looking I quickly lay down on it and soon felt the nails rising into my back. The phenomenon of the bed of nails is that the weight of your body is spread out over the thousands of sharp points and so all it felt like was someone lightly scratching my back. I told Becca and Kathy I had seen a man who once had a concrete block broken on his chest by a sledgehammer while lying on a bed of nails. Physics is amazing! They both told me to get up.
There is so much more to see and do. I loved the Earthquake and told Kathy we had to be sure and go in the Tornado House next time. Not sure she agreed.
We walked on as Becca told us MOD has strong relationships with the City of Little Rock, North Little Rock and Conway, where most of their visitors come from, but that in April of this year they had already achieved at least one visitor from all 50 states.
“It’s great because we are a destination people travel specifically to see,” she told us. “But there are also families who may be passing through and stop for a while, who may ask, ‘Where can we take the kids?’”
Beginnings
In 1927 the Arkansas Museum of Natural History and Antiquities opened. It was the vision of Julia Burnelle Smade Babcock, known better as Bernie, who used her southern stubborn streak and proved the critics and naysayers wrong who said it couldn’t be done. Bernie had only one thing to say to that, which was, “I’ll show em.”
Bernie Smade was born in Union, Ohio, on April 28, 1868, the first of six children, and her parents, Hiram and Charlotte raised their children with a freedom uncharacteristic for that time. When Bernie was in kindergarten, her lively imagination was too much for her teacher and she was expelled, causing her mother to say, “Oh, that’s only a sign she’ll be a writer when she grows up.”
The family moved to Russellville and Bernie would later attend Little Rock University, paying her way by working as the college president’s housekeeper. In 1886 she left school and married William Franklin Babcock, who worked for the Pacific Express Company. They lived in Little Rock and after 11 years of marriage and five children, William died. Bernie was only 29, but determined to make a living by writing so that she could stay at home and raise her family. So she wrote stories and poems at night, sending them to editors across the country. Her persistence paid off and Charlotte’s prediction came true as Bernie would go on to produce numerous essays and newspaper articles during her lifetime, as well as over 40 novels. She died on Petit Jean Mountain at the age of 94. A neighbor found her. In her hand was a manuscript.
Just last month Bernie Babcock was inducted into the Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame.
In 1998 the museum moved to its current location in the River Market under a new name – Museum of Discovery: Arkansas’ Museum of Science and History. In 2002 the Arkansas Children’s Museum, located in the Union Train Station, merged with the Museum of Discovery and ten years later, after undergoing a massive renovation funded by the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation and a capital campaign, the Museum of Discovery reopened with brand new galleries and an expanded facility.
A new campaign
Another fundraiser was announced this past March by Museum of Discovery CEO Kelley Bass. Called the Reimagination Campaign, the goal was to update gallery space within the museum. Two of the new galleries are Small Fry Fish Camp, designed for guests six years and younger and their families, and Curiosity Spot, aimed at kids up to nine but with no age requirement for entry.
Included in Small Fry Fish Camp is a large-scale fish sculpture called Rainbow Trout Crawler, which provides a dramatic icon around and through which kids can explore.
Another new gallery is Jump In! (0-2 years old), which has a forest floor area that contains a low enclosing wall with a gate, as well as hanging leaf shapes made of clear, curved acrylic to create a sense of autumn leaves drifting down overhead. Inside, crawlers and toddlers will find a safe space where they can develop basic motor and thinking skills as they play with soft woodland structures, including a mushroom they can climb inside.
The new Curiosity Spot gallery includes Kaleidoscope, where guests immerse themselves in an illusion while exploring a 15-foot-long kaleidoscope structure.
And in Make a Face, you get to create self-portraits using a mixture of selfies as well as different features, such as noses, ears, and hair of your choice and then display them on a monitor above with other portraits.
“Providing engaging experiences for our youngest guests and their families is at the heart of the Museum of Discovery’s mission,” Bass said. “Our informal environment for exploring and learning is the perfect complement to the more formal education settings kids benefit from. More than 80 percent of the children who come to the museum outside of group visits are 1-6 years old versus 7-12, and the percentage among our more than 3,000 member families is over 90.”
There will always be challenges, many museums across the country didn’t survive after COVID, especially if they had a disaster of a flood from frozen pipes thrown in. But with the passion and spirit of Bernie Babcock alive in the group down there now, well, look for them to keep continuing to “show em.”
For more information on the Reimagination Campaign, contact Melissa Stiles, chief development officer, at 501.537.4603 or mstiles@museumofdiscovery.org. For more information about Museum of Discovery, visit www.museumofdiscovery.org.
(Sources: Encyclopedia of Arkansas and Wikipedia)
Photo Caption:
Photo 1:
Educator Seth Chesier wows museum guests with his fantastic fire display in the Museum of Discovery’s Entergy Theatre.
Photo 2:
Guests can climb, crawl, and explore inside the Climber, a structure designed by Hands On!
Photo 3:
The Science Lab Gallery invites visitors to dive into hands-on learning with interactive zones.
Photo credit 2:
(Photo provided by Museum of Discovery)
Photo credit 3:
(Photo provided by Museum of Discovery)
