The Texas Memorial Museum

            Probably my favorite job ever was at the Texas Memorial Museum, on the University of Texas campus, a job that featured a grand old building, historical and geological artifacts, and a broad range of job duties, from the most menial to the highly academic.

            I was a student at UT at the time; it was a work-study job. I’d lasted exactly one night doing food service at the student union.  It was fast-food service; I was used to actually cooking, didn’t have a clue about fast food and after squirting pink milkshake all over the floor, I went back to the financial aid office and begged them to find me a different position.

            They sent me over to the TMM. Even though I’d lived in the neighborhood for a couple of years I had never noticed it.  It’s up a grand staircase, past a magnificent statue of galloping mustangs, surrounded by big old trees. Inside, it’s got a classic high-ceiling museum lobby which used to contain a big mosasaur fossil, and of course, a gift shop.

            As a work-study student, I got to help out in every aspect of that museum. Since there was actual research and publishing going on, I got to do some copy-editing and helped with the index of a scientific treatise.  But, I also had to do stuff like stick those little round reinforcements on dozens of volumes of loose-leaf archives. Once a month, each of the students had to wash all the glass in the building, four stories of exhibits, using a chamois cloth and a bucket of ammonia water. We also got to dust the fossils using a special air-puffing brush. I loved telling people that I had a job dusting dinosaurs.

            The most exciting thing that happened there on a regular basis was the arrival of busloads of children from all over the state. There was no Texas History Museum then- some of the artifacts now on display there were at the TMM, making it a required stop on most school trips to the Capital. Usually, they’d want to hit the gift shop immediately, and it was “all hands on deck” -scholars would emerge from their offices to hand out trinkets and make change. It was a pretty great gift shop; I still have mineral samples that I bought there for 50 cents. After the gift shop, the kids would usually head straight up to the third floor to see the shrunken head. The glass was always extra dirty up there.

            The TMM is still going strong, you can go see the mosasaur, which is in the basement now, and they’ve added a model of a 40-ft pteradon. It seems smaller somehow since all the historic exhibits have moved up the street. As its mission has changed over the years, focusing only on the natural history of Texas, it seems that they have put away all the random oddities from around the world. I wonder where that shrunken head is now?