Oklahoma Today July-August 2003 Volume 53 No. 4

The forty-eight-member Oklahoma City National Memorial
Foundation manages the endowment and is its fundraising arm.
Both boards include survivors, family members of the deceased,
and civic leaders.
Unique, too, is the memorial's relationship with the National Park
Service, which operates at the request of the trust in cooperation
with the memorial's staffand is reimbursed annually for its service.
The six park rangers who work at the memorial are responsible for
interpretation of the outdoor site and help coordinate security.
Before the dedication ceremony, President and Mrs. Bush took
a private tour of the museum. "It is a really well-done place," the
president said in his public comments. "It's powerful."
The president's visit brought the national press, and reporters
from the Washington Post and elsewhere described the museum
with the same adjective, "powerful." An ABC news report said,
"The center depicts the frenzied panic after the bomb exploded,
a short distance from the building's day-care center." In the Dallas
Morning Nezus, Arnold Hamilton said, "From display to display,
the faces, names, and places become familiar again."
The three-level complex on the west side of the Journal Record
Building begins with a subdued, granite-walled lobby and tasteful
gift store. Security is tight for the fifth-floor administrative offices,
and precautionary measures include a sign-in process, badges, escorts,
and photo ID.
The second and third floors, filled with media and artifact
exhibits, constitute the museum proper. A ten-chapter story line,
scripted by a group of key staff members and volunteers who
called themselves the "Wednesday Night Prayer Group," begins
on the third floor with a typical morning in Oklahoma City, followed
by a journey through the chaos and hysteria of the event
and concluding on the second floor with the hope and healing
that arose in its aftermath.
The memorial center is an interactive, multimedia experience.
Exhibits include glassed-in displays, television monitors with oral
histories of the people executive director Kari Watkins calls "walking,
talking artifacts," and computerized kiosks. The path through the
center twists and turns,something new around every corner.
The images within the memorial center were installed by
Hillmann & Carr, an award-winning motion picture and video
production company from Washington, D.C., whose clients include
the Smithsonian Institution, the National Civil War Museum,
and the U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum, the model to
which the Oklahoma City National Memorial Center Museum
is frequently compared.
ACTING AS VISUAL PARTNERS TO THE MANY COMPETingvoices
inside the museum are artifacts upon artifacts, the
province of collections manager Jane Thomas of Guthrie. Thomas,
a historian, began her salvage operation as a task force volunteer
in the months following the bombing.
"You have to understand," she says, "people thought I was kind
of a nut. You know, I'm over at the First United Methodist Church,
and I'm saying,
- - 'Can I have your window?"'
Thomas and other early organizers suspected the items that
would resonate most with visitors would be the ones they could
easily identlfy with. A dress, a plastic photo ID badge, and a men's
restroom, for instance.
In a case on the third floor hangs a pretty long-sleeved dress with a
belt, its only visible damage a small tear on the skirt. Florence Rogers,
CEO of the Federal Employees Credit Union, lost eighteen colleagues
in the bombing. She had worn the dress to work on April 19.
Once she finally made it home that day, Rogers shook out the dress,
dusted with debris fiom the blast, and stuck it in a shelf in her laundry
room, out of sight and out of mind. Four years later, she stumbled
upon it. "I pressed it up, and I took it to Jane at the archives-I
could not throw it awayand I said, 'Jane, do something with this;
get it out of my way."' She pauses. "I didn't know it was going to be
displayed in the museum until the board members toured through
there. I'm not a person who cries easily, but I stood there and sobbed
when I saw it standing there."
In the corner of the same display, the shards of another dress,
worn by survivor Nancy Ingram, an IRS secretary inside the credit
union at the time of the bombing, fit inside a Ziploc bag.
Thomas envisioned another exhibit filled with ID badges - repre-
-
senting the various agencies that worked in rescue and recovery. One
From left: This portion of the museum's tewchapter story line depicts
'chaos'; President Bush speakswith RichardWilliams, Major Ed Hill,
and Bob Johnson at the museum dedication on February 19,2001;
flags recovered from the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building debris are
displayed within the center.