Thelen: So that would have been the theme, not the theme, but the effect. Charles

The Sixth Floor people are interviewing people not only who worked on the project, I mean who were involved with the event, but also people who worked on the project. Conover was brilliant with the conspiracy people because the conspiracy people had expertise. Some of them specialized in still photographs, some specialize in video, some specialized in the boxes at the windows, so she knew who they all were. The guy who actually was one of the best on the video has been hired for the Sixth Floor, he had been there many years now, he is the curator. He was an advisor to us about how to get the best quality for the video pieces.

The box guy, there are so many photos of that corner window, the boxes are in all different places. You can imagine the police coming in, pulling the boxes apart, looking for evidence, the press putting the boxes back, taking pictures. There are a lot of photographs, so this guy has made a specialty of analyzing the boxes. We got copies of the boxes, we went down to National Archives and got Xerox copies of the boxes. We got new boxes made with all the right markings on them to give him the boxes to put back there.

I was - Conover had a dinner because she is very good at having dinner. She had one dinner when some of us were in town and she invited some of her key advisors who were some of the conspiracy people and theorists and so on. I was late, it was an icy day, I was coming up from Waco. I walk in, drinks are in the kitchen go in the kitchen. I go get a drink, here are these people talking and I am kind of listening and they are arguing. I said, “is there anything that you all agree on.” One of them looks at me and says, “some of us agree that Kennedy is dead.” [ laughter] It is just a great, we are proud of a lot of projects, but this one is pretty high up.

She went through - we had consciously - it may have been one of the early projects that we consciously gave the client a good set of material, I thought she had everything. It turns out we had done four smaller exhibits here afterwards and it turned out that she did not have any of those records, so we had not been good about sending those, so we made drawings and sent that to her. We also sent her three of the notebooks and she is supposed to be copying them and I said they had to be back by this summer, but it was the notebooks that said what colors things should be and things like that. Monticello on the other hand, they are putting one little case in the exhibit, how high should it be, what should it be, which is great. It is a reason I was worried about the archives, it is a whole career that could just vanish.

There are whole legal reasons, either you can be fired for not fulfilling your contract, which is a real disastrous thing to happen because it has all kinds of legal implications and financial ones, et cetera, et cetera. On the other hand, if you are fired for government convenience, I mean the government rightfully can stop any project. I mean if there are reasons not to go ahead with a project, they have to contractual have a reason to be able, I mean or an ability to stop a project. Maybe they do not have funding, maybe the building just burned down. There can be all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with competence. In this case, we just were, our vision and other people’s vision was, this is the Science in American Life, just was clashing, it was clear it was clashing.

Clearly a different vision of what this whole show should even look like. We were on it for six months maybe. Simultaneously we were working on the Seville World’s Fair which we had to get a whole exhibit built. We started in November, it had to be on a ship in February and it had to open at Easter. We parted ways in March on Science in American Life. I had shingles during this. They stopped when we parted with Science in American Life even though we still had to get Seville open so you kind of know which one was doing it. A much smaller one, I mean this happens to everybody, we have taken over jobs from other people.

I mean it is not only not pleasant, it is financially a disaster, particularly for a little firm like us. Now you have a very major project that you are kind of counting on this income and you have not sought any other projects and all of a sudden on Friday you find out that you do not have a job anymore. Not only do you not have a job, but you have to do accounting for the last six months to justify whatever you may have been paid. Come to some agreement, you have to pay some lawyers and get it all settled out. It is not something to encourage, but on American Indian I would get so frustrated I would just go out and walk by the river for an hour or two.

[laughter]

I went up to a meeting and Janet Cabien was working with them at the time and a lot of different scholars and so on. I went away and said, “from everything I have heard let me see if I can outline the show.” My outline will be a one line outline, not text outlines, you are trying to see all the little parts. So I tried to do that and came back with some ideas and they liked those ideas. They had a scholar, Matt Pinscer working on it, he is still working on it. I was really beginning to act really as developer of the exhibit as much as designer and they did not have any staff person assigned to the project, which was a problem. I said to them from the beginning, “you need a fulltime person on this.”

And they got a new president. So you had to rejustify the show and Steve Frank’s position has changed and a different person is head of exhibits. We worked last spring with a part-time, I mean a fulltime person from the Constitution Center assigned part-time to this, Maryjay Taylor and we - I looked at different collections, we looked at collections and we got a certain way by July last summer. Then it was put on hold with all the changes happening at the museum. well, we had time last summer, but we had other projects starting this winter and we had our house to get on the market and we got this office to move and we have an archives to move, so AU came in, so different things started coming in. Plus Missouri was going to start in January, Missouri Historical Society and Monticello got their NEH grant and Montpellier got their NEH grant.

The time that we really had to move this forward was last summer and last fall before everything else started happening, but it did not move forward until beginning about this March. They have now hired a fulltime person, two fulltime people on the project as of May. We just had kind of - it is a very interesting project, but looking at everything else on our plate, it is the one that now particularly that they have fulltime staff - and I like Erin a lot, I think she is really good. We cannot do everything and that seemed to be the one that was the most problematic. Both time wise because it had slipped so badly, but also maybe harder to pull off.

We worked with Craig to work out this idea that this is like a river and we are going to stop at different places along this river. The museum picked different groups for balance, I mean North America, South America, but also groups that they had good relationships with, that was one of the key issues is that they had to have partners that would work with them.

We worked, I am thinking of the groups that I actually talked with people, we would have long phone conversations. These groups had come to the museum to help pick out artifacts. Some of those had happened before we got going - I think that I did meet one group in Washington when they came. Then we would have phone conversations, we would send drawings, send outlines. They would interview them, they would go out and interview them, then we would have phone discussions with them. So we did phone discussions with Kiowa, the Blackfeet, the Eastern Cherokee, the Apache, the Otomamoto, is that what they are called? They are down on the Arizona-Mexico border. I think the Seminoles, at least six, I am not sure about some of the other ones, but we worked layouts for some of the others. Some were sort of in advance of others.

Then the plan was that we would go out to the reservations to present their area. We did, we were supposed to go out to Blackfeet. Then I think that they were beginning to get nervous about us or something. Anyway the Blackfeet trip was cancelled, but we did go. Then after that we developed, I went but we developed the whole idea for the Kiowa and we had a huge meeting with everybody, “is everybody at the museum comfortable with Kiowa presentation, yes we are comfortable.” We did blow up some text. So I went out with the curators to Kiowa. I thought that the meeting went great. I found it fascinating, talked with people. I tried to get other design ideas, et cetera. I found out later that the museum had a meeting afterwards, a debriefing meeting to which we were not invited.