Except myself; that would be for others to say.
[Laughter] Fourteen of them I can speak for and say that
they were very outstanding people. I don't have a list of their names
before me. And of course, there have been many changes because in the
eighteen years which have gone by, a few of them have died, one or two
have resigned and they have been replaced by other equally qualified
people.
Well, we started out by having, of course, an initial meeting of our
commission, and it appeared to me, as chairman, that the sensible thing
to do would be to ask the commission to authorize me to appoint some
committees, which they did. I appointed a committee on the selection of
architects. I appointed a chairman of a committee on the selection of a
site. I appointed a chairman of a finance committee. I appointed two or
three other committees, one of which was, of course, a programming
committee, which is very important because it's duty would be to say
what the museum shall contain.
Then one of the members of our commission, who was very much interested
in the arts, Mr. Gordon Hanes, stated that he would provide the
travelling expenses of a committee appointed to visit
Page 8 wherever the Commission chose to visit museums. Mr. Hanes himself has
been in museums all over this country and perhaps all over the world,
many places in the world I probably never heard of, because he's been
interested in the arts. So I appointed another committee, we didn't call
it a visiting committee, we didn't call it a travelling committee, I've
forgotten the name of it for the moment, but anyway, it was a committee
to visit other museums. The main object of visiting other museums at
this time was not to see what they looked like or what they contained,
but to ascertain the most sophisticated equipment that was available
anywhere, and particularly in use anywhere, which would enable us to
prevent vandalism and theft and damage to the objects of art which the
state had and which it might acquire. We felt that this was very
important. Had Mr. Hanes not had the experience he had he may not have
thought of that; I wouldn't have thought of it because I didn't know
anything about museums anyway.
But anyhow, I appointed a committee, and that committee was very prompt
in getting together their plans to visit museums. We visited museums in
the United States, many of them. Some of our plans didn't work out
because of things like illnesses at the time we could see a certain
museum, but we visited museums in the northeastern and southwestern
portions of the United States and just about encompassed this country.
We visited museums in New York, Washington, and other cities in the
northern and eastern United States. After visiting some of the museums
in the southwest, we visited the National Museum of Anthropology in
Mexico, which is a wonderful thing to behold. You go into that
Page 9 museum, the architecture is beautiful, and the
equipment is wonderful. For example, you can go into a room in that
museum and you can hear descriptions of objects of art, that are
available for you to see, in at least three different languages. We
enjoyed that. When we left Mexico City, as I recall, the elevation was
such that we could not in that altitude completely fill the gasoline
tanks on the airplane because of the extra weight. So we flew from
Mexico City to El Paso, I believe, and tanked up again. From there, we
visited the museum of the County of Los Angeles in California. Back in
the United States we went to a museum in Los Angeles, than to another
one in Oakland, and then we went to San Francisco. I may have overlooked
naming a city or two in which we visited a museum. After that, we went
to a museum in Puerto Rico and still later we planned and made a trip to
Europe.