Bad ideas develop their own projectile inertia.
Once energized, goofiness can sail untouched past the moment when the idea can be unmasked as ill-considered and intemperate.
Here’s a goofy idea that seems self-propelled at the moment.
Let’s give Lake County Discovery Museum’s 3.5 million-item Curt Teich Postcard Archives to the University of Illinois for free. That will save the county thousands of dollars in museum space and management costs. And besides, the university knows how to take care of such rare assets better than we common folks do.
Forest Preserves district officials pitched launching negotiations on such an idea to the Lake County Board recently. No one arose to suggest it might be a mistake based on misplaced values, like Paris giving the Eiffel Tower to Hoboken to save money. In fact, there seemed to be mostly sad, resigned, nodding-in-agreement-it’s-inevitable heads.
Absent another volunteer, I will raise my hand.
It’s a stratospherically dumb idea. Don’t do it. You’ll be sorry.
And here’s why.
The collection is not “just” a century’s worth of postcards. It’s a one-image-at-a-time visual history of American life that stands unique in the world. Let me repeat. There is nothing approaching the Teich image collection on the planet.
Its grand, human, artistic achievement began as photographic commerce in Chicago and grew into a national legacy. And the world knows it. If historians or researchers in London or Paris know where Lake County is, that’s because they’ve seen the Teich collection during its 33 years here.
Were it ever auctioned, the collector’s value would be multiple millions. But in historical measurements, the collection might be beyond price.
In fact, the county’s Forest Preserves that operate the museum proposed moving from old farm buildings in Wauconda to new Libertyville digs because the collection was so valuable it needed keener environmental security.
Of recent days, the forest folks now talk of museum “re-envisioning,” a gauzy, vague blanket that covers almost any outcome, including dumping the Teich archives and the $500,000 endowment that supports it.
In support of a new museum, Katherine Hamilton-Smith, then district director of cultural resources, trained curator and now head spokeswoman, once described the rationale this way: “The heart of the museum is coming here (Libertyville). Without the collections, there is no museum.”
Exactly.
District officials now hint shipping the collection is a good idea because the forest preserves need to save money. The budget is so tight. Really?
The let’s-save-money motif seems very odd for an agency that spends $80 million a year in local taxes, including $3 million this year to buy fewer than 100 acres.
But forests are investments that presume a future when wildlife and nature still matter. That future costs money. Lake County voters have always backed preservation’s price, and let their wallets speak loudly.
In the Teich collection’s case, money might not be as short as institutional will to treasure irreplaceable history. That’s fundamental shortsightedness of a kind the district has never shown before.
A 2008 voter referendum approved borrowing a maximum $185 million for property acquisition and restoration, including money to “create and improve public use areas for recreation, education and historic facilities …”
So spending money to protect Teich was implicitly part of older instincts.
But sending the collection to Champaign means it’s gone forever. Thousands of local students introduced to its amazements every year won’t.
Of course, they could always drive the 340 miles to Champaign and back if they were curious.
But that’s goofily obtuse.
Unique history is not data. It’s a tangible inspiration to be shared, protected and revered, like Mark Twain’s collected letters or George Gershwin’s original music.
Lake County protects a cultural asset that the world envies. The people of Lake County own that asset.
If Lake County surrenders the Curt Teich Postcard Archives to chase false savings, two results are sure.
The collection is gone forever from the county’s future.
And forever is exactly how long the county will regret the decision.
