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Posted on 11/22/2001 7:12:11 AM PST by MeekOneGOP

Six pivotal tragedies that shaped the nation

Sixth Floor Museum teaches about horrors - and survival

11/22/2001

By ROY APPLETON / The Dallas Morning News

Dale Klapperich hasn't forgotten the first time he saw his father cry.

It was 38 years ago, the day President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas.

"I was 10 and remember not understanding what it was all about," he said.

Mr. Klapperich had his own cry after the September terrorist attacks. And Tuesday, not far from the ground zero of Nov. 22, 1963, he could respect his father's emotions even more.

"Maybe now I have a better understanding of why my dad was so taken with it," he said.

Mr. Klapperich and his wife, Debby, in town for Thanksgiving from Auburn, Wash., had gone to The Sixth Floor Museum to learn more about the life and assassination of Kennedy.

Inside the building at Elm and Houston streets, they found displays recalling the president's slaying and five other violent, nation-changing events.

The free exhibit – "Loss and Renewal: Transforming Tragic Sites" – uses historical artifacts, photographs and written interpretations to highlight the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

It takes viewers to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the bombing in Oklahoma City and the Sept. 11 attacks in New York City and the Pentagon. Bringing it home was a display on Dealey Plaza and the killing of Kennedy 38 years ago today.

The museum initially was preparing an exhibit on Dealey Plaza and its place in Dallas and national history. But the events of Sept. 11 spurred a quick change in plans to bring currency to the museum's ongoing story of public tragedy.

The idea is "to get people thinking, talking and interacting about a historical event in the moment," said Jeff West, museum executive director.

By juxtaposing these six moments of loss – from different times and places, but causing similar fears and uncertainties – a goal is to add context to all, he said.

"We've been here before, albeit not in the same way," Mr. West said. "Every time, we learn, we grow, we move forward."

Mr. Klapperich understood.

The exhibit lines two walls outside the museum entrance. The Lincoln assassination on April 14, 1865, is remembered with three bloodstained cards found on the floor of his box that night at Ford Theater. Newspapers reporting the slaying are displayed, as are photographs of the president's deathbed and mourners.

Representing the attack on Pearl Harbor is an iron fragment from the sunken USS Arizona. Newspaper and magazine covers return to Dec. 7, 1941, as do military dog tags and cards from a surviving U.S. sailor.

The Dealey Plaza display gives a hint of what's inside The Sixth Floor Museum. Photographs and a brick fragment from the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., recall Dr. King's slaying there on April 4, 1968.

From the rubble of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City are unclaimed keys and a desk calendar marking meetings never held on April 19, 1995.

Newspapers and photographs tell of the more recent attacks. The museum asks visitors to share their thoughts about the fated sites in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Do you rebuild New York's World Trade Center towers? How do you memorialize ground zero?

Responses are posted on a wall and, in time, will be forwarded to memorial planners in New York, Mr. West said. Wednesday morning, the writings were evenly divided for and against rebuilding the towers.

Don't rebuild, wrote Colleen Vaughan, 9, of Dallas. "We need to go on with our lives but always remember what happened on September 11, 2001."

Meredith, a 6-year-old Houston resident, has another idea. "I think the towers should be rebuilt exactly the same way," she wrote. "Also, Osama bin Laden is very bad."

Edward Linenthal, author of The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory, helped open the exhibit and talked Wednesday of the "toxic sites" of public tragedy.

Whether at battlefields, bombing sites or scenes of assassinations, preserving the memories of transforming events and their often-anonymous victims is a natural act – and, for some a healing act, he said.

"It is human to need to mark these sites of power," Mr. Linenthal said. And for those who visit them, "memory becomes an active protection against the agony of mass death."

Viewing the exhibit, Denver residents Jeff and Monica Meyer saw common themes across the time and landscape on display.

"Tragedy," said Mr. Meyer.

"Survival," said his wife. "People move on."

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