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By Kathryn Bender, Star-Bulletin
U.S. Army Museum director Tom Fairfull gives his
last tour after 22 years.

Museum chief
made military
appeal to all

The retiring director's vision
made Hawaii's Army Museum
one of the country's
most-visited

---

By Burl Burlingame
Star-Bulletin

When Battery Randolph was constructed to house giant cannons at Fort DeRussy during World War I, it was made to withstand almost anything an enemy could throw at it.

In the 1970s, when the Army tried to demolish the building, they discovered how true that was. Wrecking balls shattered against the battery's steel-reinforced concrete flanks. The Army gave up and established the U.S. Army Museum of Hawaii at the site.

Museum director Thomas Fairfull has been there almost from the beginning. During his 22 years, the museum has become one of the top five most-visited Army museums in the United States, widely praised for the way it interprets Hawaii's military history.

Now Fairfull is moving on to CINCPAC as a civilian staff historian. Friday was his last day at the museum.

"The museum was created in 1976 as a bicentennial project, and the people hired to operate it were military enthusiasts and buffs, but there was a certain lack of accounting and museum training," Fairfull said as he cleaned out his desk. "I was chief curator at the 82nd Airborne museum at Fort Bragg, N.C., and I saw a civil-service ad for the museum here. I was hired mainly to install accountability in the collections practices and create a coherent storyline for the museum."

Star-Bulletin file
Alexander Gonzalez, 8, from Littleton, Colorado, joins some
infantrymen at the museum's Living History Day in May.

The mission of the Army's 47 museums is to provide history education for the troops. But museums attached to military schools, such the Infantry Museum at Fort Benning, also draw a fair number of civilian visitors.

There is no national museum for the U.S. Army, Fairfull said, although one has been on the drawing board for years, likely at Carlyle Barracks, Pa.

"It was a struggle to get started here, but the real breakthrough came when we hired John McLaughlin away from Bishop Museum to design the exhibitry inside the battery," Fairfull said.

"John created a big floor model of the museum that worked out all the storytelling and traffic-flow problems, one that used the artifacts to tell the story of the Army in Hawaii instead of being about the artifacts themselves.

"Unfortunately, most of the smaller military museums are a wall full of guns, with a crusty retired tech-sergeant hand-lettering 3-by-5 index cards," Fairfull said. "We wanted to fulfill an educational mission for everyone, not just buffs, and that required balance and planning."

Bob Chenoweth, a museum technician at Fort DeRussy during the '80s and now a curator for the National Park Service in Idaho, praised Fairfull for his vision. "What Tom did that was extraordinary was to assemble a team that was committed to this vision, and then allowed us to pursue it to the best of our ability," he said.

McLaughlin's detailed plan and storyline were presented to Hawaii Army commander Col. David Helela in 1983, who gave the go-ahead for the Hawaii Army Museum Society to raise funds for the exhibits. The Army provides salaries and maintenance services.

"Visitation has been pretty steady over the years, between 125,000 and 135,000 a year," Fairfull said, crediting visitor interest to the Army's educational goals for museums.

Fairfull, 57, an infantry officer and ARVN adviser during the Vietnam War, earned his history credentials from Duke University after the war and joined Hawaii's Army Reserve, retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 1997.

The museum will be in as good hands as he would like: His replacement is McLaughlin, who has been directing an Army museum in Korea.

"Ain't it grand when a plan comes together?" Fairfull said with a laugh.