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DONALD DUCKWORTH:
Tenure marked
Duckworth leaving in June
by passion and
controversy
By Burl Burlingame
Star-BulletinIn this exclusive interview with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, the first W. Donald Duckworth has granted since the Forbes Cave story broke last March, the Bishop Museum director talks about that controversy, his years in Hawaii and at the museum and his hopes for the institution's future.We caught Duckworth and wife Sandra at their daughter's home in Vienna, Virginia, during the Thanksgiving holidays. In the background was the lusty crying of infant granddaughter Brianna, and Duckworth occasionally ducked outside to have a smoke.
QUESTION: Why retire?ANSWER: It's time! By the time I'm done with this thing next summer - my contract runs through July - I'll be 66, so it seemed appropriate. I've indicated to the board that I'm not going anywhere. And if it requires staying on a little bit longer to effect a smooth transition with whoever's coming after me, I'll do that. The board doesn't need to feel pressed for time, but they do need to get on with it.
It's not as if I'm running off somewhere to something else. Five years ago when I did my last contract I promised my family I'd retire when I'm 65, and - unless something happened - that's what I had planned to do.
Q: Did the public uproar over the Forbes Cave issue contribute to your decision?
A: People may see this in relation to the problems the museum's had in the last year. If that's the case, that's too bad, and it's not accurate, but you can't keep people from thinking whatever they want to think.
Some of the museum's critics are so emotionally wrapped up in their criticism that they seem irrational. They may be highly rational is every other phase of their life, but when it comes to the museum, what they say and do seems emotional and irrational. You get irritated by it and frustrated by it, but that's just the way it is.
You can't really fault people for caring a lot about an institution as important as Bishop Museum. It gets frustrating at times, but that's life. I've never had any complaints from the community at large. In the midst of such challenges, the community has gotten it. There are others, minor in number, former employees, who view the museum in their own unique way, who have objected in their own ways.
My feeling is that the Hawaiian community is pretty much split 50-50 on this issue. The rest of the community, at least those who paid attention, feel that a wrong was done that has to be righted, in the best kind of Western Judeo-Christian ethics.
There's a whole set of issues surrounding this very, very complex law -- plus even more complex cultural imperatives -- that (the Native American Graves Preservation and Repatriations Act) is attempting to address. No one really paid attention to the law until it began to include something that they had passion about. Frankly, not too many people get upset with the idea of reinterring human remains, except for physical anthropologists who saw their research material being lost.
But when you get to the artifacts, it's too bad that the other claimants and the museum were misled, but those things happen when passions run high. The bottom line is, most of the materials at Bishop Museum are secured; they aren't subject to NAGPRA. But the Forbes Cave-Kawaihae items were, because we didn't have clear title.
Q: Stolen property?
A: Except for Hui Malama, no one seems to want to talk about that aspect too much. There's no substantive evidence that has been presented to us that those materials weren't placed in the caves without intent to be left there. To people of that culture, that means that returning them is not the evil that those of us in the Western world see it as. These are not easy issues to answer! They are issues that are hugely emotional. They are stressful. And they are complex.
We'd rather not be dealing in stolen property. We're the first ones to run out and yell foul when sites get looted today, right?
I consider the (original) Forbes Cave episode not one of the bright spots in Bishop Museum's history. It's a litmus of collecting practices of that time period, but even back then, it was an illegal act.
Just because you're a physical anthropologist who wants a research subject doesn't mean you can dig up graves. It was the tenor of the times, we all know that, but for those whose ancestors were dug up, it shouldn't be surprising that they don't consider the noble purposes of science to be all that great.
Walter Echohawk, a Pawnee lawyer from Colorado, pointed out that if an Indian dug up a white man's grave, they'd put him in jail; if a white man dug up an Indian's grave, they give him a PhD.
Back where I come from, if someone were looting the graveyard, the response would be straight-forward; you'd go to the mantle and get the gun!
It's no accident that most of the graves disturbed by Western scientists are not Western graves. Sure, it's controversial, and sure, we're going to make mistakes as we wrestle our way through these things, but the only thing that would be worse would be to do nothing.
Q: Where are the ka'ai?A: I don't know any more than what I read in the newspaper, so you tell me. I heard they're in Waipio Valley. We stopped getting information from the police when Kekau (Abigail) Kawananakoa claimed them for herself.
As you engage the public, as you provide access, there are risks involved. In the past, the museum treated the public as potential interlopers, the only good thing about that is you had minimum-risk security. When you become open to the public, you heighten risks. Not everyone in the public are good people.
Q: How did you first become involved with Bishop Museum?
A: I came out with a National Science Foundation site-visit team in 1976, right after the museum's breakaway from Bishop Estate and we were expecting to meet with director Roland Force. I'll never forget it. It was on a Monday and we went up there and assistant director Frank Radovsky came out and said, Dr. Force isn't with us any longer. He'd been let go and we were to meet with Radovsky instead. We'd only intended to spend a day there and then spend the rest of the week on the beach!
But later that morning Radovsky's phone rang and it was Mr. Bellinger, president of the museum, who demanded to speak to our team leader. He listened to Mr. Bellinger, then hung up and said, well guys, I guess the beach is out. They're looking for a new director and they want us to really take an in-depth look at the museum and meet with him and the executive committee and give them our ideas. So instead of getting a tan, we went over the museum top to bottom and it was not a pretty picture.
Q: Describe it.
A: For most of Bishop Museum's history we were physically under Kamehameha Schools in a linked-governance system. In 1975, a group had gone to court to pull Bishop Museum away from Kamehameha, challenging Mr. Bishop's original trust.
They were encouraged to do that by the first professional accreditation process that Bishop Museum went through in the early '70s. The accreditation team studied the governance and said it was dysfunctional. So they pulled away in '75, but most of the structure and organization of the museum was interwoven with Kamehameha Schools as well.
They'd been using Kamehameha Schools' personnel system, their accounting system, what have you, so between 1975 and the early '80s, things had gotten progressively worse, and the financial situation was really really grim, when I came on board in 1984.
We were 18 to 24 months from bankruptcy. They were consistently spending six and seven-figures every year in excess of their revenues! And everyone blamed the board. There was a very adversarial staff-board relationship at the time. One of the worst I'd ever seen, as a matter of fact. They had aserious organizational dysfunction going on.
When they pulled away and the court disolved Mr. Bishop's trust, they had chartered a not-for-profit organization under Hawaii's non-profit laws, but they were really organized like a community trust, which indicated that they really hadn't thought it through. I guess they viewed themselves solely as charity.
There was an awful lot of work that needed to be done to the physical plant. Frankly, we were there in 1976 because the Botany department had applied for a large grant from the National Science Foundation and so, typically, a team came out to inspect that, plus the Entomology Department, which already had collected some large grants. Frankly, the condition of the herbarium was awful. That's what we had to tell them at the end of the week -- without a commitment to maintaining the collections, the museum wouldn't be getting any support on the federal level. There was only one botanist at the time and he'd been in New Guinea for forever.
A lot of museums at the that time were having similar kinds of problems. It wasn't uncommon. There's a great tendency to collect like crazy and then figure out to do with stuff after you've got it.Remember, the main building on campus at the time was the Pauahi Building, which held the herbarium and the entomology collection, and it didn't have glass windows! It had wooden louvers. Plus people scattered all around the collection, eating, playing, working, doing the things people do, with no barriers to the ambient conditions outside.
There were extraordinary collections in Bishop Hall and the termites were running wild in there. Even though they had no money to preserve their collection, it didn't keep the curators from adding to the collections.
The museum came very close to not being accredited the first time around. Governance was only part of it. Just after I started in the mid-'80s we almost didn't get accredited again because the conditions of the collections hadn't improved enough.
Bishop Museum has a really odd, ivory-tower history. Somehow -- without discernable resources! -- they were able to assemble those absolutely mammoth collections. It still blows my mind that a museum that was not a part of government was still able to build those huge collections when they never had any reasonable expectation of being able to afford it! But they did.
Today, as a private organization, we have an extraordinary collection. When you consider the collections in other museums across the country and around the world, all of them are either completely government or substantially subsidized by government. But here we stumbled along under the idea that our primary purpose was to gather collections and study them and that all we had to do.
Q: How did you become involved?
A: I never applied for the job! The board brought out five to seven finalists and looked them over -- so you know the board was aware that something had to change. I gather they didn't hear what they wanted to hear from the folks they brought in.
So they got on the phone and called people in the museum business. I was told later I'd been recommended by Dylan Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian. So they called me. I was actually at one of my professional society meetings in Providence, Rhode Island, when the call came in.
I wasn't really looking for another job, but they insisted that Sandra and I come on out. Sandra was an elected official at the time and had duties in Virginia. She had an election campaign and I was finishing my year as president of the Entomological Society of America, and so I flat-out told 'em we couldn't come until the end of November. Too busy.
But they said fine! The last meeting of the Society was in Detroit and we flew right out from there to Hawaii. I felt so guilty on the plane flight here because I knew how bad off the museum was and also that we weren't interested in going anywhere. I kept fretting about spending what little money they had on this trip. Finally, Sandra just took me in hand and said, Look, just consider it a consulting trip. Consider it a week's worth of consulting in exchange for our expenses. That rationale allowed me to settle down.
So that's what I did. I was pretty frank with the board because there wasn't anything to lose. I told them, you cannot keep all these people and you cannot keep spending money you don't have. You not only have too many people, you have too many of the wrong people and not enough of the right people.
It's not a comment on the individuals. They just had no management. They were researchers and collections people and that was it. When they left Kamehameha Schools, they left everything behind. They had no personnel department! You name it, they didn't have it. How they got by as an organization that long without a structure, I don't know.
Q: You were hired to shake things up?
A: I was hired to do two things: to create an organization where not much of one existed and also to open Bishop Museum up to the public. The board even then realized that they could not continue to be non-public and still expect the public to support them.
Some of my predecessors made noble efforts to make the museum more public, notably Alex Spoehr, but he said it was like swimming upstream. There were other things that he had to do as well. Up through Alex's period as director the museum had no retirement system! Alex said before he died that he burned himself out trying to get governance to do those simple things, because we were so intractably linked to Kamehameha Schools.
It was necessary to let people go. The level of spending ... Good God!
Q: The layoffs at Bishop Museum earned you a lot of criticism.
A: I came there as a change agent. I'd been in the business long enough to know that when you do that, you have to do heavy lifting, and you're going to make people unhappy. Because change makes people unhappy. This was an organization that had begged off making changes for a long time.
A lot of things had to change. A lot of things still have to change. If there's one given in the world we live in, it's that change happens all the time, and it's happening at a faster and faster rate.
People don't change unless something forces change. It's human nature. Change make people exceedingly uncomfortable. God know that voting systems haven't changed in a hundred years.
Q: Do you take criticism personally?
A: It's inevitably frustrating, but frankly, I've never really taken it that seriously. I think it's offended some people that I didn't! It just comes with the territory.
My feeling is that an organization that is doing anything in this day and age, particularly ones that sits in a pivotal position like Bishop Museum in our community, there's going to be controversy. Some people are going to be unhappy.
Hawaii's not exactly excited about change. In the kind of world we live in, controversy is going to come along. I've never really worried about it, except that controversy is distracting and costs money. And money's hard enough to come by in the best of times, and when you're bleeding money out in inefficiency and lost work time and legal fees -- although some of my colleagues at other museums seems to need a constant supply of lawyers for personnel issues -- we've been lucky in that regard.
Q: Any advice for other public figures?
A: I've worked with legislatures in Hawaii and elsewhere far too long to offer up any kind of advice. I don't envy them their job, I can tell you that! In this day and age, there's not much slack cut for anybody in the public arena.
Q: What about Hawaii in general?
A: People here living as closely as they do, on a restricted land mass that over a period of time a lot of people become very aware of everything you do.
I grew up in a small town, so it's not surprising from that standpoint, but Honolulu is a large city. And there aren't too many communities of the size and international nature of Honolulu where history continues to impact on an ongoing basis. In my small town in Tennessee, my mama knew six generations of people, but in a large metropolitan city like Honolulu, you don't expect to have that kind of background to be as significant as it is.
I was told early on that I had to be real careful, that I couldn't seat so-and-so next to this or that person at a meeting or a dinner, because of long-standing family disagreements. You have the learn the Hawaii protocols. The one thing I never tried to be was other than who I am! I'm sure I bruised a lot of protocols along the way out of sheer ignorance, but it was just out of ignorance, not intent.
Q: How about native issues?
A: Hawaiian issues have come way more complicated just in the decade and a half I've been in Hawaii. And that's not just Hawaii. Native peoples and native indigenous rights have become more complicated all over the U.S. First Peoples' issues in Canada aren't exactly peace and joy either. As we become a more pluralistic -- and also a more secular -- society, these kinds of issues are a hell of a lot more complex.
Q: As I read through your introductions in Bishop Museum's biennial corporate reports, they're fairly upbeat until the early '90s, then they become darker and more survival-oriented. But the most recent - at least in draft form - is upbeat again. What happened?
A: The thing I'm proudest of is the simple fact that we survived when the '90s in Hawaii hit. The national accreditation team earlier this year looked at the amount of money that we had lost from the state, they said, how the hell did you survive? Our organizations couldn't possibly take two-million dollar hits like you have. We'd have folded.
I tell you, there were some times there when we weren't sure we weren't sure we were going to survive either. I got three weeks' notice on that first legislative cut in our budget. We learned a lot in the '90s, stuff we would never have learned where it not for the rigors we faced. We became a hell of a lot better organized.
We realized that when the economy goes bad, even when tourism goes away, state funding goes away just as easily. Without dependable government money, there's no insulation from the realities of the marketplace. The accreditation team was particularly impressed with the sophisticated level of our budgeting and management. Well, that's what occupied us.
Q: The recent museum accreditation by the American Association of Museums was quite positive.
A: It was glowing! I feel real good about it. Accreditation is getting harder and harder to get. It's a tough scrutiny and we passed muster well. Even though the team came just after the Honolulu Magazine article came out!
Q: What's changing in the museum business?
A: This is my 40th year in the museum business. Museums have probably changed more in the last 20-25 years than they have in the preceding 200! They are traditional Western cultural temples and pretty much viewed as the source of quiet contemplative work, and the people there assemble and study the collections and publish scholarly works. That isn't the case any more.
Most American museums had a very strong public side to them, but that wasn't the case with Bishop Museum, and that the reason the museum had to be pulled kicking and screaming into the late 20th century.
About 20 years ago things began to shift. It began to cost a lot more money to operate museums. Most museums like Bishop Museum were -- and still are -- a function of government. But costs went up and there were other demands on public monies, like entitlements, even at a place like the Smithsonian that gets something like $480 million from Congress every year still has to go out and raise money. When I first went to work for the Smithsonian the previous secretaries of the Smithsonian had prided themselves on returning money to the U.S. Treasury at the end of the year.
That was the era of the permanent exhibition. They didn't change all that often and once they were up, they stayed up 25 years. When I started at the Smithsonian the telephone directory was 27 pages long, 600 names or so; now, the directory is 6,000 names. So things changed, because there have been more demands on museums than there used to be.
Q: Such as?
A: People expect museums to be engaged in this day and age. They expect to have access to everything. They expect to have goods and services and those demands are growing.
Q: What about the government's demands?
A: The government expects more, always. Museums like ours that hod natural and cultural and historical resources are an extension of government because they hold the community's commonwealth. They have large collections that are very expensive to take care of. There was a time when if you kept the collection out of the rain, you were doing OK! Science has advanced our understanding at the rate by which materials decay, and in order to be doing collections safely, it costs a lot of money.
The government relies on Bishop Museum's collection to an extraordinary degree. In every area imaginable that most governments rely on their natural history and cultural collections for information. In the two years of work, in 1986 and '87, at the Hawaii State Legislature to enact the State Museum Act, we went through the legislative reference studies and documented the degree to which every agency of state and city government turned to Bishop Museum and have traditionally turned to Bishop Museum. It was mind-boggling.
Q: Other museums, like the Field in Chicago get lots of money from the government.
A: Large natural-history museums like the Field are all either a function of government or heavily subsidized by government. The Field, for example, gets $14 million a year just from the Chicago Park District, plus funds from the state, even though they're a private museum like we are.
These museums are viewed as very important elements in the health and well-being of the community. There are just as many mechanisms for providing public funding as there are institutions, but because they're viewed by lawmakers as important, they get the public funding. Even if they began as private institutions, over time they became governmental, because of their perceived value to tourism, education and the knowledge base they serve.
Q: Why isn't that true in Hawaii?
A: The history of Hawaii explains it, it's cultural to a certain extent. Museums are Western constructs. Most of the museums in Asia and the Orient are a post-World War II phenomenon or a holdover from 19th century imperialism from Western Europe.
Also because Bishop Museum started so early! We were always there. There was a governmental Hawaii National Museum that existed before Bishop Museum, and both were flagging due to lack of popular support. Two or three years later it folded up and the collections transferred to Bishop Museum. So, from the beginning, the government shrugged and said let Bishop Museum do it by itself.
Q: Bishop Museum is a kind of catch-all, serving both culture and science.
A: Marjorie Kelly wrote her dissertation on the idea that Bishop Museum had always been schizophrenic because it was culture on one hand and science on the other. I'm not sure I agree with her arguments.
Certainly culture and science have their differences, but -- maybe because I come out of the Smithsonian where you have every type of museum imaginable under one organizational rubric -- but I feel there's synergy in the relationship between science and culture.
You have to break down those natural silos -- I'm History, so I'm over here, and Culture is over here and Science is over there. I love that comment in the current engineering exhibit that society's problems are by nature interdisciplinary, and universities are organized by departments.
Bishop Museum, like most other museums, used to be a loosely affiliated group of city-states that stayed to themselves, was glad to get what they could get, kept an eye on their neighbors, and if their neighbor showed any weakness, they'd send out little raiding sorties to see if they could divert resources to themselves. Not the best way to run a railroad!
Q: Is it more difficult to run a museum these days?
A: One of the places you can see change most dramatically is in government regulations. Not that long ago, if you were a non-profit, there was an invisible bubble over you. None of the rules applied to you. Bishop Museum didn't even have electrical inspections. That's not the case any more.
Today it's a lot harder to run a large not-for-profit than it is to run a for-profit. We have far more regulations and public scrutiny. It's no longer possible to operate on faith. Auditors roll in. Resources come from the federal government and all that money has to be accounted for. OSHA and ADA and other government regulations all apply to us.
There's some inherent challenges in the not-for-profit field, not the least of which is that the IRS insists that we do fund-accounting, which is very complicated way of keeping books.
God knows, we missed a lot of years when we should have been building things like an endowment, but when we were a part of Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate, they didn't do it and we didn't either. We passed on those kinds of opportunities.
The assets that we have now are strong assets, and we know what we're doing. When I first got there, we didn't even have a listing of our assets! We were in a discovery mode, figuring out what we really had! When the pull-away came, Kamehameha just pulled out our files and dumped them in boxes and dropped them off at First Hawaiian Bank, where they were still sitting in 1984. There was land we owned and didn't know we had, and hadn't managed, all sorts of things.
Q: Would you have been canned by the board if you hadn't operated the museum in a businesslike manner?
A: Logic would suggest that I work for a board, and they work me real hard. My major job starting out was to build an organization, and an organization WITHOUT a good board is incomplete. We've got one of the best - if not the best - boards in Hawaii, and that's been the case for more than a decade if not longer.
We have very sophisticated reporting, plus we stress there's no such thing as a stupid question. You can't keep information from the people who essentially own the place! I've got a lot of authority, because that's the way the organization is structured. In this day and age, you often can't wait for the board to meet to make decisions. But I've got strict policy and fiscal perimeters.
The traditional relationship at Bishop Museum between staff and board when I started was tremendously adversarial. I'd never seen a place where the board and the staff were so far apart. Both blamed each other for everything. We don't operate as free agents. But if you're going to lead an organization, you'd better be prepared to take heat -- because it's comin' atcha, guaranteed.
Q: Where will museums be like in the future?
A: Museums in Hawaii, like museums everywhere, face the challenge of being relevant in this day and age and into the future. That's never easy. It costs more and more. You can't get by on the cheap any more. There's a certain specific gravity that organizations need to achieve these days.
And museums in Hawaii are not only working hard to be relevant, they're trying to keep their heads above water -- if they survived the '90s, that is. It's not going to get easier. There are a lot of museums in Hawaii, and it takes a lot to support them. The potential is exciting. So are the challenges of realizing that potential.
I'm very passionate about museums, not because I love old buildings and big collections, but because of the extraordinary role museums can -- and should -- play in modern communities. There are fewer and fewer places that provide a common ground for the communities they serve. Bishop Museum is one of the few last common areas in Hawaii, where ALL the citizens of Hawaii, not matter what their background, can come together and celebrate their diverse heritage. Where else do you go to understand, celebrate and appreciate the world you live in? Or the universe we're such a tiny, tiny part of?
The potential of that great mission stimulates me. Hawaii, with it's rich heritage and rich environment, really needs to understand how vital museums are in the health of the community.
The one thing that there is no longer any debate about in the museum world is that the primary purpose of museums is public service, and the primary vehicle for that is public education.
Museums that are richly tied into their local education systems fill that niche. It is dead center what a museum is all about: K through 12 education and life-long learning. People have confidence in museums. They trust museums. Despite controversies, people still feel that museums are the institutions most reflective of themselves.
Q: Will there be any changes on campus?
A: The Science Learning Center is pretty close to getting started. The money's coming in. We've about decided to get started. Break ground some time in the next year and phase it in.
Restoration of the older buildings is under way slowly, we work along on it as best we can. It's enormously expensive. We've been in conversations with Bishop Estate about Bishop Hall. And we're progressively doing the other buildings. The Kahili Room is a good case in point. Now in the process of working on the Vestibule Gallery.
The magnitude of the work that has to be done in the older building means we're just going to have to bite it off in chewable chunks. In the early '90s, with some of the best money the state ever gave us, we redid all the roofs. What needs to be done next is repoint all the stones, but that won't happen any time soon.
Q: How about Hawaii Hall?
A: Restoring Hawaii Hall is really an important thing to do, but I made the judgement call early on that we needed our resources to open up to the community. A call on my part that didn't make me real popular with some folks, but made sense at the time. In retrospect, it still makes sense.
Most of us in the museum business today know that in the kind of world we live in, permanent exhibits are not the answer. You've got to be able to change. The latest American Association of Museums meeting I went to, the big topic was how to do even more changes than we do now! Science exhibits, for example. Hell, science advances while you're mounting the exhibit.
How do you change yourself constantly and set yourself up in such a way that you can constantly create and add to your exhibitry so that it reflects the world we live in? People are acutely interested in the changes and advances. It's news!
The museum of the future will be a continually evolving museum. Some permanent halls are a must -- Hawaii Hall will always be there, it's already a museum of a Victorian-era museum! -- but basically, we need more Castle Hall, almost like a theater stage.
Q: Any advice to your successor?
A: Be prepared to work hard, and be prepared to be preoccupied every day and night, even when you aren't working.
And be prepared to be excited, because it's an exciting business to be in. People think of museums as quiet, cloistered ivory towers, but the best museums of the future are those that put you right in the middle of the action. A vibrant, gathering place where stuff is happening all the time, where you hear kids and adults having a good time learning.
A museum is worth nothing if it isn't full of people. People are the ultimate bottom line.
We're not there yet. That will be the biggest challenge for my successor. I wish I were 49 years old again and starting my tenure at Bishop Museum all over again! Great resources, great staff, great board, superb community to serve. And because of our geographic isolation, if we're not able to serve the community, those out there who need us the most have limited or no options.
Q: Does it seem like a long or short time?
A: How the hell did the years fly by so fast? Hard to believe. Seems like only yesterday I was walking around the campus the first time. Wouldn't have seemed so fast if I hadn't been enjoying myself the whole time.
You have to take a step back and remember what things were like then. Gosh, the relationship with the state, the conditions of the collections, it was good people who turned it around. Despite all the questions and controversy, there's a solid cadre of really competent people carrying that museum forward. The best is yet to come.
I wouldn't have been there as long as I have, and there aren't many -- if any -- directors at major natural-history museums that can equal my tenure. Not a day and age when leaders of museums are around for very long. If the community and the board hadn't supported me -- and ultimately, I work for the board -- I'd have been gone. My board watches and knows everything! I take the ship where the board wants it to go.
Q: Is the board already searching for your replacement?
A: We've already had a couple of meetings to begin the preliminaries.
It'll probably be tough to replace me, not because of me, but because it's a tough job and there aren't that many qualified people to draw on. A lot of places have gone to non-museum types. Hell, the new secretary of the Smithsonian is a banker! It's not easy to find people who have experience and a background in the business and are willing to take over these jobs as they exist today. There are many museums who are on their third and fourth director in the same time since I took this job. It's a sellers market, not a buyers market. Having said that, I hope they find someone good.
As a member of the board, I have 1/24th vote around the table. It's up to the others. This is the most important thing that any board ever does. They have to have confidence in the person they hire. I guess they had confidence in me otherwise I wouldn't have hung around such a long time.
I was told by some board members a while ago that the greatest gift I could give the museum was my successor! And I immediately disabused them of that. That's not my role to play. They have to look and look and look and decide themselves. The chemistry between the chief executive and the board he or she works for has to be good. If the chemistry is bad, it'll never work.
Q: Will you return to entomology or do other museum work?
A: Not likely I'd do anything in entomology. Been out of it a long time. Anyone who tries to be both a good leader and a great scientist winds up being good at neither. I'm the longest-sitting member on the board of the American Association of Museums, but my term is up in May. I've got some friends in the museum world who want me to work with them on some project. I might do that. I might not.
Q: Are you moving back to Virginia?
A: Everyone that knows me knows that first and foremost I'm a southerner. Virginia is home, but Hawaii's been real good to us.
Q: Your wife Sandra started spending more and more time in Virginia. How did you keep a long-distance marriage intact?
A: Sandra and I have been married since we were kids, and we're best friends as well. If the relationship is important, you do what you have to do to keep it working.
We had reached a point in time when our kids were all grown and gone, and Sandra had aging parents back here on the East Coast and naturally had to spend more and more time with them. She was surprised that the Virginia Democrats hadn't forgotten her, and the more time she spent in Virginia, the more things they gave her to do. Mostly political fundraising and campaigns.
There have been many efforts to get her to run for office again, and she did that once and it was fine, but now she claims she's retiring too! She also got into Rotary when she was living in Honolulu and enjoyed it tremendously, and now she's a District Governor in Virginia Rotary, which is a big responsibility.
We've been together a long time, and we both understand that we both have our own careers, and so you make the acommodations you need to make. My work was in Honolulu and hers was in Virginia. Between plane trips, the telephone, the fax machine and the Internet and email, we make do. She keeps my household chore list as long as she ever did!
Communications are sure different today. Amazing. When we were young and had our first kids and I was traveling on expeditions in South America or wherever, making a phone call home was major operation. There was always a radio patch involved, and the signal would echo like a drum.
Q: Other retirement plans?
A: Sandra was looking at catalogs the other night and there was a sweatshirt that said RETIRED: WORKING AT SPOILING MY GRANDCHILDREN. That's all I really have in mind.