We're still here

July is a peculiar month for Independence Days. We employ the plural form here because in addition to the United States, Venezuela, Peru, Belgium, and Argentina all celebrate their Independence Days in July. Moreover, Canada became a nation in July, and Idaho and Wyoming became states. So July is a month full of anniversaries of new beginnings. Your Virginia Museum of Transportation has an odd sort of anniversary coming up, too.

It was a dark and stormy night in July, you see, when Mother Nature visited the First Bank of VMT, withdrew 10,000 square feet of roof and deposited 1,000 gallons of rain water. This shut down the museum for two weeks in the heart of our busy season. At nearly the same time, our former Executive Director resigned under controversy about misappropriation of funds. Many of our volunteers jumped ship, and we couldn't really blame them.

But, here comes July again and we're still open. On a personal note, this comes as a bit of a surprise to this blogger, and to many people, I have no doubt. In the past year, we lost our roof and our director, our Director of Education resigned, a man ran into our building with his truck, we had to call the bomb squad not once, but twice, saw our phone and internet lines cut for more than a week, had a small electrical fire in one of the walls, had a burglar break into the museum looking for cash, and discovered the ugly reality that was our exploding debt.

That's a lot of doom and gloom for one paragraph, so let's not belabor the point. In the same year, we've repaired that roof, hired a new Executive Director, paid off every penny of our debt, developed new and healthy relationships with other transportation museums and organizations, seen our volunteer corps grow in size from a handful to dozens, acquired a miniature locomotive for kids and adults to ride, and opened a brand new gallery showcasing automobiles from nearly every decade of the Twentieth Century.

The point is, we're still here. That makes it an anniversary worth celebrating.