Fast Facts and Upcoming Acts

More musings about museums and money ….

I brainstormed last time about some of the ways individuals can help the museum, from making cash donations to purchasing memberships, from using one’s Food Lion cards to shopping in our Destinations gift store (though not with your Food Lion card). With VMT membership, by the way, you get discounts on gift shop purchases. And if you’re a dad, it isn’t too late to chuff some hints about items you would love to see rolling into your station for Father’s Day. Whoo-whoo!

Here are a few financial fast facts to chew on:
* The Museum spends $ 111.76 per day for heating, air conditioning and water (over $40,000 a year). That doesn’t include telephone and internet service.
* Insurance necessary to keep our doors open (not employee health or benefit coverage) is $ 79.19 per day.
* Our real estate taxes paid to Roanoke City come to $ 36.56 per day.

I didn’t include this in the previous blog, but another way you can help financially is to donate materials. Here are some of the urgent items currently on our wish list:
* 2008 Quickbooks Premier software (single user version)
* Cases of copy paper (maybe drop off a case every month for six months—like a pledge; the I dream of a ream campaign, maybe?)
* Staples gift cards that we could use for printer ink cartridges
* Repainting of the gallery floors in the main areas—that hasn’t been done in quite a while
* Carpet cleaning for our conference room and office hallways
* A projector that can do power point presentations—we have the software; we just need a horse to pull it (so to speak)
* A roll or two of stamps

Used items would be a great help in some instances. When businesses upgrade equip­ment (note the projector mentioned above), they may end up with quality stuff that needs a new home and will end up in the dumpster if a place isn’t found. Be on the lookout for opportunities like that and call us to see if we can use the “strays.”

Amid all the needs is one piece of good financial news—since our cars and trucks and trains seldom move, rising gas prices haven’t hit us that hard.

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Meanwhile, in other news (I’m a television anchor wannabe) ….

The museum’s African American Heritage Group and the Norfolk Southern Corpora­tion are sponsoring our annual Heritage Celebration on the 21st of June to coincide with Roanoke’s Juneteenth Freedom Celebration. The NS Exhibit Car and a locomotive simulator will be at VMT all day long. That night Dr. Benjamin Dixon, retired Vice President for Multicultural Affairs at Virginia Tech, will speak. The program runs from 6:30-8:30pm and is open to the public. Seating is limited. NS employees with ID's will be admitted for half-price all day.

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VMT’s newest photographic exhibit, Images of Rail: a Photo History of the Norfolk & Western, opened recently. It includes 38 of the more than two hundred photographs that are in the similarly-named book by Nelson Harris. The framed prints hang on a background painted to look like the side of an N&W passenger car. “Harvested” from VMT files, the photos depict crews, equipment, buildings, engines and the rugged landscape that N&W trains traveled from the late 1800s on.

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In case you missed the news, on May 1 the museum held the grand opening of the Auto­­motive Gallery and its first feature: From Mud to Mobility: 100 years of the Virginia Department of Transportation. VDOT and Advance Auto partnered with VMT to create the new gallery. The sponsors of Star City Motor Madness have also played a significant role (more on that in my next blog).

Visitors can view automobiles from every decade in the 1900s including a 1904 curved-dash Olds, a 1948 Packard Limo, and a 1963 Studebaker Lark Taxi. Also displayed are photographic billboards, informational displays, and a unique collection of Virginia li­cense plates dating back to 1917, long before anyone had ever heard of a “personalized” car tag. Com2VMT and CRPL8s.