Miscellaneous

What: Archaeology of St. Augustine and Northeast Florida, Short Course offered through the First Coast Technical Institute When: 21 February - 24 March 2007 Price: $79 This course is sponsored by the St. Augustine Archaeological Association, LAMP, the Florida Public Archaeology Network, and the City of St. Augustine. It consists of four lectures on successive Wednesday nights, plus two days of field work with archaeologists, and is geared towards members of the public interested in [...]

The Daytona 500 is Today! Here at the St. Augustine Lighthouse and Museum we’re a leisurely drive from the oval in Daytona, and all day and week there will be visitors walking around in the gear of their favorite driver. On this chilly but sunny Sunday, fans of Jr., Gordon, Johnson, and Tony Stewart have already raced to get to the top of the tower so they could get back down in time to see [...]

A group of us have been meeting to discuss formation of a county-wide (St. Johns, Florida) oral history program. In the face of exploding development we have a great need to preserve as much of our history as possible before more of the important places in our community, as well as the people who can tell the stories of those places, are gone forever. […]

I am with our Senior Team, Board and some Community Stakeholders working on an interpretive plan for the museum. It's an important, long process. This has me thinking about "meaning" in museums and our enjoyment of them. What is your favorite museum/lighthouse to visit? Why? What makes that site special to you personally? What moved you about it. I am fond of "environments" that emmerse me in the site and experience and that are deeply [...]

We're a small place. We are in a constant state of file-purging, trying to keep the important stuff but avoid hoarding interesting but essentially irrelevant items. Once in a while we run across things in our piles of files that don't belong there but are too good to throw away. I hereby entrust a couple of them them to you, gentle blog-sloggers: In a magazine article regarding early patent applications for life-saving devices we find [...]

The “ghost phenomenon” has hit St. Augustine and has especially attracted the paranormal enthusiasts and curious to the St. Augustine Lighthouse. The St. Augustine Lighthouse is “my beat” and I am happy to share the space with ghosties and aliens!! Aliens have taken a back seat in St. Augustine……they are not the local focus of pursuit by the paranormal folk (of which I am a member). Consider this: where would an alien visit? Big cities [...]

In which we meet our Director of Conservation and take a stab at explaining just what it is she does…and explode the ubiquitous “vats of acid” myth. The “Conservation” title, of course, is misleading. A good deal of what we all do falls under that convenient “Other Duties as Assigned” portion of the job description. Whoever invented that should have a special place in Heaven along with the angel who invented that highly entertaining “call [...]

Someone asked me this week how to accomplish anything with a small group of people who had no particular power to change governments or move the world. They were discouraged by a lighthouse preservation problem that was taking a while to move and change. I told them that Alice Walker, the womanist, African American poet, ( someone I really love to read), wrote ..."The most common way people give up their power is by thinking [...]

What do you think about taking out lighthouse lenses and putting them in a gallery setting? The St. Augustine lighthouse keeps her lens on and working in the tower. We think that this is fabulous, and it is more and more rare. Sometimes we work with other groups to teach them how to be Private Aids to Navigation. So are lenses safer in or out of the tower? Why or why not? Yes, I have [...]

Update!! Oldest person to climb the St. Augustine Lighthouse was a woman: **on her 99th birthday** December 2006 a gentleman climbed who was 2 weeks away from his 99th birthday! Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you If you’re young at heart For its hard, you will find, to be narrow of mind If you’re young at heart You can go to extremes with impossible schemes You can laugh when your dreams [...]