Tania Talks Museums with Roger Smith, A Savannah-Based Intellectual and World Traveler
I had the pleasure of talking about museums with my good friend Roger Smith, Director of The Learning Center, at Senior Citizens, Inc., in Savannah, Georgia. We first met in the mid-1990s when he became a docent at the Telfair Academy, the museum where I worked as registrar. In addition to working and volunteering in museums, Roger has spent countless hours visiting museums in his hometown and elsewhere. When he’s not traveling, he’s planning for his next adventure, which always includes museums. As a former French teacher, he’s especially well-versed in French sites. He shared a few of his favorites here.
Tania Sammons
Roger, I see your current work as museum adjacent. You educate people. But, you have worked and/or volunteered in museums. Will you talk a little bit about those experiences?
Roger Smith
I moved into my very first house that I owned in Savannah’s historic district on Price Street at Macon Street when I was about 24. I thought, since I live downtown now, I'm going to join Historic Savannah Foundation. Their membership brochure had a box that said, “Check here if you want to learn about volunteer opportunities.” I would have stuffed envelopes or scraped gum off the bottoms of chairs after an event or something, but instead, I got a call from the then interim director of the Davenport House. They wanted me to train to be a docent. When I look at my volunteer nametag, I startle to see “since 1995.” I feel very much at home in the Davenport House arena.
Tania Sammons
You were also a docent at the Telfair Academy. How did you end up there?
Roger Smith
Through my friendship with Linda McWhorter, who volunteered in many ways at the Telfair and was friends with the Telfair’s Curator of Education Holly Koons. Holly was recruiting a new class of Telfair docents, and Linda said, “You should do this.” So I did. I was working as a high school teacher, and I remember going to the trainings that Holly and Harry Delorme conducted on Friday afternoons. While most people might have been looking forward to a bar, I couldn't wait to go to the Telfair. I remember saying to Holly, who became a friend, “I'm just so envious that you get to work here.” I thought that was the most glamorous thing ever.
When the time came for me to start looking around for something to do other than classroom teaching, there was an ad in the newspaper for a “Heritage Education Teacher” at Massie Heritage Center, which is a public school-owned teaching museum. I was an English and French teacher but thought, “What the heck, this would be really cool!” I remembered going to Massie when I was in third grade. All third graders go to Massie. So I applied and got a job offer. I loved it. It was marvelous. I figured that I would retire from there, but something even better came along, which was at the Georgia Historical Society.
Tania Sammons
Do you consider the Georgia Historical Society a museum? It has a museum vibe about it.
Roger Smith
It does have a museum vibe about it. There are display cases right inside the public entrance of Hodgson Hall, and the staff treat that space very seriously, and utilize it in good and correct ways, but I never had anything to do with it. I was Director of Education, which meant that I took groups into Hodgson Hall from time to time, but the cases were the library staff’s domain.
I was largely responsible for teacher workshops in the summer. Depending on the theme, I would take a group of teachers to a museum like the Civil Rights Museum. We also went to cemeteries, which are museums of a sort.
Tania Sammons
Now you often take people to museums. How do you utilize museums in your work today, as the Director of The Learning Center?
Roger Smith
Yes, in the last nearly 19 years of running The Learning Center, I regularly take members into museum settings, in Savannah and elsewhere. Museums do a fantastic job of distilling and crystallizing the points that we're trying to make with classroom experiences. I can't think of a single Learning Center travel program that has taken people out of Savannah that has not involved multiple museums. We made a trip once called Thomas Jefferson's Virginia, which took us to Colonial Williamsburg, Monticello, and Jefferson's Poplar Forest, as well as selected buildings on the campus of the University of Virginia.
We've been to museums in New York City, and historic sites on a Lewis and Clark-focused trip in the Pacific Northwest. And, abroad. We've traveled more abroad than domestically. We've been to Paris, Rome, Florence, London, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Prague, Vienna, and Budapest. In each instance, there were museum experiences.
Tania Sammons
Ireland?
Roger Smith
Ireland is coming up. We're going at the end of May for two weeks in Dublin, which is the only city that I personally scouted for this trip. It has a lot of the museum and historic sites that a national capital offers. We’ll visit the National Gallery of Ireland, the National Museum, and the National Library. At the very minimum, we'll go to the museum at Trinity College, where the Book of Kells is located, among other historic treasures.
Tania Sammons
I'm not going to pin you down on a Savannah museum, but of all the museums you have visited outside of Savannah, which stand out to you?
Roger Smith
I think that the 911 Memorial Museum in New York City. I did not take a group there, but I've visited myself with a friend. I thought it was extraordinarily moving. The Tenement Museum in New York City is a fabulous experience. I've been in a lot of terrific museums and had a lot of fabulous guides, but I think that the Tenement Museum is the only visit which afterward I felt compelled to write to the director to compliment our guide and the overall experience. There was something almost spiritual—and I don't use the word spiritual lightly or easily or often—but there was something about that visit that added up to more than its constituent parts. There was a human connection with the people who lived there. This program happened to be the Irish immigrant tour, but there's a German immigrant tour and there's a Jewish immigrant tour, all in the same building. I would highly recommend that museum.
Tania Sammons
How about abroad?
Roger Smith
The private tour of Windsor Castle was pretty spectacular, as far as royal properties are concerned. Kensington Palace does a really good job of creating the most museum-type of displays, but in Windsor Castle you're seeing the rooms. Those are curated, I'm sure, and conserved and maintained and all of that, but it's also where a family lives. Kensington Palace has exhibits that are different and separate from the apartments.
On the subject of places where people have lived, I've been to Paris more times than I can remember or count, maybe 40 or 50. You have to remember I taught French, so I was studying in Paris, or taking a group of students to Paris, or just going because friends asked me to go and show them around. I'm not sure how many times I've been to the Louvre, or Versailles. When I'm in those places, I try to see something that I haven't already seen 50 times.
When it comes to the Louvre, a lot of people don't know that you can visit the apartments, which I put in air quotes, because they are spectacularly palatial. There are decorative arts to view in those places and it's easy to imagine somebody 150 years ago living there. At Versailles, I discovered there are apartments that are furnished very authentically. I think the furnishings are original in a series of rooms where “Mesdames” lived. They were the sisters of Louis XVI, and they had royal accommodations, just not as flashy or as frequently visited as the bed chamber of Marie Antoinette, the bed chamber of Louis XVI, and so on. These are places that all the tourists don't go or even know about. They made me want to read more about the lives of these women who were very close biologically to the king, and what became of them.
The other thing that I discovered recently at Versailles is a gallery that was redone in the 1830s as a monument to French military victories, starting with Joan of Arc and coming all the way up to what then was the current time. There are enormous paintings, almost like murals, one after the other in chronological order. If you want a military history of France, go to that gallery.
Tania Sammons
What museums have been the favorites of your Learning Center members? What stands out, like a favorite experience they've talked about again and again?
Roger Smith
That's pretty easy to answer. The very first trip The Learning Center took was called Royal Houses of Britain, after an eight or nine-week course, and people began saying, “When are you taking us to these places?” We scheduled that trip in the little window of time when you can get into some of the royal houses that aren't usually open to the public, specifically Buckingham Palace. People were amazed by the access they had. The best example of access had to do with Linda McWhorter opening doors. She had ties to Lady Henrietta Spencer-Churchill, the daughter of the 11th Duke of Marlborough. Lady Henrietta runs Blenheim Palace like it's a business. It's her family home, but it is a full-scale museum with thousands of visitors. Linda's connection with Lady Henrietta meant that she met our group at the door, hand-selected a docent to guide us through the house, and joined us for lunch. It was a stunning experience. I don't know how well you know Blenheim Palace, but it's a succession of rooms that are meant for show. It's a theater set, basically.
Tania Sammons
Yes, I’ve been there a couple of times. It’s almost overwhelming, but those grand country houses were meant to be spectacles.
Roger Smith
Lady Henrietta joined us that day, because her plans to go skiing in Italy were thwarted by her having pulled a muscle in her back. It was bad luck for her, but good luck for us. I don't think it was staged or scripted necessarily, but I loved the optic for our group because I didn't know where we were going to have lunch. At the end of our tour, Lady Henrietta led our group through a very large, very noisy, very fluorescently lit cafeteria into a sumptuously decorated room with three round tables set just for our group. A third of our lucky travelers got to sit at the table with Lady Henrietta. As lunch was winding down, she stood up and spoke to us about running a house museum. She said it may seem glamorous, but it's not. It may seem like they're fabulously wealthy, but they have bills that match that wealth, and then some. I remember her saying that Blenheim Palace has somewhere between like three and four acres of roof, and there is never a single day when there's not some roof problem somewhere in the building.
Tania Sammons
I believe that.
Roger Smith
I think that's what our group would remember, not the three or four acres of roof, but getting the private access.
Tania Sammons
What about you?
Roger Smith
I really, really, really liked the private tour, which we paid for, of Windsor Castle. Their after-hours tour. Anybody could book that. It's around 85 pounds per person. We got deposited at Windsor Castle early in the day, and toured the castle if we wanted to, shopped, ate, and then queued when we were supposed to. The very first thing that the very engaging docent did was to take the heavy metal velvet rope off of its stanchion and threw it with this big clatter onto the floor. She said, “You people have paid to be back here.”
Tania Sammons
It sounds like it's the special, behind-the-scenes kind of tour that you and your travelers like best.
Roger Smith
Yes. We try to make sure that every single trip has at least two or three really special things. And we get those special things either because somebody knows somebody, or we simply pay for them.
Tania Sammons
Do you ever go to a museum, like the Louvre, and let your travelers wander by themselves for a few hours?
Roger Smith
We will often do that, if the museum is set up that way. We will have our guide and our program of less than the full footprint of time, but then give the travelers time to spend on their own.
Tania Sammons
If you've never been to a museum before, a solo wandering is its own unique experience in and of itself. But you are tainted because you’ve been so many times to many of these places.
Roger Smith
True. On a trip to Paris a few years ago we used a group travel company, which meant that we got a tour manager whether we needed one or not. Her name was Carrie. Carrie was delightful, and she and I hit it off, and she gave me an assignment. She said, “There is free time every single day of this tour, and I want you to do something each day in Paris that you've never done before.”
That challenge led me to the Place des Vosges, which I've been to 100 times, but on one corner there's a museum that is the apartment of Victor Hugo, where he wrote Les Miséables, and so many other works. It's a house museum. I love that kind of thing, “to breathe the same air,” as Charlie Johnson would say [a mutual friend who wrote the biography about Mary Telfair]. I listened to the audio tour in French. I thought, why not? I'm going to immerse myself in this.
Tania Sammons
I love it. Will you share some additional highlights, maybe for a person who has never been to France, and then maybe for someone who has been there many times.
Roger Smith
If somebody has never been to Paris before, you can do a highlights tour at the Louvre in about two or three hours. It’s almost like a checklist. There are people there who know exactly what people want to see and know that they may not speak French. They have a well-marked pathway to the Mona Lisa, for example, with a little picture of the painting, so you don't have to read French.
Roger Smith
The Impressionists are at the Musée d'Orsay, a former train station. It’s a beautiful building, an interesting adaptation, and much more manageable than the Louvre. Even smaller and more manageable is the Musée de l’Orangerie, which is in the Tuileries Garden. It was a citrus conservatory for the Tuileries Palace before the palace burned down. It has been converted into a jewel of a museum where the highlight is Monet's water lilies in two oval galleries with seating in the middle. You pay your money, go in, and sit as long as you want. There are some other artists represented on other floors, and if I were a great art connoisseur I could tell you who they are, but it’s really about the light on the Monet paintings. If you have more than just a few days in Paris, that is absolutely worth it. There is a skylight that's tempered with like a cream-colored canvas, so the sunlight is never very harsh. I'm not somebody who's easily wowed by art, but I was, and I am by the water lilies at the Orangerie. I've been to this place many times, and I've taken people there very enthusiastically. If you can sit or stand long enough for the sunlight to change through those canopies, like if it's a cloudy day, wait for a little bit of sun. If it's a sunny day, wait for a cloud to go by. You can tell because the colors, especially the purples, change in breathtaking ways. You cannot imagine the depth of the purple that comes out of those water lily paintings.
Tania Sammons
It's funny that you mentioned this because it makes me think about the dining room at the Owens-Thomas House in Savannah. The walls are painted gray, but as the light changes throughout the day, and on sunny or cloudy days, and with the skylight about the sideboard, the color sometimes looks purple. Sometimes bluish. Sometimes light gray, sometimes dark gray. It's in that color range that you're talking about. When I worked there I loved spending time in that room, and how the colors changed. Yep, I can totally visualize what you are describing.
Roger Smith
While we're on the subject of Monet there's a little-known museum, at least it was not known to me until The Learning Center focused on Impressionist painters, called Musée Marmottan. It’s located in a residential area in extreme western Paris, close to a big, wooded park called theBois de Boulogne. You can take the metro there, but you’ve got to know where you're going. The museum is devoted to Monet's latest paintings when he was going blind. The painting edges are very fuzzy and look unfinished. There is a hands-on exhibit in which you can put on eyeglasses that simulate Monet's failing vision, and then look at his paintings as close as you can manage to his own.
Tania Sammons
Does it clear up the image?
Roger Smith
No, it probably does the opposite, but you understand a little bit more, or at least you think you understand a little bit more about what he was thinking and seeing. It’s a different experience. We also went to Giverny, which is a little bit out of Paris, but totally worth it. Talk about being in that home, his country home, in the middle of that staggeringly beautiful garden that he created and painted over and over and over again. It feels more like a home than it does a museum. I'm drawn to that.
Tania Sammons
Me too. It’s on my to-visit list. Speaking of museums outside of Paris, are there any museums that stand out in those spaces?
Roger Smith
Yes, a good bit. There's an interesting tour of the Grimaldi Palace in Monte Carlo in Monaco, and the Papal Palace in Avignon. The experience is very effective, and beautiful. Also, a fabulous 8th century abbey at Mont-St.-Michel.
Tania Sammons
Thank you so much for talking about museums with me Roger! Is there anything you want to add before we go?
Roger Smith
You’re welcome. It's hard for me to imagine going to a major city and not going to its museums in some measure, maybe not all of them, but being selective about them. I mean, in London, go to the National Gallery, go to Tate Modern. I'm all about walking tours when there's something to see, but the museums make it easier. It's a bit of an otherworldly experience to be in a museum if it's well done.
What a wonderful interview with a museum hero. I deeply admire what Roger has done with The Learning Center. Savannah is lucky to have his brilliance & kindness.