Wow! That Oughta Be In a Museum!

Souvenirs

Another way collectors preserve memories is through souvenirs. Kim Legleiter, Stauth Memorial Museum, Montezuma

Long after the sights and sounds of an experience are finished, souvenirs can bring them back to us. They carry the past into the present.

Claude and Donalda Stauth traveled together for nearly forty years. They collected as they traveled, especially folk art, tourist pieces, and coins from central Africa and southeast Asia. Each souvenir was carefully recorded in a log. Donalda, a professional photographer, took over 10,000 photographs.

After Claude died in 1989, Donalda began planning the Stauth Memorial Museum in Montezuma, the couple's hometown in southwestern Kansas. The exhibit Around the World showcases their many souvenirs.

"I told them, 'It would be a shame when you both are gone that this stuff will be picked over in a garage sale. You ought to have a museum.' And it wasn't too long after that . . . they started talking about a museum."
-- John Unruh, Museum trustee and executor of Donalda Stauth's estate.

Pictured above, Kim Legleiter, director of the Stauth Memorial Museum in Montezuma.

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