Kenneth Cohen
speaker
48 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Kenneth Cohen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So, you know, it's interesting. When people see our pop culture materials, they often say, oh, you have the, as if there's only one. And of course, in many of these cases, with the ruby slippers, with Superman costumes, with all sorts of other things, especially costume items, there's often multiples.
You want to go all the way back probably to the 1970s, if not earlier. The Smithsonian didn't consciously collect things that we would call pop culture until the 1970s. And then what happened in the early 1980s, as the small collection was starting to grow, was that the museum received a gift of materials from the TV show MASH. and staged an exhibit about MASH called Binding Up the Wounds.
And so that exhibit, which had one of the surgery rooms and a bunch of the props, including the famous sign, hometown sign post that has all the characters' hometowns listed on it. This exhibit drew over a million people. It was the first time the American History Museum needed time ticket entry.
And it really told museum and Smithsonian leadership that popular culture was an important part of American culture and that it needed to be preserved and interpreted and that the American public really wanted to see and engage with it. And without that turning point, it's hard to imagine the robust collecting that sort of led up to now.
imagine that people really wanted to see that that much that's right you know people really connected with that program a broad cross-section of america really connected with that program and the show had the ability to turn on a dime from humor to really powerful reflection on the human costs of armed conflict and you know that really resonated with americans that the last episode of mash was
you know, by percentages, the most watched TV show until the 2010s. So, you know, it really was a powerful program.
Well, they tell so many stories, right? There's the story in the movie and in the book that preceded the movie. You know, in the book, the slippers are silver and the path is gold.
And there's a lot of conjecture about what the original author was intending in an era when the monetization, the discussion of how American monetary policy was going to be tied to gold or silver values was a really important political debate at the time the book came out. But the slippers have real relevance today, too, in sort of a real world crime sense.
You know, the museum has had a pair of these slippers since they're actually red pumps. We call them slippers because that's what they're called in the movie. But we've had a pair since 1979 that had been on display almost constantly because of how popular they were. And there's five known pairs and probably at least six total because one of the shoes has a number six on the inside of it.
And there were six different pairs of shoes, partly because they might get worn out over the course of all of the shooting, but also because the sequins are actually stitched on in slightly different angles that would reflect the stage lights in any given scene differently. And so they were used at different times in different sets in the filming of the movie.
And so our pair had been on display almost constantly since 1979, and they were being meticulously cleaned by our amazing conservation staff. And at the same time that that was happening, sort of 2016 to 2018, a pair that had been stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota in 2005 surfaced.
And the FBI brought those ruby slippers to the museum because our conservators were now so familiar with the intricate construction of the ones at our museum that they could essentially authenticate the pair that had just surfaced.
Now in examining the pair that had just surfaced, the conservators discovered that in fact not only were the recently resurfaced ones authentic, but that our pair wasn't actually a pair. The right shoe at the Smithsonian and The resurfaced pair's left shoe were actually an original pair together, and then our left and the other pair's right.
Conservators identified this by examining super small similarities in the cut style and what we call the wear, the patterns of distress caused by wearing the shoes on the sequins and on the heel of these ruby slippers. So this was a case of our collection, you know, being used to help safeguard another of these rare and super popular shoes that many Americans have really close connections to.
Yeah, so it's interesting when people see our pop culture materials, they often say, oh, you have the, as if there's only one. And of course, in many of these cases with the ruby slippers, with Superman costumes, with all sorts of other things, especially costume items, there's often multiples. Sometimes they're exact copies and sometimes they're slightly different.
the Superman costumes were stitched differently for different positions that Superman might be in so that the suit looked skin tight no matter what position he was in. So there was a quote unquote flying suit for when he was posted horizontally that would look skin tight.
But if he stood up and walked in that suit, it would wrinkle and crinkle in certain ways that were unflatteringly visible on television. And so they had a walking suit and ours is the walking suit. So used by George Reeves. When he was walking around in character.
We don't care about that. So yeah, I mean, you know, lots of people send us messages about items that they have, or asking us about items that we have. And we don't value our collections in that way. And so we don't really consider our collections from a monetary point of view. We're trying to take care of these things in perpetuity.
Yeah, so the Babe Ruth baseball, some things in our collection, we don't have great documentation on. They come to us, we know they're important, but it's hard to sort of pin down precise details. So that baseball is, the signature is authenticated. It's certainly Babe Ruth. And it was either from 1918 or from 1921. And we know that because the ball came to us
from somebody who grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and told us that Babe Ruth signed it when he came through Scranton, Pennsylvania, and he was really only in Scranton, Pennsylvania, playing baseball twice.
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