Museum

In 1985, Claire McLean was brought to the White House to primp Lucky, the first dog, for a portrait. A breeder, groomer and author of books on Bouvier des Flandres dogs, she gave President Ronald Reagan's Bouvier a brush and trim. What to do with the leftover black hair? She stuffed it in her purse. Her mother, Dorothy DiSilva, sketched Lucky and glued the hair on the page, unknowingly launching her daughter on a mission. Now the official photo of a red-ribboned Lucky hangs on a pegboard by the furry drawing in the Presidential Pet Museum, just relocated from McLean's out-of-the-way Lothian barn to a storefront in Annapolis's tourist-laden historic district.

Baltimore museums held Kwanzaa celebrations yesterday with craft activities, musical performances and art tours on the fifth day of the holiday. Visitors packed into the Baltimore Museum of Art for an annual Kwanzaa family day, a tradition of more than 10 years. Families crammed into an auditorium to watch a performance by an African-American dance ensemble, Kulu Mele, and afterward glued together a bead mosaic inspired by a Nigerian artist. By 3 o'clock yesterday, more than 1,000 visitors had come, said Annie Mannix, the art museum's spokeswoman.

About a year ago, Bob Wade took a tour of the Sports Legends Museum at Camden Yards along with other state high school athletic administrators who were in the facility for a meeting. Wade, the legendary former football and basketball coach at Dunbar, had an idea what to expect - and what not to expect. "People who had taken the tour had told me there was hardly any basketball in there. Not just the professionals and the colleges, but no mention of Dunbar ... or any of the rich history of high school basketball," Wade, now the city schools' athletics director, said this week.

Philanthropist Dorothy McIlvain Scott's $10 million pledge to the Baltimore Museum of Art continues a long tradition of leadership by women who have helped shape the institution's collections and character. Scott's gift, announced last week, will allow the museum to revitalize its collection of American furniture and decorative arts and support exhibitions and programs in the American wing. With her gift, Scott joins a distinguished company of female philanthropists whose generosity made a strategic difference in the museum's growth and development.

For years, visitors marveled over the lushly furnished mansion, the elaborate gardens and the luxurious lives of the inhabitants, with their horse races and imported wines. But they learned little about the lives of the hundreds of slaves at what is now the Hampton National Historic Site in Towson - the men, women and children whose sweat made the estate grand. While the mansion had been preserved, the few remaining slave quarters were not open to visitors until last fall. In fact, they were used for storage.

Classic black musicals and a documentary on the life and career of the Baltimore-born actor Howard E. Rollins will be shown in May at a film festival at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture. This is the second year for the festival, which is titled "Showcasing the Works of Independent Film Makers in Maryland." "I wanted to showcase directors from or in Maryland," says Nicole Shivers, who selected the films and is the public-programs director at the museum.

When a leading member of America's corporate elite is asked to bring his hobnobbing talents to the service of a financially needy national museum, perhaps no one should be surprised that his champagne lifestyle comes, too. What was galling about Lawrence M. Small's lavish spending to maintain himself and his wife in the manner to which they had grown accustomed was that he presented the tab - for first-class travel, limousine service, $1.5 million in...

Mission: To educate the public about the history and development of the electric light bulb and to preserve and display in chronological order a collection of light bulbs that ranges from Edison's earliest attempts at commercial illumination to the present. Artifacts include the world's largest bulb, 50,000 watts and 4 feet high, and the smallest, designed for NASA and viewed only under a 50-power microscope. The collection also includes the first 1906 tungsten bulb, four of the bases of Edison's 1879 bulbs, and the first U.S. patent issued to Edison for a bamboo filament light bulb.

Mission: To tell the story of the people of Aberdeen, their history and development in an interpretive manner with exhibits and displays covering cultural, industrial and sociological development of the town. The museum was founded in 1987 by Charlotte Garretson Cronin, an eighth-generation Aberdeen native. The nucleus of the museum's first displays came from the office of the late Maryland Sen. J. W. Cronin, an Aberdeen lawyer, newspaper editor and publisher. Other families have donated historical memorabilia since.

WASHINGTON -- Almost everybody knows what became of the Wright Flyer and the Spirit of St. Louis. They hang with other aviation treasures in the hallowed galleries of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.But what about the Flying Wing, the forerunner of the stealth bomber? Or the last surviving Aichi Seran, a Japanese floatplane that was folded up and carried inside a submarine? Or the Caroline, the turbo-prop airplane that John F. Kennedy used as his campaign aircraft?They are gathering dust in the darkness of drafty tin sheds in a rundown neighborhood in nearby Suitland.

Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum now boasts a replica of the one-room log cabin that the African-American scientist built and lived in on his western Baltimore County farm. Officials formally opened the 224-square-foot cabin Thursday on the park grounds in Catonsville, two days before the 278th anniversary of Banneker's birth. The home furthers efforts to educate the public about this significant figure in local, state and national history whose accomplishments included helping to survey the land that became the nation's capital.

In the summer of 1970, my father and I took a Sunday drive along Falls Road and encountered a fledging enterprise known as the Baltimore Streetcar Museum. A group of streetcar enthusiasts had made good on their determination to preserve and run some of Baltimore's revered transit vehicles of the previous 100 years. That day, we watched in amazement as aged streetcars appeared. And each year, these volunteers at the museum extended the overhead wires and the rails a little more along Falls Road into the Jones Falls Valley.

The telephone landed its own gallery show first, way back in 1968. People on one end of the curly-corded land line carried out instructions in art-making issued by folks at the other end. Later - much later - came a retrospective devoted to the graph- ics and snapshots created by the gadget's annoying, chirpy little cousin, the cell phone. Both types of talking machine are still, God help us, very much in use in modern society. But a national traveling show opening this weekend at the Contemporary Museum celebrates another communication device that is on its way out: the fax machine.

WASHINGTON - - The elderly white supremacist accused of killing a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in June had planned the attack for months and was on a suicide mission, a federal prosecutor said in court Wednesday. The disclosure came during a brief hearing in the district's federal court during which the suspect, James W. von Brunn, spoke publicly for the first time since the June10 shooting. "The Constitution guarantees me a speedy and fair trial," von Brunn, 89, said in a halting voice.

SUNDAY HEAVEN AND HELL: The heavy metal band fronted by Ronnie James Dio is joined by other genre heavyweights Coheed and Cambria at Merriweather Post Pavilion, 10475 Little Patuxent Parkway. Gates open at 7 p.m. Tickets are $35-$75. Go to ticketmaster.com. DANCING IN THE STREETS BLOCK PARTY: Dance in the streets of Pikesville and take a step back into the 1950s and 1960s with classic rock and classic Corvettes. An Elvis impersonator, Big Cam & The Lifters, and J.D. and the Blades perform.

When I asked Bill Buszinski what kind of food his new restaurant was going to serve, I thought at first he said, "iconoclastic cuisine." What he actually said was "Americana classic cuisine," but iconoclastic food might be just right for his new venue, the quirky American Visionary Art Museum. After more than three years, the space once occupied by the Joy America Cafe has a new tenant. This is very good news. One possible glitch: The cafe's liquor license was allowed to expire, but Buszinski and his wife Maria are in the process of applying for a new one. They are the former owners of the offbeat, now-closed Sputnik Cafe in Crownsville.

Maryland, birthplace of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Thurgood Marshall, is endowed with one of the richest legacies of African-American history of any state in the union. Before the Civil War, the state was home to the largest population of free blacks in the country, and it also sat squarely athwart a major route of the Underground Railroad through which thousands of slaves escaped to freedom in the North. After the war, new African-American communities sprang up across the state, centered around hundreds of small, fiercely independent churches that provided their congregants with a sense of belonging and a spiritual and physical refuge in an often hostile world.

It was a time warp, for sure, but I couldn't decide if I was hurtling back to the past or off into the future. I was wandering through the Louis Vuitton store that opened last week at Towson Town Center, a jewel box of a shop in the mall's "luxury wing" that was quiet as a museum on this particular weekday morning. Museum, indeed. During what seems like the permafrost of this recession, I wonder if someday we'll go to museums to see the kinds of luxuries we used to buy, or at least imagined buying.

If only the original sailors on the Constellation had it as good as the recent crew aboard the former Civil War ship. Raw bars were set up both "fore" and "aft." There were tables featuring mounds of Chinese noodles, seared tuna and shrimp galore. Not a bit of hardtack in sight. It was all part of the Constellation Historic Ships Museum's "10th Annual BLAST!" A couple hundred folks strolled the decks of the ship, enjoying a pleasant evening. "Excellent. We're in the [Inner] Harbor on a ship.

The Gettysburg Festival Where: : Historic downtown Gettysburg, Pa. When: : Thursday through June 28; times vary, depending on venue What: : The 10-day festival is focused on cultural arts, with more than 100 events, featuring more than 800 artists and performers. Highlights include appearances by actor James Earl Jones, celebrity chef Richard Blais of Bravo's Top Chef and sculptor Mike Shaffer, as well as musical and dance performances, children's activities, free classes, art shows and cabaret productions.