- Details
- Category: Current Issue
captions, page 4:
From left: Pat Hedenberg, Jeanne Benoit, John Miller, charter member Joy Lizotte, Elaine Turner, Kathleen Zamagni with proclamation.
Volunteers and officers at opening of Boxcar museum.
Barbara Scalise next to the interactive boxcar "dollhouse".
'Historic' May for Aspinock
and Boxcar
By Linda Lemmon
Town Crier Editor
PUTNAM — The Aspinock Historical Society and Gertrude Chandler Warner are having an amazing month.
Mayor Barney Seney proclaimed May Aspinock Historical Society of Putnam month.
Open for the Season
May 5 the Gertrude Chandler Warner Boxcar Children’s Museum opened for the season.
The museum is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays through mid-October.
At the opening volunteers and directors checked out the displays. John Miller, head of the Aspinock Historical Society, said thanks to a $6,700 donation from the Putnam Area Foundation, this year the museum will have a much-needed heating and cooling combo unit.
New this year is a railcar “dollhouse” created by Bill Scalise. Carol Boardman came up with the idea and Bill Scalise made it happen. Bill Scalise took a cardboard bookcase that is sold in the museum and reinforced it. The whole front flips up to reveal the inside of the railcar, according to Barbara Scalise, volunteer. Boardman made “everything she could think of from the books” to fill out the dollhouse. All the items have a home in the bin underneath the table so children can create their own scenarios in the dollhouse. It’s interactive, Scalise said. It was finished about three weeks ago.
Help
The Boxcar museum is in need of volunteers. They can take the 11 a.m. to 1:30 shift or the 1:30 to 4 p.m. shift, according to Boxcar museum Chair Pat Hedenberg. They might work six times in the whole season. She said there are always two volunteers and the schedules can be flexible. Volunteers are given some history of Gertrude Warner and the museum. If interested in helping, please call Hedenberg at: 860-207-6044.
Third-grader Program
All kinds of programs are in the works including a special trip for Putnam third-graders. Hedenberg said May 23-25 third-graders will head for the museum and its environs. Buses will carry 44 students and drop 22 off at the Municipal Complex for tours of the library, Aspinock Historical Society and to meet the mayor. The bus will drop the remaining 22 students at the Boxcar museum. They will go, in groups of eight, on a short tour of the areas around the museum that touched Gertrude Warner and her Boxcar series of children’s books. At the museum they will do crafts and games and experience, using all their senses, what life might have been like 100 years ago, she said. Then they all switch out. Thanks to a gift from Jewett City Savings Bank, she said, each child will get Boxcar book, #8, “The Lighthouse Mystery.”
The subcommittee, which has been working on this program since last fall, includes: Hedenberg, Renee Tsanjoures, Jeanne Benoit, Barbara Scalise and Sandra Ames.
.