1990s staff: ‘A lot of money was available’
Museum staff in the 1990s remember programs that were extremely popular with families, school groups and weddings. Peter Cook, who managed the night and weekend programs, remembers groups sleeping at the museum on Fridays and Saturdays, bringing in $300,000 a year. He said at its peak, the museum would offer 40 to 45 nightly programs with 300 to 400 participants each evening.
“We had a full schedule of reservations for people to come to the museum. Financially, the museum was great. Between our revenue and grants, state, federal and local foundations, there was a lot of money available,” Cook said.
He said it was the most fun job he’s ever had, recalling a time when he was teaching a dinosaur class to schoolchildren and uncovered a sample of fossilized dinosaur poop, which helped scientists understand what dinosaurs ate.
“For 8-year-olds, it’s funny,” he said. “Then the immediate reaction was: ‘ew.’ And sometimes I would hear a kid say “cool.” And I knew this might be a budding scientist.
Cook said the building was very old so there were some maintenance issues, but the organization had money set aside for repairs and there were no immediate issues that couldn’t be fixed.
“We’ve never had a toilet clogged overnight, even though 300 people in the building were using it,” he said.
The academy also had a large group of active volunteers eager to contribute to the organization, said Dusti Morton, who started as a volunteer, worked at live animal shows and helped run night programs from the 1990s to the early 2000s.
It was also the home of the Women in Natural Sciences program, which had foundation and grant funding to introduce young women from Philadelphia public and charter high schools to careers in science through after-school programs, serving primarily children from low-income, single-parent households.
Nancy Peter led the program from the early 1980s through the 1990s as the academy’s director of education. She said that in the years since she left, the program “really exploded.”
“This is one of the longest-running museum youth programs in the country,” she said. She added that her students have become successful scientists and that research is underway, funded by the federal government, to follow the lives of the students who joined us.
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