Aurora society's leader plans fundraising push

He is Alan Guggenheim, 54, former journalist, entrepreneur and corporate executive.

Guggenheim, who's also a history buff, said he is excited about the job he started last month.

Guggenheim's duties include managing a staff of one full-time and five part-time workers, overseeing an annual budget of about $150,000 and answering to an 11-member board of directors on behalf of the society's 200 dues-paying members. He and his staff are responsible for 22 buildings -- "that all need painting," he noted -- and thousands of historical artifacts in the Old Aurora Colony Museum's collections.

Guggenheim was quick to snap the reins. Already he is working to add new members to the society's roster, boost its bank account and attract more visitors. He wants to raise $3.5 million to build a big new exhibit hall. He expects that might take five years, but he's not waiting to meet more immediate goals.

One of the first tasks Guggenheim took on was applying for a $45,000 grant from the Oregon Cultural Trust to help preserve the museum's deteriorating collection of Aurora Colony Band sheet music.

He wants to make that collection, which includes many unpublished compositions, "accessible to schoolchildren, scholars and the public via recording, Internet and a live performance by the Metropolitan Youth Symphonic Band," according to the grant proposal.

The music, he said, reflects a perception of Oregon "as an 'Eden' of social tolerance, political vision and economic sustainability" persisting since pioneer days.

Other colony memorabilia, especially the museum's collection of some 80 antique wool quilts, need attention, too, Guggenheim said.

"They were hand-woven, hand made; the spinning and quilting were tremendous," he said. "It's a folk art."

The society owns and operates a complex of 19th-century wooden buildings in downtown Aurora that includes the Ox Barn Museum and several houses that once belonged to the Christian commune founded in 1856 by its charismatic leader, Dr. William Kiel.

The complex houses thousands of the colony's artifacts, photographs, diaries, letters and other historical documents. Access to much of them, however, is limited to a few writers, scholars and other researchers.

Guggenheim, a transplanted Southerner long fascinated by artifacts from earlier times, wants to change that.

"My grandmother was an antiques store owner," he said. "My family's vacations were to places like Monticello and Mount Vernon."

Guggenheim declined to say how much the society is paying him. It was, he said, his passion for history and "the opportunity to come in and make a difference" that prompted him to seek the job.

One of the most important tasks facing Guggenheim is making more people aware of the educational treasures the museum has to share. Of particular interest to him is the society's Stauffer-Will Farm, south of Aurora.

It features a two-story log house, a barn and other outbuildings built by John Stauffer, a colony member, for himself and his family in the 1860s.

These days some 2,500 school children from throughout the Northwest visit the 1.4-acre farmstead each spring for hands-on lessons in --baking biscuits, dipping candles, spinning wool, splitting shingles and other pioneer crafts. Guggenheim thinks a fall program could be added.

"Teachers are constantly telling us that this is the best field trip experience their kids get all year," he said.

In Guggenheim, the society's board has someone whose background includes having raised millions of dollars in venture capital and using that money to create and run companies based on fuel cells, nontoxic pest-control chemicals and other innovative technologies.

He is not trained as a museum curator, but his business skills and connections are just what the society needs, board member Mike Byrnes said.

That's why, Byrnes said, Guggenheim was the board's unanimous choice from among more than two dozen applicants to replace Joan Jacobs as executive director. Jacobs resigned last year, after four years at the post, with plans to move to Central Oregon.

Guggenheim, who grew up in North Carolina, holds a bachelor of arts degree in English from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and he studied fine arts and photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.

He said he was inspired to move to Oregon with his wife, Cheryl Guggenheim, in the mid-970s by Oregonians' concern for their environment and the maverick political views of the late Gov. Tom McCall and one of his predecessors, then-U.S. Sen. Mark Hatfield.

"I went from North Carolina to Oregon, seeking the Eden of my expectations," he said, "just as the pioneers on the Oregon Trail did."