The Finney County Historical Museum is offering its new 2023 Historic Finney County Calendar, and has opened a new exhibit, “My Place in Time.”
The calendar features photographs of local parks, picnics, playgrounds, public art and special places dating from the late 19th Century, during the community’s earliest years, to the early 21st Century.
The 12-month 11 by 17-inch wall calendar was created by Finney County Museum Collections Manager Todd Roberts, incorporating more than 70 images, some in color and many in early-day black and white.
The calendar is sponsored by Heritage Realty, the Finney County Farm Bureau Association and Valley State Bank. All three businesses have helped make publication of the calendar possible each of the past several years by underwriting part of the expenses.
Copies are on sale in the Finney County Museum Gift Shop at the price of $15 each, plus tax. The gift shop is open daily.
Calendar sales and other museum store receipts help provide funds for exhibits and year-round historical society programs offered for the community.
The calendar is created with a different theme each year. The 2022 edition, for instance, featured photographs and information from the U.S. Army Air Force training base that operated in Garden City during World War II.
Calendar sales for the 2023 edition will continue until the supply is depleted.
MY PLACE IN TIME EXHIBIT
The new exhibit is located in the “My Place In Time” display, part of the museum’s main gallery between the Buffalo Jones Exhibit and a 19th Century kitchen representation.
Assembled by Museum Research Librarian Laurie Oshel, the display features a trio of parallel display spaces to focus on local memories from three significant past decades. Each respective section asks visitors – those old enough to remember – “Where were you in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s?”
The exhibit includes more than 90 pictures, posters, garments and artifacts. Previous displays in the space have focused on different individuals who have made impacts on community history, so the new long-term collection is a change from that concept.
Guests can take turns identifying objects such as a Bakelite tube radio, period-correct scale model cars, board games, glass milk bottles and additional consumer products and packaging, various local school yearbooks; and images representing World II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
Onlookers might also spot an advertisement for the opening of the once-popular Cree Mee drive-in restaurant, a set of aluminum drinking tumblers, an Eisenhower campaign button, hang-on speakers from Garden City’s drive-in movie theater, mugs from the one-time A&W Restaurant, military uniforms, record album covers, posters for a series of live band concerts which took place more than a half-century ago and one of many coin-operated parking meters that lined Garden City’s downtown streets.