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Editorial: Big exhibit invests in city
Op-Ed · August 14, 2014


The Hoover Presidential Foundation’s announcement for a $600,000 exhibit at the Hoover Library-Museum and the Foundation’s plans to promote it strike us as audacious and grand, and we hope to see the crowds — and the needed support — to pull off a successful six-month display.


The exhibit opens in April and is called “The Making of the Great Humanitarian: Herbert Hoover and World War I.” It includes four key elements:

• A 46-foot, one-sixth-scale replica of the Belgian Relief Ship used by Hoover to get food to Europe. Crowds that came to see the Mayor’s Parade Aug. 2 during Hoover’s Hometown Days got the first look at this replica, and how a person climbs inside to drive it in the parade. Smoke billows out of the stacks and it bends to make the turns.

This ship traveled to the Iowa State Fair and the Hoover Foundation is handing out some 50,000 “Hoover cookies” to help promote the exhibit.

The ship will get hauled around from town to town for parades to further promote the exhibit, carried in a long, eye-catching red trailer bearing Hoover’s picture, the www.hoovercookie.com Web site and a map showing how easy it is to find West Branch. The trailer itself is attractive and worthy of following the ship in the parade, which is just what the Foundation did at Hoover’s Hometown Days.

• The Hoover 4-D experience, which includes “3-D projection mapping and other effects” appearing in the Figge Auditorium, modeled after the Ghost of Lincoln exhibit at the Lincoln Library.

• The Savoy Hotel depiction — The London hotel was Hoover’s base of operations while rescuing thousands of Americans trying to get back to the states after the war started. This part of the exhibit will fill the Quarton Gallery.

• WWI trench — Visitors can activate senors in the exhibit to trigger “immersion technologies that simulate battle conditions.” It is worth noting that a similar trench feature helped the success of the 1989 “Over There” exhibit. That exhibit drew some 90,000 people 25 years ago and was made by the same people who will make the 2015 version.

It is all quite impressive, and the Foundation’s parade plans will get many, many eyes pointed in their direction.

Foundation Director Jerry Fleagle and Main Street West Branch Program Director Mackenzie Krob in late January revealed only part of the big plans at a community visioning meeting. At that meeting, Krob encouraged local businesses, especially restaurants, to prepare so they can handle the hopefully bigger-than-expected crowds.

Fleagle said that if the Foundation and the community work together, drawing people not only to the Hoover Complex but also into downtown, then this exhibit will help re-establish West Branch as a destination.

We certainly agree. The money and efforts of the Foundation will create an opportunity for the city to show more of itself to visitors, tempting them to return again and again for what we have to offer. The Foundation is making an investment on behalf of the community, not just the Hoover Complex.