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Pick the green button, or the red one
by Gregory R. Norfleet · News · April 23, 2015


Don Yeager did not know … for 25 years. Yet now he knows the truth.


And starting May 1, he offers visitors a choice: Choose the green button … or the red button.

At the request of what was then called the Hoover Presidential Association, he built the “Over There” exhibit back in 1989 that drew some 90,000 visitors — the largest ever to come and see a temporary exhibit at the Hoover Library-Museum.

But Yeager, who owns Yeager Instruments, said he never heard about the volume of people who saw his work or that it had set a record.

“I was shocked that they wanted me to do it again,” he said of when the Hoover Presidential Foundation, as the private fundraising organization is called today, contacted him last year. “I was unaware of its success 25 years ago.”

This time, the Foundation hopes to break that record, drawing 100,000 to 120,000 in the six months “The Making of the Great Humanitarian: Herbert Hoover and World War I” goes on display from May 1 through October.

Yeager talks excitedly about the replica WWI trench — a key feature in both exhibits — and how the new version makes the feel of war much more real with the flash, boom and rumble of explosions of a German attack on the trench.

“If that other trench (from 1989) was ‘Trench One,’ then this one is ‘Trench 10.5,’” he said.

With a dozen periscopes for visuals, strobe lights, a surrounding speaker system with two 32-inch subwoofers and simulated gusting wind, Yeager said, the experience may seem too intense for some.

With that in mind, visitors who do not want the full blast should press the green button before pushing aside the canvas and stepping into the 13-by-51-foot trench. Yeager calls this the “educational” setting.

But for those who wish to see and hear and feel everything, to experience a taste of war minus the threat of death, press the red button.

“It is truly frightening,” he said.

The trench of 1989 measured 8 by 25 feet, about a third the size of the 2015 version. Inside the old one was one mannequin, the new one has four, including a wounded soldier. Everything on the mannequins is authentic save for their helmets and boots, he said. The inside of the trench will be lit like the early dawn, when many attacks took place.

The exhibit also includes what at first look like large partitions separating the trench from the “peace side” of the exhibit. There are six 4-by-8-foot walls, each one inch thick with clear plastic showing beads inside the walls. On one side, the beads are black; on the other, the beads are tan. Some 10.5 million black beads represent those killed — at least, by best estimate — in the war. The 10 million tan beads represent those Hoover saved in Belgium from starvation when he headed the Commission for Relief in Belgium.

When not building specialized exhibits, Yeager works as an oculist, but he said he cleared his schedule for the two months prior to the opening of The Making of the Great Humanitarian, to make sure it gets finished on time.

He had been returning from the office and working on the exhibit until as late as 11 p.m. each night, he said.