Tyler Gum applies a trusted litmus test while leading the Pennsylvania Military Museum in Boalsburg.
“If your barometer is ‘Can you explain what you’re doing or what you’re going to do to a Gold Star Family [who lost a loved one during military service] and feel good about it,’ then that passes the test,” says Gum, the museum’s site administrator since 2016. “If it doesn’t, then you need to re-evaluate.”
The museum preserves and honors Pennsylvania’s military history from 1747 onward; helping share that story with visitors is a role Gum relishes.
“As long as they have an ‘aha!’ moment, then it’s a success,” he says of tours led by staff and volunteers for visitors ranging from schoolchildren to educators to military families to the general public. “That’s regardless of age, regardless of demographic, regardless of interest. And especially if you have someone that comes in who does not enjoy or appreciate history or military history. If they can walk away with one thing and be like, ‘Hmmm, that’s cool,’ that’s a good day.”
Gum’s own love of history began as a youngster growing up in Mifflin County. He’s long been an avid reader and recalls that he and friends “nerded out” exploring the tanks during a visit to the military museum in sixth grade.
He went on to earn degrees in history from Penn State and Shippensburg, and his career has included time as a ranger at Harper’s Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia. He now leads a small staff of five at the military museum.
“We feed off each other’s energy; we back each other up,” he says. “‘Everyone fills sandbags,’ I think, is the military quote.”
Here is more from our conversation:
What provides those “aha!” moments for people who visit the museum?
Gum: People don’t realize just how important Pennsylvania is in the broad scope of the colonies, but then of the United States and then of military history, both on the community level, the commonwealth level and the country level. And there are some “aha!” moments like realizing how many women served in Pennsylvania. How many millions of people served in World War II. How much of an industrial hub the commonwealth was, and still is today, for a lot of the theaters of combat.
Peace treaties, like the Marshall Plan: George C. Marshall is a Pennsylvanian. Jimmy Stewart was a World War II bomber. Hap Arnold, another Pennsylvanian, trained with the Wright Brothers and [went] on, of course, to be a military officer. Or the first guy to ever take off and land on an aircraft carrier—technically it wasn’t an aircraft carrier, but it was the USS Pennsylvania and that was our battleship named after our state. You have so much that people walk away saying, “Dang, I didn’t know that.” It’s really neat how you have so many different moments of “aha!” that are covered in the exhibits.
How have you put your imprint on this museum?
Gum: If I were to have an imprint, I think the one that I would really care the most about is that none of the stories and none of these people are forgotten. We have artifacts upstairs that the last time someone wore that jacket, they were serving our nation and they didn’t come home alive. When you shake the hand of a Gold Star father or hug a Gold Star mom, you realize that the history you’re teaching was their son’s or their daughter’s story. I would say that’s my goal, that those families and the community know that their stories are not forgotten.
That’s a big responsibility, isn’t it?
Gum: It is. … When we get to work, you have thirty-one monuments outside. We see them in the morning; it’s the last thing in your rearview mirror as you leave. We’re entrusted with their care and their memory and their legacy.
I can go away proud to say, OK, we left it better than we found it, or we at least maintained professionalism at a level that, to me, was confirmed when a family wanted to have a memorial service here, or when a veteran or dad or mom or brother or spouse comes by and you can see them having a solemn moment at one of our monuments, or doing a charcoal rubbing or leaving a flower or leaving a beer can.
On the other side of that coin, though, is there’s always room for better. So, I think we’ve tried to make pretty earnest strides in accessibility, both financial accessibility, physical accessibility, and cognitive. And we try to give teachers and classrooms whatever we can do to help them, whether it’s primary source material, or copies of rosters, copies of orders, plans, maps, pictures, whatever; hands-on experiences for their students, anything that would make them have that “aha!” moment.
Have you seen a change in the way veterans are perceived and appreciated over the years?
Gum: I have to answer that with the caveat that I’m not a veteran myself, so I’m looking at it as a professional in the industry of museums and public history. I would say the biggest misconception that we face with veterans and with military history—appreciation of both—is just how few veterans there are now. We’re actually talking about less than half of one percent of the nation serve. Whereas, when you think about the time period of World War II and Vietnam, the last time we had the draft, you’re talking about hundreds of thousands, millions of people serving. …
Some [WWII veterans] have expressed it this way: On your factory floor, or in your bank, or in your hospital, or in your classroom, everyone did it. So, in their minds what they did was very common in an uncommon circumstance. They felt appreciated, they felt loved. They didn’t really have to talk about it because everyone lived that common experience … of service and sacrifice, either on the war front or the home front. There was that unifier.
When you come to Vietnam, obviously, it was more contentious; spitting on service members coming home and the denigration of them and the lack of appreciation. And then I think what we’ve seen more recently, kind of the ebbs and flows of that, is that some of your more contemporary veterans are finding a lot of solace and a lot of acceptance and love from their fellow Vietnam veterans, because some of them don’t feel seen or recognized because there’s so few of them, or they don’t feel as though they are appreciated.
When you think about Vietnam, or you think about these other wars, there was a uniformed combatant [on the other side]. However, in non-uniform combatant status, there’s no one flag you’re fighting against. And then you exacerbate that by twenty years of combat. There’s no dimmer switch on turning that off. You’re talking about a battlefield campaign, or theater of war, across two nations, Iraq and Afghanistan, that will have seen two generations of the same family serve. How do you account for that societally and socially?
A lot of those veterans, when they tell their stories here, may feel immensely appreciated, but not necessarily immensely understood. Just because you’re appreciated doesn’t mean you’re understood. Just because you’re understood doesn’t mean you’re appreciated. I think there’s sometimes a public breakdown there in some of the veterans we’ve spoken to. Others, though, wouldn’t change a thing; [they] absolutely feel loved, appreciated, understood.
But then when you have things such as the withdrawal out of Afghanistan take place, there are moments of discouragement, of “what did I fight for?” Or when you have certain papers released and declassified, it calls into question what motives were true and what motives weren’t.
As academic professionals, it’s our job to make sure that story is balanced and well told by all avenues. The common thing is [that] it’s not forgotten and it’s continually studied, so that you have an appreciation of the time, of the context, an appreciation of the service, an appreciation of the person.
For a calendar of upcoming events, visit pamilmuseum.org or check out the museum’s Facebook page. T&G
Mark Brackenbury is a former editor of Town&Gown.
