Why Do We Cast Cannons, Make Wooden Wheels, and Build Coffeehouses?
by Jay Gaynor Back in the 1970s, I was involved in launching Ohio Village, a living history museum near Columbus. It portrayed an antebellum town, a village with a square around which stood shops where craftspeople followed nineteenth-century trades. Shortly after opening day, I was having Sunday dinner with friends and their elderly—to me at the time, anyway—parents who had visited the museum. I asked the husband, Mr. Bradley, what he thought of it. He gave me the usual, polite “enjoyed it, nice place” answers. So I said something like, “Come on, Mr. Bradley, tell me what you really think.” His reply was not what I expected. He said something like: “Well, it was good, but everyone was thinking too much.” Explain, please. “When I was a kid in New England, we used to wander by the tinsmith or blacksmith after school, and they didn’t think about what they did. They just did it. You folks spend a lot of time drawing and calculating and measuring and figuring out. You think too much.” Mayb
