After all, it was one of the first automobiles in the city.

That early steam-powered auto still exists, although it’s in fragile condition. Part of the Center for History’s collection, it’s been stored away from public view for about 20 years.

The vehicle, about the size of a horse cart, looks more like a small wagon or sleigh than a modern automobile.

It’s believed to be the oldest car still in existence from the dawn of the auto age in South Bend.

Martin, the car’s original owner, was a South Bend musician and a piano and organ tuner for the Elbel music store for nearly 40 years. Martin drove it on the job making house calls to tune musical instruments, according to newspaper accounts. It was the first auto bought and used for commercial purposes in the city.

The Locomobile Co. of America was an automobile manufacturer founded in 1899 in Watertown, Mass., but production transferred a year later to Bridgeport, Conn., where it continued in business until 1929. The firm produced small steam cars until 1903, then switched to larger gasoline internal-combustion vehicles.

By 1902, Locomobile (the name was a combination of the words “locomotive” and “automobile”) had sold 5,200 vehicles, making the company, at that time, the largest producer of autos in the country, according to the Locomobile Society of America.

(1902 was the same year the Studebaker carriage and wagon company, based in South Bend, entered the automotive market with production of electric cars. The oldest Studebaker auto in the Studebaker National Museum collection dates from 1904.)

The new car was delivered to Martin in South Bend on March 4, 1901, according to a February 1932 interview he gave to the South Bend News-Times.

Martin ordered the Locomobile from Manlove A. “Cap” Shuey, who established the first automotive garage in South Bend and was the city’s first local car dealer.

“It was a bad day in South Bend, a heavy snow falling, but Capt. Shuey and I unloaded the thing, got it started and drove over some of the streets. Of course, automobiles were a curiosity in South Bend, this contraption aroused much interest and people stopped to watch it as we moved through the streets at what to-day would be a very modest speed,” Martin recalled in the interview.

Leighton Pine, an executive at the Singer Sewing Machine works in South Bend, had bought a Locomobile earlier (likely a 1900 model) but had trouble with it. “He did not seem to think much of it and told me it was all right as a toy but would never be of practical use,” Martin said. Pine died in 1905.

Martin said shortly after getting his car, while he was driving it near Rolling Prairie, the vehicle startled a horse, which started running ahead of the Locomobile down the road. The scene was viewed with astonishment by a group of schoolchildren, some of whom likely had never before seen a “horseless carriage.” Martin said one boy yelled at him: “Hey there, mister, you’ve lost your horse.”

By 1932, Martin had donated his Locomobile to the collection of the Northern Indiana Historical Society and it was a popular item on display in the Old Court House Museum. The year he donated the vehicle is unknown.

Martin died at age 78 in March 1932.

It isn’t known how many Locomobile steam autos still exist. A restored 1900 Locomobile steam runabout, previously part of the S. Ray Miller auto collection in Elkhart, Ind., sold at auction in 2004 for $49,500.

The South Bend Locomobile is believed to have last been on public view in the Old Court House Museum in the early 1990s.

Center for History records show that the Locomobile was examined by an auto expert in 1983 and determined to be in fair but nonrunning condition. It was stated that the car would need a total restoration in order to continue on public display. At the time, its value was estimated at $30,000.

The museum staff would like to put the Locomobile back on public display, but that will take work and expense.

The Locomobile is so fragile that “it’s a skeleton of what it was,” Center for History Executive Director Randy Ray said. And that creates a dilemma for museum professionals, he said.

A complete restoration to shiny, 1901 showroom-like condition would require so many new parts that little of the original car would remain, he said.

An alternative would be conservation of the car. Conservation is a careful process designed to stabilize the condition of an object so it can remain on public view, not to make it look like new. “I’d love to have it looking good enough to put on display,” Ray said.

Another possibility would be to sell or give the Locomobile to another museum that has an interest in displaying it, he said. Auctioning it off would be unlikely, because it probably would sell to a private collector and be removed permanently from public view, he said.

“It’s hard for me to say just leave it there (in storage). It’s not doing anyone any good. I’d rather see it go somewhere and be appreciated,” Ray told the South Bend Tribune.

“Very few of those original Locomobiles are still around,” said Tom Kimmel, of Berrien Springs, Mich., president of the Steam Automobile Club of America, when told the South Bend museum owns an early model. “Everybody wants one of those originals.”

Many people still build modern replicas of steam Locomobiles today, he said.

Shuey, the car dealer who sold Martin the car in 1901, was a colorful character who in his early career was part owner of Elbel’s music store. He later operated a river steamboat, the Ben Hamilton, between South Bend and Mishawaka, Ind., but his boat was destroyed by fire in 1897, according to Shuey’s obituary in the Oct. 21, 1924, South Bend Tribune.

In about 1902, Shuey went to Detroit and bought a Ford automobile from Henry Ford, then soon established a Ford dealership and garage in South Bend. He later also served as an agent for Waverly, Oldsmobile, Krit, Apperson and Michell autos.

Shuey gave up the dealership in 1911 and became an occasional taxi driver, according to his obituary. At the time of his death, he had been suffering for four years from injuries he sustained when he was crushed by a car that slid down an incline from a garage’s second floor, according to the article.

Some early news articles state Shuey was the first man in South Bend to own an auto, also a Locomobile, possibly before Leighton Pine did. Frederick G. Collmer, a St. Joseph County resident who died in 1945, also owned an early Locomobile steamer, according to newspaper archives.

It is unknown what became of those other early South Bend Locomobiles.

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Information from: South Bend Tribune, http://www.southbendtribune.com

Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WF-07-27-13 1844GMT

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Descendants of Coast Guard personnel who served at the station in Eagle Harbor attended a grand opening ceremony this month, honoring those who risked their lives to protect imperiled boaters.

The station was established in 1912 and operated until 1950. The current building was constructed in 1939 and is filled with artifacts for the public to see.

“Not only do we have memorabilia that we’ve collected, but we also have the physical items, the surfboats that they used, the equipment that they used,” Mark Rowe, maritime chairman for the Keweenaw County Historical Society, told WLUC-TV.

One of the most notable rescues was the saving of the L.C. Waldo shipwreck crew in 1913. The steamer ran aground at the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan’s far northwestern Upper Peninsula. Surfmen from the Eagle Harbor and Portage Canal lifesaving stations rescued 22 men, two women and a dog and received the rare Life Saving Gold Medal for their efforts.

“They had a horrific snowstorm blowing through, 50 to 70 mile an hour winds, 24 degree air temperature, freezing spray, and these surfmen took the challenge, and they went out in the lake and they saved the shipwreck crew,” Rowe said.

One of the rescuers was Anthony Glaza, whose grandson, Timothy Glaza, donated his medal to the museum during the grand opening.

“It’s been a part of our family folklore forever to hear and to retell the story of Grandpa Tony’s time here and his participation in the rescue of the Waldo,” Glaza said.

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Information from: WLUC-TV, http://www.wluctv6.com

Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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NEW YORK – The Metropolitan Museum of Art will launch the Global Museum Leaders Colloquium in April 2014, a two-week pilot program created and hosted by the museum.

Designed to stimulate and broaden international dialogue on museum management and collections care among directors from collecting institutions, it will bring together 12-15 directors, in particular from museums in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The colloquium will take place April 7-18.

“The Met was founded as an international museum 143 years ago, and this global approach is now reflected in our collections, programs, and audience. Given the breadth and depth of our holdings, it is our responsibility to encourage a dialogue that can benefit museums worldwide, one that reinforces their relevance and encourages their appropriate stewardship,” said Thomas P. Campbell, director and CEO of the museum. “The Global Museum Leaders Colloquium has been designed specifically to address a broad range of museum management issues, and we look forward to welcoming our colleagues to the Met next spring.”

The program will include directors of institutions with collections ranging from archaeological and historic artifacts to modern and contemporary art. Participants will be meeting with the Met’s curators, conservators and administrative staff and also participating in intensive dialogues about museum management.

The series of sessions held during the 12 working days of the colloquium will offer an overview of various aspects of museum operations—from curatorial research, collections management, and conservation to fundraising, education, governance and digital communications—providing a 360-degree view of current museum practices.

A significant portion of the schedule will also be set aside for open dialogue among the visiting directors, who will discuss strategic challenges facing their institutions and engage in workshops to explore timely issues confronting museums worldwide, such as how to formulate cooperative policies and how to advocate effectively for institutions at a time of scarce resources.

At a time when globalization is rapidly reshaping museum audiences as well as programming mandates, the colloquium has been created to promote strong, well-informed, culturally sensitive museum leadership. A key aim of the program will be enhanced international collaboration for all of the participating institutions and their leaders.

Participation in the Global Museum Leaders Colloquium is by invitation. Most participants will be museum directors, although in some cases the program will accept deputy directors or chief curators who have oversight responsibility for their institutions, as well as public officials with jurisdiction over museums.

The 2014 participants of the program will be announced by November of this year.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) – Jeffrey Deitch, the sometimes controversial director of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, announced Wednesday he is resigning.

Deitch made the announcement at a meeting of his board of directors, adding he plans to stay on until an ambitious campaign to raise MOCA’s endowment from $20 million to $100 million is completed. That’s expected to happen this fall.

In the meantime, the board formed a committee to look for a successor.

“As colleagues, friends and great admirers of Jeffrey’s talent, we respect his decision and thank him for his tremendous dedication to the museum and all those who value MOCA,” David G. Johnson, co-chairman of the board, said in a statement released by MOCA.

The announcement was not surprising. Although Johnson hailed Deitch for helping “solidify MOCA’s financial stability while changing the way Angelenos, and those around the world, engage with contemporary art,” the director had come under sometimes withering criticism since his arrival in 2010.

His signature achievement, the museum’s “Art in The Streets” show, featuring the works of Banksy, Shepard Fairey and other graffiti artists, drew record crowds in 2011. But other exhibitions, including one featuring the works of actor Dennis Hopper and another curated by actor James Franco, were dismissed as lowbrow.

He also alienated some in the art community with last year’s dismissal of longtime MOCA curator Paul Schimmel. The action prompted Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari and other prominent artists to resign from MOCA’s board.

Deitch was a surprise choice to some when he was hired in 2010. As the operator of Deitch Projects, he was a prominent New York gallery owner and consultant to collectors, but hadn’t worked in museums.

Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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WASHINGTON (AP) – The familiar exteriors of astronauts’ spacesuits often hide all of the ingenuity and mechanics that are built inside the suits, which were first imagined as “wearable spacecraft.”

Now a new art exhibit, “Suited for Space,” opening Friday at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, highlights the creativity behind the suits that allowed humans to explore the moon and aspire to fly farther from Earth.

X-ray images and photographs show the suits in intricate detail, said space history curator Cathleen Lewis. The museum’s X-rays are the first such images ever created to study, conserve and research the nation’s spacesuits.

“You don’t realize what a complex machine these are,” Lewis said. But the X-rays of Alan Shepard’s Apollo spacesuit and a 1960s prototype “allow visitors to see beyond what is visible to the naked eye, through the protective layers of the suit to see the substructures that are embedded inside.”

The exhibition traces the evolution of the spacesuit from the early high-altitude test flight suits of the 1930s to the dawn of the space age with Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle missions.

While technology drove much of the suit design to maintain an airtight barrier to the vacuum of space and to protect from solar radiation, fashion aesthetics of the time also played a role, Lewis said. The original Mercury seven astronaut suits were unique from all others with a silvery coating to introduce America’s space explorers to the world.

“NASA had a demand to create the astronauts into a whole new corps, a non-military corps. So here was an opportunity to dress them in a new uniform … that evokes sensibilities of that Buck Rogers imagination,” she said. “All of these guys, the engineers, they grew up on science fiction. They fed it with their ideas, and they were consumers of it at the same time.”

Curators are working to find ways to preserve spacesuits because some materials are decomposing, discoloring or becoming rigid some 50 years after they were created.

The spacesuit show is traveling to 10 cities, moving next to Tampa, Fla., Philadelphia and Seattle through 2015.

Two companion exhibits at the National Air and Space Museum also highlight 50 artworks of about 550 new items added to the Smithsonian’s growing space art collection over the past decade. They include portraits of astronomer Carl Sagan and astrophysicist Neal deGrasse Tyson, and a photograph of first female shuttle commander Eileen Collins by photographer Annie Leibovitz.

The museum’s art collection includes 7,000 paintings, drawings, prints, posters and sculptures. Curators have been working to add more contemporary and conceptual art over the past 10 years.

Chief Curator Peter Jakab said art helps people reflect on aerospace achievements and the humanity imbued in each machine.

Albert Watson, a photographer known for his portraits of celebrities, such as Steve Jobs, and of fashion, took a break in 1990 to photograph spacesuits and other artifacts. More recently, he donated two large-scale prints of an Apollo glove and boot to the museum.

Watson said he was captivated by the thought of suits that traveled in space and came back covered with moon dust.

“When you deal with celebrities every day or super models every day and fashion people every day, there is always a nice escape to go into still life,” he said. “As a child, I loved science fiction. I always remember arguing with my father about rocket ships. He said man will never go into space, he said, because what goes up must come down.”

The museum also has acquired a sculpture by Angela Palmer that evokes 46 different earth-like worlds that have been discovered by NASA’s Kepler Observatory. The piece, titled Searching for Goldilocks, involves 18 sheets of glass marked with circles for each star with an orbiting planet.

It refers to “Goldilocks” planets that might support life. They range from 132 light-years to about 4,300 light-years away.

“If you have a look, you can stand there looking from Earth, as if you are the eye of the telescope,” she said. “Or you can go to the back of the sculpture, and you can be thrown back towards Earth—4,300 light years straight back down.”

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National Air and Space Museum: http://airandspace.si.edu

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Follow Brett Zongker on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DCArtBeat

Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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