Describe your schedule and day-to-day duties. Tuesday mornings, when the museum is closed, are our workdays. We work on landscaping, changing around displays, cleaning or repairing a few things. Then, I’m the docent on schedule the second and fourth Thursdays of every month, plus on call for any tours coming through. When a group comes in, normally I introduce them to the museum and ask if they want a docent to go with them. If so, I’ll find out how long they have to spend and plan my tour accordingly. Sometimes they just want to walk through on their own. In that case, I just let them know I’m available to answer any questions. Who are your typical tour groups and how large are they? It varies. We may only get half a dozen and we’ve had as many as 120, but then we try to have other docents come in so we can split them up and keep each group down to 25. The biggest groups we’re getting are homeschooled and private-school children and other (youth) organizations. We also get families and clubs. Last week we had a women’s group come in. I’ve had people from all different countries. I had a family here last week from the U.K. and their older son was quite involved in restoring antique equipment. He just could not quit looking at all this stuff and asking questions. What are some of the most popular displays? The (kids) are interested in the old barn where we have a lot of displays that show what our children had to do in the early days to help their parents on the farms. A lot of people are very interested in the equipment. We go into the early invention of tractors, the tractors built in the early 1900s, and we try to point out all the different types and the different styles, how they were made … and how they led us up to what we have today. The big World War II crawler gets a lot of attention. Then there’s the hillside combine and the snowmobile—a converted tractor used by the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail in Truckee/Tahoe during the winter. The most common question we get is, “How in the heck did people make some of this stuff in the early 1900s with what they had to work with then?” What do you hope visitors get out of their visit? Visitors have a chance to see where we came from in farming and then compare that to what we have today. In a (tractor or other farm vehicle) from the early days, there was no GPS, no air conditioning, no cab. Most didn’t even have a cushioned seat—just solid steel—and some you had to stand up all day to drive it. I’m just glad I’m able to maybe help them understand a little bit more about how our agriculture got started and how it led us up to what we have today.
Gene Muhlenkamp is a longtime docent and the volunteer coordinator at the California Agriculture Museum in Woodland. His typical duties include giving guided tours to visitors, above, and changing displays, right, as well as miscellaneous duties such as landscaping and repairing equipment.
Linda DuBois ldubois@californiabountiful.com
MORE ONLINE Find out why Gene Muhlenkamp started volunteering at the museum more than 25 years ago and what he does to keep young children engaged. This and more at californiabountiful.com.
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