My dream job
I went to Eastern State Penitentiary today with our interns from work. Had a great time on the tour and plan to go back on my own to get more detailed information. The tour guides were very knowledgeable.
If I ever won a huge lottery jackpot (guess I should play it once in a while), I would love to do this for a living -- not necessarily at Eastern State, but as a historical guide in the Parks system. I think many of them are volunteers and those who are paid don't get much. I'd love to be a tour guide at Gettysburg or Antietem, or some of the other Civil War battlefields -- Petersburg, Franklin, Chancelorsville, The Wilderness (if stinkin' Wal-Mart doesn't take over The Wilderness batttlefield). Hosting walking tours of Philly or leading tours at Valley Forge could be fun, too. I'd probably enjoy doing the same thing at Fort Ticonderoga. The possibilities are endless.
Of course, I still need to make a living and need to live in this general vicinity due to family connections here and in NY. Heck, I already bore my friends and family with stupid little things that I know about history, or rant about people who think Winston Churchill was a fictional character, so if I had one of these jobs maybe I'd be less irritating to those around me. Then again, it could make me worse. :)
If I ever won a huge lottery jackpot (guess I should play it once in a while), I would love to do this for a living -- not necessarily at Eastern State, but as a historical guide in the Parks system. I think many of them are volunteers and those who are paid don't get much. I'd love to be a tour guide at Gettysburg or Antietem, or some of the other Civil War battlefields -- Petersburg, Franklin, Chancelorsville, The Wilderness (if stinkin' Wal-Mart doesn't take over The Wilderness batttlefield). Hosting walking tours of Philly or leading tours at Valley Forge could be fun, too. I'd probably enjoy doing the same thing at Fort Ticonderoga. The possibilities are endless.
Of course, I still need to make a living and need to live in this general vicinity due to family connections here and in NY. Heck, I already bore my friends and family with stupid little things that I know about history, or rant about people who think Winston Churchill was a fictional character, so if I had one of these jobs maybe I'd be less irritating to those around me. Then again, it could make me worse. :)
Labels: history
2 Comments:
At 1:45 PM,
Rachel S-H said…
I think that would be a neat job. They even have guides who give tours on horseback at Gettysburg--that would be awesome. I would love to work at one of the historical sites.
At 11:19 AM,
Anonymous said…
As Shakespeare could have said in Twelfth Night, "If ranting be the way of making history matter, rant on".
Rants allowed: absent knowledge of where things came from and of how we got here, we haven't the perspective to make sense out of the frequent nonsense around us.
Perhaps those "stupid little things" interest your friends and family more than they let on. These days, many people are so unaccustomed to having someone around who knows and cares about such things that they don't always know quite how to respond.
Whether about the Army of Northern Virginia or about the Green Mountain Boys, it all matters. It really does. Here's hoping that you will find ways to engage what has gone before while continuing on with workaday life (or while waiting on line to buy a lottery ticket . . . ).
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