Belair Mansion appointment a time for memories and moving ahead By ANNETTE ESTERHELD Staff Writer
Pam Williams has been appointed manager of historic properties for the city of Bowie. According to City Manager David Deutsch, Williams was appointed April 14.
"We were pleased to make the appointment," he said. "After reviewing staffing needs of historic properties, it was clear we already had on board the right person who had been doing the work."
Williams came to the city in a part-time job as museum assistant in 1996. That job changed to museum specialist and most recently she has served as the assistant director of historic properties.
For Williams, this appointment is bittersweet. She was hired by the former director Stephen Patrick, who committed suicide last year after learning he had brain cancer.
"I worked with Stephen in Annapolis," she told the Blade-News. "When he asked me to consider coming part time, I was ready to move. I had been with then Three Centuries Tours for 12 years."
"Stephen was tremendous. He had so much energy and a huge thirst for knowledge that was never quenched. He was always researching something," she said. "He had a brilliant mind with such a vision for the future of Belair Mansion and the other historic properties in Bowie."
Williams said, "It's been a difficult year. Stephen's death was a tragedy, but his legacy will never leave us. The tragedies and life-altering events are like bumps in the road and only make us stronger. We're surviving."
Surviving and thriving. There's so much going on at the properties she manages that Williams will admit to being a "bit overwhelmed at times."
She is first and foremost an educator, but she teams that with entertaining people. When she worked for the tour group in Annapolis, she was not only office manager, but tour planner and den mother for 50 part-time employees who dressed in Colonial garb to tell the story of the early days in Annapolis and Maryland. She always told her employees that "people visit us on their days off or on their vacations. We have to entertain them, but it's also incumbent upon us to educate them."
"History is not a dry tumbleweed. It's a real live, living thing," she said.
Williams is so excited about the many projects going on and planned and not-yet thought of for the historic properties that she wakes up at 2 a.m. thinking, "now, wouldn't this be cool. Or we should thus and such."
"I've been known to get up and e-mail myself a list of stuff so I don't forget," she said.
"Kids grow and we watch them toddle, first as toddlers, then toddling off to the college dorm and life. You wonder how did they get this big?" said Williams. "I think our historic properties programs are still evolving. I really think we're in our teenage years and still growing. We need to keep growing. If we stop, we'll be static and boring and history is not static or boring."
Williams said when she started in 1996 it was her and Patrick, and the Belair Mansion was only open two days a week for four hours. "Now we're open six days a week and four hours each day and that's just this property."
Included in Williams' stable is the Belair Stable, the Bowie Train Station Museum and Welcome Center in Old Bowie. She also partners with the Railroad Library, the Prince George's County Genealogical Society and the Radio and Television Museum, that are all located in city-owned properties.
"We function together and support each other," she said. One of the upcoming programs that Williams is planning is with what she calls the "Radio Boys" from the Radio and Television Museum.
"We're looking to have a small radio and maybe early television exhibit here at the mansion sometime soon," she said. "There's an art exhibit planned for the stable this summer and in the fall we're planning a history lecture on quilting and maybe an exhibit later of quilts made by the Southern Comforters quilting group. We're also planning a murder mystery with Tea Time Players here this June."
Williams is also envisioning programming specifically for children who are prekindergarten age. "We've had great success with the Kids Caboose at the train station in Old Bowie. That group goes up to age 9, but we've seen a large number of small kids so I keep thinking about planning something for small children here at the mansion," she said. "We can't wait until they're 18 years old. We have to start children early to maintain their interest."
Then there's the "A Day in the Life of a Maryland Civil War Soldier" that's planned this summer, the fall event with the Atlantic Guard Soldier's Aid Society, the teas, rental of the mansion for parties and receptions, campfires with city's park rangers, and on and on.
"I make lists. I'm never without my pad of paper and pen," Williams said. "There's never enough hours or enough people for tasks. We need to always be growing, searching for new ways to engage and involve the public."
She said, "the public writes our paychecks. We have to make our museums places that the citizens are proud of - a place to come for education, entertainment and enlightenment."
