On African Safari, Off the Beaten Path in Kansas

THE story of Martin and Osa Johnson, an American couple whose documented journeys to places like Africa transformed them into national celebrities in the first part of the last century, has faded with time. Even in some parts of Kansas, where the couple grew up before setting off on their adventures, mention of the Johnsons can now draw looks of puzzlement.

But here in the rolling hills of southeastern Kansas, in the town where Osa Johnson grew up, their memory is alive and well. Inside an old train depot, the halls of the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum are filled with photographs from their trips, copies of their books and the possessions they carried — film splicers, licenses to fly airplanes, a waffle iron, even Mrs. Johnson’s zebra skin shoes.

Occupying these halls, too, is the double challenge of a small museum off the beaten track: How to explain the significance of a once-famed couple to an audience now accustomed to glancing at African scenes with the click of a mouse; and how to do that from a town that sits about two hours from the nearest major city (Wichita, Kansas City and Tulsa, Okla., are each about the same distance away.)

The museum in Chanute, home to fewer than 10,000 residents, draws 5,000 or 6,000 visitors a year, said Conrad Froehlich, the director, who notes that small facilities, though often overlooked, actually make up the vast majority of the nation’s museums. “That’s peanuts compared to the Field Museum,” Mr. Froehlich said of attendance here, referring to the natural history museum in Chicago. “But for where we are, that’s not bad.”

The museum draws its share of Osa and Martin Johnson devotees from far and wide. But other visitors, Mr. Froehlich acknowledges, have never heard of them.

“Some people just see the sign and stop in, and you can watch those visitors getting excited as they learn about the Johnsons for the first time,” he said. “That reminds me why we’re here. What we’re doing is keeping their legacy alive.”

By the 1920s and 1930s, Martin and Osa Johnson were household names and faces — as famous in their era, according to one Johnson historian, as Michael Jackson. Their comings and goings made headlines and, in perhaps the modern measure of celebrity, Mrs. Johnson had a stalker.
They were ordinary Kansas kids, as museum officials put it, without wealthy backgrounds or lengthy educations. Martin Johnson, a lanky boy raised in Independence, Kan., not far from here, was expelled from school for a photography prank that made fun of the school principal, the museum notes, though the episode is not emphasized before the busloads of Kansas schoolchildren who travel here on field trips.

At a young age, Mr. Johnson yearned for adventure and managed to travel with Jack London on his 1907 voyage on the Snark. After marrying when Osa was 16 (another fact not emphasized for school groups), the pair set off on their exploits, spending years in Africa and the South Pacific and documenting the animals, people and scenes they saw in a series of films. Mr. Johnson captured the images. Mrs. Johnson, who was also a photographer and filmmaker, starred.

The films were successful. Tours and talks followed. So did books.

“They projected the ideal American couple, and they really debunked a great deal of the previous imagery of Africa at the time,” said Dr. Pascal James Imperato, dean of the school of public health at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, who edited Mrs. Johnson’s final book, published after her death; co-wrote a biography of the Johnsons; and is an honorary trustee of the museum. “They made Africa a place of beauty and tranquillity that was accessible almost as if it were a backyard in Kansas.”

But in 1937, Mr. Johnson died in a commercial plane crash in the United States. Mrs. Johnson, whose 1940 autobiography, “I Married Adventure,” became a best seller, died in New York in 1953.

In the years that followed, some forgot about the Johnsons, whose films now seem dated. Some in new generations never heard of them. And travel — and travelogues — shifted, both in technology, style and reason for being.

The museum opened in 1961, thanks to contributions and efforts from Osa Johnson’s mother, Belle Leighty, who still lived in Chanute at the time. It has expanded to include objects of African art and an ethnographic collection of masks, tools and musical instruments. It also developed traveling exhibitions and moved to its current, more polished setting.

The museum’s 10,000 square feet (including a storage facility and space shared with a library) house a cozy theater and a gallery with statues of the Johnsons — Martin before his camera — at the center. The gallery guides the uninitiated through the Johnsons’ story, featuring childhood clothing and personal memorabilia and photographs from their trips.

Survival for any small nonprofit museum is hard, not least of all during a recession. With two full-time employees and one part-time worker, Mr. Froehlich said, the museum “stretches things as far as we can” to manage its $150,000-to-$200,000 annual budget. Since the 1970s, the museum has entered into licensing deals for the images of the Johnsons, a way to make ends meet.

But those efforts have picked up sharply in recent years, and a larger campaign is under way, according to a lawyer who has been hired to lead the museum’s licensing efforts. American Eagle Outfitters had a licensing agreement with the museum in connection with the retailer’s Martin + Osa stores. The stores, which American Eagle recently decided to close, used the museum archives for “design and lifestyle inspiration,” according to the clothing line. A Hollywood producer is developing a movie.

If that all sounds contrary to the academic work of a museum, Mr. Froehlich says that it is quite in keeping with the way the Johnsons themselves got by. Some view them as pioneers in the notion of product placement in film. They used items like Hershey candy bars and Bisquick in their movies and elsewhere in order to pay for the next adventure, he said.

In any case, Mr. Froehlich said, none of it clashes with the museum’s goal: “Introducing the Johnsons’ story and lives to a younger and more diverse group.”

Jacquelyn Borgeson, the museum’s curator, says she sees signs that their story is re-emerging. In different decades, different fields of study have focused in on the Johnsons, finding relevance in their work.

In the 1960s, she says, the Johnsons were rediscovered by conservationists. Then in the 1970s, anthropologists found them, followed by scholars of women’s studies in the 1980s and aviation specialists in the ’90s. During the last decade, those in the fashion world found Mrs. Johnson (who had her own clothing line and was once voted one of America’s best-dressed women).

“They’re slowly coming back, niche by niche,” she said. “It’s a slow process.”

Others, too, are finding them, perhaps accidentally along the quiet road through this town. On an afternoon this year, the halls were mostly empty, but for a few of the curious.

In a museum this size, there is time and space for visitors’ journals. A recent entry gushed, “Osa Johnson is a woman who knew how to live.”

Source: The New York Times
By: Monica Davey