This week­end we’ve had a museum parked in our dri­ve­way. It’s the “BUS-eum” from the Traces Cen­ter for His­tory and Cul­ture in St. Paul, host­ing a trav­el­ing exhibit on Ger­man POW’s in the US dur­ing World War II. We were happy to host the BUS-eum’s Irv­ing Kell­man over the week­end in-between stops in Cape May Cour­t­house and Vineland.  I asked him to give us the story of the Ger­man POWs on video.

As you might guess, there was a lot of Quaker con­nec­tions in the 1940, with Amer­i­can Friends Ser­vice Com­mit­tee involvement. Traces’ direc­tor Michael Luick-Thrams is a Friend and did his PhD the­sis on the Scat­ter­good Hos­tel, a refugee camp set up at the then-abandoned Friends school in Iowa. Many of the BUS-eum’s stops are Friends Schools, with pub­lic libraries being another com­mon destination.

The visit was made with help from FGC’s Direc­tory of Trav­el­ing Friends. I think this is the first time we’ve actu­ally had a vis­i­tor after a decade of being listed there (most past inquiries have fallen through when they looked at a map and real­ized our dis­tance from Pen­dle Hill, New York City or what­ever other des­ti­na­tion brought them east).