Spock's Museum

Barry Greenfield, 3, climbed onto a huge scale and discovered that he weighs as much as 47 cans of Campbell's chicken-with-rice soup. Yvonne Younis, 7, lay down on a brobdingnagian desk top, twelve times normal size, beside a ruler in the same scale and found that she is 4 in. tall. Mark Stanton, 10, crawled under the flap of an Indian hut, looked around and then popped a bit of pemmican into his mouth.

The children were having fun in what all too often presents a forbidding atmosphere: a museum. But the private, nonprofit Children's Museum in Jamaica Plain, outside Boston, is a very different kind of museum. It has no collections behind glass, no bored guards, no admonitions to be quiet or keep hands off. In fact, the staff is frankly put out when a child is reluctant to try on an Indian sari, scrape the stretched deerhide with an Algonquin stone tool, or try on the Boston Celtics' Tom Sanders' size 17 basketball shoes.

The man in charge of this permissive atmosphere is Michael Spock, 35, eldest son of the famed baby doctor and himself the father of three. "Children get enough instruction in school," he says. "We're trying to make the world where a child grows up understandable to him -- that part of the world you have to reach out with your hand and touch to really know about."

Grandfather's Cellar. Michael Spock recalls that his father was reasonably strict ("I knew exactly what the limits were and how he felt about things") and ingenious about rigging a staircase for children to climb up on the examining table by themselves ("The kids loved it"). But Michael feels that the main thrust for his career came from his own youthful enthusiasm for art and science museums. When he became director of his museum six years ago, he staged the kind of exhibit that would have' fascinated him as a boy. Called "What's Inside," it featured a cross section of a city street. Children entered through a sewer pipe, hunched past a maze of utility lines, climbed out through a manhole and examined the topside, with its parking meters, trolley tracks and working Volkswagen. Planned as a six-month exhibit, "What's Inside" was so popular that it ran for five years.

For his current exhibit, Spock has remodeled an old auditorium. One result is "Grandfather's Cellar," a nook that introduces children to the world their grandparents knew. It contains a washtub with hand wringer, a coffee grinder, butter churn, mechanical apple peeler and a 1927 Atwater-Kent radio--all in working order. In the Algonquin Indian exhibit, children who once learned about Indians by watching a movie and looking at artifacts now grind maize in stone mortars, chip arrowheads and munch dried berries.

Snug Burrows. For nature study, the museum has taken birds and butterflies out of glass boxes and installed them in a simulated forest that the children can observe from overhead platforms. There is also a tunnel tour below the forest floor, where they can see wood-chucks, weasels and chipmunks all snug in their burrows.

"Superficially, it looks like we're the place where we let kids handle things," admits Spock. "But that's only a byproduct." The real aim, he points out, is to "bring kids together with three-dimensional materials in such a way that real communication occurs between the child and the object." There is no question that the kids respond: attendance has nearly tripled since Spock took over, reaching 2,000 a day.

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