BIG PLANS FOR STARS AND STRIPES MUSEUM

BLOOMFIELD, Mo. -- The Stars and Stripes Museum has a low profile but big plans.

Opening in 1997 at the birthplace of the famous military newspaper, the museum has outgrown its exhibition and storage space and is set to begin construction of an addition that will more than double its size.

More than 200 people made donations to the museum last year. The museum has hundreds of boxes of books alone with no space to display them.

The Stars and Stripes Museum and Library is growing despite few people outside Southeast Missouri are aware of it or its significance.

The museum's most precious possession is one of three existing copies of the first edition of Stars and Stripes, published in Bloomfield on Nov. 9, 1861. Overall, the collection is viewed as "a historical chronicle of the U.S. art war."

Curator Delilah Tayloe draws a distinction between the Stars and Stripes Museum and other military museums.

Museum about people

"This museum is about people who put their careers and their lives on the line for the sake of journalistic integrity," she says.

Among the famous journalists associated with Stars and Stripes through the years are Bill Mauldin, Ernie Pyle, Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Andy Rooney and Steve Croft. Joyce Kilmer, most famous for the poem "Trees," was a Stars and Stripes correspondent.

Ten "Stripers" have died while covering wars. Ninety-nine journalists working for other organizations were killed last year while doing their job.

"A lot of people aren't aware how preciously the news is bought," Tayloe says.

The addition is part of a 10-year master plan to build a complex to include an new building for the museum, the Missouri Veterans Cemetery due to open in 2002, and a museum housing more than 500 pieces of antique agricultural equipment donated by Gene Rhodes of Cape Girardeau.

A groundbreaking ceremony for the second phase of the Stars and Stripes Museum and Library will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday at the museum.

The 3,800-square-foot metal building will more than double the museum's exhibition and storage space. The addition will cost $120,000 when both the shell and interior construction are complete.

The museum's long-term plans depend upon its ability to raise the necessary money. Help has come in the form of a $30,000 McCormick grant to pay for a new 10-minute video about the museum narrated by nationally known broadcaster Bill Kurtis. It includes interviews with museum officers Jim Mayo and Gary Capps and with Dr. Frank Nickell, director of the Center for Regional History at Southeast.

The video will be used to solicit funding from corporate sponsors. The museum association is beginning a fund-raising drive it hopes will lead eventually to construction of a 20,000-square-foot museum building that will cost $3 million to $4 million.

Another part of the museum's plan is to solicit sponsors for billboards that will direct tourists to the museum.

"We are one of the few cultural attractions between St. Louis and Memphis," says Tayloe. "We need to raise our profile."

The museum also is attempting to arrange with the U.S. Army for external displays of military hardware such as tanks and helicopters.