Excavating the secrets, scandals, and untold stories hiding below the surface of life, and giving voice to the characters who make or made those hiStories happen.
As I write this post, Team TTT&T’s Oliver Latsch is in Utah, USA, interviewing Gail Halvorsen, aka “The Candy Bomber,” aka “Uncle Wiggly Wings,” aka “The Chocolate Pilot.” He's the post-WWII US military flyer who, in 1948, came up with an ingenious idea for delivering treats to the children of Berlin, then trapped by Soviet Russia's blockade of the city. Gail's story is the inspiration for Oliver’s upcoming Time Traveler Tour to Berlin, slated for publication in 2018.
When the Soviet blockade of the western sectors of the German capital began, the city only had 36 days worth of food for its 2 million inhabitants. Coal for energy and medical supplies were running perilously low as well. Neither train nor automobile nor river barge could penetrate the Soviet sphere of influence that surrounded Berlin.
In my last post, I wrote about how I found the voice of Time Traveler Tours thanks to a perceived failure. But the learning did not end there. Not by a long shot. It took another misstep en route to preparing our newest title, IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF GIANTS, to make us realize we had not yet cracked the code as to who our characters should be, and what stories they should tell.
It was another lesson learned by trial and error on our way to developing our mission and vision for Time Traveler Tours & Tales...
Did I ever tell you the story about how I met Charlotte Corday? How she came to be the narrator for Time Traveler Tours’ first title: Beware Madame la Guillotine?
Did we ever disclose how Mary Hoffman came to choose Michelangelo as her guide for In the Footsteps of Giants when she thought that job would fall to the model that stood for the David?
These stories are core to our burgeoning media company for they form the foundation of our model and Voice. They also both stem from potential failures that – were it not for our tenacious spirit and a willingness to pivot – resulted in twin successes.
At Time Traveler Tours we combine the traditional power of narrative with the magic of the touchscreen to #TurnHistoryOn. We put the story back in history to ensure that no one says, “History is boring!” ever again.
This is our unique proposition: the value-add we bring to the worlds of museum education and educational tourism.
And I don't mean by watching reruns of the Flintstones.
In my last post, I mentioned that my work for Time Traveler Tours & Tales is only one of my jobs. I also work in collections at the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. The site is famous for being one of the only museums in the country that has a live paleontological excavation on site. And here's the thing:
