Museum board looks at selling Havre Dinosaur Trail memorabilia

Editor’s note: This version corrects the former church from which Abundant Life Ministries is donating a piano to the H. Earl Clack Memorial Museum.

The H. Earl Clack Memorial Museum Board Monday discussed setting up some items for sale related to the Dinosaur Trail in Montana.

Board Member David Sageser said Dinosaur Trail said he attended the Dinosaur Trail meeting April 13 at Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman.

He said the state tourism department paid a graphic designer to create designs specific to each of the 14 members of the trail, which includes the Clack Museum, the Blaine County Museum and the Depot Museum in Rudyard.

The Clack Museum is one of the last two to get a design set, he said.

Once the design is built, people will be able or order on demand — they can order postcards, coffee cups, posters, T-shirts and so on, and the item will be printed and mailed to their home, rather than buying it in the museum.

“You order your item and then instead of having to worry about toting your coffee cup back to North Carolina with you and getting it broke along the way, … it’s at your door when you get home, but you have a souvenir from your travels” on returning home, Sageser said.

The group discussed seeing if Zuul, a newly discovered species of the armored ankylosaurus dinosaur found near Havre, could be incorporated in the design.

They also discussed trying to get David Evans, the curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum, where the find is being studied, to come to Havre.

The dinosaur, a 20-foot-long plant eater with spikes on its body and a massive club on its tail, was given the name Zuul — Zuul curivastator, or Zuul destroyer of shins for the club on its tail — due to a resemblance to the dog-like creature Zuul in the 1984 film “Ghostbusters.”

The board also discussed seeing if it could get some Zuul items for sale at the Royal Ontario Museum to sell at the Clack Museum.

Sageser said the trail also gave an iPad to Havre that can be used to track how many people come to the museum as part of the trail — if they are touring the trail, they sign in on the iPad, allowing the state to track how many people are visiting the Dinosaur Trail.

“It’s some kind of astronomical number that the Dinosaur Trail brings into the state in annual revenue,” Sageser said. “And if we’re using the iPad to collect even better data then we get a bigger chunk of to help support that.

“That (revenue is) part of how they funded this … giant advertising campaign and got this graphic designer to do a logo for us,” he added.

He said the state also is tracking cellphone data and credit card purchases to see exactly where people on the Dinosaur Trail are going and where they are spending their money.

The Dinosaur Trail passport, a card that lists all of the locations on the trail that tourists can have stamped at each location, will not change for the next year or two, he said, when it might be updated.

Sageser said next year’s Dinosaur Trail meeting is planned to be held at Rudyard’s Depot Museum.

The board also discussed work that needs to be done to clean and repair Wahkpa Chu’gn Buffalo Jump behind the Holiday Village Mall, and from museum and bison kill site manager Emily Mayer about hiring guides for the site.

Mayer said she has two guides who worked last year who want to return, and would be excellent guides to bring back, and that she had several applications turned in by Havre High School students when she worked the job fair at the high school.

She said several items are being donated to the museum, including pictures, a piano donated by Abundant Life Ministries that was in the former First Baptist Church building the ministry has purchased, a victrola and radio that belonged to the family of Dick Scharfe, as well as a friendship tablecloth from about 1910 and other items.

She said tours are picking up at Wahkpa Chu’gn, including a tour of a Girl Scout troup from Miles City with other groups and schools calling to schedule tours.

H. Earl and Margaret Turner Clack Memorial Museum Foundation Chair Elaine Morse said the recent Living History and Digging Up History fundraisers were a great success.

Many businesses and groups sponsored the event, leading to about half of the 22 stations at Hands on History in the Holiday Village Mall being free to the children.

Morse said they figured that for a child to go to every station cost about $14.

“We had lots of volunteers — we can always use more,” Morse said.

She said the Digging Up History, where children used one of four machines to dig up items to exchange for prizes, also was extremely busy, as was the horse-and-wagon ride hauling people back and forth.

I think that made a huge difference,” she said.

Morse said a credit-card device that can be attached to a phone to accept credit and debit cards also made a huge difference.

Morse said another new fundraiser is Amazon Smile. If people go to Amazon Smile to make purchases and name the Clack Museum as the beneficiary, qualifying purchases will lead to a donation to the Clack Museum.

Board Chair Lela Patera said the tea fundraiser the foundation held Saturday also was a great success, and it beat last year’s total, $4,815 to $4,675.

That mostly was from ticket sales, with the raffle for the quilt made by Havre quilter Karen Vosen down just a bit, Patera said

She said the “Jeopardy” entertainment, put on by Grant Olson and Rachel Dean of Montana Actors’ Theatre with questions having a local slant, was a big success during the tea.