Many visitors are curious
about the
person who started the museum, so . . . .
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At left, Harry Finley, founder and
former director of the physical
MUM in his house, and creator of this Web
site.
Many years ago I painted this
self-portrait in my kitchen, in Heidelberg,
Germany, (in oil, looking into a mirror)
before I lost much of my hair,
not entirely due to the effort required to
create and develop this museum.
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During World War II, in 1942, I was born in Long
Branch, New Jersey - Winslow
Homer, maybe America's greatest artist,
once limned the beach, famous in his time - where my
mother was waiting
for my father to return from the war in the South
Pacific.
I attended nine schools in the twelve years before
high school graduation,
including three high schools, so peripatetic because
of my father's career
in the Army. He was a colonel, an engineer, and a West
Point and Cornell
graduate, who oversaw the construction
of the largest
building in the world (the VAB), by volume, at
Cape Kennedy, Florida.
My older brother and fellow artist, George, long the
leading caricaturist
of the Army, also graduated from West Point. My
father's brother, my namesake,
wrote witty newspaper columns in Atlantic City, New
Jersey, and HIS father,
Alexander Finley, president of a five-state newspaper
circulation association,
thought up the Miss America contest. Muscular
dystrophy crippled and at
21 killed my little brother, Jim, who remarkably loved
to laugh - but wit
helped him tolerate the intolerable.
And read a bit about my mother
("And a Letter From Your MUM to You").
Besides having a B.A. in philosophy from Johns
Hopkins - so
what else could I do but start a museum of
menstruation? - I
dabbled in masters degrees in German, geology and
philosophy but woke up
and fled to Europe before finishing them to work
mostly as an self-taught
artist. By the way, my older brother now earns much of
his living as a watercolorist
and oil painter, in Germany, Scotland and in the
U.S.A., besides voluntarily
collecting and driving tons of medical supplies and
toilets to Ukraine in
his spare time (Rotary International gave him an award
for that) and founding
the first Ukrainian solar energy organization; he's
illustrating a book
about solar energy for Ukrainian children. Recently he
established the American
section of the town museum of Schwäbisch Hall,
Germany, and contributed
documentary footage to a German TV film about the end
of World War II. My
brother has inspired me since we were kids.
I clung to Germany 13 years, mostly as a graphic
designer, cartoonist, painter and illustrator,
and in the 1980s returned,
with regret - still fresh - to the United States,
where I made graphics
for the federal government in Washington, D.C., until
my retirement in 2004.
Now I paint portraits, read, and work on MUM, with the
goal of establishing
MUM again as a physical museum. (See
much more of
my art here.)
The histories of astronomy (especially spectroscopy
in the 19th and
early 20th centuries) and medicine fascinate me, as do
languages (I read
a few, speak two and am teaching myself Japanese),
cultural history, biography,
painting (mainly faces), creating picture-stories,
making cartoons for people,
The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, die
Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, and sitting around, dreaming stuff up. I
usually walk miles every
day.
Actually, if I had had the chance to pick my genes
and interests, I
would now be creating classical music, which I love,
but haven't a tune's
worth of talent for.
Read more in my entry in Who's Who in America
and Who's Who
in the World.
How does this qualify
you to run a museum of
menstruation?
I had the nerve to create it, buttressed by my
interest in the cultural
history of menstruation. And I researched and
constructed exhibits by trade.
MUM was my first Web site.
Before I started MUM, I had to decide if I wanted to
suffer the criticism
it would of course bring (and criticized I have been);
the enterprise had
to be worth it. I've had no reason to regret my MUM,
although it's been
hard. (Read my plans for the future
public museum.)
Man muß
sich für eine
gute Sache eben beleidigen lassen. - Stefan
Zweig
"One must be willing to suffer
insults for a
good cause." (My translation.) Stefan
Zweig, Austrian Jew, the
most translated writer in the world in the late
1930s, was a fabulous writer,
especially of short biographies. He killed himself
before the war was over,
having fled from country to country to country. He
thought the Nazis would
win.
© 1998, 2001, 2006 Harry Finley.
It is illegal to
reproduce or distribute any of the work on this Web
site in any manner or
medium without written permission of the author.
Please report suspected
violations to hfinley@mum.org
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