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 MUM, 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.
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.
Who's Who in America and Who's Who in the World have additional
information about me.
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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