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Boyde Beck’s work at the PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation has ranged from curating exhibits at PEI museum sites, to managing sites at Green Park, Basin Head, and Beaconsfield, to editing the venerable Island Magazine—but he smiles impishly when he notes that his job description also calls on him to do “other duties, as required.”
“It’s the luxury of poverty,” he says: small museums can’t do everything, so they do the best they can. “Poverty gives you a lot of freedom to get away with things you couldn’t do if you had money,” he says. “You can concentrate on things you do well.”
A case in point: most funding was cut for phase two of a major redevelopment at Orwell Corner, but some remained—enough lemons to make lemonade. Boyde is lemonade-maker, developing exhibits to tell at Orwell the story of PEI agriculture from the 1800s to “the break.”
“The strength of PEI’s collection of agricultural artifacts is in farm machinery,” Boyde smiles, “so there will be big things in interesting settings.” The building they have to work with is “about the size of five or six bungalows—but imagine how full your bungalow would get if you parked it full of tractors and hay binders.” Making the most of the small space will mean making the most of the artifacts‚ stories—and Boyde’s job as curator is to condense those stories and make them fit.
Telling stories is what Boyde does best, whether he’s curating exhibits or relating tales from Island history as CBC Mainstreet’s “history guy.” “Most Islanders don’t have much exposure to their own history,” he says, but he doesn’t fault them. “I have to make a full confession,” he says. “I didn’t know anything about PEI history. I graduated from UPEI, in 1982, with a degree in history. But …” and here he speaks confidentially, “I never took a PEI history course from Father Bolger.”
Fans of Boyde’s Mainstreet spots (and the book that came out of them, PEI: The (Un)Authorized History, benefit from Boyde’s late discovery that Island history is fascinating. About his radio spots, he says, “In the early days, I would go in trying to convey all sorts of ‘important’ information… I used to write up notes and duly refer to them. But I’d lose the flow of the story. So I started going in with no notes, having muttered the story to myself on the way to the studio.” This proved the key to bringing the stories to life.
“History boils down to a few questions: What happened? How come? So what? And what if? You get to ask ‘What if’ more in public,” Boyde says. The “what if” question one could ask about Boyde is what if he hadn’t come back to PEI and discovered Island history? “If you’d asked me in 1987 if I was coming to PEI, I would have said no,” he admits. “I have a deep, dark secret: I loved Toronto. I know I take a big risk in saying so. My citizenship as a Maritimer could be revoked… Then I met my wife, and decided she was worth coming back to PEI for… and the one job I was best suited for on the Island opened up, by sheer lucky coincidence.”
Boyde’s positive attitude contributes to his luck. Even facing the reduction in scale at the Orwell Corner site, he sees the positive side: “One good thing about our PEI museum—almost 50 per cent of our artifacts are on display,” he says, pointing to the seven sites across the Island. The Orwell site will have more to show this summer. The problem of storage for the other 50 per cent of the collection is a major concern, but Boyde acknowledges it won’t be resolved in the current fiscal climate.
Are there lessons from our Island past to get us through the Province’s financial downswing? Boyde grins, “Stuff happens. It always has, and it always will.” Sometimes that stuff will happen here, and historians like Boyde Beck will tell the stories, with what resources they can.