Friday, May 23, 2008

Winston Churchill

With all my posting from our St. Louis trip, I forgot to post the pictures from our stop along the way. When we were visiting Kansas/Missouri a few years before moving here, we stopped in Fulton, MO to see a Winston Churchill Memorial. At that time all we found was a statue. It turns out that that's basically all it was then. Now it is a full fledged, pretty cool museum. Our kids were a bit freaked out by the war displays and Hitler video, but who wouldn't be. The museum is in a church (designed by Christopher Wren) that was damaged in England during the war, bought by Westminster College and moved (parts of it) to Missouri and rebuilt (just about as crazy to me as when I was in London and found out that the London Bridge I'd sung about my whole life was actually in Arizona).



The kids with young Winston Churchill



the family (minus Daddy) w/ Winston Churchill Statue



Buddy and Princess Sparkley with a chunk of the Berlin War
(they played Germans for a bit... I'm not sure if that was disrespectful or not)


Okay, in trying to find a cool picture of the church I found this, that describes everything I wanted to say and didn't:

In 1946, Winston Churchill delivered his famous “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, popularizing the phrase that would come to describe the division between the Western powers and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Westminster College established the Winston Churchill Memorial and Library in 1969 as a tribute to Churchill’s life and legacy. The memorial is housed within the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, a 12th century church from the middle of London that was redesigned by Sir Christopher Wren in 1677 and painstakingly relocated, stone-by-stone, to Fulton. Within the church are artifacts and works that chronicle Churchill's life, from his youth through three wars, and finally to the speech he gave in Fulton warning of the coming Cold War. Churchill Museum Executive Director Dr. Rob Havers will discuss the renovated museum and its state-of-the-art exhibits that bring to life one of the greatest statesmen of the 20th century through sight, sound and touch.

from www.sos.mo.gov/archives/about/calendar.asp

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