Q&A Toby Stephenson ’98
Director, Bar Harbor Whale Museum
For eight years, Toby Stephenson curated the Bar Harbor Whale Museum in a West Street building provided by Tom Walsh’s Ocean Properties, Ltd. Now that building will be razed to make way for a large hotel complex. While ideas for a new museum settle into place, the exhibits won’t be idle. Some are going to the George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History on campus, others to local schools and other locales. Q: How did you get involved in the museum? During the fall of 2002 Eben Salvatore of Ocean Properties called up Allied Whale to see if they had naturalists who could train their whale watch crew. I was working for a competing whale watch at the time. When I was told that they also wanted to give a percentage of ticket sales to support Allied Whale, I said, “I’ll be your man.” Then he asked if we were interested in fixing up their whale museum, which had fallen into disrepair. Judy Allen [COA registrar and longtime Allied Whale volunteer] and I saw it as an opportunity to raise money for our field season at Mount Desert Rock; Steve Katona, president at the time, saw the wisdom and gave us the authorization we needed to order supplies, and Judy and I stayed up late nights to get it going. We opened in 2003. In 2004 Mindy Viechnicki took on the gift shop (she’s now the museum manager) and sales doubled. In 2005, they doubled again. Q: You put so much into this museum. What compels you? The primary reason is my dedication to marine conservation and education. But I also noticed that all the local whale watch boats were making money offering an environmental experience from the knowledge naturalists had gained studying material that was gathered by researchers and scientists for a very different 48 | COA
reason. Nothing came back to the scientists. As soon as I saw that the Walshes were willing to support the research, I was there. They have donated $20,000 a year to Allied Whale since. It’s a great model to show how for-profit and nonprofit can blend together. Very human ecological! Q: You’ve assembled, or articulated, a number of the museum skeletons, right? Yes. Several are senior projects, the rest were installed with students. We’ve also accumulated skeletons that were too big to fit here, but are waiting for a new facility. A few years ago we collected a sperm whale skeleton. This fall we collected a right whale off Drisko Island. It’s now in a compost pile in my garden, where insects and microbes will eat away the remaining flesh. In the spring I’ll pull it out, bleach it in the sun, and hopefully assemble it in a new museum. Q: What’s the museum’s future? We’ve never been under the illusion that we had a guaranteed future, but we certainly have a vision for a very nice facility for downtown Bar Harbor—if we have the community support to bring that to realization. It would be absurd if Bar Harbor, the mecca of eco-tourism for coastal Maine, didn’t have a place like this. Unfortunately it will come down to the bottom line. Q: Can you tell us your most satisfying moments? The students I work with, the staff, and faculty. And it’s been personally enriching to be able to offer a very cool experience to so many—in eight years we got human ecology across to half a million people. That’s nothing to shake a stick at!