Welcome to the Mob Museum - Two Appalachian grads take you behind the scenes

Las Vegas Mob Museum is a repository of the extraordinary and unexpected.

The actual wall that caught the bullets from the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day massacre is there.

So is the hazmat suit Bryan Cranston wore in his role as Walter White in the hit AMC series “Breaking Bad.”

A larger-than-life Dick Tracy cutout, complete with yellow hat and drawn Colt .45, stands guard over one of the exhibits, a pixelated reminder that crime does not pay.

But the capper, the big surprise?

Against all odds, even in a betting town, two public history majors from Appalachian State University – 2,500 miles to the east – discovered each other working just two cubicles apart. Join Curator of Collections Carolyn Fisher ’07 and Education Manager Diana Rafferty ’11 for a behind-the-scenes tour of the Mob Museum.

Making History at the Mob Museum

Appalachian State University history majors find dream jobs in Vegas discover a fellow Mountaineer, just a cubicle away

July 4, 2016

Are there jobs for a history major? You bet! The opportunities are rife. Learn how two Appalachian graduates from the Department of History found dream jobs and a fellow Mountaineer at the Las Vegas Mob Museum.

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About Appalachian State University

As the premier public undergraduate institution in the state of North Carolina, Appalachian State University prepares students to lead purposeful lives as global citizens who understand and engage their responsibilities in creating a sustainable future for all. The Appalachian Experience promotes a spirit of inclusion that brings people together in inspiring ways to acquire and create knowledge, to grow holistically, to act with passion and determination, and to embrace diversity and difference. Located in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Appalachian is one of 17 campuses in the University of North Carolina System. Appalachian enrolls more than 19,000 students, has a low student-to-faculty ratio and offers more than 150 undergraduate and graduate majors.

Transcript

Carolyn Fisher: The Mob Museum was opened in February 2012. February 14, actually, on the anniversary of the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. We’ve been open for four years now. So this building was completed in 1933. It’s one of the few historic buildings in Las Vegas. It used to be the Federal courthouse and the post office, actually, so a lot of very interesting trials happened here.

Diana Rafferty: This building was supposed to close down and be demolished, but they gave the option to the city to buy it for a dollar as long as they could renovate it and make it something cultural. And they thought originally that they might want to do an art museum until Oscar Goodman stepped in and said, “You know what we should do? We should do a mob museum.” Oscar Goodman used to be a mob lawyer, and it made a lot of sense to put something like the Mob Museum in a town that the mob built.

CF: We have exhibits about organized crime and law enforcement, and it’s not just a focus on Las Vegas. It’s really the national story. The mob story is the American story. It’s U.S. history told through organized crime. It’s been present here since the beginning. We’ve been extremely popular since our opening. We’ve had over a million visitors in just those four years. And it’s really neat to have a museum about the mob and Vegas history, and all of these things happened in such a historic place.

CF: Alright, so my job here at the Mob Museum is curator of collections, which is a pretty cool title, and it’s a pretty cool job. I get to work with all of the stuff within the cases. These are the artifacts, the historic objects. The longer story is that I manage both the intellectual property rights for all of the artifacts, as well as the physical well being of them. So it’s kind of two-fold on that. A typical day could be anything from making up a loan agreement, or it could be something a little more exciting like getting into a case and cleaning an object, or acquiring something new for the collection. And we’re always growing our collection here at the Mob Museum. You never know what’s going to happen, and it’s very exciting.

DR: Well, I am the education manager here at the Mob Museum. I train and maintain my staff of educators, and I do a lot of research here. I do a lot of research within the building, but also outside of the text that’s on the walls. We have to address a lot of issues here. Everything from immigration and prohibition to what’s happening today. Like, for example, we’re going to be putting in an El Chapo exhibit here in another couple of days actually. So we’ve got a lot of cool stuff going on, and I’m involved with a lot of it. Not to mention guided tours that we offer every day. We have a lot of fun doing it, and every tour is different. We’ve specifically designed the guided tours so that every person who is giving a guided tour does their own take on the guided tour. Everybody’s interested in different things, and you’re a better tour guide if you’re passionate about what you’re talking about. So we’ve specifically designed it as a skeleton that each individual guide gets to flesh out on their own. I was a tour guide back in North Carolina. When I was in high school I worked for the Newbold-White House and was a docent there, and I have loved being a tour guide ever since. It’s one of the things that got me really interested, really passionate about working in museums as opposed to working in a classroom. And as far as choosing history as a major, I knew…I’ve known since I was tiny child that I was going to be a history major when I was in college. Some of my earliest memories are reading history books.

CF: People have this misconception, I think, that you can’t get a job with history, that history is a useless degree, and it’s absolutely a myth. Public history has opened so many doors for me. There’s never been a point since I graduated in 2007 that I haven’t been able to find employment within the history field. I absolutely love what I do. And I’m very excited that public history provided the opportunity for me to work in this field.

DR: You learn more about humanity, and you learn more about the way people work when you study history than anything else I’ve ever studied. But even if you don’t want to stick with history and work in a classroom or work in a museum, it can be a jumping point towards being a lawyer, or being an activist, or being a politician. It can be great for all kinds of things, because if you can’t study history, if you can’t understand how history works, how humanity works, then you’re not going to do very well understanding current events. And seeing the way history and current events collide, so to speak, they’re not separate things. They’re definitely the same…different sides to the same coin, or different sides of the continuum, so to speak. It allowed me to see that I don’t have to study history and stay in the past. I can study history and still keep looking forward.

CF: I grew up all over the world actually. My family moved a lot. I lived in Florida a couple times, Texas, Pennsylvania. But I actually lived overseas in Singapore for six years, from when I was twelve to eighteen. And then when I was eighteen I went to Appalachian State University and just fell in love with everything about the town, about the university. I just knew that it was the place that I wanted to be. So I decided that Boone would be my hometown, and that that would be the first place I would pick to live and make it where I’m from. So I tell people “Boone” now. That’s where I’m from.

DR: I’m a military kid. I was the kid of a Coastguardsman. I’m originally from Alaska. We’ve moved a lot in my time, being a military kid that’s common. So Alaska to North Carolina and back…and back again. I ended up going to high school at John A. Holmes High School in Edenton, North Carolina. And then choosing App…this is the first time…when I went to App was the first time I was able to choose where I moved to, and it was something that was important to me. So I made a choice to go to Appalachian, and it’s been wonderful. Making that choice was probably the best choice of my life. It helped me develop who I am. I wouldn’t be who I am if it weren’t for App, and the people that I met there…the best friends I’ve ever had I’d met at App. The best mentors I’ve ever had, I’ve had at App. If I had gone anywhere else, I would be a very different person, I think.

CF: So I started at the Mob Museum in June 2012. It was a couple months after the museum had first opened, and I was meeting all of my new coworkers, and one of them said, “Oh, you studied public history? We’ve got another girl that studied public history. Here! Come meet Diana.” And I meet Diana, and I’m like, “Oh where did you study public history?” And she goes, “Oh, you’ve probably haven’t heard of it. It’s a small school up in the mountains of North Carolina.” No way? Really? Oh, Appalachian State? And it was just like a reunion right there, and I was like “Me too! Appalachian State!” I don’t know what your reaction was. You looked like you didn’t believe me.

DR: It’s such a small school, and I’m out here in the middle of the desert, 2,500 miles away from Boone, but as soon as we both realized that we’d both been to App together, actually at the same time. Although we didn’t know it. I was a freshman when she was a senior…it was shocking. I really couldn’t believe it. Oh my gosh. There’s somebody else who…we went to the same university. We went through the same program. We had some of the same professors. Gosh, 2,500 miles away from home and here we are, two cubicles away from each other.

CF: So we definitely bonded right away about being both public history students and being Appalachian Alumni.

DR: When Carolyn and I met here at the Mob Museum it was an immediate connection for us, having both been to Appalachian. Whereas, we might not have made that immediate friendship otherwise. I still connect with App alums all around the country, so when people come in, if I happen to see someone from Boone there’s an immediate friendship. Whether we knew each other or not before there’s an immediate friendship.

CF: You know, there’s just a connection there, I think, back to the Appalachian community no matter where you are. And it’s really great to have that, and it’s just such a bonding experience to have been a part of such a great university and a great little town.

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