Galveston’s Weather Warriors: Unboxing History with Dr Hurricane Hal Needham

In this episode of Unboxing History, co-hosts Christine Hopkins and Jodi Wright-Gidley unbox a special artifact from the Galveston County Museum: a portrait of the pioneering meteorologist Dr. John Freeman. They discuss Dr. Freeman's contributions to meteorology, including his work with the U.S. Weather Bureau and the founding of the Weather Research Center. Special guest Dr. Hal Needham, also known as Hurricane Hal, provides expert insights into the historical weather instruments on exhibit and compares past and present meteorological practices. The episode explores the history of weather forecasting, the impact of historical storms like the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, and the importance of learning from history to prepare for future weather events. The museum features a recreated 1940s weather forecasting office and a variety of meteorological tools, underscoring the evolution of weather science.

Special thanks to the Galveston Chamber of Commerce for their ongoing support and Shawn Schoellkopf for creating and performing the theme music.

Thank you for listening to Unboxing History, presented by the Galveston County Museum. 
For more information on the Museum, visit our website.

History of the Galveston County Museum
The Galveston County Museum was formed in 1976. It was located on Market Street for many years. After Hurricane Ike damaged the HVAC and electrical systems in 2008, the unharmed artifacts were moved. Now, the museum is located in the Galveston County courthouse building at 722 Moody/21st Street in Galveston.

​Galveston County Museum is a joint project of the Galveston County Commissioners Court and Galveston County History, Inc. The museum cares for a collection of 20,000 artifacts and archives. We also maintain the Historical Commission's library. If you are interested in research or donating an artifact related to Galveston County history, please call 409.766.2340.

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Transcript

Episode 9

[00:00:00] 

[00:00:21] Christine Hopkins: Welcome to Unboxing History. I'm Christine Hopkins, co host of the Unboxing History podcast.

[00:00:27] Christine Hopkins: And I'm Jodi Wright-Gidley, director of the Galveston County Museum. Every month on Unboxing History presented by the Galveston County Museum, we unbox a new artifact that's part of the museum's collection. So Jodi, what do we have this month? 

[00:00:42] Jodi Wright-Gidley: So this month we are unboxing something that is kind of related to a season we have here that makes people get a little worried, hurricane season.

[00:00:52] Jodi Wright-Gidley: And so we're unboxing a, um, special portrait of someone that's [00:01:00] related. This is Dr. John Freeman. So Dr. John Freeman was a pioneering meteorologist. He got his, um, he got his start being a meteorologist and then he joined the Army Air Corps where he developed his meteorology and his experience further. It was very important for the military to have accurate weather forecasts because the Pilots needed it to plan their flights and missions.

[00:01:24] Jodi Wright-Gidley: And so as he was working in that field, he was a real pioneer developing new weather forecasting technologies. 

[00:01:32] Jodi Wright-Gidley: Dr. Freeman has worked at the U. S. Weather Bureau. He developed the Weather Research Center along with his co founded that with his daughter, Jill Hasling.

[00:01:44] Jodi Wright-Gidley: And so that had, they had their weather research. center in Houston and they had a museum. And the museum there was really one of a kind. It was a place all about weather, children, and the public could go and learn about tornadoes and hurricanes and climate change and weather [00:02:00] forecasting. And that museum was a great museum for, from about, it started in 2006, but it unfortunately closed in 2011.

[00:02:07] Jodi Wright-Gidley: And then they worked with other museums in the area to then carry on, take in that collection and carry on that tradition. And so our museum actually obtained some of his collection. And so here in our museum, we have recreated Dr. Freeman's weather forecasting office from the 1940s. It has a lot of different equipment.

[00:02:28] Jodi Wright-Gidley: And so those things are now part of our collection. 

[00:02:30] Jodi Wright-Gidley: So what kinds of weather instruments are part of this exhibit and part of his, uh, office replica? 

[00:02:36] Jodi Wright-Gidley: Well, there's a lot of things that really isn't used anymore because technology has changed, but we have a machine called the Wefax, we have barometers, slide rules.

[00:02:46] Jodi Wright-Gidley: Different instruments that, uh, did the job of weather forecasting back then. 

[00:02:51] Christine Hopkins: Well, you know, I think it would be nice to speak to an expert on weather. Do you think we know of anyone who might be able to help us with that? 

[00:02:57] Jodi Wright-Gidley: I think we do. 

[00:02:58] Christine Hopkins: So, this [00:03:00] month, on this month's Unboxing History podcast, we're really excited to have a guest.

[00:03:05] Christine Hopkins: Um, Dr. Hal Needham, also known as Hurricane Hal. So he's going to be telling us a little bit more about this exhibit and the instruments that we look at and we may not understand a thing about. So we're going to talk to him a little bit more. So Jodi, I'm going to turn it over to you. 

[00:03:22] Jodi Wright-Gidley: Okay. 

[00:03:22] Welcome, Hal. I'm so glad you're here at the Galveston County Museum. And we are going to rely on your expertise to really finish telling the story that we've started.

[00:03:32] Dr. Freeman is someone we introduced a few minutes ago. How do you feel like his legacy is sort of similar to your own? 

[00:03:39] Dr Hal Needham: Oh, I mean, it's amazing just the work he did. And he had this. passion for outreach and education. I would say I noticed that he helped start meteorology programs at Texas A&M and University of St. Thomas. One of my passions early on was working with the university is over a 12 year period. I worked at universities in Pennsylvania, Alaska, Louisiana, and Colorado. So I get that vibe. There's a lot of energy at the university system. Students come in, [00:04:00] they're so curious. So that's part of it. But also I love the fact that he really did what I call applied meteorology.

[00:04:06] Dr Hal Needham: He was making forecasts that pilots could use. And for me, I always want to make that happen. forecast that people can use to make decisions as opposed to theoretical meteorology that you're behind the scenes working with like developing math equations or something like that. 

[00:04:18] Jodi Wright-Gidley: That makes sense. We need to know.

[00:04:19] Jodi Wright-Gidley: We need to be prepared and all of that. Um, so the exhibit that we have here at the museum includes a lot of different weather tools. Can you tell us more about them? 

[00:04:29] Dr Hal Needham: Yeah, they have so many. Interesting instrument. So things that we'd be familiar with, like thermometers that measure temperature, barometers that measure air pressure.

[00:04:37] Dr Hal Needham: Um, all these, all these different types of things, even they had instruments that measured humidity and, and the, what they call the mixing ratio, which tells you more about the water content in the air. It's really interesting looking at the barometers that they had back in the day. The history of the barometers fascinating.

[00:04:52] Dr Hal Needham: So barometers measure air pressure, and that's really important for weather. When we have high pressure, that's when we have clear skies and light winds. When we have low pressure, we get a [00:05:00] lot of storms. And so the, the, um, barometer was really invented in the 1600s. They had mercury barometers that were a tube that was open on one end.

[00:05:09] Dr Hal Needham: And when the, when the high pressure was pushing down more, the mercury actually dropped. But by the time that, that Freeman and his group was really doing work in the 40s, they were using more what we call aneroid barometers. Those were using springs and discs. That, that the air pressure would push on them with a meter, kind of like the ones that we might see in our, our parents or grandparents home where we have the, the meter on the wall.

[00:05:30] Dr Hal Needham: That's really what they were using in the 1940s. And that's what we have here more, uh, in, in display at this exhibit today, we use more digital instruments, whether it's thermometers or barometers, where we're just seeing a digital reading back then, they used a lot of instruments with needles and dials that the meteorologist would actually have to go up to the instrument, look at it, and then write it down on paper on a log.

[00:05:50] Dr Hal Needham: And now we have computers to do a lot of that for us. Yeah, now things are very computerized. I think that big shift, uh, shifted over in the 80s and 90s. But even you go back 50 years [00:06:00] ago, a lot of things were very manually done. So we would have instruments where the meteorologists had to look at them and write them down.

[00:06:06] Dr Hal Needham: And also a big difference is weather maps. Today all of that's computer generated and sent by computers. Back in the day, uh, Freeman and his colleagues would have actually hand drawn weather maps, which is a very meticulous, they spend a lot of time to develop these.

[00:06:18] Jodi Wright-Gidley: So, one of the things we have at the museum is a Wefax machine. What is that about? 

[00:06:23] Dr Hal Needham: This is really fascinating. So, today, we just take pictures on a smartphone and can send it across the world instantaneously.

[00:06:29] Dr Hal Needham: Back in the day, the question was really, how in the world can you transmit? Um, images over remote distances. And so WeFax, it's really a form of radio fax. This is basically sending a facsimile, but over radio waves. This technology came out in the 1920s. So there's evidence of a, the first long distance WeFax was an image of president Calvin Coolidge that was sent from New York city to London in November of 1924. But even by the thirties and forties, we started seeing these being used for like news reporting. For example, [00:07:00] the iconic image of the soldiers in World War II hoisting the American flag at Iwo Jima. Mm-Hmm. That printed the next day in American newspapers. How in the world did they get that picture from the Pacific?

[00:07:09] Dr Hal Needham: It was actually sent by WeFax or RadioFax from Guam to New York City. 

[00:07:13] Jodi Wright-Gidley: So. What is the "we" part of it? 

[00:07:15] Dr Hal Needham: The "we" part of it, when we think of radio fax, the "we" part is specifically for weather. So when we think of WeFax, it's like a weather fax. And so they were using the same technology to send images over radio waves, but they were doing it with weather maps.

[00:07:27] Dr Hal Needham: A lot of times meteorologists like Freeman were hand drawing these weather maps and then they could actually put them in a WeFax machine and send them out to broad audiences using radio waves. 

[00:07:35] Jodi Wright-Gidley: Here at the museum we've recreated Dr. Freeman's office from the 40s. So is there anything in this exhibit that you do still use today?

[00:07:42] Dr Hal Needham: Yeah, you know a lot of the instruments we're measuring, uh, Data or measuring weather information that we still measure today, temperature and humidity, air pressure, wind speed, but they were doing it very differently for the most part. Now it's, it's very digital, I would say, except for, uh, anemometers, which measure wind speed.

[00:07:59] Dr Hal Needham: We [00:08:00] still use cup anemometers and some of those are still very similar, but a lot of these things we see back in the, back in the day, they had dials and needles and now it's more digital, but we're still measuring the same thing. It's still very important that we can measure temperature, humidity. Wind speed, these types of things from the ground, just like they did back in the 1940s.

[00:08:18] Jodi Wright-Gidley: For those of you who don't know, Hurricane Hal is also very knowledgeable about the 1900 Storm. And he does tours about historic storms all around Galveston. So let's talk a little bit more about the 1900 Storm. I'm really curious about how the meteorologists at that time, you know, the Clines, and what did they use, and how did they, um, you know, try to predict the weather at that time.

[00:08:40] Dr Hal Needham: Yeah, so it was a very different time back then. They did not have the benefit of what we call remote sensing. Now we have radar, and we have satellites, and all these ways to detect when a storm is out there. They didn't have that back in 1900. They had really land based weather instruments. They could send information from one station to another through telegraph.

[00:08:56] Dr Hal Needham: But they didn't have a lot of what we had today. [00:09:00] Unfortunately, the 1900 Storm approached the upper Texas coast in September of 1900 as a very powerful category 4 hurricane. They really had no indication that this was coming until, I would say, the day before when really large swells or these big big waves that outran the storm started, uh, started arriving on the coast.

[00:09:16] Dr Hal Needham: But in general, they, they had these similar weather instruments with temperature and humidity and air pressure and wind speed, but they didn't have a way to really remotely sense that something was coming in from the Gulf. So that's why really Galveston was taken by surprise on September 8th 1900.

[00:09:32] Dr Hal Needham: Unfortunately, six to eight thousand deaths on the, on the island. It seems like when we include the mainland, maybe as many as 10 to 12 thousand deaths from the 1900 storm. It's still the deadliest disaster in U.S history. 

[00:09:42] Jodi Wright-Gidley: Yeah. We have an exhibit about that, too. Um, so be sure when you visit the Galveston County Museum that you stop and visit the exhibit.

[00:09:49] Jodi Wright-Gidley: Both the Dr. Freeman section as well as the 1900 Storm exhibit.

[00:09:53] Dr Hal Needham: I can say one more thing too about that the time of where the Clines were here, Isaac Cline and his brother Joseph, they were here [00:10:00] with the U. S. Weather Bureau. Galveston actually has the longest continuous weather records west of the Mississippi River.

[00:10:05] Dr Hal Needham: So we have the Weather Bureau here since 1871 providing continuous weather information. So Galveston has a long history of Weather Observations and the U. S. Weather Bureau, which is now the National Weather Service. What's interesting also about that time is they were just kind of emerging into the better science of meteorology.

[00:10:21] Dr Hal Needham: So they understood that some of these things they recorded, we still record today. They knew that these basic parameters were important, but there were still some things There's some theories and some myths out there. One of them is, if a hurricane's coming to the coast, there was a myth that you're going to see a red brick sky.

[00:10:36] Dr Hal Needham: So you're going to look out from a high building and the sky is going to look like red bricks out there. And so they kept looking for that when the winds picked up and the water picked up, thinking, if it's a hurricane, we're surely going to see a red brick sky. They never saw it. And I think the 1900 storm and the work here prove that that was just a myth that wasn't really true. 

[00:10:53] Dr Hal Needham: Is there anything they could have been done better any on the day of the storm?

[00:10:56] Dr Hal Needham: I think they did everything they absolutely could have. They were very attentive. [00:11:00] They were, they were working as hard as they could. It was more in the bigger picture of that era. It's very, we can get into this thing of them downplaying it. 

[00:11:08] Jodi Wright-Gidley: So from your perspective, what's the biggest lesson that people today can learn from the 1900 Storm and the work that the Cline brothers did then?

[00:11:16] Dr Hal Needham: I think the biggest lesson is looking at your risk in a big picture and also looking at what's happening in your neighborhood. So for example, if you live in a neighborhood where two or three of your neighbors have been robbed, you know, you could say, well, I haven't been robbed. It'll never happen to me.

[00:11:29] Dr Hal Needham: Or you could say, I live in kind of a dangerous neighborhood. I might need to take. Precaution, right? So, and that's, that's the case of the upper Texas coast in the 1800s. There was a city down the coast called Indianola, which was not as big as Galveston, but it was vibrant. It was growing about 120 miles south of Galveston.

[00:11:44] Dr Hal Needham: It was hit by hurricanes in 1875 and 1886 and wiped off the face of the map. It's a ghost town. It was destroyed and, and it completely abandoned after the 1886 hurricane, a powerful storm surge, this wall of saltwater washed over Indianola in both cases. And they just ended up [00:12:00] abandoning the site. What's interesting to me is that Galveston also got a lot of flooding in 1875 and 1886 from those hurricanes.

[00:12:07] Dr Hal Needham: And a city just down the coast was wiped off the face of the map. So it's interesting to me that really Galveston's risk was largely downplayed. And even Isaac Cline himself had testified that he did not believe a hurricane could destroy Galveston. That's confusing to me in a sense because Galveston was severely flooded. 

[00:12:24] Dr Hal Needham: Especially in 1886, there was talk about building a seawall. And it's strange to me that a city, a neighboring city was wiped off the earth. And yet the Galvestonians maintain that, that they didn't have the risk. I think in a sense there was a lot of pressure on them. There was a lot of investment and huge growth here.

[00:12:41] Dr Hal Needham: Galveston was extremely wealthy. And I think the, the concept that Galveston wasn't vulnerable to hurricanes would have, would have been very much applauded by the local commercial interests that, that wanted people to continue investing in Galveston. Yeah. Thank 

[00:12:53] Dr Hal Needham: you.

[00:12:53] Jodi Wright-Gidley: So what do you think people should take away when they see our John Freeman exhibit and our 1900 Storm and they take your tour? [00:13:00] What is the thing you want people to take away from all of that? 

[00:13:02] Dr Hal Needham: I think two things. Number one, the amount of painstaking effort that John Freeman and his colleagues put into meteorological studies science back in the day. We take that for granted. Now we have a lot of technological luxuries today in our modern era. They put a lot of work into doing what's a lot easier for us today. And I think there's an appreciation of the science. When you look back, I've been leading Galveston hurricane tour for seven years.

[00:13:23] Dr Hal Needham: And it's really the stories of how Galveston's endured hurricanes over all these years, a lot of human interest stories. We get into the science of hurricanes and it really parallels a lot of what y'all have done here in the museum. I love your displays.. You're, you're amazing at storytelling here and really taking people back to that time.

[00:13:38] Dr Hal Needham: And that's really what we're trying to do too with Galveston Hurricane Tour by taking people out in the city and getting back to that time and really understanding how Galveston became so resilient. 

[00:13:47] Jodi Wright-Gidley: So one of the lesser known storms that struck Galveston was in 1915. What stands out about that hurricane? 

[00:13:54] Dr Hal Needham: You know, I think that's one of the most misunderstood hurricanes that ever struck Galveston.

[00:13:58] Dr Hal Needham: In a sense, it was a very powerful [00:14:00] hurricane. A large, slow moving hurricane that made landfall about 50 miles south of Galveston. But because it was so large And moving so slow, we had hurricane force winds in the city for about 10 hours. It did a lot of destruction. People talk about the night of terror.

[00:14:13] Dr Hal Needham: It was, the worst of it was at night and it was a long, hard night for Galvestonians. But in general, when we look back at the history, the intensity and the scope of this storm is usually overestimated and the impacts underestimated. And again, Galveston was trying to show the world that we're, um, that we're protected by the seawall and we're not going to be destroyed by another hurricane.

[00:14:31] Dr Hal Needham: But I think some of the impacts, when you look back at the history, we're very minimized by this, by the Galvestonians trying to show that we don't have a hurricane problem anymore. But when you look at some of the photos of the waves crashing over the seawall and destroying a whole blocks there in the, in that area near the seawall, and actually there were also numerous.

[00:14:48] Dr Hal Needham: deaths behind the seawall as well. Some of that and some of the historical accounts are downplayed, I think, in the effort to show that Galveston was, uh, was not vulnerable to hurricanes anymore. So this was a big, bad hurricane, [00:15:00] catastrophic by today's standards. And I think it really showed us that even though we have the seawall, even though we raised the grade of the island, we're still very vulnerable to hurricanes here.

[00:15:07] Jodi Wright-Gidley: Yeah. Though, when I see the 1915 hurricane photos, those always stand out as looking a little odd because It was after the grade raising, and so a lot of the buildings had shifted, and you have these piles of sand everywhere, and it just looks really different from any other photo collection. 

[00:15:23] Dr Hal Needham: Some of those photos, when you first look at the damage, you think that has to be 1900 Storm.

[00:15:27] Dr Hal Needham: And when you realize, wait, this is 1915, the seawall has been built. The grade has been raised. It makes you think about today, if we were to get a direct hit from a very powerful hurricane, the damage might be a lot higher than people expect. 

[00:15:39] Jodi Wright-Gidley: Yeah. So we live in a hurricane prone area. And so, What is your general advice for everyone to think about? 

[00:15:46] Dr Hal Needham: You know, one of the things is really realizing, I say we live in a place with high risk, high reward, right?

[00:15:50] Dr Hal Needham: We have the deadliest disaster in U. S. history here, the deadliest industrial disaster in U. S. history was 10 miles away, but yet most of the year we go out and it's sunny and beautiful and we have this amazing beach. [00:16:00] So it's an amazing place to be. To be, but we have to realize we are at high risk. We have to take seriously, uh, hurricane, wind and flooding.

[00:16:06] Dr Hal Needham: And I think my main advice for people would be to get out ahead of these things, whether it's preparing your property, how you build your house, but also if a storm is approaching, the best thing you can do is leave early. Um, not only to protect yourself, but you also don't want to get stuck in that evacuation gridlock, that those have actually been fatal themselves.

[00:16:25] Dr Hal Needham: Like we think back to Hurricane Rita in 2005, where it was taking people eight, nine hours to get to Houston. You don't. I don't want to get stuck in that. So I always encourage people be prepared early and if, if you leave a couple of days before a storm arrives and it was an unnecessary evacuation, at least you left on open roads, you weren't running out of gas and you didn't have these other problems that come with a gridlock evacuation. 

[00:16:45] Jodi Wright-Gidley: So Dr. Needham, will you just walk us through the Dr. Freeman exhibit one more time and talk about the instruments.

[00:16:50] Dr Hal Needham: I'd love to. Y'all have so many great artifacts and instruments here. I'd love to walk through that with you. 

[00:16:54] Jodi Wright-Gidley: If you'll just walk us through more of the instruments that are in our exhibit. 

[00:16:57] Dr Hal Needham: Sure. This is called a clinometer. It [00:17:00] looks like a stopwatch, and actually it is. So, in the 1930s, they started using weather balloons, because if you think about weather, we're very interested in what's happening on the ground, but also interested in what's happening higher in the atmosphere.

[00:17:13] Dr Hal Needham: With this, they could actually launch a balloon and start the stopwatch, and the hand would turn, and it would actually, because balloons Generally would ascend at a constant rate. They would actually time how long it took a weather balloon to hit the clouds and they would stop this and this would use time to estimate how high the clouds are.

[00:17:30] Dr Hal Needham: Again, they would start the clock, it would start spinning. They would let let go of a balloon, and when the balloons hit the cloud, they would stop it. It would tell at what elevation those clouds are at. And so today we would use a laser. We would just point a laser at that. So again, a lot of things are digital.

[00:17:44] Dr Hal Needham: Back in the day, it was needles and things like that, dials and needles, and they'd actually have to manually interpret this. 

[00:17:50] Jodi Wright-Gidley: So, I think this is called a slide rule, but I have no idea what it does. 

[00:17:54] Dr Hal Needham: A slide rule. It's interesting. Used in meteorology, but also used just in science in general.

[00:17:58] Dr Hal Needham: It's kind of like an [00:18:00] early calculator where you could, uh, do, you know, slide this along. You have these, these different basically scales that line up. So even in mathematics classes, my dad would talk about using slide rules in the, in the fifties and even sixties. It was just a way to do very quick mathematical calculations.

[00:18:15] Dr Hal Needham: You didn't have to be a meteorologist. You might just be working in construction or engineering or another part of sciences. 

[00:18:20] Dr Hal Needham: If I show these two together, this is a mixing ratio calculator and this is a temperature evaluator, but these just show a lot of their instruments back in the day had a lot of these dials that you turned, like with the mixing ratio calculator, you're trying to take a parcel of air and understand the, What mass of that was just dry air and what mass was basically, uh, the moisture of the air.

[00:18:43] Dr Hal Needham: And so you would use, set these dials up and turn them to make these calculations. Again, all of this would be digital today and the same with this temperature evaluator. This related to radio zones and related to the weather balloons going up. But again, they had dials and they would, they would, Turn and spin these types of things to make calculations.

[00:18:59] Dr Hal Needham: You can see [00:19:00] that these, these turn again, they would, they would, at that point they would launch weather balloons, but then the information they were getting back, they would use these types of dials to understand like the humidity levels or, or different properties of the, of the atmosphere today, all of this would be computerized and digital.

[00:19:16] Dr Hal Needham: Um, this here is a ship weather messenger and again, a lot of dials, there's a lot of little information around the sides. This gets into the concept of coded weather, so weather has been sent through codes for a long time really getting back to the days of the early telegraph all the way through the 40s and 50s, and even when I started getting into weather in the 1980s, I had a shortwave radio and you could actually hear coded messages. It just sounded like very fast Morse code, like really fast. I had a decoder that would actually, I could see that there were consistent coding messages. I went to my local National Weather Service office and they gave me a key to break the code to see what they're talking about. It seemed like I was being a spy in my basement when I was 12 years old.

[00:19:57] Dr Hal Needham: But again, this, this gets into some of these things where they have codes [00:20:00] and different things that a meteorologist was observing in the atmosphere. They would have different, different coded numbers that they would put in. 

[00:20:05] Jodi Wright-Gidley: So why were they coding it? 

[00:20:07] Dr Hal Needham: So great question. Why coding it, right? A lot of times it was to transmit as much information as you could, as quickly.

[00:20:13] Dr Hal Needham: So for example, they would, um, you would have your air pressure, your temperature, your wind direction. So instead of typing out that the winds are coming from the east, That would take a lot of, a lot of letters in a Morse code or a teletype. They would just say, they would just have, you know, so far over in your coded message, you have a number.

[00:20:31] Dr Hal Needham: If it said zero nine zero, that's a compass direction for an East wind, for example. So it was a way to really make the information more compact to go out in a numeric code. And then someone on the other end could use a decoder to kind of understand what your coded message meant. 

[00:20:44] Jodi Wright-Gidley: So, before now, you hadn't been to the museum, and now you have, and so, as you looked around, what stood out?

[00:20:50] Jodi Wright-Gidley: What did you enjoy here? 

[00:20:51] Dr Hal Needham: Oh, I loved it. You have such a depth here of different artifacts and stories. I thought it did a great job with the storytelling. What really hit me was [00:21:00] walking through and seeing the artifacts that were found on bodies from the 1900 Storm, the coroner's ledger, all of that. And the reason I thought that was important, it's really humanizing the impact of that storm.

[00:21:10] Dr Hal Needham: And that's one of the big challenges with forecasting and communicating meteorology. We can talk about miles per hour wind or the height of flood waters, but the challenge is really to humanize it. What does this mean as potential impacts on the ground when we look back and we're seeing these different angles of telling these stories and the impact on the population, I think it really helps touch people and help them understand the context of the severity of these types of storms.

[00:21:35] Dr Hal Needham: And that really helps bring this history when we look back into understanding our risk and prevention as we move forward today, as we look into the future. 

[00:21:43] Jodi Wright-Gidley: It's important to learn from history. Thank you so much for being here. We've enjoyed it. I've learned a lot because when our museum got this collection, it was a really kind of a mystery to me.

[00:21:52] Jodi Wright-Gidley: I'm not a weather expert and now I, I know a lot more and we're going to do some changes in the exhibit based on what we've learned today. 

[00:21:58] Dr Hal Needham: You know, something that really hit me from walking [00:22:00] around too was that all these different instruments they use to measure the weather, but a lot of them are based on communicating the weather from the coded instrument thing to the WeFax. The challenges they had to communicate over .Long distances were so much.

[00:22:11] Dr Hal Needham: And I think we can all learn that from coming here to the exhibit. 

[00:22:15] Jodi Wright-Gidley: Thank you.

[00:22:15] Christine Hopkins: Jodi, what did you learn today from Hurricane Hal or Dr. Needham that you didn't know before? 

[00:22:21] Jodi Wright-Gidley: Well, the instrumentation information, I had not known before. And so I learned a lot about that. It's amazing how technology has changed. But it's also still a little bit the same. You're still measuring the same things.

[00:22:34] Jodi Wright-Gidley: You're just using a computer today instead. 

[00:22:36] Christine Hopkins: Well, and you know, an important part of this museum is people taking away something, learning something. What do you want people to learn about the Freeman exhibit? 

[00:22:47] Jodi Wright-Gidley: Well, I just want them to appreciate, you know, technology changes so much and so fast. And it was people's hard work that did that.

[00:22:56] Jodi Wright-Gidley: So that's what I appreciate. And I hope that people learn is. [00:23:00] All the people that came before us that, that did the hard work that we get to benefit from, and we also need to just remember where we came from and learn from history because even when you're talking about hurricane history and we still live in a hurricane prone place, you've got to learn those lessons so that you can be more prepared.

[00:23:18] Christine Hopkins: What's on exhibit at the museum is just a small portion of the overall collection here at the museum. You know, how much percentage wise of the collection is actually available for people to see? And what's behind the scenes that may be a good resource tool for them? 

[00:23:35] Jodi Wright-Gidley: Well, so about 30 percent of our collection is on exhibit here for everyone to see and the rest is in storage upstairs.

[00:23:42] Jodi Wright-Gidley: But that, just because it's sitting in storage doesn't mean that no one can ever see it. We do bring things out different from time to time. And we're also here for researchers. So if you're doing a project and you are really needing to do some digging, contact us because we might have something that will help you and we will be glad to help.

[00:23:59] Christine Hopkins: If you're [00:24:00] interested in visiting the museum, the Galveston County Museum is open Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 10 to 4. But also you can have your own museum experience called Padlock Mystery. For those of you that don't know, Jodi, will you tell us a little bit about this Padlock Mystery? 

[00:24:16] Jodi Wright-Gidley: Sure. 

[00:24:17] Jodi Wright-Gidley: So we have someone scheduled later on this week to play the game.

[00:24:20] Jodi Wright-Gidley: You get the museum to yourself, you and whoever it is that you invite. And we set four locked boxes around the museum. You find clues throughout the museum to help you open these boxes that lead you to the next clue. And in the end you end up making something that's really cool to play with. 

[00:24:38] Christine Hopkins: Every time I come to the museum, and of course I've been coming once a month, if not more, um, I always see something new, something I didn't know before, I learn something new, um, and it's just a real hidden gem on the island.

[00:24:51] Christine Hopkins: Um, we're located in the old former courthouse. Um, what's the address again? 

[00:24:55] Jodi Wright-Gidley: So we're in the old courthouse that's at 722 Moody, which is also 21st [00:25:00] Street. We're inside first floor lobby. 

[00:25:01] . 

[00:25:01] Christine Hopkins: Thank you for tuning in to Unboxing History presented by the Galveston County Museum. Please follow this podcast and tag your history loving friends. You'll find this podcast on i45Now's PodNow and everywhere where you watch and listen to your podcasts. And make sure you check out our channel on YouTube as well.

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