A Belated Thank You

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PHOTOGRAPHS AND POSTS.

While I have not been posting to this BLOG, we still get 5 to 15 hits a day. We are currently at 8500 hits and counting since 2010. People come to this place to see photos and read the stories of Michael's Museum and how it came to be.

I continue to be grateful to the people at Chicago Children's Museum for helping me to bring the joys of collecting and the magic of the Tiny Treasures that are Michael's Museum to the families and friends and children and visitors of the Chicago Land Area.

Over the years I have thanked many people for their involvement in helping Michael's Museum come to be. There is embarrassingly one person who deserves a HUGE thank you which I have not delivered. Until now. I just realized that he is probably in line for having deserved the FIRST thank you!

My dear friend Roger Zanchetti (who I have known for over 30 years) was helping out with a garage sale at our home back in 2007. When Barbara Mahany and Blair Kamen walked in, Roger recognized them right away. At the time Blair was the Architecture Critic for the Chicago Tribune and Barbara (they are a husband and wife) wrote about interesting, unusual things around Chicago in the Sunday Q Secion of that paper.

Because of Roger's making us aware of who these people were, we approached them and introduced ourselves. Blair recognized Gregory and his architecture work around the city.  They admitted that they did not really come to the garage sale but were very interested in our loft building which held Gregory's architecture firm on the first floor (now retired,) and our home on the second and third level. 

The third level guest room also housed "Michael's Museum" which held my collections in the room designed for me by Gregory. Barbara fell in love with the space and within a few months she and I had set up a number of meetings in which she visited the museum, interviewed me about collecting, and wrote a wonderful article which appeared in the newspaper on APRIL FOOL'S DAY, 2007.

That article began the chain of events that eventually led to the opening, as a permanent exhibit, of Michael's Museum: A Curious Collection of Tiny Treasures in May 2010. The exhibit has since become a favorite of visitors to Chicago Children's Museum and Navy Pier.

If it wasn't for Roger having been at our garage sale (besides the wonderful help he gave us) most likely MM@CCM would never have happened.

T H A N K   Y O U   R O G E R!