I’d forgotten about this until Lorna reminded me, but in addition to the Braemar hat buying experience mentioned in my last post, there was another day last year when I tried on several hats. It occurred about a month before the Braemar episode, in a very different sort of environment.
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I wonder if the name Andrew Carnegie means anything to you. He’s perhaps best known as an industrialist and philanthropist of the 19th and early 20th Centuries who amassed great wealth, becoming at one time the richest man in the world. He financed thousands of public libraries, and a number of trusts, funds and buildings, including the Peace Palace in The Hague, and New York’s Carnegie Hall. Although often thought of as American, he was in fact born in Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1835. During his childhood, his parents were struggling to make ends meet and opted to emigrate to America to seek a better life when Carnegie was 12 years old.
The house he grew up in still exists and has been turned into a museum dedicated to telling the story of Carnegie’s life. I wasn’t sure what to expect when we visited the museum, but was pleasantly surprised by how good it was.
The museum is divided into two parts: the original house the Carnegies lived in, and a large hall adjacent to it that was built by Carnegie’s widow in 1928. The hall contains a wealth of information about the man and his varied and productive life.
When we first entered the old building and I saw the steep staircase leading up to the original accommodation, I chose to stay at the bottom and let Lorna investigate the upper level. She went up to take photos and report back, but while she was doing this I decided to have a bash at the stairs. Much to her surprise, when she was on her way back to the stairs she found me standing at the top of them.
On this upper level there was a small room that had housed the entire Carnegie family, and a larger room that had been made into a display about Andrew Carnegie’s youth. In the larger room, while I was busy reading some of the information boards, Lorna was rummaging about in a dressing-up box in the corner.
She found some items of interest and proceeded to dress me up. I wasn’t paying much attention to what she was doing as I was busily focussed on what I was reading.
When she’d run out of hats and I’d run out of brain space for new information, we went back downstairs to the hall built by Carnegie’s widow. The amount of information available to read was quite overwhelming and we skimmed through it, taking in what we could. I even met the great man himself, seated in his study, and introduced myself. He didn’t say much, but he seemed quite pleased to have a visitor.
Bennet McInnes 