‘No one ever flunked a museum.’

“No one ever flunked a museum.” Frank Oppenheimer was forced out of the University of Minnesota in 1949 after HUAC, and spent the next decade ranching cattle in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. In 1957 he took the job of sole science teacher at the local high school — under 300 students, every grade — and taught mechanics, heat and electricity using auto parts hauled back from the town dump. Those lessons became a hundred working models at the University of Colorado, then the founding exhibits of the Exploratorium in 1969, then the Cookbooks: three volumes of construction recipes for 201 exhibits, published so any museum in the world could build them for nothing.