Hometown historian to talk about ‘Space Craze’

Growing up in Bradford, Margaret Weitekamp did not want to study history.

Her father, Dr. Raymond Weitekamp, taught American history at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford; her mother, Ann (now Ann Gannon), taught history in Bradford public schools. Summer vacations usually included historical sites and explanations.

“I thought it was boring, and it was only about dates and wars,” she said. 

Decades later, she is, of course, Dr. Margaret Weitekamp, a space historian, curator and chair of the space history department at The Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. – one of the most visited museums in the world.

Weitekamp will return home to Bradford on Sept. 19 for a 7 p.m. talk co-sponsored by Friends of Hanley Library and Control Chief Corp. The talk, which is about her latest book, “Space Craze: America’s Enduring Fascination with Real and Imagined Spaceflight,” will take place in the Mukaiyama University Room of the Frame-Westerberg Commons.

“I like to think that the book works as a behind-the-scenes extended tour of the space memorabilia and space science fiction objects collection,” Weitekamp said. That is the collection she curates at the museum and includes toys and games, medals and awards, buttons and pins, comics and trading cards as well as the restored studio model of the Star Trek Starship Enterprise and even tribbles, fuzzballs that became the stars of “The Trouble With Tribbles” episode of the original Star Trek series, which ran from 1966 to 1969.

Weitekamp’s interests extend far beyond dates and wars to how space flight is, why it is a powerful idea in American culture, and how it plays on Americans’ view of themselves as explorers and pioneers. All of that is something “Space Craze” talks about as told by the objects left behind – Buck Rogers’ ray guns, movie props, carnival rides, Apollo program memorabilia, and ephemera from the three-decade-long space shuttle era.

After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh in 1993, Weitekamp earned her master’s and doctoral degrees at Cornell University, studying primarily women’s history, a field she was drawn to in part because of its newness, even in the 1990s.

“I really fell in love with the stories that were being told, and that was really only a field that began in the 1960s and had a lot of freshness,” she said.

A doctoral thesis is supposed to advance the knowledge of the field being studied. Weitekamp found her thesis while listening to a radio interview of a woman who had undergone privately funded astronaut fitness tests. Weitekamp discovered that those women still held the records of their participation and conducted interviews with them that became the basis for her thesis and first book, “Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program.”

While researching her thesis, she spent a year in residence at the NASA Headquarters History Office in Washington, D.C., as the American Historical Association/NASA Aerospace History Fellow. Before joining the Smithsonian, she taught in the women’s studies program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y.

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