As a reward for hours spent with packing, house repairs, and financial stuff, my mother and I went to the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History yesterday.

We had a good lunch at the Stars Cafe and a fascinating, though all too brief, visit to the exhibits, including interesting talks staff about the Museum’s history. In addition to being our reward, the visit was a commemoration. it was nearly 60 years ago, on George Washington’s birthday, that my parents and I moved to Fort Worth from Houston. On his birthday this year, my mother will be packing her belongings to move to Austin.

Not long after we arrived, she enrolled me in The Frisky and Blossom Club, the first class of the Museum School. So, a return to the Museum marked both her time in Fort Worth and the evolution of the Museum itself, from being a children’s museum in a house to the recently renovated, massive complex of today.

The current Museum is grand and spacious, with atriums and courtyards. But the prior Fort Worth Children’s Museum was a wonderful place in a different way, with a sense of mysteries tucked away in crowded rooms and clubs devoted to astronomy and insects. But it was my first encounter with the Museum at its Summit house location that hooked me on museums:

The museum’s history actually began in 1939 when the local council of Administrative Women in Education began a study of children’s museums, with the idea of starting one in Fort Worth. Two years later the charter was filed, but it would be almost four years before the museum would find a physical home. With the help of the city’s school board, the museum opened in early 1945 in two rooms in De Zavala Elementary School.

In 1947 the museum moved into the large R.E. Harding House at 1306 Summit, where it kept growing in size and popularity. Three years later two significant entities appeared: The Ladies Auxiliary of the Fort Worth Children’s Museum (now the Museum Guild), and “The Frisky and Blossom Club,” the forerunner of Museum School®. Soon it became apparent that a much larger facility was needed to serve the growing needs of the community. Ground was broken for a new facility in 1952. On January 25, 1954, the museum open the building at 1501 Montgomery Street. The following year the Charlie Mary Noble Planetarium, the first public planetarium in the region, opened.

In 1968 the name was changed to the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History so that adults even without children could enjoy the Museum. It worked! Today more than half the Museum’s visitors are adults. Much of that is due to the addition of the Omni Theater in 1983. The Omni was the first IMAX® dome theater in the Southwest and continues to be one of the most successful in the world.