Feb. 18, 2001

THE STORIES MUSEUM DOCENTS DON'T TELL

I love to listen to people talking shop, especially in fields I know next to nothing about. In museums, the people talking shop are the docents, volunteers trained to help visitors understand and appreciate the exhibits.

One might be a guide at Ocean Journey, the Denver aquarium, showing a busload of schoolchildren what to look for in a display of riverine ecology.

Another might be the gracious host at the Byers-Evans House in Denver, bringing its history to life and then joining guests for an elegant Valentine's tea.

A third might be the retired pediatrician entrancing young visitors to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science with a demonstration of medical dissection -- as practiced on chicken wings.

And all three might be Jack Moyer, who does all these and more.

After I wrote a column about my new neighbor -- the police administration building -- Moyer sent me a note inviting me to visit the Byers-Evans House, an "Italianate restored Victorian," another neighborhood landmark.

"My wife and I have been docents there for eight years and regard it as our 'town house,'" he said.

I joined one of his tours last weekend. William Byers, founder of the Rocky Mountain News, and his wife, Elizabeth Sumner Byers, built the house in 1883. In 1889, they sold it to William Gray Evans, son of Colorado's second territorial governor, John Evans, and William's wife Cornelia. The new owners added on to the house in 1900 to make room for John Evans' widow, Margaret, and her daughter, Anne.

And much as it was early in the last century, so it is now. William and Cornelia's three daughters lived there -- Josephine and Katharine all their lives -- and when Margaret Evans Davis, the last of the sisters, died in 1981, the Evans family gave the house to the people of Colorado. In 1988, after an extensive restoration, Gov. Roy Romer dedicated it as a museum.

It's not just the house, it's the family's possessions. The furniture. The draperies. The elegant French china. Glass-fronted bookcases with rows of gilt-bound Victorian classics like Carlyle and Bulwer-Lytton (now remembered only for "It was a dark and stormy night . . ."). Paintings by (and of) the family, and Josephine's art supplies.

There's even a bullet hole in the living-room window, a relic of violence during the 1920 Denver tramway strike. A gallop-by shooting, perhaps? The Evans children, who went to school at the now-vacant Evans school two blocks south, had to have Pinkerton guards.

All quite wonderful, but as I told Moyer when he first wrote to me, I was interested in writing about why people want to be docents and become so committed to it.

That was a more profound question than I realized. Moyer told me, when we met, that his and Margaret's son Andrew died in a skiing accident on Christmas Eve 1992. They sought out opportunities for service, he said, partly to fill the empty times and places in their lives.

Besides museums, John and Margaret Moyer work with the Donor Alliance.

After Andrew's death the family donated his organs. "The kid who loved science so dearly would have wanted to know that he was giving health to somebody as well as the hope for understanding of certain diseases," John Moyer told the Rocky Mountain News at the time.

After hearing his personal story, I understood better why he told the Evans family history with such empathy. John's wife, the first Margaret, lost a 5-year-old child to scarlet fever in July 1862, shortly before she left Evanston, Ill., for Denver. She took the train to Topeka, Kan., and then chartered a coach for the 500-mile trip to Denver.

Moyer retired from his practice in Evergreen two years ago, the same year four of the babies he delivered graduated from medical school, he said. But he continues to teach one day a week at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, a course he calls "Fundamentals of Doctoring," which teaches medical students how to take a patient's history by listening instead of talking. (I've known some doctors who needed to learn that.)

Museums are full of stories, and docents tell them. Their own stories are just as much worth telling.

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