Bishop Museum still searching for Duckworth successor
By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer
Bishop Museum has yet to find a successor to Director Donald Duckworth, who announced his impending retirement seven months ago, a museum spokeswoman said yesterday.
Advertiser library photo • April 18, 2000
Duckworth will retire Saturday after more than 16 years as the head of a treasure house of royal collections that was designated by the Legislature as the State Museum of Natural and Cultural History in 1988.
Donald Duckworth spent 16 years at Bishop Museum.
He and his wife, Sandra, will be honored by the museum board at a private aloha dinner this weekend, but hopes that his successor could be introduced at the same dinner have not been realized.
"There is not a new director chosen yet," said Ruth Ann Becker, the public relations executive designated by the museum board to handle all questions about the succession. "The search committee has narrowed it down and has gone through several phases (of the search)," she said.
In the meantime, Becker said, the museum's longtime chief operating officer, Pat Duarte, will take over as acting director pending appointment of a replacement for Duckworth.
Bishop Museum was founded in 1889 by Charles Reed Bishop, husband of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, as a tribute to her and the Kamehameha family.
The museum's directors recruited Duckworth from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington in 1984.
Duckworth, who started his museum career in 1960 as an intern in the division of insects at the Smithsonian and went on to become a Smithsonian curator, brought shows on dinosaurs, wolves and music to the Bishop Museum in an effort to reach 500,000 visitors a year.
But he also presided over dismissal of many museum employees over the years in retrenchments brought on by diminishing financial support and an end to lucrative archaeological contracts associated with construction of the H-3 Freeway.
