Posted on: Sunday, March 20, 2005

Wahiawa war museum finds new life in Nebraska

Associated Press

OXFORD, Neb. — Clark McMinn points out the names of his fallen friends. Erwin Havranek was like a brother, McMinn tells a group of sixth-graders gathered outside the National Korean War Museum to hear the veteran speak.

McMinn finds Dale Fugate's name among dozens of golden plaques. Fugate was McMinn's friend from his hometown of Hamlet, he says. McMinn served as an honorary pall bearer at Fugate's funeral.

There are dozens of names, state by state, on the rear walls of the museum. Kyle Kopitke, the museum's curator, said he hopes to have one plaque for each of the 33,000-some American soldiers who were killed in hostile action.

He's hoping other veterans show up for the museum's grand opening next month. Kopitke, who moved with the museum from Hawai'i last fall, said he's not sure the plaques will be displayed in time.

But to veterans of the Korean War, it won't matter, Kopitke said. It has taken years to get enough interest to get a national monument in Washington. But Korean War veterans also want a wall of names similar to the one in Washington for Vietnam veterans, he said.

"This is more or less a pilgrimage for them to come to," Kopitke said of the wall outside his museum.

On a recent day, dozens of locals, schoolchildren, city officials and veterans wandered the halls of the museum's new building, which used to be a nursing home.

To McMinn and other veterans, the years Americans fought in Korea in the early 1950s constituted a war although it was first described by the government as a conflict.

And to the veterans, this building — with its pastel walls and wide hallways, still reminiscent of a nursing home — is a museum. There are no big glass display cases here, just simple rooms filled with thousands of pictures and maps, many of them laminated and affixed to walls.

The museum has a history as varied as that of the war. In the works since the mid-1990s, according to Kopitke, the museum opened in February 2004 in the central O'ahu town of Wahiawa. Months later Kopitke was looking for a new home for the museum, he said, because there weren't enough visitors.

Kopitke also had been in a dispute over the Wahiawa property with his sister-in-law. Kopitke's plans to open a branch museum at a former Air Force base in northern Michigan also hit a snag over cost of insurance and terms of a building lease.

The museum's board of directors wanted a more central location in a state such as Nebraska, where a building would be more affordable for purchase rather than lease, Kopitke said.

Eventually Kopitke found out about the abandoned nursing home available in Oxford, which is about 160 miles west of Lincoln. Everything fell into place and Kopitke said the museum is purchasing the building for $100,000.

The goal is to get enough visitors for the museum to pay for itself, Kopitke said. He plans to charge visitors a nominal fee, between $5 and $10, to tour the museum.

Kopitke, who is not a Korean War veteran, but served in the Army, said he has felt a calling to see this museum through all these years.

When the museum is up and running, he plans to move on and leave it to someone else.