Daily Archives: August 27, 2012

From Past to Present

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Hannah Mahoney
One of the top things on Hannah Mahoney’s “to-do” list this summer was to guide museum-goers through building a cardboard replica of Pacific Street, Santa Cruz, California’s historic main drag. It sounds like child’s play, and in a way it was—but the kicker is Mahoney also got to rack up work experience for her efforts.

Mahoney, a history major going into her senior year at Oregon State, spent the summer as an intern at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History.

Her task was to create interactive exhibits for the museum’s “Third Friday” public events that would not only educate the people of Santa Cruz about their town’s history, but would also get them involved in it.

As a public historian, that’s what I want people to do in museums,” Mahoney says. “I want people to be talking and be part of the history instead of having to stay behind lines that you can’t go past.”

And so for Third Friday’s “Street Art Night,” Mahoney procured dozens of cardboard boxes— some of them taller than the children who participated in the exhibit—and coached citizens of Santa Cruz through the process of recreating Pacific Street’s early 20th century landmarks.

There were cardboard buses, and stores, and even pets. There were factories, and restaurants, all informed by the research Mahoney did in the museum’s archives.

“I found old pictures of how Pacific Street looked,” she says. “It was to show kids how it used to look, and then people recreated it and did their own street art on the cardboard boxes.”

To Mahoney, it was people’s way into history they might have overlooked.

A new home

Mahoney wasn’t always certain she wanted to go into history, but she was sure about Oregon State. An Orange County native, Mahoney wanted to have a college experience beyond California’s borders.

She and her parents researched several out-of-state schools, and then cross-referenced them: Oregon State made everyone’s list.

It became a definite thing as soon as she visited campus. “I totally fell in love with it, and said, ’Oh, this is where I’m going,’” she says. “I wanted a West Coast school with an East Coast feel, with historic buildings. Oregon felt like home. I still walk out of my house every day and feel lucky to live here.”

Mahoney was also convinced by the people she met here. Kerry Kincanon, the head adviser in Oregon State’s exploratory studies program, where Mahoney started out before declaring history, made an impression on her.

“He was super nice. I saw that the staff was great there. I knew I could have that college experience that everybody wanted,” she says.

History comes alive

Although Mahoney loved history, she wasn’t sure she could make a career out of it. But Kincanon encouraged her. “He said, ‘if you want to do it, you can make a job out of it,’” she says.

She was also inspired by an art history class she took fall of her freshman year—the instructor had worked in a museum. It made Mahoney wonder if she could combine her love for community service and history and work in museums or national parks.

Mahoney’s next step was taking an archival studies class with Larry Landis and Tiah Edmunston-Morton last year.

There, she learned about an internship that would gain her practical experience: organizing archival material for St. Philip the Deacon Episcopal Church in Portland, and then presenting to the congregation on their annual Parish History Day.

St. Philip the Deacon was established in Portland in 1911 as one of the city’s first African-American churches, and now values its current, diverse congregation as one of its greatest strengths.

Mahoney loved the opportunity to talk to them on Parish History Day and get help identifying some of the archival photos.

“I don’t think it’s very often that you get to talk to the people who created the collection. Usually they’ve passed away,” Mahoney says. “I’d talk to people, and they’d say, ‘This is my relative, or this is my mom.’ I felt like they were famous. It was like I knew them.”

Throughout her senior year, Mahoney will be working to digitize the church’s archives so they will be publicly available. She’ll be happy to continue working in the archives.

“Tiah Edmuson Morton, Larry Landis and Natalia Fernandez have all been really influential people to me,” Mahoney says. “They are so supportive of the my ideas and they are always willing to talk with me.”

Looking back to move ahead

Having the opportunity for internship experience is just one of the things Mahoney values as a history major at Oregon State.

“I didn’t choose Oregon State for history, but I probably am getting the better history degree I would have gotten anywhere else,” she says. “All the professors are great. They really love where they are and what they’re doing.”

To Mahoney, understanding history is key to understanding how things came to be. “I think it’s the only way to look forward,” she says. “I was trying to explain to my friend, who’s an engineer, who didn’t think history was important. I said, ‘Well, that bridge that fell down 50 years ago, you need to know why, right?’ Then he got it.”

In the future, whether she’s creating interactive exhibits or reaching into the past with community members, it’s the personal connection with history Mahoney wants to maintain.

Now a senior, she’s researching graduate programs in public history. “I feel like whatever community I’m in, I want to help them tell their story. I like to help them identify what they need and their history,” she says.

Movie Magic

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Picture this scene: A teacher is the last one to leave the school. It’s dark. The parking lot is empty, except for his car. The music is ominous. He gets in, turns the car on, hits ‘play’ on the cd player, and does a double take before he puts his foot on the gas.

That’s when he sees the first rat.

It squeaks as it scurries beneath his feet and under the seat. He glances into his rear view mirror. There are dozens of rats, poised on his rear dash. They rush him. He screams, but in a moment they’re on him. He panics, and accidentally locks himself in his car.

The next morning all that’s left of him is some flesh, bones and a lingering rat or two, which the hapless school principal has the misfortune to discover. The scene, which opens an episode of the NBC show Grimm called, “Dance Macabre,” is not only eerie – it evokes a visceral response. It’s the rats. People fear rats.

Lauren Henry knows this. She’s the one who trained them.  She taught the rats how to bound toward their victim, how to hang from his hands as he struggled. She taught them to linger over his devoured corpse.

The scene itself is otherworldly, but helping to create it is Henry’s job – she’s made a career out of training animals for film. For more than a decade the OSU alum and her partner, Roland Sonnenburg, have owned and operated Talented Animals, an agency that supplies animals, trainers and coordinators for film. Henry and Sonnenburg have facilities in Oregon, west of Salem, and in California, north of Los Angeles. Their staff ranges from 2-20, but mostly they employ 3-5 people.

Henry’s line of work has brought her to the sets of movies like “Into the Wild.” It’s brought her to the set of “Portlandia,” where one of her cats was a member of an indie band named “Cat Nap.” One of her favorite films was “New Moon,” where one of her wolves appeared in a surreal dream sequence in which a forest was growing through the windows of a desolate, freezing bedroom. In 2010 her work brought her to a Corvallis warehouse, where she spent two weeks working with 12 dogs and a goat to create an acrobatic, one-take video for the band Ok Go’s song, “White Knuckles.”

“That was a dream this band had,” Henry says. “I was in charge of making their dream come true.”

Henry, who graduated from OSU with a degree in Animal Science and a minor in Chemistry in 1999, and completed post-bacc courses in Animal Nutrition and Immunology until 2005, has always loved animals. When she was 5, she’d head into her grandparents’ pasture in Virginia and play with their stallions, observing how the creatures behaved and interacted with each other and the world. When she was 6, she and her grandfather nursed an injured robin back to health. They raised the bird until it was able to fly again. Apparently it was grateful. Each spring it would return to Henry’s yard and perch on her finger. The image evokes Snow White.

“That was a wonderful experience,” she says. “It was the beginning of my love for the veterinary medicine side of things and the rehab side of things as well.”

Her grandfather certainly took notice of Henry’s affinity for animals. “My grandfather had this prophetic saying, ‘You’re going to train animals for film,’” Henry says. “At the time I was 6 or 7 years old, and putting on shows with my dogs for the neighbors.”

After a childhood of immersing herself in animal training and books about animals, Oregon State seemed like a natural choice for Henry, who went to high school in The Dalles. “The animal science and pre-vet departments were among the best,” she says. “I had a fabulous experience at OSU. I was born with an innate gift to train. And I have my schooling background, and classes and seminars to give me an educational framework for what comes naturally. OSU has played a big part in that.”

Henry got her first break when she was still in school, for a TV movie called “Silver Wolf.” The film called for a dog who looked like a wolf, could pull someone on skis, and demonstrate a variety of other behaviors. One of Lauren’s dogs was a perfect match. Silver Wolf’s on-set animal trainer was impressed. “He hired me to work on another show right after the movie,” she says. “I worked with him for several shows, and realized my true calling had just arrived.”

For Henry, training an animal for film is about understanding and communication. She and Sonnenburg spend a lot of time getting to know an animal and understanding its needs. She researches the animal’s social structure and instinctual behavior. She learns what the animal likes, what it loves to do, what kinds of games it loves to play.

“The underlying principles for training are similar across different species,” she says. “What we have to do with each animal is find its motivations, its wants and desires. A wolf may have a strong desire to chase a moving object, while a crow may find that same object frightening but find a small shiny item irresistible.”

Henry often turns the behaviors directors want from animals into a game. If she wants a skunk to cross the road, and the skunk is motivated by food, she’ll train it to go to a sound to receive a treat. Once the skunk is used to following the sound for food, it’s easy to get it to cross a road when the beeper is on the other side. “With training any of our animals, the absolute key is that they are comfortable with people, and the environment and love what it is we are asking them to do. It has to be their choice.”

Henry’s favorite projects are the ones that feel like summer camp – where she gets to spend time on the set getting to know the cast and crew. “I love when we can really sink our teeth into a character and spend a lot of time prepping. We can really show what the animal can do,” she says. “Everyone’s doing their thing to the best of their ability. We’re doing our thing to the best of our ability. It all comes together to create this amazing piece. That’s my favorite.”

Henry and Sonnenburg share their home with many of the animals with whom they work. It’s easy to imagine the animals happy there – they have acres of Oregon Coast Range forest in which to play. They have dogs, goats, a ringtailed lemur, an anteater, a pied crow, a raccoon, a skunk, wolves. The animals are their family. For them, there’s no one better to work with.

“Who we have in our house is who we want to live with,” Henry says.  “When we wake up in the morning, it’s who we want to run down and play with, or maybe even who we wake up next to in a lot of the cases. That’s our primary reason for doing what we do. We want to spend every minute with our animals.”