Wallace tightens a D-ring holding the first aircraft from the U.S. Coast Guard, CG-1426, to be on permant display with the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. It will hang from the ceiling of the Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center with other famed aircraft of the past. Reservist with Smithsonian roots helps the National Coast Guard Museum take flight When the Coast Guard teamed up with the National Coast Guard Museum Association to plan exhibits to display at their stunning new building in New London, Conn., what they needed was a curator who understood both sides—how to explain the Coast Guard’s history, and how to draw eyeballs to exhibits. Enter Anthony Wallace. Wallace joined the Coast Guard in 2016 and jumped on a fast track. He completed the Direct Entry Petty Officer Training, boatswain mate A-school, and a nine-month PSU deployment within his first 18 months in the service. He was excited to be immersed in the Reserve missions, but he missed his infant son, who was just three months old when Wallace left. Focus on his military career paid off, though. “When I got back, all my signoffs for coxswain were done; I just needed a board and a check ride,” said Wallace, who’d chosen to go the PSU because friends had told him that’s where boat drivers would get a lot of stick time. “I wanted to be underway as much as possible,” he said. Wearing the uniform was, in fact, a break for the Smithsonian macro-artifact expert. Wallace had come to the museum system after several internships unlocked by his work toward a degree in history. As a kid, he’d grown up outside Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, so a chance to work with the displays at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum fit him just fine. During one project, writing a classification and collecting system for the museum’s pop culture artifacts, he learned he preferred the internships where he worked hands-on with the collections. The warehouses of artifacts, rows of ancient collections and historical objects fascinated him. 26 RESERVIST � Issue 2 • 2020 In another internship project, he worked on the Smithsonian’s founding collection of botanical artifacts from the Charles Wilkes expedition in the 1840s. Wallace’s job was to remount the precious 200-year-old plant samples, and he remembered the supervisors telling him that once he opened the cabinet to retrieve each specimen, he needed to step back and let the mercury settle for a few minutes before beginning work. “I realized I never want to work in a cubical for the rest of my life,” he said. Wallace was hired by the National Air and Space Museum as a large artifact handler in 2008. There, he learned to drive tractor trailers, forklifts and cranes to move priceless artifacts. He’s even hung Coast Guard helicopters from the museum’s rafters. Through friends he’d met working on his undergraduate degree, Wallace reconnected with another Coast Guard civilian who was working on the Coast Guard Museum, Heather Farley. She told Wallace the Coast Guard was looking for a curator for their new museum project. The thought gave him pause, because while it would mean a temporary pay cut to switch to the military salary, work as a curator was intriguing. “The position of a curator is very different at the Smithsonian compared to everywhere else,” he said. “Curators are historians, they’re academics, they write books, give talks, they have articles that get published. I didn’t have any of that.” Still, Wallace knew his background would help the application process, and he interviewed for the job as a second- class petty officer.
