Janis West loves to give tours of the Hot Spring County Museum on Third Street, just a block or so off Main Street in downtown Malvern. It seems each item has a story behind it, and sometimes the story is hers.
“This is our collection of old radios,” West said, pointing to a corner of a room in the museum that is filled with display cases but still carries the atmosphere of a dining room. “The large one in front was ours, and yes, even before television, the family gathered around, and we watched the radio and listened.”
She said the radio collection, which also includes several rare models, comes from longtime residents of Malvern and Hot Spring County. West said the collection keeps growing.
On the other side of the wall in a room that might have once been a parlor for entertaining guests, there is a collection of dolls, and yes, they are West’s.
“I just love dolls,” she said. “I had to get permission from a granddaughter to bring these in.
“When I was a little girl, my grandmother had a toy store in town,” West said. “As I did chores for her, she would give me credit — a dime or a quarter — but instead of money, I would pick a doll and wrote on the box how much credit I had earned toward having it. They were all about $3.95 a piece.”
She said the collection dates from the late 1940s through the 1950s.
On Thursday, the members of the Hot Spring County Museum Commission, including West, will celebrate the 33rd anniversary of the museum. There will be a special open house from 3-6 p.m.
“We’ll have live music with the Cooper Road Bluegrass Band on the porch of the 1876 Hughes cabin,” West said. “We will also serve tea from our tea house; we should have a fan put up by then. I might need to buy a bug zapper, too.”
The tea is the culmination of the museum’s latest project, gathering a collection of teapots and cups from residents of the community.
“We could use some more before the anniversary,” West said. “The owners can pick them up after we have had them on display, but I hope we can have a big collection of them.”
The teapots and cups are just another project of collecting, preserving and sharing a bit of the community’s domestic life that is reminiscent of bygone times. West said that is a major theme of the museum and its homelike atmosphere.
“They are part of how we lived and who we were,” she said, looking at the items on display. “Last Christmas, we had a salt-and-pepper-shaker collection. Lena Boyle Murphy brought over her collection. She had received sets as souvenirs from all over the world. We had one set that represented The Wizard of Oz. It had the yellow brick road, and each piece was some part of the movie.”
West said that for Christmas 2014, the museum wants residents to bring in their cookie cutters and molds.
“We want to get as many as we can,” she said. “They’ll get them back in time to make cookies for the holidays.”
Being a leader of the group that started the museum 33 years ago is the biggest project for West in a lifetime of volunteerism and service.
“I was born to be a volunteer,” she said, when asked her occupation.
West said that as she grew up, she followed the path her mother had made as a volunteer.
“It was a wonderful thing when I found out it was OK not to get paid,” she said. “I started helping out with Scouting when my daughter Angie was a Brownie, and I continued until Erika, the youngest, graduated from high school.
As a child, West said, she wanted to grow up and be involved in church work. She has been active in the United Methodist Church and the United Methodist Women organization. West said she helped with Vacation Bible School at the church for more than 30 years as well.
West was also the first woman to serve on the school board for the Malvern School District.
“My heart was always in raising children,” she said.
As for her leadership in community projects, West is modest about her skills to get others involved.
“I am blessed to be surrounded by people who didn’t think I was crazy and who went along with what I did,” she said.
West was a volunteer leader in the community for the Girl Scouts of the USA for more than 30 years. West said the urge to help out in the community comes from her mother.
“When I went to school, lunches came from home,” she said. “My mother made my lunch and then had me bring several more sandwiches and give them to the teacher. She would give them to kids who didn’t have anything to bring. Once a week, my mother and my aunts brought soup to school for everyone. I never thought about it; it was just what they did.”
For 15 years, she led Girl Scout summer day camps around the community.
“We taught the kids to cook on a campfire and a lot of other things,” West said. “Once, the girls dug a trench, and the next day we cooked chickens in it. We did plays and would take bike hikes all the way to Lake Catherine.”
Once, she said, she made a batch of pull candy, or taffy, from her grandmother’s recipe and brought it in for the Girl Scout campers to pull.
“By the time they had pulled it, I think some dirt had gotten worked in,” West said. “They ate it all anyway.”
Her Scouting leadership extended well past the years that her children were in Scouts. She served on the local or regional level for more than 30 years.
A Malvern native, West attended Arkansas State Teacher’s College (now the University of Central Arkansas) in Conway, where she met her husband, Gail. After he graduated, they married in 1960, and he entered the Navy as a corpsman. The growing family lived in Charleston, South Carolina, and Memphis while he was in the service.
Gail left the Navy and entered the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock to become a pharmacist. The family returned to Malvern, where West started her career as a volunteer. Her husband is now retired.
By far, the biggest volunteer project of her life has been the Hot Spring County Museum.
The idea came from a committee of the Hot Spring County Historical Society that was working on the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the founding of the county. The idea led to creating a county museum, and the museum commission was formed.
The home of the museum is the Boyle House, built in 1891, with a second story added the next year. It was the childhood home of Stella Boyle Smith, one of Arkansas’ leading philanthropists and patrons of music. She was one of the founders of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, and her foundation continues to be a major supporter of the ASO. The concert halls at the University of Arkansas campuses in Fayetteville and Little Rock are named for her.
Smith died at the age of 100 in 1994, but in 1980, she was talking with West about saving the family home and creating a museum.
“My heart is in this place, but I never dreamed how much money would need to go into it,” West said.
First, the house had to be moved across the street. It was going to be taken down for a parking lot for a bank, but the house was moved across Third Street to a site next to the public library.
Smith helped pay for the move, then gave the museum a trust of $100,000.
“We have used the interest on that money and membership fees for operating expenses,” West said. “Now we need more. It’s an old house, and it needs so much. Over the years, other houses have been moved to the museum property, including a cabin from 1868.”
“The Hot Spring County Museum is a great gathering place of our past,” West recently wrote. “Each structure is well over 100 years old. Our museum has stories to tell and artifacts representing those stories.
Staff writer Wayne Bryan can be reached at (501) 244-4460 or wbryan@arkansasonline.com.