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There’s an exhibit about the history and culture of alcohol at Scranton’s Everhart Museum — and you should bring your 9-year-old, says curator Nezka Pfeifer. The exhibition, To Your Health! The Science, Culture & Art of the Cocktail, opened in July and runs through Dec. 31.
Pfeifer said the nature of the exhibit had some of her colleagues skeptical when she first pitched the idea in 2012.
“Some staff members were concerned the exhibit would promote drinking alcohol and give the wrong impression to kids,” Pfeifer said. “Alcohol is not really a subject that a lot of people address. Who knows why? Moral judgment? I don’t know. But even when I was a kid, and I was learning how adults interacted with certain things, it was very clear that some adults had difficulties dealing with alcohol. Kids have those observances and those questions.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics recently reported parents should begin dialogue about alcohol at age 9 to prevent binge drinking in young people.The report found as many as 50 percent of high school students currently drink alcohol. In that group, up to 60 percent binge drink.
For prevention to work, the conversation of alcohol needs to happen as soon as children have the emotional or psychological comprehension to understand the terms being provided to them, said Gene Middleton, a certified interventionist who coaches families to have guided conversations about alcohol abuse in and around Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Middleton said the conversation is especially important in families where a genetic predisposition to alcoholism exists — but that doesn’t mean anyone should neglect the topic. “Sometimes experimentation can develop a physical addiction as opposed to a psychological addiction,” he pointed out.
Visitors of all ages will likely benefit from being cultured on the presentation of the curbed subject. Pfeifer said the display provides a historical lesson on how alcohol shaped American culture. For instance, the 19th century social movement against the consumption of alcohol, known as The Temperance Movement, was essentially racially charged.
The WASPS (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) wanted the Irish and German immigrants to stop drinking, said Pfeifer. Alcohol then became a rousing target in politics.
“Today we don’t think of Irish and Germans as being another race, but that’s kind of how divisive the language was in the 1830s and ’40s,” Pfeifer said. “They thought they were foreigners and that they drank too much. The upper-class WASP women forcefully educated the wives of the Irish and Germans to support a temperance movement to get their husbands to stop drinking.”
Pfeifer said a good analogy would be if people wanted Taco Bells to go out of business because they were prejudice against Mexicans. She said it’s important for people to understand the role alcohol played in The Temperance Movement because the trend of targeting immigrants is still prevalent in politics.
“Whatever the new immigrant is — they’re (considered) bad. They’re not going to help society,” Pfeifer said. “And eventually, of course, people calm down and they realize it’s always good to have new people coming to help increase our population but also contribute to it in many, many positive ways.”
Katie Seigle, from Nicholson, served as Pfeifer’s intern on the project. Seigle studies anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C., and helped research the local history of alcohol. The 19-year-old was most intrigued when she discovered a map of speakeasies in Scranton.
“Being able to drive by all the places where there were speakeasies everyday on my way to my internship was really interesting to me,” Seigle said. “There were so many places selling and bootlegging alcohol in the area, I couldn’t believe it. It’s a really important part in history. People know about Prohibition, but they might now know NEPA’s role. The exhibit at the Everhart can educate them.”
Pfeifer said the exhibit features more than 250 items from local and national lenders. The Lackawanna Historical Society lent historic whiskey jugs and bottles for shipping and sale by local companies, including Scranton Distributing Company and Brookside Distilling Company. The Luzerne County Historical Society also lent historic bottle of whiskey from Wilkes-Barre companies, including Freeman Brothers, as well as the Stegmaier beer can. The Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia loaned a preserved liver with hobnail cirrhosis and a stomach with gastritis, both affected by alcohol consumption.
The exhibit, encouraged for the entire family, is $7 for adults, $5 for children ages 6 to 12, and $3 for children 5 and under, during normal operating museum hours.
