there is no strife no Prejudice no National conflict in outer space as yet it's hazards are hostile to us all its Conquest deserves the best of all mankind and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again but why some say the Moon why choose this as our goal and they may well ask why climb the highest mountain five thirty five years ago fly the Atlantic why does Rice play Texas we choose to go to the Moon we choose to go to the Moon we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard my name is Paul spanner I'm the director of Collections and curator here at Space Center Houston the JFK lectern is the same lectern that was used by President Kennedy for the famous we're going to the Moon speech because that [Music] that one we intend to win and the others too it was built probably around 1960 maybe the late late 50s was made by IBM which is kind of funny because we think of computers and software and typewriters associated with IBM and you wouldn't think of something like this high-end piece of furniture coming from a company like IBM we started seeing it in a lot of photographs starting around 1958 all throughout the 60s it seemed to be a very popular lectern with corporations and universities they were used by presidents and Senators congressmen some of the individuals would be like Eleanor Roosevelt Jimmy Carter Billy Graham used that same lecture all throughout his career the lectern was gifted To Us by by Rice University 30 30 years ago it was put on display in the destiny theater it's one of the it's the main theater here at Space Center Houston and at the beginning of the film that you see which is an orientation to the history of space exploration Gene Kranz the Apollo flight director is doing a voiceover and you hear him make note of the podium the lectern and a light comes on and he says you know it All Began here all those years in the beginning it was always on display in the inside the theater last year in in 2022 was the 60th anniversary of when President Kennedy gave we're going to the Moon speech at Rice University so there's a lot of attention on the lectern and everybody's picturing that iconic shot of President Kennedy standing behind the lectern so at that anniversary date there was a reporter that reached out to us who on behalf of a JFK historian questioned whether or not this really was the real lectern and we said yes of course it we knew where it came from it came directly from Rice we have the paperwork the the letter that saying that it was a gift the story was well known by the employees of Rice University And the reporter was saying well we have evidence that shows otherwise in the historic photograph you see a black line around the base and it's very obvious I've seen it a thousand times never questioned it I thought it was a shadow line probably from the railing but when you look at ours we don't have that line and it's not a shadow line from anything else it's very clear that the bottom section is in two pieces and I couldn't show you that on on the lectern so with the story coming out and that strong piece of evidence we thought the best thing to do was remove it from display until we could take a closer look at it the next step for it was we were already thinking about doing conservation work on on the lectern in this case a professional conservator who could help us do research and to help learn about it to find out if this in fact really was the actual lectern that was used by the president [Music] one of the other things that I've noticed in the in the initial examination is how this has been said on casters so you can see the the depth of the the shadow is much more like the three-quarters of the plywood here so that they've added these at some point in fact when I removed one of the casters it had a still had a sales sticker from Southland Hardware so we know that that's that was a local repair or modification to make it easier to move this around there's a conservator that I knew that worked at the Museum of Fine Arts here and Houston who had worked as a conservator at that museum for 32 years and he was recommended by the the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum so I knew he was the right person for the job here we go and this would have been able to Pivot but it's missing some components you can see that there's breakout here so there's a little cup that would match the little well it's called a bullet hinge on each on each corner so this is as less stable than it should be I invited the conservator Steve Pine to come out Steve said well have you ever taken it apart I said no I didn't know it came apart so he said well let's see what happens and the three of us lifted the top off and as soon as we raised it about eight inches or so there was that line it was covered by this sinking down and this this edge here obscuring that there was a middle section and you'd be able to use the buttons that are here to activate a mechanism that is stored in down inside the Box that would be able to tilt or to be able to raise or lower this to match the comfortable height for the speaker and when the lectern arrived at Space Center Houston unfortunately only part of that mechanisms came along with it so that that's perhaps why it wasn't able to sit at the height that we were used to seeing in the photographs I think they're being two aha moments that one was unexpected for sure when we found that that line the one that I was really looking forward to was in the photographs there's these tight parallel lines of wood grain there were things that I saw that were a little bit more than a coincidence and it's very difficult to see that with all the coats of varnish that were on there and I was dying to see what that looked like with the varnish off if I turned off the light and and added took out a black light ultraviolet light you could see the difference in all these surfaces the wood surface without without any varnish at all this is the first layer of Varnish in color and then a much later varnish that we can see in when the lights are on which is much thicker and and more reflective well there's certainly a misalignment where this middle section had shifted and you can see look look at the uh at the patterns here those and the diagonal on the solid wood right here once you compare side by side with a photograph of the the lectern match completely they're perfect there was no doubt that the top and bottom matched up the photographs at that point and then going forward it was just a matter of completing the work on the whole lectern having that authenticity questioned maybe it made me mad at first but it caused us to stop and focus on this right then and there now I want to go hug that person that questioned it because this is one of the coolest projects that we ever worked on you know after all it's it's it's a it's a piece of furniture but it was worth all the time that we put into it and I get the question asked a lot so why do you go to go through Extreme Measures to take care of something all the objects that are here in our Space Center have stories to tell and as long as we're here our job is to preserve those artifacts so that people in the future and another 30 60 years from now also have that that privilege of being able to see the artifacts as for this specific object its story is about uniting the country to get everybody on board to to go to the Moon this lectern is a symbol of that moment we talk about spacesuits and spaceships and tools and computers but who knew this could be so exciting and I'm was thrilled that it was questioned because it sure opened a lot of doors about its history foreign