Mercury, Minolta and Miss America

No sooner had I thrown away a packet about the Mercury exhibit at the Strategic Air & Space Museum than I had questions it might have answered.

I unexpectedly had a chance to view the exhibit -- while my wife and daughter waited in the van -- on the drive back from Omaha. It's not that they might not enjoy the exhibit, it's just that after I've drug them to the museum for the 40th time, the displays all start to look the same.

So while they relaxed outside, I toured "The Lost Spacecraft," a display featuring astronaut Gus Grissom's Liberty Bell 7 Mercury capsule, which sank deep into the Atlantic in 1961 after the explosive hatch "just blew."

I remember listening to the Mercury flights on the radio and reading about them in Life Magazine. And, the great HBO series, "From the Earth to the Moon" featured a segment about Grissom's first brush with disaster. His second, on preparations for the first Apollo mission, ended in his death.

After a successful flight, Grissom nearly drowned and the capsule was lost after the hatch incident.

No one expected to see it again, since it was about the size of a refrigerator and lay about 4,000 feet deeper than the wreck of the Titanic.

But found it was, in 1999, and that story is at least as interesting as the tale of how it flew and was lost.

There are only a few weeks to see the exhibit at the museum between Lincoln and Omaha, so it's well worth the stop.

But one question, for me at least, remains unanswered.

While there are films, a simulator and interactive displays in a well-lighted area on the way, the spacecraft itself is nearly in the dark.

Perhaps it's to keep the exhibits from fading in the florescent lights, or perhaps it's just to lend an air of mystery to the display.

But for eyes like mine, more than half a century old, it was almost impossible to view the black capsule itself and surrounding exhibits.

If you do stop in at the museum, and I hope you do, you might consider taking a flashlight.

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The medical appointments in Omaha offered time to read magazines I usually don't peruse. As someone who deals with photography as part of my profession every day, I was sad to read that a great name in photography was basically getting out of the camera business. While most of us used Nikon equipment, one of my former co-workers used Minolta gear.

Now, Minolta -- most recently Konica-Minolta -- will no longer manufacture cameras. It seems another company won a lawsuit over Minolta's autofocus system, and the company also made the mistake of investing heavily in a later film system that was quickly overshadowed by digital imaging. It turns out that Konica-Minolta was already owned by Sony, which will continue producing cameras of the digital kind.

I shouldn't be surprised; after all, Nikon has virtually gotten out of the film camera business, and even Kodak is spending most of its time "developing" new digital technologies rather than film.

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Is Miss America going back to its roots?

What started as a path to Vaudeville and Hollywood via a bathing suit contest in 1921, today gives away $40 million in cash and tuition prizes annually, making it the largest source of scholarships in the world.

But, thanks to declining ratings, the show, dropped by ABC, will become a seven-episode reality show/documentary on CMT, with an American Idol-like component of viewers voting their favorites via telephone and Internet.

My niece virtually worked her way through college with the help of local Miss America pageants, and that without even taking the state title.

It would be a shame if the national program's troubles hurt the local contests and the opportunities they offer.