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The World War I Museum made a stop in Southlake on Thursday at Legends Hall at the Marq. The museum, which travels around the country, was free and open to the public from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
It was started by bereavement counselor Keith Colley, who works with Alzeheimer’s patients. One of his patients asked him if he knew anything about the WWI 100th anniversary that was coming up.
“I’m like ‘I don’t even remember World War I, let alone [the anniversary],” Colley says. “So I did some research on World War I so I could communicate better to him.”
Colley says it worked.
“With all Alzheimer’s patients, the more of the senses that you can engage in at one time, the better the response,” Colley says. “I ordered [a shovel and trenching tool] online and when I put it into his hands, he started crying.”
Colley says stories started flowing and his family was able to engage with him again. And after being in an accident that put him into a wheelchair for a year, Colley thought "that if it worked with one [person], let’s see what we can do.
“So I’ve been traveling now for four years with it, over 200,000 visitors so far,” Colley says.
Colley owns all of the things on display as part of the museum, which took him eight months to collect.
“I had a specific purpose,” Colley says. “A lot of it was easy because you can just type in World War I and things were going to come to you but as I researched and learned more about the war, then I wanted more specific pieces.”
One example of this is the black speaker that is on display, which Colley says he went seeking.
“Because the music was so important back then and the songs that were written, so now I can play music to that specifically,” Colley says. “So I went seeking that.”
Colley also says that he wanted a specific booth just on cameras and film because WWI was the most filmed and photographed event to date.
“That’s when it became challenging to try to find specific pieces,” Colley says.
Colley says lots of visitors thank him for “keeping the memory alive."
“That’s probably the biggest thing but there’s a lot of tears,” Colley says. “And it’s become not just a platform to say thank you to World War I [veterans], but it’s become a platform to say thank you to all veterans of all wars.”
Colley says that the museum visitors are not just veterans.
“We have a lot of veterans, but the majority are everyday people like you and me,” Colley says.
Colley also says that with the schools the museum has been at, the kids have “gone crazy over it."
“They want it to be brought to them,” he says.
One of the visitors on Thursday morning was 80-year-old Southlake resident Bernie McCauley. She says she came to refresh her memory about WWI.
“World War II gets all the play and all the news and of course we have veterans from that era,” she says. “I just thought it would be a good reminder and I’m kind of on the patriotic side anyway.”
She says she thinks it’s a good idea that the museum came to Southlake.
“If we could connect with young people to make them more patriotic, it would be just so wonderful,” McCauley says. “And my age and my era, we studied a lot of that and we’re aware of it and have met people that were involved and so on and so forth, but I don’t know that young kids study that in school enough anymore.”
McCauley says WWI is so much of America’s history, especially compared to older countries.
“For our country, it’s old history,” she says. “And it’s definitely worth remembering and knowing about.”