Scott Becker celebrates 25 years leading Pennsylvania Trolley Museum
Observer-Reporter
Pennsylvania Trolley Museum Executive Director Scott Becker
Holly Tonini/Observer-Reporter
Pennsylvania Trolley Museum executive director Scott Becker
ARDEN – “I love my job,” Scott Becker explained one afternoon last week.
The point is amplified when the executive director of the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum remembers a phone call he received a while back.
The caller informed Becker that they were cleaning out their grandparents’ house, and came across glass plate negatives depicting scenes from the Washington & Canonsburg Railway Co. from the 1890s and early 1900s. Did he want them?
You bet he did.
“They were just beautiful,” Becker recalled. “And glass plate negatives have such beautiful detail. Things like that are pretty amazing. You’re getting a window on the past.”
The glass plate negatives are now housed in the trolley museum’s archives, preserved along with other photos and records of local and regional trolley companies. Being an archivist is one of the many hats Becker must wear as the head of the trolley museum. He also has to manage a budget of about $570,000 annually, write grant requests, oversee the maintenance and renovation of an assortment of trolley cars, and generally serve as a cheerleader for the trolley museum, which drew about 31,000 visitors last year and remains one of the premier attractions in Washington County.
“We’re a small business,” he said. “Our product is the visitor experience.”
This year marks Becker’s silver anniversary at the trolley museum, having started in 1993. The New York native arrived at the museum with a background that included stints as the executive director of the Connecticut Trolley Museum, vice president of the Shore Line Trolley Museum in East Haven, Conn., and executive director of the Eli Whitney Museum in Hamden, Conn.
“When I came here, the museum wasn’t well known,” Becker said. It’s taken a lot of “missionary work” to get it on the map, he added, and that’s included talking it up at Rotary clubs and other organizations, and letting the media know about what’s happening there.
“Every day is different,” said Becker, who is 61. “That’s the main thing.”
Tom Rooney, a board member of the museum, noted Becker was the first full-time employee the institution had ever had. Until then, it had been an all-volunteer operation. He describes Becker as “the most effective, dedicated, well-liked and respected leader” in the nonprofit realm that he has worked with.
“The trolley museum is the little engine that could, and Scott has been the conductor, navigating and networking the public, private and political parts of the pie,” Rooney added.
The president of the board, Bob Jordan, recounted how they were looking for someone 25 years ago who was “fully cognizant and conversant as to what our mission was all about, and be able to communicate it to others. … Scott seemed to have the background and skills we needed …”
Becker’s fascination with trolleys and trains started early. When he was a boy, he would sometimes accompany his father into New York City when the elder Becker had to pull weekend duty at his desk at the Reynolds Metal Co. Becker would get a treat along the way by being able to ride with the engineer at the front of the train. He also grew up in a family where collecting antiques was a passion, and copies of magazines like American Heritage were easy to find.
“That stuff makes an impression on you,” Becker said. “We were always immersed in history. We would visit historical sites on vacation.”
And Becker believes that the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum not only tells a specific story about a specialized and now largely defunct form of transportation, but it also tells a tale about America – how people carried out their daily lives, and how commerce was shaped before the United States’ car culture took hold and trolley tracks were torn from the streets.
“My goal is to help people understand history, and how people lived 60 or 100 years ago,” Becker said.