AN OYSTER cannery in South Baltimore is using child labor.
Apron-clad kids, only 9 and 10 years old, stand at shucking booths popping open oyster after oyster in a race against the clock. Not allowed to talk to one another, they sing. Upstairs, kids work three different hand-printing presses, applying colored ink to labels as they try to meet the exacting standards of a strict supervisor. In the steaming room, youngsters hustle to fill each can by weight, secure the lid and steam huge batches of oysters before more empty cans arrive.
But this is no grim sweatshop -- it's the Kids' Cannery factory at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. In the innovative educational program, school kids take on the identities and jobs of real Baltimore cannery workers from 1883.
"I liked making cans," said 9-year-old Alex Tatum of his shift at the cannery during a recent school field trip. "You weren't yourself, and I liked taking on the jobs of other people."
Nine-year-old Tory Atkin reveled in her power as the cannery owner. "I wanted to feel what it was like to be in charge, and the responsibility was very scary," she said.
Serious lessons about immigration, technology and economics underlie the chaotic frenzy of giggles and shouts as the kids scramble to roll cardboard into cans, print colored labels and pry open wired oyster shells to free a marble (the oyster) that has been glued inside.
The museum is a six-acre complex housed in and around the 1865 Platt Oyster Cannery building on the south side of the Inner Harbor. According to the museum's education director, Tricia Edwards, the museum seeks to preserve the history and heritage of the industries and workers who built Baltimore. As the westernmost deep-water port on the Eastern Seaboard, Baltimore has been a magnet for industry and immigration from its earliest days.
"We are a hybrid museum, the only one of our kind," said Edwards, as she explained the museum's focus on science and technology, as well as the history of the city and its residents. According to Edwards, the museum's mission is to inspire the next generation of math, technology and social-science leaders. "But we also really want people to come here and realize how many things were invented, started or perfected in Baltimore," she added.
Baltimore can boast of being the birthplace of the umbrella, gas street lights, Noxzema skin cream, the Linotype typesetting machine, disposable bottle caps and countless other inventions.
When I accompanied my daughter's fourth-grade class from North Chevy Chase Elementary School to the museum this winter, several kids were particularly impressed by the 1910 pharmacy where Baltimore native George Bunting invented Noxzema skin cream. They examined the old-fashioned cash register, studied the built-in soda fountain with its marble countertop and tried to guess what the brown beehive-shaped objects that hung from the ceiling were. (Turns out they were decades-old, filled prescription slips pierced on hooks.) Paul Cane, our knowledgeable "museum teacher," as the guides are called, explained that the large bottles filled with colored liquid in the pharmacy window let customers know what dangerous illnesses were lurking in the neighborhood and what precautions they should take. Red might mean scarlet fever, and blue chicken pox.
"An early version of the homeland security color code," quipped social studies teacher Jackie Moore, who was happily marshaling her students through the museum.
In the Print Shop, Cane demonstrated how Baltimore resident Ottmar Mergenthaler's 1899 Linotype typesetting machine introduced printing innovations that were used by major newspapers such as the Baltimore Sun well into the 1970s.
Nine-year-old Elaine Deelen was struck by "how people kept trying to make newer, better printing presses because they didn't think the old ones were fast enough." Many other fourth-graders shared 9-year-old Maggie Persons's amazement at how big and bulky early computers were. "It took up a whole room," she marveled.
Cane pointed to a bulky machine the size of a refrigerator and explained that this Japanese computer, a Sigma Graph 3000, had been purchased in 1989 for $240,000. Then he pointed to a small desktop McIntosh computer that debuted three years later, sold for just $3,000 and could do everything the Sigma Graph 3000 could do, only faster and better.
