Julie Arrison-Bishop gave her classification speech. She is currently Special Projects Manager at the House Seven Gables. She talked about the winding road which she took to get to where she is now.
As a child, her love of history and museums intersected. She showed old photos that her mom had saved of her on a field trip to Storytown Village, and acting as a junior volunteer at the Holyoke Children’s Museum. Her parents made it a point to take Sunday drives. She still remembers the smell of the blacksmith shop at Plymouth Plantation as the smith pounded out nails for both her and her sister. The drives even went as far as Ellis Island where Julie could see the names of her Lithuanian grandparents in their archives.
Originally she thought teaching was what she wanted to do, but time spent with young children, high schoolers, and middle schoolers convinced her otherwise. That necessitated a shift during college and a shot at the service industry career through Chili’s arose, but working hours at odds with those of her friends left her seeking something new.
Volunteering with the Olmsted Association and Franklin Park Coalition she pursued her passion for history, even publishing an "Images of America" book with collected historical photos of Franklin Park.
These experiences led her to pursue graduate studies in public history at Northeastern University. An internship at the Thornton Burgess Society was exciting and fed into a job at the Massachusetts Historical Society...a fantastic collection second only to perhaps the library of Congress. Julie urged us all to visit.
An opportunity arose on the North Shore, and reluctantly at first she became site manager for Historic New England, but now she doesn’t want to leave the North Shore to even visit friends!
And finally, she has an ocean view and gets to help with the mission at the House of the Seven Gables, including disaster preparation (historyabovewater.org).
