Obituary for Uncle Phil

This weekend was the weekend that I had contemptibly cheap roundtrip airline tickets to San Francisco. Last summer Southwest had a short but sugary sweet sale and I scooped up (4) tickets for moose and my parents who've never been to SF. I was excited to see the new Renzo Piano designed Natural History museum, delighted that Kathryn Aaker was up for dim sum and her excellent reccomendation (Yank Sing) and most of all totally psyched to share my love of traveling with my family. But this weekend was not to be. Instead I received a call and boarded a plane for Minnesota, finally stepping out into the icy nursing home parking lot at 1:30am.

This Great-Uncle who passed away January 30th at 8am at Greeley Street Care Center in Stillwater, MN, was the greatest, great-uncle to ever live and he was like a father to me. As a kid, I would leave my house in a flat-out run, pumping my little legs as fast as they would go past the 6 houses that made up the distance between his home and mine. From diaper-hood until age 17 I'd been sleeping over at Auntie Dee's and Uncle Phil's. Auntie Dee used to tell me stories about me hiding my dirty diapers behind the easy chair in the living room. Uncle Phil used to literally toss me into bed as a nightime ritual, "one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, here benny goes!". Uncle Phil like to call me Ben or Benny, short for Benjamin J. Bonehead. During my tomboy years this would often result in waitresses asking "and what does your son want to order" whenever we were at a new restaurant.

After Elementary School, out of necessity, sleeping over turned into moving in so that I could take care of Auntie Dee who'd had a stroke that had taken her body but not her tender heart and spirit. Uncle Phil cleared out his office, a room that was painted green like the needle-fans of a cedar tree. A framed beetle, tarantula and butterfly specimen hung on the wall. The desk was a large formica countertop resting over two steel specimen cabinets filled with drawers of meticulously preserved insects.

Uncle Phil planted the seed that grew into my present roots here in San Diego. We took a trip to SD when I was 12 to visit his mother and sister (Muriel E. Taylor) . He took me to the tide pools in La Jolla and my kid-brain remembers hours of discovery, hermit crabs, tadpoles, small fry, bugs. We did a fair amount of bird-watching and Phil was so excited to add new sightings to his "life list". We went to the French Cafe and Bakery which is still in La Jolla where the bread was shaped into different creatures. I went home with an alligator which lived on in the refrigerator far longer than it should have. On Thanksgiving Day we ate lunch at the French Cafe together and I felt so rebellious doing something different than the traditional Thanksgiving.

Another favorite trip with Uncle Phil was a fishing excursion up to Prune Lake. We caught and packed a cooler full of bluegills. Poor uncle discovered the limits of my tomboyishness that day when I was too grossed out to put the night-crawler on the hook. We brought the fish home, de-scaled and gutted them in the backyard. My last job of the day was to wrap the guts in newspaper, dig a hole in the garden and bury them so the racoons wouldn't find them. I'm digressing...there's so many great memories with him!

Obituary for Phil Taylor - Science Museum of Minnesota

Phil Taylor was a longtime director of the Science Museum of Minnesota. Phil always felt, "your work should be your vocation, your vacation and your advocation" and he lived that mantra. He even repeated this after he'd gotten Alzheimers.

Growing up with him I loved to hear him talk about his work at the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM). He had a box of memorobilia with a sepia colored photo of the first ever SMM, which was little more than a room in an old building housing a small collection. He was very proud of the relationships that he'd built with the governer and MN legislator not only securing more and more funding but also indirectly improving the funding environment for all MN arts and culture organizations. His efforts led to the former Science Museum with the giant 'lizard' sculpture in front of it. During the design phase, the architect Ralph Rapson, kept wanting to make a statement with lots of glazing and Phil would say, "I'm just going to paint those windows black".

Phil spearheaded the OMNI theatre's integration with the museum after scouting it out elsewhere (possibly at the Ruben H. Fleet in San Diego). He also brought the innovative idea of mixing live theatre with science education, delighting kids by the busload. One of his last project before retirement was the establishment of the St. Croix Watershed Research Station and the honor of having Taylor Pond named after him.

At home, after his workday had ended, Phil would talk about the men and women who made all of the museum programs so successful, from theatre to dinosaur digs, to curating. I know there were some who were like sons and daughters to him too because even after they had moved on to other institutions he would still know of and share their ongoing accomplishments.

His visit to the new state-of-the-art science museum on the river was very much a crowning moment for him. Not many people get to see their legacy so solid and so clear.

In addition to being the longtime director of the Science Museum of Minnesota Phil was a war vet, a U of MN graduate, an entymologist and an avid outdoorsman and I'm going to miss him so much.