Even a thousand miles away, my thoughts return home. 

Even as I watch my grown daughter in her own home outside Syracuse, New York, laughing with her mother about something or other, I see the little girl she was holding my hand as we stare at a whole galaxy of stars above us on the planetarium ceiling.

And I see another little girl, my granddaughter, doing the same. And I see her little brother jumping back wide-eyed when the Tyrannosaurus Rex roared, when he saw the snake skeleton, when they both saw the miniature circus perform, when we all flew across the IMAX screen.

And I see a little boy, me about a hundred years ago, see the shrunken head, and ask everybody at Memphis State Training School if they’d seen the shrunken head. And I saw him a few years later seeing live theater, things he had read coming to life on a stage in the deep end of an empty swimming pool.

I saw generations seeing magic things, things stirring the imagination, firing curiosity, challenging the possible, knowledge growing before their very eyes.

I saw what those generations have shared, the cherished memories and the future promise of ... MoSH?

The eccentric, brilliant, troubled mind of Clarence Saunders conceived of self-service grocery stores and automated grocery stores and gave us the grocery stores we know today. He once owned an undefeated semi-pro football team in Memphis and turned down the invitation to join the fledgling National Football League. He once cornered the market in Wall Street, causing them to change their own rules to punish him.

When the Memphis Country Club wouldn’t let him in, he built the largest and most ostentatious mansion in the city, then and now, right across the street from the club and, just to show them, he built his own golf course that they couldn’t play on.

His Wall Street slaughter meant he wouldn’t live a single day in the mansion, swim a single stroke in its indoor swimming pool, or hit a single shot on the course.

The golf course became Chickasaw Gardens, and the mansion became the city’s. The mansion became the city’s museum, and then the patriarch and namesake of a museum system, and the pool housed the Little Theatre, and that became Theatre Memphis, now in its own magnificent home.

Because of its size, presence and personality, because of the very marble it was made of, it was forever given the unique and colorful moniker of ... MoSH?

I just can’t stand it.

When several of you asked if I was going to write about what your and my tax dollars have just named our museum system, I thought not. After all, I recently wrote two rants in a row about what I thought about a couple of other names that I felt were – let’s just say – ill-advised.

Then I read about the name – MoSH – an acronym for Memphis Museum of Science and History. Wait, shouldn’t that be MMoSaH? And won’t that little “o” be intimidated among those other great big letters?

From Kevin Thompson, executive director of ... whatever, in a press release:

“I am excited to bring MoSH to a regional audience. For too long, visitors to Memphis have not known what the Pink Palace is or associated our properties together. Even many Memphians do not realize the Pink Palace, Lichterman Nature Center, Mallory-Neely House, Magevney House, and Coon Creek Science Center are all managed by one entity. Creating our umbrella brand will enable us to unite our holdings and expand throughout our region.”

First of all, no one in “a regional audience” gives a flip that those entities “are all managed by one entity.”

“Look, Elizabeth, Memphis has museums under one entity. Pack the car!”

Second, that mess of letters will only be a name with any meaning to the people who came up with it, and those who approved it and actually paid for it. Nobody can unite and expand under MoSH. If one is under MoSH, one is going to want to get out from under it immediately and wash off.

“Mommy! Daddy! Can we go to MoSH? Please! Can we?”

Calling it an umbrella brand may be right. You want to get under there and make sure you don’t get any MoSH on you.

In that same news release, Thompson continued: “And for locals, there’s nothing wrong with calling us the Pink Palace. We plan to keep the name as a locator to direct you to the right place,” he said. 

We don’t need permission. We “the locals” will never call it anything else. And, I submit, even with a primer to explain whatever a MoSH is, no one – from here or anywhere else – is ever going to call it that either if they can help it.

These are our museums, each different but ours, and the name Pink Palace is ours uniquely, far more than “a locator.” These museums were fine under the branding of “The Pink Palace family of museums.” Such an umbrella goes under, not over, the individual museums.

It seems that the people managing the museums want to call themselves something other than the Pink Palace. They seem to want a descriptor that separates them from all the other Memphis museums of, say, art and music. Fine. Be straightforward:

MEMPHIS MUSEUMS of Science and History

That goes at the bottom, not the top, and in small letters. The name of the museum goes at the top. You – Mr. Thompson et al. – are not the brand, or the show, or the magic. Don’t give up the master brand that already sets you apart even if you don’t realize it. .

Promoting the individual museums properly as part of a shared greater Memphis experience, and individually by their individual merits, is far less expensive than throwing out decades of goodwill and identity and trying to make anybody understand what a MoSH is and why they should care.

Put another way, ask anybody – from here or anywhere else – if they would rather explore a pink palace and all it has to offer or a MoSH.

Ask me, or my children, or my grandchildren.

Let the answers you get be your guide.

I’m a Memphian, and you can’t take away our Pink Palace.