Jerry Porter

FREDERICKSVILLE, Texas — Jerry Porter died on Nov. 21, 2022, at Methodist Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, at the age of 88, due to a respiratory illness.

He was born on Dec. 12, 1933, in Arlington, Texas, to Carl Stephen and Velma Mae (Curb) Porter.

Jerry grew up in the Fort Worth area and as a boy, he worked at the Gem Theater in Handley, where his father worked extra hours as a projectionist. Jerry attended Handley High School and earned letters in football, basketball, tennis, and track and field. To save money for college, he roofed houses and loaded sides of beef onto refrigerated rail cars at the Fort Worth Stockyards during summers.

He attended the University of Texas and worked as a student assistant for the Department of Art and the Texas State Library to help pay for college. In February 1955, he met another UT student, Nancy Lee Palmer of Pipestone, Minn., on an arranged double date at Dirty Martin’s. It was love at first sight and within six months he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and he and Nancy married in Pipestone on Aug. 30, 1955.

During college, he joined the United States Marine Corps’ Platoon Leader program. After college, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant but was discharged soon after finishing the Basic School due to the end of the Korean War. Returning to Fort Worth, he worked as a technical illustrator for Chance Vought Aircraft. In 1957, he and Nancy moved to Los Angeles, where he began working on a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. During his studies, a professor encouraged him to volunteer at the new Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, thus launching his museum career.

Jerry originally planned to work as an art teacher in the public schools, but a former professor at the University of Texas suggested he apply for a curator of education job at the Texas Tech College Museum in Lubbock based on his experience in Los Angeles. A few years later, he left Lubbock to become the assistant director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Science in Boston and was promoted to director of exhibits and then director of program at the museum and overall assistant director of the museum. Jerry had a strong entrepreneurial streak and always aspired to run his own museum. He did not want to wait 20 years to take over the directorship at Boston and so he left in 1966 to carve out a unique place in the museum industry.

His first opportunity was to design a new museum to be located within Union Terminal, the abandoned train station in Cincinnati, Ohio. He drew ambitious talent from the museum industry and designed participatory exhibits that encouraged learning by doing. He served as executive director of the Cincinnati Science Center from 1966 to its closing in 1970, due to a lack of funding. He then served as the associate director for Exhibits and Programming at the Franklin Institute Science Museum (1970-1973) in Philadelphia and the executive director of the Laguna Gloria Art Museum (1973-1974) in Austin.

In 1974, he seized an opportunity to create another unique museum. He was hired to oversee the design and construction of a new hands-on science museum in Hot Springs, Ark., called the Mid-America Center (later renamed the Mid-America Science Museum). He brought in former work colleagues to help design the new museum. It was set in nearby woods and consisted of two buildings connected by a large, windowed bridge spanning an artificial stream, which eventually attracted its own ecosphere of wildlife and plants. The museum remains in operation today and led the industry by involving visitors in the learning experience. Jerry rightly considered the creation of this museum as one of his major life accomplishments. While living in Hot Springs, he discovered a love of bass and fly fishing and spent many weekends on Lake Ouachita in his canoe and bass boat. Eventually, politics interceded and Jerry left the museum when its success drew interference from state officials who intervened to manage the thriving museum.

He eventually returned to the museum business as the director of the Museum of the Southwest in Midland, Texas (1983-1985), as a museum planner with E. Verner Johnson and Associates, an architecture firm specializing in museum design (1986-1989), and as executive director of the Detroit Science Center (1990-1995).

When the Mid-America Science Museum devolved from state control to the city, local city leaders invited Jerry to return for a second stint as executive director (1995-1999), where he stayed until retirement. After retiring, he and Nancy lived in Hot Springs for a few years before moving to Fredericksburg, Texas. During retirement, he did some consulting on museum design and spent many hours writing his autobiography.

He is survived by his wife Nancy, three sons, James Scott Porter, of Houston, Texas, Stephen Robert Porter, of Raleigh, N.C., and Stuart Campbell Porter, of Austin, Texas, and six grandchildren.