TACOMA, Wash. — If the walls inside a storage facility in Tacoma could talk, they'd say a storage unit is no place for the heartbeat of a community.
They'd say when we lose the past, we can't love the present.
Though those walls can't talk, Marc Blau can. He wants to make his message clear.
"What we don't need is storage. We need our own museum. Our own facility," he said.
He wants a facility to house history.
Blau works for the Tacoma Athletic Commission and was the founder of the Tacoma Sports Museum.
The museum, however, no longer exists.
"We were at the Tacoma Dome when we opened up in 1994. We were there for like 23 years, and the Dome needed the space. We understood, it was disappointing, but we didn't have a place so we've been in storage for a little over three years now. The motto of the Dome was, 'A dome of our own.' And we want a museum of our own that the people can come and enjoy and go through and see all these artifacts," Blau said. "Five thousand a year for storage, that's just a waste of money."
It's a collection that puts the art in artifacts, the memories in memorabilia and the story in history, featuring things like a signed baseball from Babe Ruth when he visited Tacoma for an exhibition game.
But it's not just stuff that's sitting in storage, it's people, too.
No home for the museum means no office space for head curator Megan French.
"We're working out of storage for anything we do with the collection. It's hard when all the donations and all the great things we have, people can't experience and see," she said.
"Any time you lose your history, you're losing a little bit of your community," said Jack Connelly, who's an attorney by day and on the museum board by night.
He's one of the people trying to right these wrongs, and serves as the middle man between the TAC and potential partners.
"I don't know as a standalone facility if it draws enough. Around a restaurant or training facility would be great," he said.
But Connelly said nothing is imminent. For now, it's history that will stay a mystery to everyone else.
"It's so important to save those stories," Blau said. "This needs to be shared with the community."