Office: 810-237-3443, Email:
AMancour@SloanLongway.org Vehicle City Stories web page:
SloanLongway.org/VehicleCityStories Photo IDs: 1) Members of the Binder family taking a selfie with the late Reliable Furniture owner Harry Binder’s oral history video.
2) Discovery Society members watch a sample of the Vehicle City Stories oral histories
3) Sloan’s Curator of Collections, Malcolm Cottle
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SLOAN MUSEUM PREMIERES ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
-“Vehicle City Stories” is Sloan Museum’s digital oral history platform dedicated to preserving the voices of Flint and Genesee County-
Flint, MI – Sloan Museum of Discovery launched a new oral history program during a private Discovery Society Social donor event on November 5. “Vehicle City Stories” oral history program preserves the history and people of Flint and Genesee County through recorded interviews that focus on a specific event or particular experience. Currently, there are thirty completed oral history videos located at
SloanLongway.org/VehicleCityStories, the free web platform that will host the oral history interviews. They can also be accessed on Sloan Museum of Discovery’s YouTube Channel.
"Vehicle City Stories" was created and curated by Sloan’s Curator of Collections
Malcolm Cottle. “As a curator, my role is interpretation of history and historical events. But these oral histories don’t need interpretation. They are real people telling their stories, in their own voices. This new platform creates a place for community voices to be shared and preserved, including underrepresented voices from our history,” Cottle said of the new project.
Viewers can watch oral histories from former residents of Flint’s historical St. John Street and Southside neighborhoods, the Arab-American community in partnership with the Arab-American Heritage Council (AAHC), former Genesee Bank President William Piper, and the late Reliable Furniture entrepreneur Harry Binder who passed away at 100 years old a few months following the interview. There are also recorded stories from residents about Ojibwe culture, the UAW, the Water Crisis, Flint advocacy, Michigan School for the Deaf, and more.
Vehicle City Stories was generously supported by the Binder and Hurand Families. Learn more at
SloanLongway.org/VehicleCityStories.
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Sloan Museum of Discovery and Longway Planetarium are overseen by the non-profit Flint Institute of Science and History (F.I.S.H.) with a shared mission to engage communities on a learning journey in history and science. Together, they served over 308,000 visitors and students during the 2023-2024 fiscal year. Located within the Flint Cultural Center Campus in Flint, Michigan, Sloan Museum of Discovery opened in July, 2022, with four primary hands-on learning galleries and one exhibition hall for special traveling exhibits. The original Sloan Museum opened in 1966 as the Sloan Panorama of Transportation, named after long-time General Motors president, chairman and CEO Alfred P. Sloan. The new Sloan Museum of Discovery is nearly twice the size at 107,000 square feet and completely re-built into a re-imagined world-class, hands-on science and history museum. Longway Planetarium, named for Robert T. Longway, a community leader and one of the men responsible for the development of the Flint Cultural Center, opened in 1958 and was renovated in 2015. Additional upgrades, including a Digistar 7 projection system and surround sound audio, were made in 2021. It remains the largest planetarium in Michigan. Classes on the solar system and general science are offered to school groups and the general public. Both institutions are supported in part by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and Michigan Arts and Culture Council (MACC). Educational programs are supported, in part, by the Genesee County Arts Education and Cultural Enrichment Millage. Learn more at www.SloanLongway.org.
