Six WWII veterans started a museum that records Colorado's war stories

Six Broomfield-area men who came home from World War II founded a museum in 2002 to hold onto a kind of history that disappears when people pass: the firsthand account. They are gone now, but the place they started keeps doing the work, run mostly by volunteers, many of them veterans themselves.

The Broomfield Veterans Memorial Museum has nine exhibit rooms that trace Colorado service members from the Civil War and the Colorado frontier through the Spanish-American War, both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, and the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the quieter draw is downstairs. The museum keeps a reference library of more than 3,000 military history books and hundreds of recorded interviews with veterans, plus a multimedia room that seats around 40 for talks and screenings. It is a small archive of people telling their own stories in their own words.

The building has its own past: it is the original Mamie Doud Eisenhower Library, at 12 Garden Center, that General and Mrs. Eisenhower helped dedicate in July 1963.

Admission is free, but the hours are limited, so check ahead. The museum lists current times and tour details at broomfieldveterans.org.