Living museum

After decades of collecting nursing memorabilia, retired nurse Melodie Chenevert established a small museum in her Cannon Beach home. Photograph by Eric Näslund

Melodie Chenevert lives in a museum. That’s not a metaphor for a stuffy, formal house. The retired nurse and self-proclaimed packrat filled her Cannon Beach home with nursing memorabilia and had it zoned last year to function as a museum, which officially opens in May. And there is absolutely nothing stuffy about it or her. 

“I’m so old now I belong in a museum,” she says. “So I opened one.”

Chenevert, 70, bubbles with energy and laughter. She wrote several books on nursing — one was in print 30 years — and led lively nursing seminars across the U.S. and Canada, sometimes showing up dressed as a bee or a queen. She used her down time to scour flea markets and antiques shops for books, posters, calendars, sheet music and magazines featuring nurses. “The focus of the collection is the image of nursing,” she says, “and not so much the tools of nursing.”

When she and her husband, Gary, retired, they packed up the collection and moved from the East Coast to the Oregon Coast, “a plan 47 years in the making.”

“Cannon Beach was the first place I ever saw the ocean,” says the Iowa native. She was smitten. But jobs for nuclear physicists were rare so they followed her husband’s career path around the country including 24 years in Delaware. In 1982, the opportunity for Chenevert to establish a nursing school in Astoria arose, so she and their then-school-age sons spent a year in Oregon. Chenevert was eager to reunite the family but she never stopped talking about the Oregon Coast. 

“Gary said, ‘You know, Mel, there is an ocean on this side of the country,’” she recalls with a laugh.