Joel Bloom, museum director

When he was a boy growing up in Brooklyn, Joel N. Bloom would often spend Saturdays at the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park.

"One of my favorite exhibits was a magnificent Haida war canoe from the Northwest Coast. I would stand beside this canoe and think and dream," he said in a speech when he was president of the American Association of Museums. "I don't know if I would have become a scientist and then a museum director if that canoe had not inspired me.

". . . In a very real sense that canoe carried me here today."

On Tuesday, Mr. Bloom, director and president of the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia from 1969 to 1990, died of respiratory failure at St. Barnabas Hospital in Livingston, N.J. He was 83 and had lived in Philadelphia.

Following a $13.5 million fund-raising campaign in the 1980s, his leadership culminated in 1990 with the completion of the Tuttleman Omniverse Theater and the Mandell Futures Center.

Mr. Bloom might best be known to a certain generation as the man who parked a full-sized Boeing 707 outside the institute from 1975 to 1987.

He also was responsible for the institute's hands-on exhibits, printing science experiments on packages of two Philadelphia supermarket icons of the day, Mrs. Paul's fish sticks and Tastykakes.

In its 1991 newsletter announcing his retirement, the Association of Science Technology Centers (ASTC) said that "under Bloom's leadership, the Franklin Institute launched the most extensive museum-school partnership in the U.S."

Mr. Bloom's program "placed hands-on science kits in Philadelphia's public and diocesan elementary schools and is now being extended to the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania."

He was the founding president of ASTC in 1971 and president of the American Association of Museums from 1988 to 1992. He was also chairman of the U.S. National Committee of the International Council of Museums.

Born in New York, he graduated with a degree in chemical engineering from the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in 1949 and earned a master's degree in operations research from Columbia University in 1954.

He was an Army veteran of World War II, having served in Europe.

From 1949 to 1952, he and his wife, Paula, lived in Israel. "Zionism," his daughter Margo said, "was absolutely integral to my parents' identity for their entire lives."

In Israel, she said, "he was a research engineer for the Ministry of Defense.

His daughter shares two of her father's passions, as senior vice president for development at the Birthright Israel Foundation and former director of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia.

Besides his stories of Saturdays at the American Museum of Natural History, she said, "I grew up hearing about his trips to the Brooklyn Children's Museum," near where he lived in Borough Park. "When he was a kid," she recalled, the museum "had things you could take home and he used to check out these little dioramas," to play with at home.

"He was an extraordinarily imaginative and creative dad," Margo Bloom said. "I would wake up on my birthday and there would be cutouts of footprints, and I'd follow the footprints and there'd be all these clues of where I could find my presents."

Speaking from San Diego, where he was researching exhibits to bring to Philadelphia, Dennis Wint, the institute's current chief, said Mr. Bloom "was one of the great leaders of the [museum] field, creative, inspirational. . . . He was also a terrific mentor for young museum professionals, probably more than anyone I know."

Nancy Kolb, president and chief executive officer of the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia, which opened around the corner from the Franklin in 1976, was one of those young museum professionals.

"At a time, 20, 25 years ago, when women were just beginning to emerge as leaders in the museum field, Joel mentored many of us," she said. "Certainly, he was extraordinarily important to me."

In addition to his daughter Margo, Mr. Bloom is survived by sons Dan and Ron; six grandchildren; and a brother. His wife, Paula, died in 2006.

Funeral services are set for 1 p.m. tomorrow at Joseph Levine & Sons, 7112 N. Broad St. Burial follows at Mount Sharon Cemetery, Springfield, Delaware County.