A decade ago, Bethesda philanthropist Ann B. Friedman envisioned a museum for words and language. In just five years, she gathered a team of “geniuses” and opened Planet Word in the historic Franklin School in downtown D.C. Photo by Duhon Photography, courtesy of Planet World

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When people first walk into Planet Word, a museum near the National Mall, they enter a room with a large, blinking globe. The soft chatter of languages from German to Tagalog to Piscataway ema­nates from several tablets.

“When the elevator doors open and you hear people gasp, adults and chil­dren, it’s just the nicest reaction you could get,” said Ann B. Friedman, founder and CEO of Planet Word, which, since its 2020 opening, has welcomed more than half a million visitors.

As the first museum dedicated to lan­guage and words, Planet Word has a “magical” library, an audience-led show about the origins of the English lan­guage, a talking tree and other exhibits.

“You know in The Lorax, ‘I speak for the trees’? I like to say to myself, ‘I stand for the words,’” Friedman said, admit­ting, “I didn’t know it was going to end up this way at all.”

Spark that started it all

About 15 years ago, Friedman was a retired Montgomery County school­teacher, volunteering to keep busy. One day she happened to read a story in the New York Times about a math museum, National Museum of Mathematics, and had a lightbulb moment.

“I started reading about how museums have changed, and that now you can have experiential, participatory museums and I said, ‘I can do that; I have ideas,’” she said.

“I could do it with language, which is way more important now in our democ­racy than math.”

Friedman gathered a team of experts — geniuses, she calls them — to put to­gether Planet Word. The collaboration with designers, artists, curators, engi­neers and voice actors has been a joy, Friedman, now 72, said.

“I can’t tell you how intellectually re­warding it’s been. I’m way too old to be doing this, but it just keeps you alive and thinking.”

Childhood love of reading

Friedman (then Bucksbaum) grew up in Iowa, where her father built shopping centers and co-founded a real estate in­vestment trust once valued at $4 billion.

She and her brother, John, grew up in a “book-filled home,” she said. Plagued with childhood allergies, Friedman pre­ferred books to sports.

“I really didn’t like to go outside and play; I liked to read,” she said. She would venture outdoors occasionally to bike to the library. Favorite books were The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, Eloise and The Se­cret Garden. One summer in typing class, she typed a rather long list of all the books she had ever read (she still has that list).

The family traveled extensively, and in ninth grade Ann helped plan their first trip to Europe, choosing castle destina­tions from her books. She had learned several languages, too. As a teenager, she spent a summer on a farm in Fermo, It­aly, living with a family who she still keeps up with. Several years later, she led a trip of teenagers to France’s Dordo­gne.

She graduated from Stanford Univer­sity a year early and moved to the UK to get a master’s degree in international re­lations at the London School of Econom­ics. That’s where she met her husband, Thomas (Tom) L. Friedman, now a New York Times columnist. (Mutual friends encouraged them to meet.)

After marrying in London, the couple moved to Beirut in 1979 so Tom could report on Lebanon’s civil war for the wire service United Press International. Meanwhile, Ann took a job as a French-English translator and began learning col­loquial Arabic, adding another language on top of her Spanish, Italian, French and Hebrew. They avoided the war zones.

“We mostly knew how to stay safe, but you heard fighting and explosions all the time,” she said.

As the civil war worsened, Americans were targeted. In 1983, a suicide bomber blew up the U.S Embassy, killing 24 people.

Six months later, another bombing destroyed the U.S. Marine Corps bar­racks, killing 241 servicemen. Jolted awake on a Sunday morning, she had to drive her husband toward — not away from — the destruction.

“It was a very searing kind of experi­ence,” said Friedman, who was evacu­ated to New York, where she then worked as a magazine copyeditor.

The following year Tom Friedman got a new position as New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem, where their two daughters were born.

After four years there, in 1998 the fam­ily moved back to the States, settling in Bethesda, Maryland, for Tom’s position at the Times. The couple still lives there today, with two grandchildren in California and two nearby in the DMV.

Teaching days

When her daughters were older, Fried­man went back to school yet again, earn­ing a master’s in teaching from American University. Channeling her grandmother, who had been an English teacher, she took a job as a long-term substitute teacher, then was a fifth-grade teacher in Gaithersburg and finally a first-grade reading teacher at Burning Tree Elementary School in Bethesda.

“I was fascinated by everything to do with reading new books and learning,” she said. “I never ever imagined that I would teach first grade — I never even was a babysitter — but it was the great­est job, and everything led to me starting Planet Word.”

How a museum took shape

During her nine years as an educator, Friedman didn’t have an inkling of the museum she would one day create. After she retired, she volunteered as a reading tutor and served on the boards of several organizations, including the National Symphony Orchestra and Conservation International.

When she read about the math mu­seum, something shifted. Immediately she flew to New York to meet with its founders. Inspired, she hired a museum consultant “from what turned out to be the top company,” she said.

When its 90-page feasibility study to evaluate “whether a museum like the one I had in mind could be successful” was overwhelmingly positive, she was thrilled. “They said yes, and they loved the idea.”

The next step was to gather people from all different fields to serve on a board. They put out a request for propos­als for a museum designer, and Friedman chose two companies, who worked to­gether on a master plan for Planet Word.

For the exhibits, the design studio she ultimately chose, New York-based Local Projects, “was a match made in heaven,” Friedman said.

“They got it; they knew what I wanted to do. The exhibits you see now — al­most 100 percent of them — are a result of our collaboration. They’re geniuses.”

Perhaps most important was to find a home for the museum. Friedman had read that the city of D.C. was looking for a tenant for the historic Franklin School, de­signed by Smithsonian architect Adolf Cluss. The building had been a laboratory for Alexander Graham Bell and eventually became a city homeless shelter.

Friedman noted that the building wasn’t far from the former home of Frances Hodgson Burnett, who wrote The Secret Garden, one of her childhood favorites.

Mayor Muriel Bowser chose Friedman’s proposal in 2017, agreeing to lease the building to Planet Word for $10 a year for 99 years in exchange for its renovation. Friedman footed much of the $39 million cost to retro­fit the school and raised the funds to build the museum inside.

Today Planet Word is a three-story mu­seum with 10 rooms, each with a differ­ent look and feel. In one room, visitors can write down their favorite words and pin them to the wall. In another, they can read famous speeches.

Friedman’s favorite room is the li­brary, whose books come to life with pro­jected animations and narration. More than 100 different books are available to “read,” including Corduroy, which is nar­rated by none other than Friedman her­self. “What do buttons do?” she asks. “They bring things together.”

Free museum with broader reach

The same could be said of Planet Word. On a recent Friday afternoon, visitors to the museum included two mothers who listened to their children sing karaoke, two men in their 70s who quizzed each other on advertising’s language tricks, two young women who faced off in the “joke gallery” and a middle-aged man who seemed delighted to discover the poetry room behind a secret door in the library.

Wordplay Wednesdays has become a date-night destination for 20- and 30-somethings, and Sunday Storytime, run by the public library, welcomes fam­ilies. Museum admission is free.

Friedman continues to be inspired by the people she works with as well as Planet Word’s mission.

“With what’s happening right now polit­ically, it’s so important for us to be present and have a voice and stand up for words. Because how would you feel if we lose our democracy and we said nothing?” she said.

As she was planning the museum in 2016, Friedman realized it should be more than a children’s museum.

“The increasing relevance of a museum about words and language is what really energized me,” she said.

“It’s not just going to be about reading and getting kids to like books and read again; it has a much bigger, much broader raison d’être.

“That really was a big change in what this museum was going to be about — and made it more of a calling. Because I don’t have the New York Times as a plat­form, and I’m not a politician; I’m not a public figure. But this is what I can do.”

Correction: The print version of this story included a few inaccuracies. The U.S. Embassy in Beirut was destroyed in 1983, not 1984, and the second bombing occurred six months later. The print article also stated that the museum’s lease is free; however, it is $10 a year, and the renovation cost was not $50 million but $39 million. We regret the errors.