When he was a little boy, Paul Cypher's grandfather took him on long drives in a big blue car, imparting life lessons through stories about working in steel mills.

Now 36, Cypher is recalling those stories as he plans changes at the Baltimore Museum of Industry.

The new executive director of the Locust Point museum wants to make it a venue for storytelling, just as that car was for him.

He believes the museum can offer a better history of Baltimore industry by telling the personal tales of canners, printing press operators, garment makers and steel mill workers.

"Industry and manufacturing is all about people," said Cypher, who began his job yesterday. "Let's listen to other people who lived it, experienced it."

The 25-year-old museum near the Inner Harbor is at a unique point in its history, board chairman Edward G. Novak said. First it had its founder, then its caretaker, now it has Cypher as its third director.

"We need a manager to take us to the next level," Novak said.

To Cypher, that means more museum members, more adult visitors and more personal histories.

Cypher first saw the nonprofit museum in 1982, a year after it moved to its home in an old oyster canning factory along Key Highway. His school - North Hagerstown High - took a field trip there.

"Even then I thought it was kind of neat," Cypher said.

Until this month, he was a vice president at the Rochester Museum & Science Center in Rochester, N.Y.

He previously oversaw fund raising at a Rochester zoo. To get his new job, he beat out more than 85 other candidates.

Novak said the museum's search committee liked Cypher's gregarious personality, his background in fund raising and his willingness to critique.

The museum is a collection of miniature models and artifacts from the industries that shaped Baltimore. There's a model of a Bethlehem Steel plant, a historic printing press and a mock assembly line where children assemble paper cars.

When Cypher took a tour of the museum this year, he told the search committee that he would replace and augment some of the exhibit labels with oral history recordings and other interactive learning.

Those would cater more to adults, while allowing them to explain some of the exhibits to their children.

He also said the museum, which reports 150,000 visitors a year, needs to develop a larger base of regular visitors and donors. Memberships cost as little as $20 for students and seniors and as much as several thousand dollars for corporations.

In Cypher's determination to attract more regular visitors, he is representative of the changing museum world, his former boss said.

"We used to focus on the collections, and now we focus on the use of collections and the way the collections are used to make people connections," said Kate Bennett, president of the Rochester Museum & Science Center.

Scholars with doctorates formerly were museum chiefs. Cypher has a bachelor's degree from Villanova University and a master's degree in communication and leadership from Seton Hall University.

His experience with industry came in part from those rides with his grandfather.

His grandfather supported his steel workers' union but held it up as an example of "doing things the hard way," Cypher said.

If his grandfather thought young Paul was upholding principle over practicality, he would compare the boy's actions to a union requirement that the steel production line come to a halt each time a light bulb burned out, Cypher said.

Cypher also learned about industry during weekends at his father's window spring manufacturing plants, and by exploring the limestone plant near his first home in south Chicago.

"I used to think I was going into manufacturing," Cypher said. "Now, I am."