A Distinctive Bit of Westminster Says Goodby

I just heard about it, and I don’t know quite how to react to the news: The Westminster Elephant Museum is leaving for Oregon. It will be gone by Thursday.

For a year, all those jars of pickled elephant organs and all those elephant bones and elephant memorabilia--gathered over the last 20 years by a college professor who is crazy about elephants --have been on display in a disused kindergarten room at a shabby former elementary school. Perhaps 2,000 people came to see them during that year.

Now, because the city is evicting the museum from its drab but rent-free location, the stuff is headed to the zoo in Portland, Ore., which is building a $400,000 elephant museum of its own.

I’m not sure, but I think this is a loss to the community, if only because an enthusiastic eccentric will probably drop from the scene. Enthusiastic eccentrics often become our most cherished citizens.

This one is Jack Adams, a grandfatherly retired professor of psychobiology at Cal State Long Beach and Cal State Dominguez Hills. He saw elephants in Africa in the early ‘60s and fell in love with them.

By the time he retired in 1983, Adams had collected an amazing amount of elephant stuff, from skulls and teeth to pictures of elephants on beer bottles and campaign buttons.

He was living in Westminster, so he went to the mayor and somehow convinced him that a museum devoted to elephants was just the thing for the city.

I don’t know how Adams did it, but the mayor took the bit in his teeth and pushed through the City Council an approximately $6,000 allocation to refurbish the old school room and turn it over to a nonprofit museum corporation.

But I suspect Adams did it with the same infectious enthusiasm I encountered when I met him Monday at his now defunct museum. His ardor somehow overwhelms your skepticism.

“This is the only elephant museum in the world, “ he said. “There are other natural history museums, but this is exclusively elephants, you see.

“That collection of jaws (there were 12 of them) is unique. You’d never be able to see that collection of jaws anywhere else.

“We have elephant fetuses-- people don’t see these kinds of things. We have an elephant heart, an elephant brain, an elephant kidney. We have a testicle, we have tongues, we have bile stones. We have just about everything. We have livers.

“Elephants have been involved in practically everything human beings do. Elephants on stamps, elephants on money, elephants in mythology, elephants in music, elephants in the economy, elephants in the Republican Party, elephants in war. Elephants in religion--a whole case on that.”

Adams recalled, with enthusiasm, the moment that he won over then-mayor Evar Peterson. “Mayor Peterson said, ‘By golly, Anaheim has Disneyland and Long Beach has the Queen Mary. Westminster is going to have elephants!’ He could perceive a great big sign: ‘Home of the Only Elephant Museum in the World.’ ”

What Peterson may not have envisioned were the campaign leaflets that would be distributed by his opponents during his 1984 campaign for reelection. One asked: “Evar Peterson thought that Westminster really needed an elephant museum. So he used your tax dollars to finance one. . . . How many more ‘white elephants’ will you have to pay for?”

Last November, Peterson lost the election, and a new majority came onto the council. They voted unanimously last Feb. 12 to cancel the agreement with Adams and evict the museum. A park and senior citizen housing project is due for the old school property, and the building containing the museum may be demolished.

Adams says he is happy that his collection is going to “somebody who appreciates what this thing is.”

(“His collection is quite valuable,” said Jack Delaini, manager of educational services at Portland’s Washington Park Zoo. “It’s almost impossible to fix a value because these things are not available. You don’t just find an elephant skull.”)

Adams said that city officials’ lack of appreciation for his collection was “the heartbreaking thing. They (the council members) didn’t even come here to see this thing,” he said.

That’s not entirely true, said the present mayor, Joy Neugebauer. “I’ve looked in the window,” she said. But, she added, the collection’s departure won’t be a significant loss. “I really can’t see that it added anything.”

Nor did the city’s Chamber of Commerce pay it any mind. “We didn’t promote it,” said Allen Pace, then president of the chamber. “I went over there a couple times, and it wasn’t that spectacular to observe.”

But what other cultural assets does the chamber have to promote?

Pace paused a good four beats. “That’s a good question,” he said. “It is a good town. It’s being upgraded all the time.”

I don’t know, maybe it’s all for the best. It takes a certain kind of town to embrace oddities like Jack Adams. Though it was the most distinctive institution in Westminster, maybe Adams’ museum was out of place there.

I’m glad Adams has found a grateful recipient for his cherished collection. I hope they throw a testimonial for him up there when their museum opens next year.

I don’t think he ever would have gotten a resolution from the Westminster City Council. To do that, he’d have had to open the Elephant Shopping Mall.