The Odyssey of the Human Spirit in Rural and Small-Town California : The Living History That Is a Part of the State’s Past Is Explored by Different Speakers in a Humanities Workshop in Santa Barbara

Director Mark Rawitsch has to smile when visitors to the Mendocino County Museum in the Northern California community of Willits ask what time his soda fountain opens. The fountain, a town institution for 50 years until it closed in April and was moved piece by piece to the museum, no longer serves sodas. But it is living history, not some relic in a dusty case.

It’s the same with another museum exhibit, the dental office of Dr. Withrow, who practiced in the town for 54 years. Just to see that big drill is to recall the terror and pain of a visit to the dentist circa 1929. Rawitsch noted, “People never ask when the dentist’s office opens.”

Slices of Real Life

The exhibits are, in short, slices of real life. To old-timers, some of whom as children remember visits to the Willits Creamery clutching prescriptions for ice cream cones written by a local physician, will point to a certain counter stool and remember that they sat right there, in that very spot, which of course was not right there at all.

“And you wouldn’t believe the guilt stories,” Rawitsch said. He told of a middle-aged man recalling, as a child, being dispatched with $10 to take a bus into San Francisco to see the 1939-40 Golden Gate International Exposition; the bus never showed up so the boy blew the whole $10 on ice cream for all his friends at Willits Creamery.

Rawitsch was one of the speakers at a workshop Monday at UC Santa Barbara on “The Humanities and Rural/Small-Town California,” sponsored by the graduate program in public historical studies with funding from the California Council for the Humanities.

Even as speakers struggled with different definitions of the humanities, each zeroed in on the theme of what Carola Rupert, director of the Kern County Museum and Pioneer Village, called “the odyssey of the human spirit.”

In short, Rupert said, “People like to see things, but people love to know about other people.” She suggested, “When the humanity is lost in the humanities, we’re all in big trouble.”

“An Anthropologist in the Country: The Culture of Small Towns in California” was explored by Elvin Hatch, professor of anthropology at UCSB. Ethnographers studying these little slices of life frequently come up short, he said, because they come up with something not unlike “stamp or butterfly collections, interesting perhaps as curios but not much more.”

An ethnographic study of a community, Hatch said, should include its economic organization--for example, “whether the local merchants line up with the farmers against the working people”--the relations between the community and others nearby, how the people sort themselves out socially and community dynamics, or how things get done.

In most studies, he noted, “we don’t see how (people) got along with their husbands, or their children, or their neighbors. We don’t see how ambitious they were.” He asked: “Where is the line drawn between respectable people and the disreputable? . . . What are the symbolic markers that differentiate the social categories?”

Examining ‘Little Pieces’

In studying a community, Hatch said, it is not enough to examine “little pieces,” such as a school, without asking: “What kind of people got elected to the school board back then? How did people mobilize the district to build this schoolhouse? Where did the profession of teaching stand in the social spectrum?”

Two of museum director Carola Rupert’s favorite resources are old etiquette books and “how to type” manuals. The latter, she noted, “tell you so much about women entering the marketplace.”

Rupert--whose challenge in bringing visitors into the Kern County Museum includes the general view that Bakersfield is, as she said, “the place to go through to get to somewhere else”--likes to build on old photographs to create exhibits to which people can relate. A photograph of a horseless carriage outing to the woods, for example, might inspire a vintage picnic exhibit with inexpensively authentic props such as Ball jars.

Rupert had brought to the workshop a panoramic photograph of a Bakersfield Motorcycle Club outing in downtown Bakersfield, circa 1915, that inspired her to start asking: “How many photographers had these (wide angle) cameras? Are any of the young people in the picture still alive? Where can I find one of these motorcycles?”

But Rupert’s thinking didn’t stop there. She was mentioning the collective fascination that Bakersfield has always had with the automobile, the fact that old-timers can still tell you what happened to the first one in town, how it plunged off the Grapevine and its parts were recovered and recycled. . . .

Robert Z. Melnick, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Oregon, suggested that “rural landscapes have been forgotten” by the preservation movement, which has been more intent on saving old buildings. Culturally, Melnick said, “the most lasting changes occur in the landscape,” in the interaction of the culture on the natural landscape--houses, fences, roads, canals, ditches, bridges.

Melnick said it is a mistake to ignore change; rather, he said, the challenge to preservationists is to “protect” rather than to “preserve.”

“One of the worst things happening” in the preservation movement today, he said, is the “bell jar” syndrome--”Put everything in a bell jar, suck all the air out of it and preserve it.”

(Later, as an example he cited Colonial Williamsburg. There, he said, all of the buildings were returned to their first period, thus “denying the layers of history.” Still, Melnick said, “I’m against Williamsburg changing. It’s now 60 years old. In its own right it’s sort of gained a sense of history so people can say, ‘Look what they did in the early part of the 20th Century to preserve places. . . .’ ”)

It is essential, Melnick said, for local residents of a community to be involved in any preservation project for it is they who understand, for example, that the various uses to which a structure has been put through the years is more significant than the type of wood from which it was built. Likening a cultural landscape to a treasured photo of a great-grandparent, Melnick spoke of “converting the concern we all have for personal history to societal history.”

Citing a typical small Midwestern town as an example, he said that it is those who have lived in that town who understand the relationship between the bank and the cafe two doors down where banker and customer would meet.

“I get very tired of hearing about major battles” (to save major historical landmarks), Melnick said; rather, he wants to see saved those things that are reminders of the everyday life styles of the people who lived in the communities.

Christopher L. Yip, professor of design and planning at the University of Colorado, observed that “there’s a tendency for Americans to see themselves as timeless and placeless.” He said that most relate to history as “somewhere just before their grandparents,” beyond which everything is somewhat blurry.

History and Place

The challenge, Yip said, is to “try to reconnect history with place.” For example, he said, thousands each year visit Lookout Mountain near Golden, Colo., the burial site of Buffalo Bill (William Cody), who died in 1917, yet for most of those visitors Buffalo Bill is a name that goes “no further back in time than Disneyland.”

Yip, whose topic was “Ethnicity and the Rural Landscape: The Case of the Chinese in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta,” spoke of ethnic diversity as “an important element in the cultural landscape” of California, dating from the late 19th Century when Chinese were brought in as agricultural labor.

Soon, he said, the small delta towns had developed “ethnic ghettos” that functioned as commercial and social centers for these laborers. His slides illustrated the fact that the Chinese in California looked on this as a temporary home; the majority of immigrants were males who planned to retire to China and send a son here to work.

Their contributions to the cultural landscape did include gambling halls, remains of which still stand, and houses that can be identified as one-time brothels, closed down at the start of World War II when, Yip said, “evidently the military thought these places were not such a good idea” in close proximity to installations such as Travis Air Force Base.

Ethnic Makeup

As automation, centralization of the canneries and the opening of job opportunities in other fields for Chinese-Americans changed the ethnic makeup of small California towns, the cultural landscape changed. Today, residents include yuppies and, Yip noted, “the last vestiges of hippies,” together with a handful of old residents.

Judith Cunningham, director of the Calaveras County Museum and Archives, said her declining budget ($52,000 this year) is a problem but so is the apathy of the locals: “The old-timers are not much interested in talking about anything but where they went to school and who they went to school with.”

So Cunningham, in trying to bring history alive, has sought the help of the newcomers, young people who have been drawn to the old gold mining towns as part of the back-to-the-land movement. And she gets help wherever she can find it. For a recent excavation, she noted, she enlisted “anybody who thought they knew anything about archeology, or even just liked to dig.”

Her museum houses a re-creation of an old general store built on artifacts loaned by a family member.

Invaluable Source

Cunningham numbers among her friends an elderly Native American woman she has found to be an invaluable source. As a result, she has involved herself in the plight of the Native American population living in poverty in the county, working through the federal programs.

“You can’t just work with them on their histories,” she said. “You have to deal with their living conditions,” which include substandard housing and roads.

In an community with high unemployment, low income and a choice between spending tax dollars for a museum or for police protection, Cunningham does have one ace in the hole. “Little House on the Prairie” films its courtroom scenes at her place. The money ($750 a day) goes into the county’s general fund, but if a television show brings more visitors in, Cunningham said, “that’s great.”