Historical Society’s Library Provides Tie to San Diego’s Past

Among the old books and papers stored in the San Diego Historical Society’s archives in Balboa Park, Sylvia Arden has become acquainted with two women who are long dead.

But this should come as no surprise. Arden has spent more than 20 years cataloguing, leafing through and simply walking around in the archives. There is an immense amount of history stored there; it would be impossible not to be touched by some of it.

“You become very fond of certain people,” said Arden--even when, as in this case, they exist only in 100-year-old diaries and photographs.

Arden is head librarian for the historical society’s collections of books, maps, public records and other documents. She has worked in those collections since 1961, and her knowledge of them is encyclopedic.

Researchers at the library are often surprised to discover that this tiny, immaculately dressed woman, whose energy is in inverse proportion to her size, apparently knows where to find the answers to their inquiries without consulting any reference guide.

Interested in the dimensions of San Diego schoolrooms in 1863? Arden will direct you to the Public School Teacher’s Report for that year. Want to know if there was a local chapter of the American Guild of Organists? She’ll bring you the group’s minutes. Anything on Wyatt Earp’s stay in San Diego during the 1880s? Arden will ask you to be more specific; she knows there are several index cards full of material.

When told that she seems to carry a comprehensive index to the archives in her head, Arden blushed and laughed. “Well, I’ve been here so long--you accumulate a lot of knowledge almost without even realizing it,” she said.

Richard Esparza, executive director of the historical society, said that Arden has had a “tremendous impact” on the library.

“Much of the collection predates Sylvia,” he said, “but over the last 20 years, it’s largely through her efforts that the collection has been (organized) and made available to the public.”

For someone who never had formal training in library science, Arden takes to it like a duck to quacking. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Hunter College in New York, eventually moved to San Diego from the Los Angeles area in 1961, and soon had a part-time job indexing the historical society’s collection of books and manuscripts for 75 cents an hour. It was the first library work she had ever done.

At that time, the collections were housed in a dark, cramped room in the Serra Museum in Presidio Park, Arden said: “It was a very small place, with one desk that could accommodate six or seven people. But there weren’t a lot of people using the library then.”

Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, the society’s library grew, and so did the number of people using it. Finally, after years of storing valuable books and other documents in several different locations, the society in November, 1984, moved into larger space in the basement of the Casa de Balboa in Balboa Park. Arden, who became the society’s head librarian in 1977, said that the size and amenities of the new location still seem “like a miracle.”

Roughly 10 times the size of the old room in the Serra Museum, the new library can seat 60 people--”comfortably,” Arden said. Its broad wooden tables allow researchers to spread out notes and papers as they work.

Special Precautions

Tanks in the ceiling contain halon, a nontoxic gas that would be released automatically during a fire, smothering the flames without damaging documents the way water from sprinklers would. Temperature and humidity controls will be installed when the Casa de Balboa’s heating and air-conditioning systems are completed this year.

Meanwhile, under Arden’s direction, all documents are stored in acid-free paper folders and boxes to prevent them from staining. Many are also covered with thin sheets of plastic to keep them from deteriorating in the hands of researchers.

“The early documents are the most fragile,” Arden said. “No one could touch them if they weren’t protected.

“The material in this archive covers everything from the earliest Spanish period up to current time. And we have a lot of things on the Indians. There isn’t a subject that isn’t covered--maritime history, cultural activity, sports, transportation, business, horticulture. . . . Everything that is a part of San Diego’s history, there would be material here on it.”

Although the collection focuses on San Diego County, documents pertaining to nearby areas, such as Baja California and the Colorado River, are also collected, indexed and stored by Arden and her staff of 20 volunteers.

There are 3,000 books, more than 500 manuscript collections (each consisting of one or two boxes full of letters and papers), and shelf after shelf of old newspapers and city and county government records. There are also about 1,400 maps, including the earliest street map of San Diego, drawn in 1849.

The collection has become so large, in fact, that Arden; her assistant, Steve Wolz, and society archivist Rick Crawford now have the luxury of being selective about new additions.

“We look for things that would fill gaps in our knowledge,” she said. “We are selective. When people offer us something, the first things we want to know are whether it deals with San Diego and what condition it’s in.

“We don’t want it if it’s just (memorabilia from) your family or my family, and you moved here from Missouri four years ago. But if you had a jewelry store downtown in 1920, or started Fed Mart, we would want material about that. If you started a lemon ranch in El Cajon, we might not care what your name is, but if you have photos of it from the 1930s. . . .”

Oral History

Arden is particularly proud of the collection’s oral history program, which consists of nearly 600 taped interviews. Arden said the oral history program started in the 1950s, when society volunteers went out with dictating machines to record the reminiscences of old-timers around the county.

The project’s scope has been broadened to include such diverse groups as minorities, factory workers and former government bureaucrats, “not just old-timers and VIPs,” Arden said. “The goal is to fill in gaps in what appears in the history books. The interviews give you a picture of the social history of the area that you can’t get anywhere else.”

Dennis Berge, chairman of the history department at San Diego State University, said the interviews are particularly valuable “because people are more frank, more spontaneous with this kind of presentation” than they usually are in written memoirs.

Collection Praised

He said he has perused a dozen transcripts of interviews in the society’s collection and found them to be “fairly expert, and very useful. . . . You can find things that you can’t find anywhere else.”

The interviews are conducted by volunteers; Arden has done several herself, including one with Mandel Weiss, a founder of Fed Mart. (Fed Mart was an innovative warehouse-style store chain founded in San Diego. It has since gone out of business.) The oral history program has become a model for others of its kind nationwide, and Arden has become a recognized expert in the field.

Esparza said that, as a longtime resident of San Diego, Arden has also helped the society make useful contacts within the community and at other historical libraries across the country. She has two sons: Daniel, 31, produces the television show “San Diego at Large” for Channel 8; David, 36, is a pianist who has worked with the American Ballet Theater in New York.

But two of the people Arden feels closest to--Charlotte Baker and Hazel Waterman--died before she was able to meet them. While working in the archives, she has become steeped in the letters, diaries and photographs of the two women. It’s no coincidence that both were professionals who also raised families.

“Hazel Waterman worked under (architect) Irving Gill” at the turn of the century, Arden said. “Because she was a woman, she never got her architect’s license. But she was a beautiful, talented woman who raised her family and had a career long before women’s liberation.

“Charlotte Baker was a doctor who rode around in a buggy and delivered babies” in San Diego in the 1890s. “She was active in the suffragette movement, but had a family, too.”

Sylvia Arden is a career woman who helped raise two families: one of people, and one of thousands of books, maps, letters and manuscripts on old San Diego. She could tell you the names of all of them, and if books had birthdays, she could tell you those, too.