Autry Lost His Pennant but Won a Museum

For 79-year-old Orvon Gene Autry, it has been a year of hopes postponed and realized.

His California Angels came within a strike of going to the World Series for the first time in the club’s 26 seasons. And the Los Angeles City Council approved the construction of the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in Griffith Park.

The World Series and the museum have been longtime dreams of the one-time singing cowboy from Tioga, Tex. For the Angels, there is always next year. But for the museum, the waiting is nearly over. Ground will be broken Nov. 12.

For those wondering what sort of museum an ex-cowboy movie star might be raising in his own name in an urban public park, planners promise that the Autry museum will be a world-class act.

To Open in 1988

When it opens in mid-1988, they say, the public will be treated to a credible cultural and educational institution dedicated to the history of the American West, not just a show place for memorabilia of cowboy actors, although that will be there too.

“We are a history museum,” said Wyoming-born curator James Nottage, 36, who worked at the Kansas Museum of History for nine years, serving as supervisory historian from 1981 to 1985. “My instructions are that we will develop a credible institution.”

Its galleries will be organized around “Spirit of the West” themes, including discovery, opportunity, conquest, community, romance, imagination and the cowboy, Nottage said. Visitors will view artifacts ranging from the early Spanish explorers and the Lewis and Clark expedition to the present.

“The museum is planned to be the most comprehensive repository of American West history in the world,” a museum fact sheet declares unequivocally.

“Collections will include historic firearms, common tools, conveyances, equipment, clothing, toys, games and furnishings of both famous and ordinary people of the Western landscape. Fine artworks by such artists as Frederic Remington and Charles Russell will be highlighted.”

Museum Director Joanne Hale said that Autry has been collecting Western heritage material for more than 50 years, and the Autry Foundation has acquired the 10,000-item collection of the Frontier Museum Historical Center in Temecula in Riverside County.

The Temecula collection includes historically accurate dioramas, such as one depicting the gunfight at the OK Corral, the actual Butterfield stagecoach, hundreds of saddles, paintings, drawings and sculptures, and 60 life-size figures of well-known characters of the West, Hale said.

In moving from the factual old West to the fictional movie screen, she said the museum will exhibit memorabilia, such as boots, saddles and attire, of some of Hollywood’s most famous cowboy actors, including John Wayne and Autry.

Besides art, artifacts and memorabilia, the museum will include a research library and archives center, a 250-seat theater for movies and small productions and an education center, with a director to work with school systems.

The museum and its exhibits are expected to cost a nonprofit corporation, headed by Autry, up to $27 million and attract half a million people a year.

While no criticism has been voiced about the dignity of its architecture or the quality of its exhibits, other features of the museum have been criticized, including its location in Griffith Park.

Critics charge that they were thrown a curve in the way that the museum was approved, and they contend that by authorizing a 50-year lease at $1 a year, the City Council has helped itself to public parkland for the benefit of a private organization.

“The Gene Autry museum will honor a Hollywood singing cowboy star,” Elden Hughes, chairman of the Angeles chapter of the Sierra Club, wrote Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley in March. “It would seem that Hollywood is the proper location for such a museum. . . . Gene Autry with his megabucks can buy the proper location, and Los Angeles cannot afford the loss of its scarce and precious parkland. The Sierra Club believes that parks should be used for park purposes.”

Despite similar sentiments expressed by others, including the League of Women Voters and two former members of the Recreation and Park Commission, the museum was enthusiastically approved by the city’s Board of Referred Powers and unanimously endorsed by the City Council.

“We should get down on our hands and knees and thank God for Mr. Autry bringing this to Los Angeles,” Councilman John Ferraro said at one point in consideration of the project.

Wachs’ Support

Councilman Joel Wachs said the Autry museum will be the finest of its type and predicted: “It will probably be one of the leading attractions in the city.”

The museum will be financed, developed and operated by the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, a nonprofit charitable corporation formed by the Autry Foundation, which was itself created as a charitable trust in 1980 through the estate of Autry’s first wife of 48 years, Ina Mae.

Autry’s second wife, Jacqueline, led a two-year effort to win approval of the museum.

“My husband has always wanted a World Series ring,” she told The Times. “The second thing is a family joke: He would never win an Academy Award. The third vision he’s had is to leave a museum to the people of Los Angeles that will portray the history of our Western heritage.”

The museum will rise in the Pine Meadows section of Griffith Park, an open, moderately sloping area of mowed grass and pine trees between the Golden State Freeway and the parking lot of the Los Angeles Zoo, nearly opposite the entrance to the zoo.

Construction is planned in three stages. At first, the building will be a three-level, 139,436-square-foot structure designed to express the Southwest’s Spanish-Mexican heritage. Its design features will include stucco walls, red tile roof, ceramic tile trim, a California pepper tree-planted plaza, a courtyard and a bell tower.

Planners point out--in response to critics--that the building itself will occupy only 1.46 acres of the 13-acre site, while the remaining 11.54 acres will be extensively landscaped and improved with a park and picnic area maintained by the museum.

The museum is expected to grow an additional 53,000 square feet in later construction phases. In all, according to a study commissioned by the operating corporation, the completed building and parking area will occupy about seven acres.

Museum Keeps Receipts

Under terms of the city lease, the museum will keep all the money it charges for admission, as well as what it makes through a gift shop and cafe, to help offset operating costs to be borne by the Autry Foundation. Ticket prices are expected to be comparable with the zoo, ranging from $1.50 for children between the ages of 5 and 15 to $4.50 for adults.

On the drawing boards, the museum has grown increasingly ambitious--and costly--during the last two years as the Autry Foundation sought a location, according to Hale. As first proposed, it was to have been a $4-million, 30,000-square-foot structure in Burbank’s Buena Vista Park.

When opposition developed among environmental groups and neighbors who complained that the project would destroy the spaciousness and the beauty of the park, Jacqueline Autry withdrew the museum offer in May, 1985, blaming “misinformation in the newspapers.”

By late August last year, when the five-member Board of Referred Powers, made up of Los Angeles City Council members, approved the present Griffith Park site, planners were proposing to build a 70,000- to 100,000-square-foot facility, costing $12 million, to accommodate the Temecula collection.

The planned size was greatly increased and the total cost more than doubled earlier this month when the City Council unanimously approved, without discussion, the location of the museum in Griffith Park. Bradley approved the lease.

When the Autry Foundation initially proposed Pine Meadows as a site for the museum last year, the staff of the Department of Recreation and Parks opposed its location anywhere in Griffith Park on grounds that it would reduce the parkland available to the public and set an unwanted precedent.

“During one recent six-month period, the department received four requests for the use of property in the park, including proposals for two celebrity-related museums and two theaters,” the general manager advised the Recreation and Park Commission. “Staff believes that now is the time to establish a clear policy of denying these and similar requests.”

Recreation and park commissioners never got a chance to decide the issue, however. Because of a potential conflict of interest involving Commissioner Mary D. Nichols, whose husband works for the law firm representing the museum, the question was sent to the Board of Referred Powers.

Study’s Findings

After the board approved the site initially, museum officials hired Engineering Technology Inc. to look into possible negative effects in a study required by state law. The firm concluded that construction and operation of the museum in Griffith Park “will not have a significant adverse effect on the quality of the human and natural environment.”

The Department of Recreation and Parks staff reviewed the report and agreed with its conclusion, while reporting that during the public review period for the project, running from March 13 to April 12, the department received 114 written responses, 112 of which objected to placing the museum in Griffith Park.

Royce Neuschatz, an urban planner who served as a recreation and park commissioner from 1978 to 1984, co-signed a letter from the League of Women Voters opposing, in principle, the construction of any museum on public parkland.

But, she said, it was clear that “there wasn’t a prayer of stopping it” because the political facts were that “things were very well greased.” Museum backers had “got to a lot of council people,” she said. What concerns her, she said, is the precedent of using parkland.

At first, Neuschatz said, there were doubts about the appropriateness of the museum. “Most initial reactions were, ‘Ho, Ho, Gene Autry’s memorabilia,’ ” she said. But, she added that while she thinks the museum is an “ego trip” and is meant as a “sort of shrine” to Autry, there nevertheless appears to be a “serious effort” to build a class museum.

Jill Swift, a recreation and park commissioner from 1973 to 1978, said the question of locating the Autry museum on parkland had “really been expedited” without an opportunity for adequate public participation in the way it was considered by the Board of Referred Powers.

Park activist Alex Man contended that the agreement to lease parkland for the museum subverts the Recreation and Park Commission, which, he said, will receive no income and have no role in its operation.

“They’re going to be charging admission,” Man said. “It really amounts to a subsidy of the Autry interests. . . . This is setting a dangerous precedent. It’s privatization of the parks. . . . Autry will probably have himself memorialized.

‘Totally Inappropriate’

“If they wanted to do this, they should have bought the 13 acres somewhere else. He could have done it without riding on the backs of us taxpayers. It’s totally inappropriate to take this kind of parkland out of use.”

Jacqueline Autry defended the location of the park, maintaining that Balboa Park in San Diego and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco are “great parks because of their museums.” She explained in a recent telephone interview how the museum was named.

“This was a by-committee concept,” she said. “We played around with a dozen names (and eventually) decided it should be called the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, like the Getty Museum and the Norton Simon Museum. These were endowed by two great gentlemen for the benefit of the people of Los Angeles.

“I hope we never forget our Western heritage. . . . I hope 200 years from now, when we have colonies on Mars, they will be able to come and learn about their ancestors.”