Tour Guides Start Young at Historic Gamble House

Inside Pasadena’s architecturally famous Gamble House, Jeffrey Reid, eighth grader and official tour guide, was holding forth about the living room’s cruciform structure.

He actually used that word, cruciform, as he spoke to a tour group of Sierra Madre fifth graders and their teacher. With a sweep of his hand to draw their eyes across the vast room, Jeffrey noted that it means “in the shape of a cross.”

That shape, explained the 13-year-old in sneakers, allowed the Gamble family to entertain guests in distinctly separate areas of this central room in the turn-of-the-century house off Orange Grove Boulevard. In that corner, he said, someone could play the piano (like all the furniture, designed specifically for this house), over there they could sit by the fireplace, or they could gather in the window seating area overlooking the garden.

Form and Function

“Now, everything in here has a purpose, but it also looks good--like me,” Jeffrey said, showing that he has learned one of the key architectural concepts of Gamble House. Form and function go hand in hand.

About this time, the teacher discovered that one of the pupils was chewing gum and told her to put it in her hand. Overhearing, Jeffrey issued a warning that went with equal force to teacher and student in this oasis of Honduran mahogany, Burma teak, Port Orford cedar and Douglas fir: “If there is gum in your hand, don’t touch ANYTHING!”

Jeffrey, a student at Eliot Middle School in Altadena, is one of 38 “junior docents” for Gamble House, a local, state and national landmark. In a program believed to be one of few of its type in the nation--and being watched by other museums--he and the other young tour guides are leading dozens of their fellow San Gabriel Valley schoolchildren on an architectural and historical journey each Friday from December through May.

With surprising sophistication and spontaneity, the junior docents, without the help of notes, make their appointed rounds through house and grounds. They speak of the genius of architects Charles and Henry Greene, who in 1907 designed this winter retreat for Mary and David Gamble of Cincinnati, whose family founded Procter & Gamble Co.

Youngsters Are Trained

In six, two-hour sessions after school, the student guides are trained in the legend, lore and architectural history of the house considered one of the finest example of the Craftsman style, which combines Occidental and Alpine. At the end of their training, the youngsters take their parents through the three-story house that has been called the ultimate California bungalow--all 8,100 square feet of it.

On a recent Friday morning, while Jeffrey’s group finished its tour, seventh-grade guide Geneva Fares led a foursome from Pasadena’s Don Benito Fundamental School, explaining to them how the 1985 movie “Back to the Future” featured Gamble House.

Remember, she said, the mad-scientist and his front door? This is it, she said, the door that actor Michael J. Fox ran up to in the movie. From the inside she opened the main door, which has two smaller doors on either side. It is made of exquisite dark Burma teak and inlaid with Tiffany stained glass patterns to form a gnarled California oak across the three doors.

In the living room on his tour, Jeffrey explained that no nails are visible in the house. The Greene brothers relied on joinery techniques, Jeffrey said, such as “finger lap joinery” that utilizes dowels or brass screws hidden by pegs. To illustrate the finger lap, he clasped his hands together, letting the fingers weave through one another, coaxing his tour group to do likewise.

“Uh-huh,” Jeffrey said. “You got it.”

Explains Deep Eaves

Upstairs, after passing through a bedroom with vintage wicker furniture, Jeffrey moved his group onto a sleeping porch with a commanding view of the San Gabriel Mountains and the Arroyo Seco below. Just above the children was one of the deep, overhanging eaves with its exposed rafters, designed to shade the house.

“OK,” Jeffrey said, snapping his fingers, “now here’s something really interesting.” He ran his hand along a wooden shingle on the house’s exterior. “Eleven inches is exposed but they are really 36 inches long. That’s for insulation.”

He herded the group down the hall and into the room where the two Gamble boys slept. “Where are the secret doors?” asked one fifth grader.

Jeffrey explained that the secret doors are no longer a part of the tour. “How many times you been on this tour?” he asked.

Four, the boy answered.

Unusual Banister

After the group filed through the boys room, Jeffrey led them downstairs, telling them they were finally allowed to touch something, the mahogany banister with ebony pegs. “Now you’d have a hard time sliding down the banister,” Jeffrey said, noting its unusual stair-step design.

The program that brought Jeffrey and Geneva to Gamble House began eight years ago. This year the guides are selected from classes for gifted and talented students at four schools in the Pasadena Unified School District: Eliot, Wilson and Washington middle schools, and Marshall alternative school. Two private schools, Chandler of Pasadena and Ascension of Sierra Madre, also have become involved.

The program has trained a total of 300 guides and taken 1,000 children on tours annually, with each guide working from six to eight Fridays during a season. Although the guides normally work only one season, some may soon be used on Sundays to work with senior docents giving tours to adults, program officials said.

“When I see the expressions on the youngsters’ faces, it tells me the whole program is valid,” said Randell L. Makinson, curator for Gamble House, which is overseen by USC’s School of Architecture and Fine Arts. In a time of family and societal instability, Makinson said, the program offers psychological benefits for both the children who are guides and those on tour. “They learn their city has history, roots, stability,” he said.

Picked Up an Idea

Makinson got the idea from a visit to the Frank Lloyd Wright House in Oak Park, Ill., where he noticed a fifth-grade student giving a tour to another youngster.

He returned to Pasadena where teacher Germaine Potter, who was working with gifted students in the public schools, volunteered to help establish a junior docent program at Gamble House. Last year, Potter helped the Pasadena Historical Society set up a similar program.

“It’s not a usual thing for museums to do child-to-child tours,” said Kim Donahue, educational director at the Wright House in Illinois, which is credited with originating the practice. Donahue has heard of only one use of junior docents in addition to her own program and those in Pasadena--at Drayton Hall, an 18th-Century house in Virginia run by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

But Donna Haugaard, Gamble House’s “senior” docent in charge of the junior docents, said there have been inquiries from museums around Southern California and the nation whose officials are intrigued by any program that might increase the interest of school-age audiences.

“If you remember as a kid taking a field trip and a rather dried old lady taking you through some historical site, you didn’t really listen,” Haugaard said. The young guides benefit by gaining self-confidence, she said.

Given Much Leeway

Like the adult guides, the youngsters are given a great deal of leeway in how they conduct their tours, although usually a senior docent keeps a watchful eye on the proceedings. “Let’s be perfectly candid, the kids on the tour might get some misinformation,” Makinson said. But adult guides sometimes make mistakes too, he noted.

One of the Gamble House guides, eighth-grader Claire Smith, said those on tour listen to her better than if an adult guide was telling them: “Don’t touch.”

Another guide, Melinda Wood, simply said, “You’re a kid and you can really run around with them.”

Catching herself and looking around the house filled with lamp shades made by Tiffany and priceless chairs designed and handmade specifically for the Gambles, she added: “Well, not really run around, but you understand them because you’re a kid too.”