History Takes Shape in Future : Artistic Traveler Helps to Mold Fledgling Balboa Park Museum

A galactic traveler surveys his holiday meal of freeze-dried stuffed turkey in a silver tube and Mumm’s champagne in a rubber balloon. Reminded of Christmas repasts on another planet, the homesick astronaut gazes out of the space capsule’s window and lo!--he sees a galaxy of sparkling Christmas ornaments spinning about a brilliant silver sun.

Such is one man’s view of Christmas future--or, the holiday feast as it could appear to the space traveler in years to come. It’s Edward Moore’s idea of a “savory supper,” the theme for the recent holiday display at the struggling, still uncompleted Museum of San Diego History in Balboa Park.

Moore’s vignette was one of 31 installations to grace the cavernous interior of the Casa de Balboa for the San Diego Historical Society’s seventh annual “Celebrate the Holidays” exhibit. A fund-raiser for the fledgling Museum of San Diego History, it was titled “Savory Suppers and Fashionable Feasts.”

Based on Smithsonian Exhibit

The inspiration for this year’s display was the Smithsonian Institution’s traveling show, “Savory Suppers and Fashionable Feasts: Dining in Victorian America,” which featured fancy silver utensils, elaborate table settings and period parlor games. The show will run at the San Diego museum until spring.

Many of the design artists who helped create displays for “Celebrate the Holidays” followed the Victorian example and chose old-fashioned, elegant scenarios--from a 16th-Century Spanish castle to a vintage holiday scene re-created from Hotel del Coronado’s early years.

Others leaned more toward the innovative and eccentric, such as Dodie Garner’s “Pasta Tree,” strewn with festive multicolored strands of linguine and fettuccine, and designer Matt Stevens’ feast for an alley cat, in honor of San Diego’s forgotten cats.

Many decorators used their own Christmas trinkets and home furnishings, or those of their celebrity hosts. The display closed Dec. 11, so that contributors could use their ornaments, dishes and furniture over the holidays.

The money raised, which is yet to be tallied--will be used to build permanent displays for the museum, which will occupy about half the Casa de Balboa and will depict the history of “America’s Finest City” from 1850 to 1960. The museum will also have a library and photographic department in its research archives. A date for opening the museum’s entire exhibition space is up in the air, dependent on fund raising.

Designing the Museum

Moore, the man with the futuristic vision, is designing the museum. He has spent the last five years developing a floor plan for the more than 15,000 square feet of expected exhibits.

And just what is a museum to Moore--a man who sees galaxies as ornaments, who has lived with aborigines and performed risque plays for Samoan natives? “It’s just another form of theater,” said the veteran actor, artist, director and traveler.

“The majority of museums were established between the turn of the century and 1930, and practically nothing has been done with them since,” said Moore, over a cup of coffee in the museum’s cafe on a recent December morning. “So we have a tremendous number of outdated museums across the country, and you can’t get people to come into these dark, dusty places full of stuffed animals.

Effects ‘Will Grab People’

“The only way you can address that is to renovate, update--and that’s the work that I do,” Moore said. “We’ll use lighting, animation, startling special effects, which will grab people, pull them through the door--and then, maybe they will learn a little something.”

In 1986, Moore established a business called Realization, which he describes as a design consulting firm specializing in the development of innovative exhibits for museums. Moore sees a great future in museum design and is working as creative consultant to the Museum of San Diego History, the Escondido Historical Society and the Maritime Museum of San Diego.

Moore recently unveiled a new installation aboard the Maritime Museum’s Star of India, titled “ ‘Tween Deck.” Costumed mannequins portray the sailing ship’s passengers while on a trip from England to New Zealand in 1879. The scene was re-created as accurately as possible from a diary belonging to a passenger who had been on the Euterpe, as the Star of India was then called.

Moore Has Traveled the Seas

It is a trip Moore himself has taken, though not in the cramped conditions once tolerated by the travelers aboard the Star of India. Moore and his wife, P.A., went to New Zealand aboard a freighter ship.

In fact, Moore, 54, has spent most of his adult years traveling the seas--the South Seas in particular. He and his wife “went off walking” in 1965, and their journeys have taken them to locales as exotic as Australia, Western Samoa, the Great Barrier Reef and an Arizona dude ranch. But, whether living on a sheep ranch in the Australian outback or backpacking through rain forests, one thing has remained constant in Moore’s life: his love of theater.

Disenchanted with “the whole American scene” during the Watergate era, the couple moved to New Zealand and stayed six years. Though there were few jobs not associated with sheep, P.A. eventually landed a teaching job and Moore worked on his plays. Soon enough, he became co-founder, designer and technical director of a dinner theater in the town of Palmerston North, one of only three professional theaters in New Zealand at the time.

Moore and P.A. lived in a shearer’s cottage on a sheep ranch, or a “sheep station.”

“Everybody knew everybody, probably the way San Diego was 30 years ago,” he recalled. “At the time we were there, there was almost no crime. Once somebody stole a car and it made big headlines, as if someone had massacred 10 children.

“That was the kind of country it was--very simple. It was like paradise,” Moore said. “Naturally, we got a little bored.”

They Moved On to Australia

So they moved on and spent two years in Australia, where P.A. worked as a cook on a sheep station in the outback. “There I tried to write in daily temperatures that reached 120 degrees, and she learned how to cook mutton 101 different ways,” Moore said.

They were eventually drawn to Western Samoa, “where the islands themselves are wonderful, typically South Seas, but hopelessly overcrowded,” Moore said. Unemployment was so severe there that only one of them was permitted to work, so P.A. taught school while Moore played a lot of golf and rustled up a local theater company.

The company decided to do a production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” staged inside a ceremonial “fale,” an open thatched hut, in the courtyard of the brothel-turned-hotel made famous in Michener’s tales of the South Pacific. “I think it was one of the best directing jobs I’ve ever done,” Moore said.

The local newspaper critics, properly schooled in missionary ethics, lambasted the production. But the natives were thrilled by the foul language used in the play, he said. “We received some of the worst reviews I’ve ever gotten, but we played to packed houses every night,” Moore said, clearly delighted at the irony.

Later in their travels, Moore and his wife “played cowboys and Indians” for two years while managing a dude ranch in Tumacacori, Ariz. “It was a very unusual form of theater,” he mused. “We were both playing our roles 24 hours a day.”

Began Theater Career Doing Summer Stock

Educated in theater arts at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Moore began his theater career doing summer stock during college. His first job out of graduate school was as a copywriter for an advertising agency, but he soon gravitated back to drama and helped establish an off-off-Broadway theater--so far off Broadway that it was in Ohio.

Moore has written a number of plays and won two playwrighting contests in college. He draws heavily on his traveling experiences for his creative works and often touches upon the theme of communication--or miscommunication--between people of all cultures.

The inspiration for one play, not yet penned, lies in his memory of a place called Jabaroo, Australia.

Moore and his wife had been wandering through the northern territories of Australia for a while, P.A. having finished her stint as sheep station chef. At Ayres Rock they fell in with a group of aborigines and lived with them for a while. “We were staggered at how well-educated they are,” Moore said. “The aborigines want to learn all about the white man’s culture, but they don’t want to be assimilated at all. They send their children to the ‘Western’ schools, then the kids come back and live with the tribes.

“So we might encounter a naked man sitting in the dust eating a lizard, speaking with a perfect British accent and discussing the latest article in Time magazine,” Moore said. “They kept us abreast of world affairs.”

Off to Aborigine Reserve

Emboldened by their experience with the relatively civilized aborigines, the Moores set off to visit a vast aborigine reserve called Arnheim Land at the wild northern edge of the continent. After jumping through many bureaucratic hoops to obtain the necessary permission to enter the off-limits reserve, the Moores set off on their journey.

They were startled, indeed, to find that the road to the wilderness was paved and perfectly maintained. The picture-perfect road, in fact, went all the way to the edge of the reserve, where it simply stopped in the middle of the rain forest, Moore recalled. Curious, he and his wife took a road that branched off to the side and discovered a brand-new town, a sparkling subdivision that looked like a slice of any Western suburb.

Jabaroo, the Moores discovered, was established by a cartel of mining companies and sits atop a huge, untapped uranium ore field. “The aborigines refuse to let them dig it,” he said. “Everyone living in Jabaroo is a mining engineer or geologist and they want to be there when they first open it up, because there’s billions of dollars to be made.

“It’s a fully functional community that’s sitting there purely on speculation,” Moore said.

The couple, who lived in San Diego for a while in the late 1960s, finally returned to settle down here in 1980. Moore expects it to take at least another seven years to complete the Museum of San Diego History project. P.A. is an administrator at UC San Diego and is working on her doctorate.

They don’t mind the relative stagnation, Moore said, because they figure they did the right thing by using their younger, more energetic years to travel. “A lot of people do it the other way around,” he noted. “We don’t have a lot more productive working years left, and we’ve never put anything aside,” Moore said, “so now we’re working on building up a bit of a nest egg to support us in our decrepit years.”

Of course, “settling down” is a relative term for the Moores. “We were setting goals the other night for our future,” Moore said, “and we said, ‘Well . . . what about travel?’ ”