Living in the Past : To caretakers who live in area museums, it’s no big deal to share their homes with tours, vandals, ghosts and historical artifacts

Paul Hafen, Joseph Marino and Elva Meline can best explain their living arrangements to friends by handing them museum brochures.

They live in area museums as caretakers or curators. They admit that their “open-house” style of life is a bit unusual. Bathing in an 1880s copper tub, inviting guests to stay the night in a Victorian guest room or sharing quarters with a ghost isn’t for everyone.

Every Wednesday through Sunday afternoon, the public tramps through Hafen’s adobe home. “The rest of the time, when it’s not open for tours, it’s all mine,” said Hafen, caretaker of the sprawling Leonis Adobe ranch in Calabasas.

Hafen, 72, moved into the Monterey-style house three years ago. He is on duty from 5 p.m. until early morning when he leaves for his job as general manager of Creative Dental Ceramics in Los Angeles. He lives at the museum rent-free, as have two previous caretakers. He is there in case of fire or vandalism; he has no other formal duties.

Home of Pioneers

Leonis Adobe, which was built in 1844 and is a historical landmark, was the home of pioneer Miguel Leonis and his Indian wife, Espiritu.

“Now this is living; you can watch the world go by,” Hafen said from a second-story porch outside his room. Before him was a small vineyard and arbor covered with budding grapevines. The dim roar of the Ventura Freeway behind the house could be heard. Bustling Calabasas Road with its antique shops, restaurants and clothing stores cut a parallel path in front.

“Most of the things around here are more than 100 years old,” Hafen said. “I really consider it my home. In fact, I got married right in this doorway here.”

Hafen paused in a curved archway. Two years ago, 50 guests filled the museum’s living room for his wedding to Mary, his third wife, who lives near Victorville and visits on weekends.

“It’s like going back in time,” said Mary Hafen, 65. “It’s amazing; you sit there in an oasis and the world goes on around you.”

“I think he really enjoys the house,” Glenn Hiatt, museum director, said about Hafen.

Hafen got the job after a friend recommended him to the museum’s board of directors. “He has free rein of the place,” Hiatt said. “We don’t want to have any big parties, but we don’t restrict him too much either--he’s a very congenial fellow.”

Company Barbecue

“I’m having a company barbecue next month,” Hafen said, pointing to a massive barbecue pit in the museum’s back yard. Nearby was a chicken coop, vegetable garden, farm machinery and a corral where sheep, goats, horses and a few Texas longhorns stirred up the dust. “They’ve got that huge rotisserie--we could do a cow.”

Hafen occasionally puts overnight guests in the master bedroom, where Miguel and Espiritu Leonis once slept. The room’s entrance is gated; like other rooms, it is decorated with Victorian furniture. A massive canopy bed framed by flowing red velvet drapes and a carved mahogany headboard dominates the small room.

“I just unlock the gate and tell them not to use the commode,” Hafen said, pointing to a basin under the bed. “I tell them to use the bathroom.”

Down the hall from Hafen’s private bedroom, originally used by the Leonis’ only child, Marcellina, is Hafen’s bathroom, which doubles as a tourist exhibit with its 1880 copper-lined, walnut-paneled bathtub and 1920s fixtures.

“One time the board of directors had a group up here and I stepped out with just a wraparound towel on,” Hafen said. “I took a towel with me on the spur of the moment. It could have been a disaster.

“I no longer bathe between 1 and 4.”

What Joseph Marino once saw on TV newscasts, he now sees in his back yard, which is a city park.

“At first it was kind of spooky,” said Marino, 53, who moved two years ago to Bolton Hall Museum in Little Landers Park in Tujunga. “You have to deal with all the drug addicts, ex-cons and dopers that hang out in the neighborhood. When you actually live what you see on the news, it’s kind of scary.

“When I first moved in, kids would climb up on the roof and throw rocks and burning paper down the fireplace,” said Marino, a former Glendale mailman who--with his walrus mustache, shock of gray-blond hair and portly frame--could easily double for Captain Kangaroo. “They were testing me. But now they help me clean up the park.”

Lives Rent-Free

Marino receives no salary for his full-time job but lives rent-free. As a 24-hour live-in caretaker, he is responsible for keeping up the main hall, which is used by church groups, women’s clubs and an art society. Another caretaker lived at the museum, which was built in 1913 as a community hall, for a year before Marino moved in.

Marino sometimes sits alone at night in the hall with its imposing stone fireplace. Tujunga Indian artifacts and other memorabilia surround him. There is a yellowed copy of the Tujunga city song: “Tujunga--See What You’ve Done For Me.”

“I just sit and look out the windows,” Marino said, petting his small poodle named Bebette (“that’s French for bug”). “Kids look in the window and think I’m a ghost.”

Bebette growled at some visitors who poked their heads in Marino’s kitchen. Behind him was his bedroom, which once served as the Tujunga jail.

“It’s a strange feeling, living in the middle of a park,” Marino said. “When I open my back door, I see the public day and night--like what you see now.” Marino pointed out his kitchen window. Four teen-age boys were exchanging cash for marijuana joints.

Mixture of People

Like many city parks, Little Landers Park hosts a mixture of people--parents and their children, teen-agers, transients and an occasional reader. A small playground is at the rear of the one-acre parcel, and picnic tables surrounded by pepper, oak and olive trees dot the area. “They shoot up in the women’s restroom all the time,” Marino said. “The city doesn’t put a lock on it because they’d just break it.”

“The city is considering installing floodlights in the park,” said Carl Decker, district supervisor for the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department. “We have worse parks, but there is definitely a problem at Little Landers, and it is mostly at night with kids and gangs.”

“We have a mixture of good and bad,” said Sally Walker, vice president of Little Landers Historical Society. “Joe helps to keep the drug addicts out of the building. A couple of times, they tried to burn the front door down.”

Marino, who regularly scours graffiti from the building’s fortress-like stone walls, said transients routinely ask for assistance.

“The first day I started working here, an older guy, an alcoholic, would come to my door for help,” Marino said, slipping another of an endless chain of cigarettes into his mouth. “I took him to the V.A. hospital for help.”

A small boy on a bicycle crashed nearby. Marino ran to him and untangled the child’s feet from the bike’s spokes.

Dragging a Guitar

A transient, dragging a guitar behind him, crossed the street and entered the park.

Marino walked up to the man, who was dressed in a frayed leather vest and checked flannel shirt. A small blue swastika was tattooed on the inside of his left arm. Bebette growled.

“How ya doing?” Marino asked.

“Lousy,” the man answered.

“Been a rough day?”

“It’s been a rough life ,” the man replied, lifting his bashed-in guitar and strumming a few notes.

Back in his kitchen, Marino motioned out his window. “I tell people, ‘You want excitement? Just come sit out in my park--we’ve got everything.’ ”

There are times, Elva Meline admits, when she hears “creaking kinds of noises” in the Andres Pico Adobe in Mission Hills, where she lives and works as curator. She hears them while doing research in the library. Alone. At night.

“But they’re probably just wood beams that are expanding,” added Meline, 79, jumping slightly as the old lock mechanism on her front door began jiggling wildly.

“Excuse me,” she said sheepishly, rising to greet what she could only assume were visitors. “I do get goose bumps and shivers up and down my back. We do have a lot of ghost stories.”

Meline, who moved into the museum in 1976 after 25 years with the San Fernando Historical Society, pays no rent and receives no salary for her duties, which include assembling exhibits, light cleaning, organizing community events and secretarial work.

“It was the answer to my prayers and the perfect job for me,” said Meline, who lives in a sectioned-off second-story bedroom. The historical society invited Meline to move in because of her involvement in saving the building, which was scheduled for demolition in 1965.

“Elva dearly loves that old house,” said Allie Eckert, 63, a past docent and longtime friend of Meline’s. “And she’s very knowledgeable about California history.”

Meline’s granddaughter occasionally stays in a second-story bedroom once used by the Pico family. “Everyone calls it my house,” Meline said while sitting on a crimson Victorian sofa in the adobe’s dimly lit living room, which dates to 1834. “But it’s really everybody’s house.”

A massive 1880 Weber square grand piano and 1869 rosewood melodeon guard the room’s south entry. Dour portraits of Isaac Lankershim and Isaac Van Nuys line the walls near a mantle clock flanked by towering rosewood candlesticks. Just above the mantle hangs an oil painting showing the adobe in ruins, circa 1920.

“You’d be surprised at the number of people who visit just to experience the place because of all the ghost stories,” Meline said. “People swear they feel a kind of presence on the stairs and up in the exhibit hall.”

Mark Harrington, former curator of Highland Park’s Southwest Museum, regularly heard the clatter of Spanish dancing on the living room’s red tile floor and on the staircase. Harrington restored and lived in the adobe in the 1930s and ‘40s.

Ghostly Feet

The clatter purportedly comes from the ghostly feet of Catarina Pico, an adopted child of Andres Pico, an early settler for whom the museum is named.

“Catarina supposedly sits underneath the staircase and knits. There , in that chair,” Meline said.

Turning, she looked at an 1888 Edison cylinder phonograph, with its oversized, lily-shaped horn jutting into the room. Meline popped in a tube-shaped record, wound up the device and lowered the stylus. A tinny World War I song filled the cool room, reverberating off the adobe’s 21-inch-thick walls.

“I sometimes have a fire when it’s cold enough,” Meline said, walking across the living room to her private kitchen, adding that she enjoys reading when the public has gone for the day.

“I remember the first night I stayed here,” Meline said, glancing up the staircase. “I said out loud, while walking up the stairs to bed, ‘Well, Catarina, you’re going to have to take care of me now.’ ” Meline paused, her eyes brightening. “And she has.”