For George C. Page, the Pits Are a Pleasure

The museum at the La Brea tar pits exists because of an orange.

Early in this century, when George C. Page was a 12-year-old schoolboy in his native Nebraska, a teacher gave him an orange from California.

“I was so awed by the beauty of that piece of fruit that I said I hope someday I can live where that came from,” Page, now a trim, energetic 89, recalled in an office of the Hancock Park museum that bears both his name and his personal stamp.

At 16, Page hitchhiked to Los Angeles with $2.30 in his pocket, living on Hershey bars and 10-cent bowls of bean soup fortified with crackers and ketchup. He knew no one here, but “any place that produced that piece of fruit must have merit,” he believed. He got work as a busboy, although he was so naive that at first he thought the job involved driving a bus.

On his single day off each week, Page did what many curious young Angelenos with little money did for fun. He went to the ostrich races in Pasadena--once he and a bunch of his pals shared a scrambled ostrich egg. He went to Busch Gardens, formerly in Van Nuys. And one day he went to Hancock Park to see the oozing pools of asphalt famous around the world as the La Brea tar pits.

Fascinated by the puddles that had trapped saber-toothed cats, mastodons and other ancient animals, he was dismayed to learn that the only way he could see the fossilized bones was to travel seven miles to the Museum of Natural History in Exposition Park.

“What a pity they haven’t been exhibited on the site where they were found,” he thought. Then, he recalled, “a half-century goes by before I’m in a position to do anything about it.”

What Page did about it was to give Los Angeles a $4-million museum for its La Brea treasures, a unique cache of thousands of remains, some caught in the lethal goo 40,000 years ago. But, more than that, he shaped the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries, which opened in 1977, bringing his years of experience in marketing and packaging to the building and its contents.

Although Page never went to business school (his formal education ended with eighth grade), he knows packaging. When he was 17, living in a $3-a-month attic room in downtown Los Angeles, working days busing tables and nights jerking sodas, he started the company that would make his fortune.

He decided to send a box of California fruits to his mother and brothers back in Nebraska as a Christmas gift. He artfully lined the box with red paper and decorated it with tinsel. The teen-ager’s gift was so attractive that 37 other roomers in his boarding house offered to pay him “what’s right” to make up similar boxes to send back to their Midwestern families. The result was Mission Pak, the gift-package company Page operated until 1946.

“Believe me, to open the purse, you had to appeal to the eye,” he said.

Throughout his professional life, Page was always aware of the power of attractive packaging. On a trip to France when he was 21, he saw a new material called cellophane and grabbed up as much as he could to beautify his gift baskets. He once operated a small business that made spiffy auto bodies to upgrade the appearance of battered but functional cars. And, as a developer, he was sensitive to the importance of landscaping in enhancing the value of a property.

Page wanted to create a setting for the La Brea fossils that would “be right for the subject and something that was different and outstanding.” He rejected the proposals of five established architects whose designs included a kind of open-air circus tent and a gigantic three-leafed clover. On the recommendation of a friend, he talked to two young men not long out of architecture school: Willis E. Fagan and Franklin W. Thornton. Using their own limited funds, the pair spent a month touring the museums of America, asking professionals what they would do differently if they could re-create their institutions. Finally, they came to Page with a proposal.

“You’ve taken them out of the ground here,” the young architects said of the La Brea discoveries. “Why don’t we put them back in?”

They proposed building a burial mound for the collection, a museum half underground to conserve energy and to keep the park grounds as intact as possible.

Once construction was under way, Page got a trailer and was on the site at 7 o’clock every morning, including Christmas, for three years.

Originally, Page was only committed to paying for the museum’s shell. But it soon became clear that if he wanted to see the museum operating in his lifetime, he would have to do more than that.

He is not impressed by how long it takes the county to get things done nor how much it ultimately costs.

“What they do,” he said, “is they call in an expert, and he calls in an assistant expert.”

Page used his money and energy to streamline the process. “I happen to be a persistent cuss,” he said, “and when I start something, I finish it.”

He was horrified when he first saw them at how the La Brea discoveries had been displayed at the Museum of Natural History. The skeleton of the imperial mammoth was propped up with plumbing pipes, and the bones fell with every good-sized tremor. Even worse, in his view, “they had the 9,000-year-old woman stretched out on plywood, covered with dust, and the kids would look at her and yawn.”

“I was determined to breathe life into every exhibit,” he said. If the fossils were not exhibited skillfully, he feared, visitors would see nothing but “bones, bones, bones.”

Page was especially concerned about displaying the bones of the woman--the only human remains found in the tar pits--to maximum effect. He makes it clear that not everyone appreciated the fact that he, an amateur and a non-scientist, had strong views on the museum’s displays.

There were those at the parent museum, he said, who wondered “how can a man who’s been lucky in the jungle of commerce presume to arrange a museum in a professional manner?” Eyebrows were raised, he said, when he sought advice--not from the museum but from the Walt Disney Co.--on displaying the 9,000-year-old woman.

Page approached the creator of the spectral figures for Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion attraction.

“There’s what is known as Pepper’s ghost,” Page was told, describing an optical illusion in which an object seems to turn into another image and back again. As a result of that conversation, when visitors to the museum look into a dark case containing a cast of the ancient woman’s skull atop a modern woman’s skeleton, the bones seem to become a young girl.

The effect is created with the composite skeleton, a model of a young Indian woman with long, black hair, careful lighting and a piece of plate glass. (The 17 bones actually belonging to the 9,000-year-old woman are in the museum’s ossuary.) A similar display shows a skeleton seemingly transformed into a snarling saber-toothed tiger.

“Evidently I’ve done it right, because the kids squeal with ecstasy,” Page said.

Over the objections of purists, the museum features a “dinosaur theater,” where visitors can see a short film about that most-charismatic of creatures. No dinosaur bone has ever been found at the tar pits, but virtually every visitor to the museum expects to see their remains. Page thinks the youngsters who come by the thousands should be educated, not disappointed.

Page also insisted that there be two theaters, not one, so visitors can see an explanatory film about the tar pits. “People don’t like to wait,” he said. The theaters are next to the entrance because Page says he thinks visitors should have a vivid image of what life was like in Los Angeles of the Ice Ages before they see the inanimate remains in the rest of the museum.

In Page’s view, pictures are far better than words at engaging the public. He likes pithy explanatory cards, not epics, next to exhibits.

“I’m not going to put a book on the card,” he said. He is also proud of the way that painted backgrounds, showing the La Brea “monsters” as they were in life, flesh out exhibits of skeletons and plaster models.

A resident of Hancock Park, Page is a hands-on patron who continues to keep close tabs on the museum. When natural asphalt proved inappropriate for a display that shows visitors how strong the sticky stuff can be, he found a chemist to develop a synthetic version that didn’t harden up like the real thing.

“When they have these problems come up, they call George,” he said. When he walks through the museum, he notices everything from the health of individual plants in the atrium garden--”That sego lily looks a little sick,” he warned the gardener--to the condition of the carpet.

The carpet is emblematic of his ongoing involvement. Page wanted carpet, not marble or ceramic tile, on the floor because it is more comfortable to walk on.

He thought the present carpet would stand up well when he chose it 13 years ago. And he’s glad he got a 10% overrun: It’s proved invaluable for repairing spots damaged by high heels.

But 13 years is 13 years, and half a million people walk on that carpet every year. Recently, Page said, he heard that a European manufacturer has developed an ultra-durable tile that might be just the thing for the museum floor.