San Fernando Mission Prepares for Children of Video Age

The San Fernando Mission, whose 35,000 visitors each year are mostly schoolchildren, was bracing for the first busload of pupils in the new school year.

Building toward a grimace, Msgr. Francis J. Weber said that as mission administrator he wants to provide a meaningful 75-minute tour for Los Angeles fourth-graders studying California history.

“But sometimes we have to ask the kids to leave because they’re bothering the fowl or breaking the flowers,” he said. “A third of the teachers sit in the bus or in the park across the street while the kids tear up the place.”

What was different this September was the unveiling of a small movie theater, the first-ever audiovisual feature within a musty museum where exhibits lean toward the static and unpretentious.

With money from the Fritz Burns Foundation, the mission used laser discs to record three existing films on Catholic history. Visitors to the new El Teatro de Junipero Serra make their choice by pushing one of three buttons near a four-foot-square screen.

“The room is kid-proof,” Weber quickly noted. “We have unbreakable glass in front of screen and you can’t jam the buttons.”

Adult tourists seem to like it, said Weber, longtime historian and archivist for the archdiocese. “The movies are going on every time I look in.”

Nevertheless, he admitted that fourth-graders are likely to fidget if they choose either of the two longer presentations: a 29-minute film on Father Serra, the 18th-Century founder of the California mission system, or a 24-minute show on mission history. Weber wrote the script on the latter in the early 1960s and plans to revise and shorten it.

More engaging is a 12-minute movie showing the history of the archdiocese and employing special effects and several film clips.

Waiting inside the gift shop-mission entrance for the children to arrive, Weber pointed impishly to the wall over the cashier’s area. A large, framed cartoon depicts a gun-toting preacher saying, “Smoke and I’ll shoot your ash off!” Weber said it was drawn by artist Andy Dagosta, a fellow western history buff. In a gift shop crammed with rosaries, religious medals and statues, he said with a smile, the cartoon has prompted some indignant “Real-ly, Father” remarks.

Just then, out of a yellow bus poured 42 youngsters--second-graders to high school students--from Ability Plus School in Woodland Hills. Several wore the school’s “A+” T-shirts.

Weber was visibly relieved.

“These are high-achievers, aren’t they?” he asked the teacher, Carol Loweree. She nodded yes. It turned out that this was “missions week” at the private, non-sectarian school. The group was traveling later in the week to the San Gabriel and Santa Barbara missions.

Weber slipped back to his office. Since none of the mission’s volunteer docents had been lined up to lead the tour, curator Kevin Feeney stepped in.

Feeney guided the students through two rooms of exhibits, but it wasn’t until they went outside that the younger ones became excited. “Whoa . . . holy smoke!” They had spotted the several pheasantlike peafowl on the grounds.

The group eventually filed into the 233-foot-long building known as the convento. In one room, Feeney stood before a pipe organ he said was 200 years old. “Wow,” said James Moore, a 9-year-old clutching a feather he picked up outside.

“Can you play it?” one boy asked. “You can, but you won’t get any sound,” the curator responded.

Feeney was peppered with questions in each artifact-filled room. Finally, he led them into the new theater where the kids settled into the movable, hard-plastic chairs.

Responding to a question, Feeney said historians don’t know what the room was used for originally. He did say it “is immediately above an old wine cellar. . . .”

“Is there any wine down there?” asked Jesse Decrescenzo, 14.

“There are wine barrels, but no wine,” Feeney said.

The teacher chose the mission history film. As might be expected, it speaks in highly favorable terms of the “civilizing” of the Indians by the mission fathers and attributes the suffering by Indians at the end of the 40-year mission period to the sudden “secularization” of the missions by Mexico.

The film was heavy on minutiae. And words such as discernible, replica, expectant, paleontologist, annals and canonically appeared in the narration by veteran radio announcer Thomas Cassidy.

Several youngsters stretched and squirmed. The bus driver dozed off.

However, Dharma Wright, 13, insisted afterward: “I thought it was cool. I liked it.” Shawn Thorburn, 10, conceded, “There was at least five words I didn’t understand.”

Johanna Sweigart, 11, added confidently, “We’ll ‘clear them’ later.”

At the gift shop, where the children could buy souvenirs before leaving, teacher Loweree explained that the students later will discuss words that they didn’t understand. “We’ll go to a dictionary, talk about the definitions and ‘clear them,’ ” Loweree said.

As the Ability Plus youngsters left, ending a well-behaved but probing two-hour stay, cashier Mary Shaw teased the curator-turned-guide, “Your eyes have that glazed look.”

“I haven’t done that for four years, since I left teaching,” Feeney said.