Museum Reaches Out to Children : Exhibit: Youngsters at Autry gallery will be encouraged to touch displays that trace five generations of a Mexican-American family.

From a child’s perspective, traditional museums can be torture chambers--rows of stuffy rooms where adults dawdle and speak in hushed tones, tall display cabinets filled with incomprehensible objects and “don’t touch” signs affixed to the most intriguing items.

But a new permanent children’s gallery at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum is a different sort of museum exhibit.

The gallery’s first show, scheduled to open at noon next Tuesday and last two years, will document five generations of a Mexican-American ranch family believed to have emigrated to Arizona in the early 1800s.

So far, so boring, a child might respond. But the twist is that the story of the Ruelas family is told through replicas of the family’s two Arizona homes that have been re-created inside the gallery. One is a Victorian-era brick house in Tucson, the other a 1903 adobe ranch house. Both are packed full of things to pick up, try on, turn on and climb on.

This exhibit encourages young museum-goers to touch. Through their tactile pursuits, they can learn about ranch families who often established second residences in Southwestern cities to take advantage of the cultural and educational opportunities there.

“We set it up as a mystery: ‘Can you discover why this family, that’s been in the American Southwest for 170 years, had two homes?’ ” said Cynthia Harnisch, director of education and programs at the museum.

Clues abound. Hanging in the townhouse attic is a drop-waist wedding dress made of lace and satin. A photograph in one of the few exhibit cases, just past the attic banister, depicts Adelina Ruelas in the original dress on her 1927 wedding day. Nearby is another picture of the bride as a teen-ager at the ranch, dressed in chaps and a cowboy hat, her small gold earrings the only hint of her more feminine tastes.

A shiny new canteen hangs from the saddle on a fiberglass horse--which children can climb. A similar canteen, battered with age, is hidden in the attic, documenting the family’s practice of saving everything and transferring to the city house those items too worn and fragile for the ranch.

Children also may stumble on more complex family mysteries.

Toys stored in the attic reflect the Ruelases’ journey from wealth to poverty during the Great Depression. They range from expensive China-head dolls to boiled tailbones from cows.

Hidden in boxes, cupboards and trunks are items engraved with Hebrew characters, including several tops, or dreidels. These hint at the possibility that the family descended from Jews who fled Spain during the Inquisition. Even the family remains unsure of the validity of those clues.

The exhibit also has another serious goal: debunking prejudicial stereotypes. With that aim in mind, the museum staff chose a real-life family, with all its richness and wrinkles, instead of creating a generic one.

Using a real family allowed the museum’s education staff members to correct their own misconceptions. They had planned for the adobe to appear rustic, with cracks in its painted surface to expose the clay brick beneath. But a descendant of the Ruelas family, Mary Ann Ruelas, insisted that the family took great pride in keeping its adobe crack-free.

“We found that with the great torrential rains that they have there, the house would have dissolved away,” Harnisch said. “It would have been a great teaching tool--’See, here’s how adobe is made’--but it wouldn’t have been accurate.”

Ruelas works as an assistant director of educational programs at the museum. She has made numerous trips to Arizona and received countless telephone calls and packages from relatives who heard about the project.

Some memories brought back by the project were painful.

Through a heating grate in the attic, children can overhear a taped conversation in which Ruelas’ father, Rudy, tells of his experiences with racism. Such stories provide the vivid detail that would have been hard to replicate with a generic family.

Scrapbooks and photo albums stored in trunks in the attic tell tales of marriages, deaths and friendships. A bullet hole in a wooden trunk inside an exhibit case lends credence to an aunt’s wild story of a posse shootout in the early 1900s, during which bullets passed through the adobe’s windows.

The adobe’s tin roof could prompt a discussion of the family’s love for fireworks, which set the original wood-shake roof on fire in the 1920s. A 1946 radio show that can be turned on from a radio perched on the adobe’s screen porch documents the world’s happenings the day Navy Seaman Rudy Ruelas returned from World War II.

The exhibit is being sponsored by the Los Angeles Times and the Times-Mirror Foundation with a $150,000 grant. Donations also were received from companies including RC Cola and IBM and from many individuals.

As the exhibit evolved, gallery teacher Noelle Toal interviewed museum visitors and fourth-grade students at Mt. Washington Elementary School, the Autry museum’s adopted school, about the project. What she found was that her description of the Ruelas family caused people to reminisce about their roots.

Recognizing that visitors to the children’s gallery might have the same response, the education staff set out to stimulate that conversation by designing the adobe porch and the city house’s living room as places to sit and chat. Paper handouts in the attic filing cabinet urge children to create their own family tree or timeline. A printed handout of the Ruelas family’s recipe for corn pudding will encourage visitors to leave behind accounts of their family’s culinary traditions for a gallery recipe book.

“We hope that children will learn to appreciate their own heritage and learn to appreciate that of others, too,” Ruelas said.