Home-Grown History

As he had done so often in younger days, Harry Lechler bent over a wooden Victrola, lifted the instrument’s arm and slowly placed the needle on a record.

And as if he still were a young boy playing a song for his sweetheart, the 83-year-old man excitedly wound up the Victrola and listened as the voice of Bing Crosby filled the room.

“If you want it loud, you keep both doors open,” he said as he opened wide the doors of the phonograph’s acoustic horn.

The Victrola is one of thousands of artifacts that Lechler has collected over 52 years. Determined to preserve days gone by, the Piru native has turned his collection into Lechler’s Museum.

“We do not advertise or anything; people hear about us from friends and relatives who have visited,” said Lechler, who doesn’t charge admission.

Tucked into the back yard of his home at Market and Church streets, the collection fills two sheds, a garage and an 864-square-foot room. Agricultural tools from as far back as 1875 clutter open space in the yard, while the main building flaunts the skin of an 18-foot boa constrictor, Chumash arrows and mortars, a copper ax blade traced to the Incas and correspondence between his wife’s aunt and then-First Lady Grace Coolidge, among other things.

Lechler said he began putting the museum together in 1943 when he bought a showcase to display shotguns that he had inherited. Friends and relatives began to chip in.

“I never turned anyone down,” Lechler said. “Whatever people want to donate, I take it.”