Museum for the Ages

First off, you’ve got to take into consideration you’re talking a Disneyland-jaded generation of SoCal children: E-ticket babies who, even back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, were weaned on “animatronics” and something that we could crudely refer to as first-generation “interactive” (pop-up books and help-our-hero by drawing-on-the-TV-screen cartoons like “Winky Dink and You”). So a trip to the Science and Industry museum went head-to-head with all that the land of alternative leisure had to offer.

So on the eve of the posh new California Science Center’s grand-scale unveiling, I find myself rooting around a bit. Within the dusty memory banks, I can easily come up with the theme songs to various game shows and sitcoms, but I can’t remember if the first time I went to Exposition Park’s museums was as part of a yellow swarm of school buses descending on the complex and the adjacent rose gardens for an afternoon of “classroom without walls,” or as part of an underhanded plot my mother had hatched to keep me from watching the two solid hours of Lucy reruns (late and early career) I had happily blocked out each day in anticipation of vacation viewing. Without telling us, she enrolled both me and my younger brother in summer classes that Exposition Park’s museums routinely offered. Then just as I was settling into KKTV’s first 9 a.m. episode of “I Love Lucy,” I was unceremoniously dispatched to the showers, directed to dress and load into the car: We were going “out.”

Harumph.

You might imagine, I had hard feelings.

The classes became more than a tolerated punishment--even my TV-addled brain shook itself out of blue-cathode-ray slumber. I took one about birds while my brother took one about dinosaurs and reptiles. I knew kids who took classes and made magnets and pulleys and intricate contraptions with rubber bands and paper clips. I spoke to a woman recently who remembered that she later impressed her fifth-grade class because she knew what a dry cell was, and that piece of info came from her Science and Industry summer residence--a class called “Bells, Buzzers and Ringers” that she says was probably her father “projecting,” since she was the only girl who had signed up. A first lesson in crossing the gender bar.

But that’s just it. The California Science and Industry museum was custom-fitted for a city of the future, for a region that wanted to meddle with dictum and formality and old rules, and for a generation who thought of back-lot tours and gentrified ghost towns as everyday occurrences.

Stepping across the threshold of the Science and Industry museum threw open a sense of possibility. The air was less rarefied than that of LACMA (dauntingly known in casual parlance as County), where you felt you’d get a knuckle rapping for staring too closely at a masterwork’s frame. Science and Industry encouraged touching. You could race around in your P.F. Flyers, veer from one exhibit to the next and peer into booths that were outfitted with buttons that you could depress over and over and over again--to learn about some principal of physics or geometry or just to send your teacher ‘round the bend.

If you passed any time in an L.A. County school in the pre-Proposition 13 days, most certainly you were scooped up to take a walk through those grounds. Despite the moored airplane and big boat propeller standing sentinel outside, the poor Science and Industry museum had to do battle with the Museum of Natural History’s dinosaurs. “And when you’re a kid, what can outdo dinosaurs?” suggests a friend, a self-described “natural history guy.”

OK, he’s got something there.

But Science and Industry focused on other towering puzzles: It was a vibrating place full of hums and clicks and whirs and snaps; glistening metal trapezing in and out of nowhere; a stream of air thrusting a swirl of pingpong balls into mad popping-corn formation.

We were mesmerized by the layers of the Earth’s crust and the burp of an earthquake, by Space Age slide shows drenched in New Frontier boosterism, and always but always lingered to marvel over what appeared to be market variety eggs in an oversized incubator hatching dozen upon dozen upon dozen of baby chicks--shells atop their heads like little pillbox hats.

As a destination, the museum itself, with its cool, electric-blue fluorescents and modular “futuristic” bearing, blended in with so much else in a region dotted with Googie-this and Jetson-that. Maybe the old S&T; wasn’t as technically mind-spinning and gee-whiz fantastic as what’s currently going up. But for a time it was a place for us late boomers to ponder questions about the past and future--and one’s connection to them. At the same time, it allowed us to consider, close-up, the texture of the present. When you grow up in L.A., with its Space Age aspirations and head tipped forever toward the future, tomorrow is something bigger and better and, most important, like show times, always subject to change.