Where the Dust Settles

Change is one of the few constants in Orange County, where yesterday’s strawberry field is tomorrow’s strip mall, where “Founded in 1985” seems ancient. In local museums, displays and/or artifacts may be replaced anywhere from every few weeks to never. We asked museum officials how long their oldest item had been around.

“Our oldest exhibit? It has to be the Mary Pickford set from the [1929] movie ‘[The] Taming of the Shrew.’ She helped dedicate the museum, so that’s been there 35 years. But what we’ve done is add other sets in that general area to update it, to give a little more bang for our younger customers. On the same hallway you’ll see Tom Selleck leaning on a palm tree wearing a tuxedo.” --John Dailey, project coordinator, Movieland Wax Museum, Buena Park

“Our Anaheim Room is a chronological history of Anaheim from the time the Indians were here. Anaheim started out as a wine colony, so we have a wine pump and a wine press from that era. Then it went to oranges, and we have artifacts from the orange industry, such as labels and packing equipment. And we have a model of Disneyland that’s pretty popular. It’s a permanent exhibit, but we’ve been here 10 years now, and it’s getting a little raggedy.” --Susan Liu, registrar, Anaheim Museum

“We have two plaques featuring three-quarter profiles of the artist founders of the museum, Edgar Payne and Anna Hills, and they’ve been on display since 1928. But it’s not like some diorama that we’ve forgotten. It’s very much a part of the gallery space and speaks about the history of the institution.” --Bolton Colburn, director, Laguna Art Museum

“That doesn’t apply to us, because we do traveling exhibits. Have you tried the Bowers?” --Bevin Zandvliet, communications coordinator, Fullerton Museum Center

“We rotate our exhibits fairly frequently. The Bowers? Have you tried there?” --Helen Saric, administrative assistant, Muckenthaler Cultural Center, Fullerton

“The longest-showing individual artifacts in the museum are the Bell Rock and Indian Maze Stone. They were placed in the courtyard in the early 1930s, to the best of my knowledge. That’s as early as it gets. The building was completed in 1932. The museum opened to the public in 1936, and they already were in place when the museum opened.” --Armand Labbe, chief curator, Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, Santa Ana

“Our longest-standing permanent displays here are the five buildings, which have been here for 220 years.” --Gaynel Wald, visitor’s center manager, Mission San Juan Capistrano

“All our displays have been up about eight years. One of the funnier things in the museum is the potato chip art. They’re paintings on potato chips.” --John Dailey, project coordinator, Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, Buena Park