A Fossil in the Hand Is Worth Zillions in a Book

Before a class of second-graders, Edward Reiter held up a magazine open to the fossils page.

“These are pictures,” he said. “How would you like to touch the real animal?”

Excited, students rubbed and tapped every object passed to them: a piece of amber with insects frozen in time, a dinosaur tooth, an ancient tree limb filled with glossy minerals, the outline of a fish imprinted on hard rock.

“Is this good eating?” Reiter asked, pointing to the fish.

“No!” yelled out 8-year-old Edwin Gonzalez. “It’s turned into a mineral.”

Reiter, a retired teacher who returned to the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center in Pacoima to teach social studies and science to children from pre-kindergarten to seventh grade, manages a classroom museum with original fossils, rocks, Native American artifacts and myriad oddities.

The collection is somewhat disparate, but its items, handled constantly by his students, are an extraordinary teaching tool, Reiter said recently.

“Touching is the way I learned,” he said. “When you touch something and see it, it becomes real.”

The so-called museum, which functions as a classroom with props, was proposed and built by Principal Yvonne Chan in 1998, five years after Vaughn became a charter school, so it receives public funding but is free of many district regulations. The mini-museum largely owes its existence to Reiter, who has taught at Vaughn for 40 years and owns most of the artifacts on display.

“They [administrators] knew I had the stuff,” he said. “They’d seen it at my house when they came over for parties.”

Immediately after entering the classroom and taking their seats on cushion-like chairs on the floor, groups of fewer than 20 children view the artifacts and answer numerous questions from their teacher.

At 71, Reiter is sprightly. Wearing sneakers and a button-down striped shirt, he is somewhere between an absent-minded professor and a basketball player.

Holding a black stone that fit into the palm of his hand, Reiter, who has a taste for slightly provocative delivery, appeared to shock the class.

“This was inside a dinosaur’s stomach,” he said. “It’s a gastrolith. It helps him digest food.”

Anticipating the student’s puzzled looks, Reiter was ready for his comeback.

“Do any of you have chickens?” he continued.

Many raised their hands.

“Well, it’s the same thing. They eat the same way.”

A dinosaur jaw; a mano and its accompanying metate (native Californian grinding tools); toy lunar modules; and an American mountain man kit, the colonial equivalent to today’s Swiss army knife, compete for attention in glass display cases lining the walls.

In corners, a spinning wheel and wood butter churn rest next to an otter pelt used to illustrate the Russian fur trade in California. Across the way, a multi-pronged Native American fishing spear and deer-killing bow share space with a Revolutionary War rifle.

Sitting on a vitrine filled with animal skulls, a stuffed iguana and alligator keep watch over the class. After Reiter picked one up to explain to a group of kindergarteners the meaning of the word “reptile,” 6-year-old Juan Pablo Trujillo couldn’t help raising his hand.

“Did you catch those?” he asked.

“No,” replied Reiter. “I didn’t catch them. I bought them.”

To expand the collection, Reiter, who retired seven years ago but continues to teach three times a week at Vaughn, traveled. He attended fossil auctions in Arizona and shopped for colonial antiques in Pennsylvania.

Clothes were traded for opals extracted from lead and zinc mines in central Mexico and bartered for fossils in Baja. Swap meets yielded Chumash and Pomo baskets, and museum memberships led to inside knowledge on interesting objects about to be discarded. A set of replicas of American homes made its way to the museum this way.

Other items were simply found.

“All you have to do is go to Topanga Canyon after heavy rain and pick the stuff,” said Reiter, who has taken several of his classes there to hunt for fossils.

Many of his fossilized shark teeth, he said, were obtained during visits to Bakersfield.

Reiter’s interest in collecting dates to 1966 when, on his way back from a vacation in Arizona’s Petrified Forest, the image of a Hopi village 90 miles north of Flagstaff mesmerized him.

As he paused to take pictures, a small altercation with the townspeople ensued.

“They were flustered because they didn’t want me taking pictures,” he said.

His conversation with a clan leader who tried to defuse the situation lasted two hours and marked the beginning of Reiter’s collecting career.

“I walked away with a kachina doll and a basket,” he said. “I spent $13 and didn’t have any money to eat on my way back home.”

The relationship between Reiter and the Hopi has continued and has entered his curriculum in the form of correspondence and student trips to Arizona in 1996 and 1997.

“My kids wrote to their kids,” said Reiter. “Then they met their pen pals.”

Reiter, who is married to a teacher and is the father of three adult children, credits the museum not to his travels and purchases but to the charter school movement, which he says allows greater flexibility in spending and curriculum design.

In 1993, Vaughn Next Century Learning Center became the first school in Los Angeles to gain charter status. The pre-kindergarten-through-eighth grade school, which serves mostly Latino children, plans to add ninth grade next year and to build a high school across the street, which it hopes to complete next year.

“You can’t do this in a regular school,” he said. “I have free rein here.”

Part of the supplemental education curriculum, Reiter’s job is financed by grants obtained and controlled by the school independently, said Vaughn director Anita Zepeda.

Grants also provided money to build a permanent place for the classroom-museum manned by Reiter and to purchase some of the items he has chosen for the collection.

“In a public school, kids would get a social studies class or a science class,” said Zepeda. “Because of a lack of resources, a lot of the extras are cut out.”