An Eclectic Collection Seeks a Home : The Santa Monica museum includes donated items ranging from the historically significant to the purely kitsch

It’s called the Santa Monica Historical Society Museum, but don’t let the stuffy title fool you. Where else can you see the tunics worn by wrestler Michele (The Baron) Leone in the 1950s, a gynecological chair from the 1930s or a giant music box that plays a piano-marimba-snare drum version of the TV theme “Believe It Or Not”?

“Everything here was donated,” said the president of the society, Louise Gabriel. And indeed, the museum located in a Santa Monica Promenade storefront looks as if everything offered was taken, even if it had little to do with the history of the area.

“Isn’t this nice?” Gabriel said, her hand resting on a vintage hand-driven apple peeler that a small sign describes as “Made in New Hampshire.”

“People have given us such wonderful things.”

The result is an offbeat collection that ranges from the truly significant to pure kitsch. And it’s in need of a new home.

The museum was opened by the society on the Promenade shortly after the group was founded in 1975. Nine years later, after the outdoor mall fell on hard times, the museum took advantage of a free, larger space in an office building on Colorado Boulevard. When that building was scheduled for demolition last year, the museum was moved back to the Promenade.

By then the Promenade had undergone an extensive renovation and several upscale businesses had moved to the area. The owner of a storefront offered the society the space at reduced rent with the understanding that the society would have to vacate if a tenant willing to pay the full rent came along.

Museum volunteers worked to make the best of the facility’s temporary home. They cleaned the space extensively and encouraged local businesses to donate numerous items, including display cabinets. But because the storefront is smaller than the society’s previous space, much of the collection had to be stored.

Gabriel hopes that a local individual or business will donate space for a permanent home soon. “It’s important that we preserve our heritage,” she said. “After all, we were the first history museum in Santa Monica. In fact, we are the only one.”

The society grew out of a historical photograph display that was part of the Santa Monica centennial celebration. At the current museum, some of those pictures and others collected since then can be seen. There are photographs of the first mass selling of lots in the city in 1875, the elaborate wood-frame Arcadia Hotel that was located near the site of the present Santa Monica Pier in the 1880s and an American Indian reservation set up by a movie company during silent film days for a Western sequence shot on a cliff overlooking the ocean.

Gabriel, who at the time was the chairwoman of the Chamber of Commerce Women’s Council, and others involved in creating the exhibit decided it was time their city had a group dedicated to preserving its heritage. They signed up dues-paying associates of the society, which currently has 400 members.

And to broaden the collection beyond photographs--the society currently has more than 7,000 of them--the organization solicited the donation of historical artifacts. One of the founding members, Virginia Tegner Spurgin, donated the books and records of her grandfather, Charles Tegner, a Swedish immigrant who came to the area in the 1880s and played a prominent role in its history.

“He farmed in Malibu, he had a fish business, he opened one of the first real estate offices and he was very involved in local politics,” Spurgin said. One of the ledgers she donated contained detailed information about the ships that came into the Long Wharf north of Santa Monica Canyon. That wharf, completed in 1893, was the official port of Los Angeles until San Pedro emerged as a more geographically favorable location.

The children of Abbot Kinney, the founder of Venice, gave several items including a bust of their father. A group of 19th-Century ladies’ fans were obtained from the family of Arcadia Bandini de Baker, the wife of the co-founder of Santa Monica. Singer Dennis Day, who owned an antique shop in Santa Monica after retiring from show business, gave a vintage fire hat.

Other items were more directly related to the history of the city. An 1887 registration book from the Santa Monica Hotel, which was destroyed by a fire in 1889, made it into the collection, as did the tools used to build the first wooden fence in Palisades Park overlooking the ocean.

Also given were a collection of Santa Monica High School yearbooks dating back to 1908, deed books recording land ownership dating from 1908 and a scrapbook of newspaper articles about the opening of La Monica Ballroom, a dance hall built “at an expense of $150,000” on the Santa Monica Pier in 1924.

To fill out the collection, donations were accepted of various items of clothing, including a satin dress that Gabriel thinks dates back to the 1880s; several vintage typewriters and a manual adding machine, a quilt from 1937, the gynecological chair that came from the widow of a doctor who had a practice in the city and a hat that belonged to Eugene Biscailuz, county sheriff from 1932 to 1958.

The wrestling outfits worn by Santa Monica resident Baron Leone, who was one of the stars of wrestling shows on KTLA-TV in the 1950s, came from his widow after an automobile accident took his life in 1988. The Baron was the stereotypical bad guy when he tangled in the ring with the likes of Gorgeous George and Wild Red Berry.

“But he was a very nice man,” Gabriel said.

Gabriel said the group did not hesitate to collect items that other historical societies might consider frivolous.

“It is all history, part of our heritage,” she said, “and people like to look at them.”