History Lesson

Karen Berkland, a teacher at Luther Burbank Middle School in Burbank, took her class on a journey of discovery recently. But they didn’t have to leave town. They just went back into another historical era right in the East Valley.

Not far from their school is a building complex with a name that reveals little, but contents that reveal much: the Burbank Historical Society’s Gordon F. Howard Museum Complex. Playing a hunch, Berkland recalls, “I didn’t leave my discipline problems out of the field trip group.” Her hunch paid off. “They were all mesmerized,” she reports.

At the end of the visit, which was by appointment with the museum’s volunteer staff, she overheard her students exclaiming to one another, “I want to take my parents here!” (That’s possible without an appointment on Sundays, when the complex is open to the public, free, from 1 to 4 p.m.)

What was it that grabbed the kids’ attention? Just about everything on display at the complex. The time span covered, through artifacts and life-sized interactive tableaux, runs from Burbank’s founding in the 1880s by a dentist with that name (who was not related to the botanist for whom Berkland’s school is named) to the era of movie-making and the building of the U-2 spy plane. (Yes, the U-2 airplane in the news lately was conceived of in Burbank in 1952 by C.L. “Kelley” Johnson, founder of Lockheed’s top-secret Skunk Works.)

“My students had been working on an assignment to interview a member of their family who was over 60 years old--and write a story about it,” Berkland explains. “But a lot of the things the older people talked about, the kids couldn’t visualize.”

The museum complex solved that problem handily.

One feature of the complex is the Metzner House, an 1880s residence on Olive Street, east of Victory, which has been restored and thoroughly outfitted with the furniture and appliances of that era. So thoroughly, it happens, that last weekend, a crew from the PBS TV series “The American Experience” showed up there to film a sequence about how the medicines of the period were often homemade with things found around the house or in the yard. (PBS will air the show, which describes a nationwide epidemic in 1918, on Feb. 9.)

Recalling her class’ visit, Berkland says, “The people who took us around had good stories.”

Those docents, Les and Elaine Rosenberg, report that kids are stunned to learn that life has not always been the way it is today.

“The things that went on then--heating water on the kitchen stove for dishes and bathing, hanging up and beating the rugs, having to go outside to use an outhouse and living without TV and radio, amaze them,” Les Rosenberg reports.

On weekends and during school and Scouting group tours, he says, “We tell kids it’s going to be an hour [to see everything] and there are groans. Then, at the end, we hear them saying, ‘Oh, is it over already?’ ”

Chris King, a Scout leader who took Cub Pack 264 through the entire complex recently, says her group of 8- to 10-year-olds was fascinated with the life-sized tableaux--Dr. David Burbank’s 1880s dentist office, a hotel, a local general store, an old Burbank winery and a silent-movie studio. Of the old-time telephone earpieces through which kids could listen to a description of each display, King reports, “The kids loved the little phones. They stayed on them and listened to every word.”

To parents she says, “The complex is small enough that it’s a good place for kids for a first exposure to a museum. It’s good for families.”

The president of the Burbank Historical Society, Mary Jane Strickland, says of the complex, “It’s the best-kept secret in the Valley, until children see it on a school tour or wander over from the [adjacent] park on Sundays, then they drag their parents in.”

BE THERE

Museum hours--The Burbank Historical Society’s Gordon F. Howard Museum Complex is at 1015 W. Olive Ave., Burbank. Open Sundays 1-4 p.m. and Tuesdays by reservation for groups of 10 or more. Free. (818) 841-6333.