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On March 15, 1940 The Desert Sun published this open letter to the public: "Fellow Residents! Shall Palm Springs have a desert museum? It is for you to decide!" The dream of the letter-writers was to have a place where residents and visitors could bring their questions about desert plants, animals and history. If you dropped in from Chicago and had never sniffed creosote or spied a sidewinder track, this would be your first stop. Readers responded with donations and memberships and Palm Springs got its little museum. Now, though, the museum has changed its mission to focus only on arts and architecture, and the natural history collection soon will be dispersed. Before the last stuffed bobcat is carted away, this is a good time to recall the early years of the institution. If you only know the museum as that big impressive building up against the mountain near downtown, you'd never guess at its humble and earnest roots. It all started with the famous desert botanist, Edmund C. Jaeger. Jaeger was a local schoolteacher who got around on a burro named Nettie and lived in a homemade cabin near where the Tennis Club is today (West Baristo Road in Palm Springs). In 1919 he founded "The Nature Club" and began taking school kids on field trips into the desert. With these outings Jaeger pioneered the idea that desert, and the Palm Springs desert in particular, was a place worth knowing well. Next, some 16 years later, along came Theodore Zschokke. Ted, as we'll call him, was a Stanford science student who came to town seeking relief from his asthma. Working as a caretaker at Deep Well Guest Ranch, he spent his days off making walkabouts into the canyons with his kit fox companion. Enthralled with the bugs, birds and cacti he encountered, he wanted to share his joy with others and so built his own nature trail system in Tahquitz Canyon. Ted's dream was to build a natural history museum, but he couldn't even keep his trail exhibits going on the small donations he received. When he moved away, one of his students took over. Don Admiral, who had learned all about desert creatures from Ted, opened a tiny museum in La Plaza on Palm Canyon Drive in 1938. Admiral's Auto Caravan Field Trips became a precursor to the popular desert museum hikes. But Admiral struggled financially, just as Ted had, and in 1939 there was only $2.57 in the museum's bank account. That's when the letter excerpted above went out to residents and the museum we know today took shape. Edmund Jaeger enlisted a young UC Berkeley graduate, Lloyd Mason Smith, to come out and be the first director at a salary of $160 a month. In the early days the staff consisted of Smith and his secretary Agnes Andrews, who used an orange crate for an office chair. The museum moved to the children's wing of the Welwood Murray Library on Tahquitz (where book sales are now held on Fridays). The facility was equipped with five aluminum display cases, six glass-topped insect boxes, and a prized fluorescent mineral exhibit. In the museum's annual report one year, a poet inventoried the holdings: Old baskets and potionsEventually the shells and snakes took up so much room the museum expanded next door into a converted war-surplus hospital ward. The growing institution was represented in the Desert Circus parade each year by a float depicting a giant horned lizard Just as the founders had hoped, the museum had become a place where anyone could walk in and ask a question about the desert. Schoolteacher Frances Nunan did just that in 1945. New to the area, she was curious about a shiny black bird she'd spotted. A museum worker identified it for her as the mesquite-loving Phainopepla. In 1953, Lloyd Mason Smith resigned to take another job. His assistant Agnes Andrews closed up the final exhibits. She once said: "I can remember carrying the last tarantula, scorpion and three tiny little mice, walking down Tahquitz, climbing up the hillside and letting them go." The freeing of the beasts signified the end of an era. The museum soon would become more diverse and sophisticated. Those who remember the charmed early days are saddened by the current changes. "I think it's a terrible shame we're losing our museum," Phainopepla-finder Frances Nunan said recently. "But I don't have $10 million to endow a natural history museum so I can't complain." Lloyd Mason Smith, now 89, is also realistic. "With just the natural history we'd never be able to have a museum like that. The art - that's where the money is. But you certainly could use a little natural history museum somewhere in Palm Springs." So maybe someone would like to revive Theodore's Zschokke's concept - a one-room museum on the plaza with no Chihuly chandeliers. Just vinegarroons and ollas. And land sakes. The snakes. |
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