A Trip To The Museum

The primary purpose of my trip to San Francisco was completed yesterday.

It struck me as a bit strange when I saw the announcement just over a year ago, now.

Marceline, of course, made perfect sense.  There in the plains of Missouri, is the town created by the railroad years ago.  Those days of smoke-belching train engines needing a stop between Kansas City and Chicago are now gone, consigned to the memory of those in their seventies and eighties.  It now is a sleepy little place slipping back into its agricultural roots.  It is the sort of place where the children grow up, go to college and move away.

The rail station, no longer needed for its original purpose, has been retrofitted into a museum in honor of the town's favorite one-time resident--Walt Disney.  This is a charming, cobbled-together collection of random artifacts lovingly displayed in aged glass cases.  The museum has no connection to the Walt Disney company and their holdings come primarily from one member of Walt's family who thought the town should have them.  The people who work there have the sort of municipal pride that only those who have lived in a place all their lives can nurture.

It seemed much odder when I saw that the Walt Disney Family Museum was going to open in The Presidio in San Francisco.  Walt never lived in San Francisco.  The Presidio is a former military base by the bay which has been turned into a cross between a park and an exclusive up-scale community.  There are no other museums in the area.

When I asked one of the docents, who was dressed like a theater usher, why the museum was here and not in Los Angeles, he told me, "Diane Disney Miller (Walt's Daughter) has lived here in San Francisco for most of her life and had put all her father's things in storage in a warehouse in The Presidio."

And what a collection it is.  Quite simply it is like walking through the biography of Walt Disney come to life.  Multimedia experiences, lighting, architectural distinctions all lie within the outer shell of the building which remains identical to all the others in the area.

I'm not sure if everyone would enjoy this museum as much as I did, but I was like a kid in a candy store.  The building has only ten rooms, but it took me almost two hours to get through the first four.  By this time, I had lived with Walt all the way through the making of Snow White.  Because of time constraints, I moved much faster through the reset of the museum, I could have spent several days and not exhausted my curiosity or the resources there.

This museum in The Presidio is not a shoe-string job by a community holding on to a different age (which is not to criticize Marceline, but to praise it), but a spare no expense effort by the family to tell their own story.  The resources are comprehensive and engaging.  Like any family effort, despite some notable efforts to include varying views, the over-all effort enforces an all-together positive and uncritical appraisal of Walt and his life.  The primary resources for research are outstanding.

I am glad that I went to both Marceline and San Francisco.  They are very different places, but both speak to the needs of people to preserve and solidify the fleeting wisps of memory.  Doing so gives us hope that someday, we too will be remembered.