[00:00:10] Speaker A: Hello, folks, and welcome back to another episode of the American Attic, where we deliver dialogue driven explorations of California history and beyond, presented by the Sacramento Historical Society and hosted by Eric Swigart. Join us as we uncover topics that inspire imagination, inform action, and enrich the present.
Our guest today is a man who has smelled the dusty archives of public history. He is watched as the sun set over the placid shores of the Pacific Ocean and on the edge of America itself. Indias deep roots in telling the story of California history. Prior to his current role as museum director of the California State Railroad Museum, he was chief museum interpreter at Hearst Castle and before that, an intrepid scholar of public history. He has swam in Neptune's pool and has literally walked in the footsteps of other great California historians. And he continues to share his passion for the past to those who visit old Sacramento State Historic park. In this episode, we discuss his initial encounters with appreciating the past as a curious 16 year old, the roles of mentors and teachers, as well as the unasked question facing public historians and more. So please enjoy this candid and compelling conversation with museum director Ty Smith.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: So again, I'm here with Ty Smith. Ty, thanks for taking time out of your day today to chat a little bit about what you're up to at the Sacramento Railroad Museum.
[00:02:00] Speaker C: Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Awesome.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Well, I think before we get into the meat of the discussion, I would love to learn more about your background and your journey to history. Kind of connecting the dots. I know after exploring your background, I know a lot of where you've been and what you've done, kind of. It seems to span between the Sacramento area and the central coast of California. So how, in your own words, would you describe your journey to, to history as a profession and something that you're practicing week in and week out?
[00:02:32] Speaker C: Yeah, I think I kind of always knew I'd be involved in history in some way. It's like twelve years old and I went into, you know, like we were Latchkey kid. Right? Like Gen X. Here's your key and good luck. And so there's a lot of free time, you know, after school, walk home, and then a lot of free time to get into trouble, too. I did, but I was in the house and sneaking through my dad's closet, which is taboo. You don't go into dad's closet. Sure, but I did.
I'm unsupervised.
And so I found something that was startling to me, and that was a military uniform. I was like, this is odd. I know my dad wasn't in the military. He was kind of a hippie and grew up in the late sixties and was in a garage band playing credence clear water revival covers.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:03:23] Speaker C: And I go, man, I don't, what is this? And I kind of looked at it, and I reached inside the pocket, and I felt like, this silky thing inside. I pulled it out. It was this flag, you know, I go, what? What is all of this? And so we had a. We had, like, most of a set of encyclopedia Britannica, and luckily it had. We had volume m. So I look up military, I think, and, you know, you kind of go down the rabbit hole of that. So I was looking for insignia. And in the span of that couple hours of that afternoon, I determined that whoever had this uniform served around, in and around world war two into the korean war, and was a navy medic, you know, so I was just kind of matching a bit of painting history, detective. And the flag that was inside was a japanese flag.
[00:04:13] Speaker B: Oh.
[00:04:13] Speaker C: And so then. But then I had this. This kind of conundrum because I had to confront my dad about it. But then, you know, also revealing that I was in his closet, which I wasn't supposed to.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:23] Speaker C: Tribal curiosity, you know, just got the better of me. I go, dad, what is this military uniform that's in your closet? Why are you in my closet? Don't worry. Just, what. What's the uniform? And so he told me that it belonged to his father, my grandfather, Clarence Smith. I never met him. He died when my dad was very young in Albuquerque, past his military service. And so it just wasn't a part of the family lore. I think it was really painful for my dad to have lost his dad at such a young age in the way that it happened. He died of a massive heart attack in Albuquerque.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:04:59] Speaker C: But he told me through the process of that conversation, I just quizzed him and quizzed him and quiz them.
Kind of heard the story that I'd never heard before about my grandfather, who was a Navy medic. He grew up in Oklahoma, and the army. Joining the military was a way out, and he ended up working as a Navy medic. He was at Pearl harbor the day of the attack, the USS Solace, a hospital ship. He whipped all of the hospital ship horrors of that day and then went on, served through the korean war and then retired.
And that was his life. And so just through that object, you know, I knew at that moment that history wasn't something that happened in a book, something you read about in a textbook, but it is tied to things and objects and to place.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:54] Speaker C: I think I understood from that very early time the power of all of that. And so I was interested in history, you know, even when I was running around getting in trouble in high school and stuff and kind of directionless, I was always reading about history and interested in history, even if I wasn't a good student. And so then it was like senior year of high school, and I go, what am I going to be? And when you're 16 years old and kind of. Kind of a rebel and getting in trouble, it's almost cute. When you're 18, you're just a criminal, right?
What am I going to do? Things change my life.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: Yeah, things can change very quickly.
[00:06:27] Speaker C: Yeah. And so I was kind of looking at the lay of the line. I go, well, I got to do something with my life. And I stumbled in my counselor's office, a guy I'd never talked to, and he goes, what are you doing here? What do you want? And I go, well, tell me about college. I think I might want to go to college. And he just started laughing.
Come on, Smith, get out of here. What do you really want? I go, no, I really want to go to college. He goes, well, have you taken any sat exams? I go, what's that? Applied to any schools? I go, you had to do that? And he goes, yeah. He goes, you should really take up a trade.
Would be better for you, maybe. What does your dad do? I go, he's a disabled Ford mechanic and broke his back wrenching on cars and all the stuff that he did in his life. And he told me one point very early on, if you can, son, try to make a living from your neck up. And it's not that he didn't recognize the dignity of labor. I came from a laboring family.
And it wasn't that there wasn't dignity in that work, but it's just his comment was, they can't take that away from you.
And so kind of armed with that idea, that was the, okay, what does college look like? But then the counselor says, there's one place that has to take you.
Where's that? Community college. And so then a couple Saturdays later, I was taking my entrance exam, and I stumbled into Cuesta Community college. It was an experience that really shaped, was so pivotal in my life. And I met this guy named Dennis Judd, who was a public historian. He worked for a lot of years, given tours at Hearst Castle, and was working as, at that point, an adjunct professor at Cuesta. He would go on to be full time tenured professor, but he just changed my life. The way he taught history was exactly the way that I understood it. It was through the objects and through place. It was rooted to things and places. And he was the kind of professor where if we were talking about agrarian revolt, he'd say, okay, meet me downtown on Riverside Road. 225 Riverside Road. We're going to talk about the Grange and the farmer's alliance, and we'd be in front of the Grange building or the Farmers alliance. So it was just that public historical approach where it wasn't these abstract things. It was like specific people did specific things at specific times, in specific places, and so rooted to our experiences, and therefore so relevant, you know, to those around us. So that really did shape my. My desire to go to pursue history in a more serious way. The other choice I had was being a graphic designer and illustrator, but I was afraid of being creative on demand, so I chose the history groundwork, found some wonderful mentors, and kind of proclaimed my first semester at Cuesta Community College, which is, you know, community college is one of the great democratic institutions of our society. And I proclaimed loudly and vociferously that I wanted to be a professor, and I was going to get a PhD in history. And that was maybe the most naive thing I had ever heard.
I eventually did go on to do all of that, but it was a long and winding path that brought me, in the meantime, because they won't just let you teach because you want to. You got to have brought me into working in museums, which, coming from working in auto parts. The idea that I could go up to Hearst Castle, give tours as a college job, it was nice to get paid to talk. Everybody had always told me to shut up to that point. So I found my.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: Well, I will not be saying that on this episode.
So, yeah, thank you for that. And it's now Cuesta College. Is that right there off a highway? Highway one.
[00:10:15] Speaker C: It is kind of in between San Luis Obispo and Morro Bay. Yeah, yeah. And I was actually part of the first cohort to attend the north county campus, which really just a series of portable buildings. It's built up since then. But I grew up in Paso Robles, California.
[00:10:33] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:10:34] Speaker C: As the locals call it.
I grew up in a latino community, and we'd be talking Spanglish, but even they would say paso robles. You know, it's very pronunciation. Sometimes people. People correct me, and I go, yeah, I get what you're saying.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: But, you know, locally, the beautiful part. Beautiful part of California, and I wanted to just dial in really quickly. So Dennis Judd, you said, was a professor you had at Cuesta, and he really helped bring the past to life in a way that maybe other professors or other teachers don't really. Was he kind of the main, main instructor you encountered that kind of helped shape your interest in the subject?
[00:11:15] Speaker C: Yeah, it was funny because I remember it like it was yesterday, attending his american history course. I think it was the 17 b. So the second half of us, history is a surreal experience because I graduated high school barely and then got into Cuesta College, but I was attending classes at the high school. So it's like going.
Just going back to the high school campus.
But I remember that a question came up in the classroom, and Dennis, he had the answer, but he wanted to engage the students. Anybody know? Anybody have the answer for this? And my hand shot up, and it was about why Native Americans couldn't vote. And I understood that complex history of citizenship, which didn't come about until the 1920s.
And he goes, hey. At the end of it, he goes, hey, you seem like you're interested and know a lot about native american history. Do you want to come to a conference with us? I go, what's a conference? And he goes, it's a place where people get together and talk about ideas. And I went, sure. Whoa. Yeah, I want to go to a conference. And so we all got in these two vans, and we went up to Berkeley, and we attended the California Indian conference in 1996. I was 19 years old, and that evening, we all got together to talk about ideas, like what we had heard in the conference. And there was this guy, and he was just sitting there off in the distance, and he was cursing and emoting and weaving together all of these ideas. And I go, who's that? And Dennis, he goes, oh, that's doctor Bill Fairbanks. And he became my anthropology teacher at Cuesta College.
Doctor Bill Fairbanks, another great mentor of mine. And between those two, they really mentored me, taught me not just the subject, but, you know, what it really was was they taught me how to have a public life, and that wasn't something that was part of my tradition. I'm basically first generation college student. My grandfather actually did go to. To Cal Poly, but it just wasn't something that we talked about in my family. It wasn't something that there was an expectation of that for me. And so I just didn't have the vocabulary or the custom or the instruction of it. And so in addition to teaching me a lot about the subject matter, they taught me a lot about how it is to show up in public and have a public life and participate not just in academic modes, but how that informs the world around us and community and all of those kinds of things.
Best professors at Cuesta College at the time. Just amazing.
[00:14:07] Speaker B: Yeah. And that seems like such a relevant topic these days, too. Not just a subject matter, specific historical phenomenon of reconstruction to the 1920s, whatever the period you're focusing on, but how to have a public life. What do you think? This thought is just occurring to me right now, but what do you think? If you bumped into any of those professors now and you shared your career with them, what do you think they'd say?
[00:14:31] Speaker C: Oh, well, no, I keep in touch with them. I mean, they're dear friends.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: Oh, great.
[00:14:34] Speaker C: Bill Fairbanks, when he retired from Cuesta College in his late seventies, maybe early eighties, he said, there's no ritual. He's an anthropologist. There's no ritual, meaningful ritual in our lives for retirement.
So much of our life is our identity in life is tied to our profession. You go to a meeting or you go to a party or something, and the first thing somebody asks you is, what do you do? As if that's the most meaningful measure of who you are. Yeah, but it is. I mean, you know, it's linked to that. And then all of a sudden, you are. And then you are not.
[00:15:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:09] Speaker C: And then what do we do with all that? We don't have any. Any threshold or ritual moment. So he decided to create his own ritual, and that was to walk across the United States.
[00:15:19] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:15:20] Speaker C: And so he chose a route that was meaningful to him. He walked from Baywood park, where he lived, and he went up to the Bennet valley where he grew up.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Uh huh.
[00:15:27] Speaker C: And then walked across the United States and ended in Dedham, Massachusetts. That's at the Fairbanks farm that was built in the 16 hundreds.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: Holy cow.
[00:15:37] Speaker C: But towards the end of that long, you know, multiple year project, because he didn't just do it all at once, you know, he would pick up and go and. But he walked every bit of it. And we met him in Massachusetts. Dennis Judd and I flew out there and met him in New Hampshire, actually, into Boston, met him in New Hampshire. And we walked a couple days with him. And he said that we slowed him down because we were only doing 12.5 miles a day, whereas in the past, he had been doing over 16 miles a day.
[00:16:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:06] Speaker C: And so we had a chance to walk, but, you know, I think metaphorically, I had always been walking with Bill.
[00:16:13] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's great. Well, if he made it that far, you guys probably were slowing him down. If he was that far advanced in his journey.
[00:16:21] Speaker C: Yeah, we were limping and hurting, and, yeah, we were slowing him up, but it was a great time. So I keep in touch with all those people. They're, you know, dear friends and mentors and. And we've worked on projects. I've served on boards and, you know, continue to attend conferences with them, even when I wasn't part of Cuesta, you know, as a. As a poly student, and then later a Sac state student, and then later as a UCSB student, I. I would always show up with the Cuesta folk.
[00:16:48] Speaker B: Yeah, well, and that's great, because that's one of the other benefits, not just learning about the past, but pursuing something like history as a academic pursuit or professional pursuit. You meet some of the most interesting and compelling people. That and the relationships, you know, the relationships that come out of that. Just diving in a little bit more on your academic background, because I was. I was curious about this because I know you were. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you were Cuesta college and also bachelor's from Sac State. Do I have that right?
[00:17:21] Speaker C: I did. I did my AA and transfer work at Cuesta, and then I went to Cal Poly.
[00:17:27] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:17:28] Speaker C: Okay. And did my undergrad mainly at Cal Poly. I actually. I left before I graduated to take a promotion. I was a guy at First Castle, and I came up to work as a guide supervisor at the California State Capitol Museum, knowing that I wanted to do my master's at Sac State, but not wanting to take advantage of that opportunity, so I left. I left Cal poly, sort of needing to write a senior project, needing a few electives. So I actually took my last courses at Sac City College and a couple spanish courses, and finished my senior project remotely and sort of just scraped by and then started the master's program soon after.
[00:18:07] Speaker B: That's awesome. And then. But you ended up going back for the PhD. That was Santa Barbara.
[00:18:13] Speaker C: Santa Barbara. I was, you know, it's a joint PhD program or it can be attending Sac State. And I had wonderful mentors at Sac State, too, who said, you know, you should really go on and do a PhD.
And I thought at that point, I was thinking, well, you know, the master's degree is actually a terminal degree, and sort of had some success within California state parks, and my career was going pretty well at that time. I had transferred to interpreter position, where I was working on distance learning, and I thought, well, maybe that's enough. You know, certainly no state job requires a PhD. And so then maybe that's not something to do. But I had really great mentors at SAc State, says now you're. You're going on. You're going to do the PhD and make peace with that. You know, really pushed me in that, in that direction. And so I said, okay, here's the deal.
I'm only going to apply to one place.
There's only one place I really want to go, is the creation, the place in which the idea of public history was created, Santa Barbara, in the 1970s. And the idea at the time was that it's a joint PhD program. So I could do most of my coursework in Sacramento, go down to UCSB, and kind of camp out for nine months for academic year because you had to do a minimum at campus and then come back up and finish.
As it turned out, I was one of a couple, just a handful of public historian students who were offered some funding, but the funding was tied to the UC. And so that meant that I had to relocate fully to UCSB. And so I did and never came back to Sac state, although some SAC state faculty were on my committee, my dissertation committee, and weighed in on that, basically did the whole thing at UCSB.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: Wow. And we don't have to. We can get as much into the weeds as we want. But what. So some of these projects, like your final dissertation, for example, what was the subject matter of that? Was it something? I imagine it was something pretty specific.
[00:20:18] Speaker C: Well, I learned a little bit too late that if you really want to see the world as a historian, you got to pick do some research project in France, South America, or somewhere. Somewhere cool.
But I'm a public historian and sort of a local historian by nature. So, you know, I went as far away as the special collections library at the Davidson Library at SAC, UCSB. I just walked across campus going to the archives, and I wrote my dissertation as a preservation history, critical preservation history of Santa Barbara.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:20:54] Speaker C: The way in which, starting around the 1910s, 1920s, a very, very western american town reinvented itself as a spanish bubbler.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: Really.
[00:21:05] Speaker C: And of course, it always started off with the mission history and all that, but the built landscape, if you were to walk through Santa Barbara around 1900, very.
Except for the landscape, proximity to the beach and stuff like that, the built environment looked like a very western town. A lot of Beaux art buildings, a lot of brick, a lot of wood structures.
Today we see it as a Spanish Shangri la. Yeah, but that's by invention. Largely by invention.
[00:21:39] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:21:40] Speaker C: And so I was looking at tracking how that historic. As a project of historic preservation, what were the mechanics of that? Who was involved and why?
And as it turns out, to recreate Spanish Santa Barbara, they had to kick out all the brown people.
How the mechanisms of historic preservations create opportunities but also disadvantage people because it's an exercise of power, like, things are so looking at that. I had a title for it initially that I used, but then I was talking to this good friend of mine, Malcolm Margalin, who was the longtime editor of Heyday books. I had sent my manuscript in, I think, for, like, the California Historical Society manuscript contest or something, and I didn't win, but Malcolm read it, and so that was a win for me. And he goes, yeah. He goes, whenever you go to Santa Barbara, it's just sort of the tyranny of the pleasant. And I went, oh, that's it. There's. So if I ever come back around to making the dissertation to a book, which I don't think I'll probably do, but if I ever do, that's the. That's the title. The tier pleasant.
[00:22:53] Speaker B: That's a great. That's a great title.
Yeah.
[00:22:56] Speaker C: I have.
[00:22:56] Speaker B: I have a close friend who lives in Los Osos, but I don't make it down to Santa Barbara as much as I would like. So. Yeah, I'll have to go check that out.
[00:23:06] Speaker C: Just.
[00:23:06] Speaker B: And to see. To walk through a space that, you know, like, especially given your subjects that you've studied, looks very different than it did 100 years ago.
[00:23:14] Speaker C: No, about 100 years ago. Yeah. Because, you know, they called it the spanish program. And, you know, it's weird when you're engaged in that kind of research because it's not to denigrate, you know, anything that anybody's done. I mean, people make the decisions they make, and they have reasons behind them. And there are a lot of true believers there, Pearl Chase among them, leading the charge, who. Who really did believe that they could do what no other municipality had done.
[00:23:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:41] Speaker C: To create, really, the dream of the arts and crafts movement, of creating a community in which art and beauty and society were all wrapped together in a harmonious way. Other private communities had tried to do that and succeeded in certain ways, but Santa Barbara really is, if you're looking at it from an economic property value, a place where people want to resort, it's a success story in so many ways.
[00:24:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:10] Speaker C: But, you know, it also has everything that's good, has its shadow side and the mechanisms of historic preservation, if wielded the wrong way, like any, like, any tool can become a weapon, right. It's like whether it's just because of its blunt heft or, you know, how it's wielded and it did disadvantage people. And so not losing track of that. Not because I want to denigrate the decisions that were made in the past, but because we as preservationists working in the present and the future, ought to be aware of all of the sides of historic preservation. It's always viewed as a value positive proposition, or at very least a value neutral one. It's never viewed as a negative thing. And there are aspects to historic preservation as a tool.
[00:24:55] Speaker B: Well, and that's the benefit of hindsight, right.
If you're in the position where you look at the past, you're able to see the swing of the pendulum from, you know, here's the lead up to the event and, oh, we can now see what happened after the event that may not have been desired or whatever.
[00:25:15] Speaker C: No, totally. And then also being able to distinguish between that which provides a little path that we. That somebody else has tread that makes our lives a little easier from the wagon rut stuck in a way that we don't want to be. And just having the wisdom to look at that and, you know, I think it's. It's good to understand what happened to the asian quarter of town, what happened to the mexican american legacy of that town and. And how that was forced to the periphery. Yeah, absolutely. Just looking at that, that evolution.
[00:25:51] Speaker B: Sure. So zooming back out a little bit. Zooming out of Santa Barbara, looking at the swing of that career. So nineties, the rubber is really starting to meet the road, it sounds like in the nineties, in terms of career experience to what you're doing now at the railroad museum. I did want to ask. You mentioned a few already, but is there a particular moment or a particular place that stands out? You already mentioned the significance of places when teaching history and how powerful that can be. Do you have any places that you found yourself across that career that really kind of struck you?
[00:26:28] Speaker C: Yeah, I do tend to gravitate around the same areas because, you know, I bopped up to Sacramento and work, and then I went back down to the central coast and then came back up and then went back down. I've worked at Hearst Castle twice in my career. I started there as a guide trainee, seasonal employee, and then went back and worked as the chief of interpretation. I ran the tour program there and supervised the activities of a bunch of guide supervisors, and at that time, about 70 or 75 highly skilled interpretive guides 800,000 people a year or so. We're coming through that place during the five and a half, every year during the five and a half years that I was there and did a lot of meaningful preservation work. I loved the place.
That's special to me. It was in my backyard, but it was an amazing convergence of a lot of different histories. Well, maybe California history changes, but it's not the kind of, it's an added change, it's an additional. And so you could really see on the landscape, you know, all of the eras of California, from native american land use practices that go back thousands of years to the continuity of cattle ranching from the mexican period into the american period.
You know, the mission influence, because it was all part of the hinterlands of the mission, the assistantsia and the cattle ranching operation of missions, and took its form because of that history and people like Julia Morgan understanding that history and incorporating that into landscape. So I love that place, but I also love Sacramento. I worked at the California State Capitol Museum, came back to run the California State Railroad Museum, not because I was a big train person, but I understood the centrality of railroading in our lives. And in fact, one of the first things that we did when we all got here, the management team that's here now all came about the same time, within weeks.
And we really decided that to get more people interested in the place is we couldn't just talk to the people who are interested in trains. We had to talk to them, but we had to talk to more people, too. And so we kind of created a unifying theme that says, our lives are made of railroad stories. And as it turns out, when you start talking about our language, you know, we're always getting off track, derailed, trying to gather up a head of steam, blowing off steam, you know, all that kind of stuff.
It informs our language, it informs our music. I mean, you can't. You can't listen to jazz, rock and roll, country western music without hearing the rhythm of the rail.
Our most iconic movies, decisions that somebody made 150 years ago, shaped the way I get across town in my commute, you know, every day. And so when you start talking about it in those broader terms, it just comes bubbling up, you know, it's just so much a part of what we are.
[00:29:11] Speaker B: Well, there's a lot to unpack. A few things came to mind. I was scribbling some notes as you were speaking. So my experience with Hearst Castle, and you have an abundance of it. I rode my bicycle past at one time off of highway one, I was going south on highway one on doing a bike tour, and I just looked up on the hill and I saw it right there. And I. And I had heard about it, and I just. There's this degree of mystery for me personally around Hearst Castle. So I did want to follow up on you. You mentioned that it's a special place, and I just wanted to say why, you know, what makes it a special place, are there?
[00:29:46] Speaker C: Well, I mean, first of all, it's not developed, and it very well could have been. I mean, one of the reasons that George Hearst wanted to buy it in the first place. And he bought it at a time of great economic collapse for the kind of California culture they were running cattle. Middle 1860s, 150 year drought, catastrophic drought cycle.
[00:30:09] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:30:10] Speaker C: The vestiges of the California culture who are running thousands of head of cattle. I mean, slaughter hundreds of thousands of cattle because the land just wouldn't support it anymore. And so therefore, somebody like George Hearst, who attained mineral wealth, was able to buy big swaths of it, you know, tens of thousands of acres and pretty cheap, you know, comparatively. And he was looking at it because he's like, well, this could be developed. It's got this natural advantage of the seaport that could be, you know, developed into something. San Simeon Bay, you know, harbor. That could be something.
That rock up there. It's beautiful, Cinnabar. But from it, we can get our hands on some mercury that's helpful in gold mining. And he owned a big portion of home state gold in South Dakota, black Hills gold. So that was attractive. But then it was the family's love of it that also made them not do anything with it for years and years and years. And certainly by the time it got to William Randolph first, there was no, no inclination to develop it, you know, in a major way. Corporation had some plans, but it was the grandson of William Randolph Hearst who ultimately led to what is one of the most amazing conservation easement plans that has happened in the state that sold off the development rights. So the corporation got some good money for it, but it means that it stays accessible in terms of the property west of highway one for all of us. And then we won't see anything built on or in or around it, really on the rest of the property, you know, like 50 50 something thousand acres. So it's a. It's a major triumph for conservation, open space. And in that respect, there's, like, still cattle on it, and there's still cowboys, vaqueros with, you know, old California mexican names who still run cattle on that land to this very day. So there's this great continuity of it. And so even if there wasn't the cat, you know, quote unquote, the castle on it, the land, the land in and of itself is just tremendous. But then this amazing jewel of Hearst Castle, which is a testament not just to the wealth of William Randolph Hearst or his vision for having, you know, a beautiful place up there, but Julia Morgan's the first female licensed architect in the state. Her ability to take his sometimes very far out visions and then make them into a composed whole for our collective benefit, I mean, it's just. It's tremendous.
[00:32:45] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I almost fell off my bicycle riding past there because I saw zebras, which I did not. I saw zebras about 200 yards off the. Off the road. And I couldn't believe it.
[00:32:56] Speaker C: Yeah. And, you know, there's other remnants of the herd animals that were part of what was once the largest private zoom. Amazing. Amazing. Sam Bardir and Udads and zebra and all kinds of stuff which, you know, kind of makes it. Makes it also remarkable and surprising. And, you know, there's not a day that goes by, at least in the nice parts of Europe, where there's not people riding on highway one on their bikes. And some of them go and they turn and they try to ride up to it. You can't ride your bike, you know, up the mountain, sir, please don't do that.
[00:33:34] Speaker B: I was tempted. I was definitely tempted. So on the property itself, and I promise we're getting to the railroad museum.
We're on track to get there.
Just asking about Hearst Castle itself. So I'm a layman, obviously, I've never been there, but I have seen it. Any places in particular that really struck you through your work there and your time spent there? Was there a particular spot on the property you really enjoyed?
[00:33:58] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. You think it looks nice from the bottom looking up. You wind up that hill and it's 5 miles in and 1600ft up.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:34:06] Speaker C: A lot of times you'd be up there and completely surrounded by fog, and you would just be the, you know, like in, in the full sunlight, but completely surrounded by fog.
[00:34:17] Speaker B: And then you were above. Above the fog.
[00:34:19] Speaker C: Yeah, not always, but, but, but usually. But then when the. The fog would. Would go away, would recede this commanding view, 360 degree view, the Santa Lucia mountains, a view all the way to point Junipero Serra, which was once the northern boundary of the ranch. And if you followed that down, that's 400 ligate the coast, just this commanding view of the coastline. And that's exactly why they went through the hardship of building that far up was the view. And in fact, the guest houses, we say this, but they're like 6000 are named for their views. Casa del Mar. Casa, the mountains. Casa del Sol, a view of the setting sun perfectly framed from the sitting room. Casa del Mar, house of the ocean. So it is about the view and. Yeah, I mean, you could just command of you and then, you know, to see just the artful integration of the native landscape as it yields to a more formal landscape as it yield. And then when you're on the top, it's a very formal, manicured kind of renaissance garden. And to have all of that swirl together in that place is really amazing. So there's no bad place on the hilltop. And then occasionally, I don't think this was always true, and I think it may not be true still, but there was a little window of time when I was there when we got to have the employees swim.
[00:35:42] Speaker B: No.
[00:35:43] Speaker C: And so it's cold, let me tell you. But it's worth it to backstroke in the Neptune pool.
[00:35:51] Speaker B: That's amazing. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Well, I got to get up there. If there's one thing, you know, I've, I've thought about. I've spent some time down there, like I was saying, but it's, uh. I seem to. Can never spend enough time. Yeah, that's great. Well, no, I was. I'm glad we got a chance to talk about Hearst Castle because that's. It definitely seems like one of the gems of California in a lot of different ways. You know, there's, there's always, there's Lake Tahoe, there's Fort Ross, you know, there's, all of these places that you can go, but Hearst Castle seems to be on all of the lists of California I've ever seen. So I don't think that's a coincidence. Before we get to the railroad museum, last question I wanted to ask just about public history in general. As someone who's a practicing public historian, are there any kind of general opportunities in your mind, opportunities where we could do public history better or things to consider in the arena of practicing public history? Things that are maybe threatened currently? Any comments on that? You know, public history is something that's. It was never something I was practicing. I always, I had a specific subject or a period of history that I was looking at. But any, any remarks on, on the state of public history, I guess you.
[00:37:04] Speaker C: Could refer to it as, I think, public historians, they dig deep, you know, into specific genres of history areas of history. It's not that. It's just they have to take the additional step of them making that history relevant to a group of non experts or a very wide audience. You know, simple definition of public history is people is history that's produced for and consumed by a larger audience and a larger public. So the challenge for public history is we have to speak the language of the people, not our own solar language. And I think that extends to genre. So, I mean, I remember going to school and just like Cal Poly studied under really remarkable professors, but really from a more intellectual, like, east coast intellectual, you know, history tradition.
And they would complain about things like Ken Burns. Oh, I can't believe Ken Burns did this in his documentary about the Civil War. And he gave voice to this person and didn't do that. And. And, you know, he used something as crass as a metaphor to make a point about something, compared something, you know, and. And I get it, because we need research historians. It's not that, but it's time for the historians to stop complaining about how the movies are made or complaining about the popular. The more popular forms of the graphic novel or podcasts or documentary and start doing those things themselves. Yeah, because that is the language of the people. You know, most people don't pick up a book, maybe at all. Those who do probably pick up a historical fiction before they pick up a weighty historical tomb. But there's ways that we could write history to make it more exciting and more accessible. And we only benefit history as a discipline.
And then just sort of how that gives people. I mean, history, you know, history isn't just about the past. History lends clarity and meaning to our uncertain present and future. And it buoys us in a way that helps us deal with all of that coming at us. And so if we don't show up for the public, if we don't show up for a community as historians, whether we identify as public historians or not, then we are only strengthening the infirmity in society. And the infirmity is disconnection. You know that I heard the most profound thing I've ever heard anybody say. Maybe you know that the root of all evil is not money or even the love of money, but the root of all evil is disconnection.
And history is one tool that allows us to connect not just to each other, but to something deeper. It's literally our roots. It roots us. But if we're disconnected from our roots, then there we are, just sort of tempest tossed by whatever's happening in the moment. So public historians have an obligation to show up in the world.
[00:39:57] Speaker B: Yeah, well, well said. And I feel like those words are very important these days, you know? So thank you for that. Changing gears a little bit, looking at public history, your background with it, how did that background prepare you for the role that you're now in with the railroad museum?
[00:40:17] Speaker C: I think any success I've had professionally, I could trace back to my first season as being a guide at Hearst Castle, as a guide trainee. And I was terrified because I didn't come from a household that had a public life. My parents didn't have a public life. They worked hard, but they didn't have that presence in community. And so I came out into the world ill equipped to be a communicator, ill equipped to be up and kind of having the focus.
I guess I'd always craved it. That's why I was maybe a class clown and got into the trouble that I did. I always wanted maybe a little bit of attention. But this allowed me, you know, that opportunity allowed me in a very constructive way to communicate and to have, and to have a presence and have a public life. And it taught me the tools necessary to say what I mean, to be concise with language, to paint a picture, to move people. That skill as a guide, as an interpreter, talking to just random 54 people who come off of a bus from all these different backgrounds and able to develop a skill where I could connect at least a little something to their heart and their personality, made all of the difference in the world in everything that I've done since, whether that's working as a museum director, whether that's serving as an adjunct professor of history at Sac State, you know, all of that stems from, you know, being, I guess I got started when I was 23 and just, you know, figuring out how to communicate with people because at the end of the day, you know, that kind of activity. I was talking to a group of docents here, you know, highly trained volunteers here at the railroad museum, and I said, here's the thing about the kind of work that we do. It exists at the intersection of two important ideas, and one of them is that the work we do is awfully important in terms of connecting people to something and giving them perspective to see their lives in a different way, maybe connecting them to deeper roots. All those high minded things that I just talked about. Same time, it's just talking to people.
[00:42:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:42:26] Speaker C: So, you know, the intersection of those two ideas is just what it's all about. And people are people, you know, no matter what no matter their background, no matter they're from. So, you know, if it's managing a group of volunteers and wonderful staff like I have here at the railroad museum, that all comes through or anything that I've done, you know, leading up to that, just really attributed to that very pivotal one year of being a guide trainee.
[00:42:56] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah. And I think there's a theme here revealing itself and just the relationships and the connections that can happen, you know, when you're working in a field like this. So wrapping up, I know we're coming close to the hour mark.
What, what's going on at the museum these days? What can visitors expect? Either seasoned visitors that have maybe taken a trip or two already, or new newcomers and first timers.
[00:43:22] Speaker C: Museum opened in 1981, and I came on seven years ago, and I was, you know, I worked for California state parks. And so the hiring process was fully a product of that state process. But there was a guy who was advising on my hiring panel. His name was Doctor Denny Onsbach, and he was the founder of the museum, one of the founders, and very pivotal. I mean, he was the one who sat on board the Gold coast car that's now in the museum with then Governor Reagan and said, shouldn't there be something like a railroad museum?
[00:43:57] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:43:57] Speaker C: And it just started with that question. All of it just started with that question. But in the conversations that I had with him, which were frequent, he would always tell me, the things that made us successful for the last 40 years are not going to be the things that make us successful for the next 40 years. And so we always viewed it as a second founding. And I think we're in that process of the second founding of the museum. And so in that we asked the question, how can we mean more to more people? Because the people who came in through the doors in 1981, they had a familiarity with just how much railroading and railroading culture intersects with our lives. They had experienced themselves the golden age of railroads. They had family members who more closely related to them on their family trees who had worked for the railroads. It was a bigger part of our regional life back then, even if it was sort of in passing.
And the fact that it's here at all represents some urgency around this transition in society. But now we have people coming in the museum, and they're like, I don't like trains, or I do like trains, but that's not really, that's not really the most meaningful distinction. And so we have to do more to answer the unasked question and the unasked question is the same no matter if you're at Hearst Castle or at the California State Railroad Museum. And that's what's in it for me, everybody.
My former colleague Vicki Kastner, who was a brilliant historian at Hearst Castle, she said, we all listen to the same radio station in our head, Wiifm. What's in it for me?
That's the filter.
So we can't just assume. We have to answer the unasked question. We can't just put the open sign up and do a pretty good job at welcoming whoever happens to come through the door. We have to run down the street and say, did you know this? Did you know that? What about this? And draw those neat connections. They exist, but we have to draw the connections that run from the past into the present and their futures. And so really, people look at us as a history museum, but we're not. Every day, the main thing that we do, the most important thing we do is we help people imagine their futures through understanding their past and our collective past. So there's a lot more people stories in the museum than was the case before. Railroading is the most diverse history that we have in this nation. And so we do a lot more to draw out those experiences. We work with community to build exhibits like we did with the chinese railroad worker experience, where the exhibit wasn't just an expression of what we thought or a synthesis of whatever the latest books were. It was really demonstrably an expression of the chinese railroad worker descendant community in concentric circles extending out from Sacramento but to San Francisco and Seattle and Utah and all these other places that really represented what they wanted to see. So we are really working on kind of three main initiatives, and one of them is building a laboratory of learning. There's every day where we have young people, college students, from community college to undergraduate to graduate students, who are learning by doing. They're sorting collections, they're working on exhibits. They're getting their first experiences, some of their first experiences in working for their community at the museum.
But we also teach classes, you know, so sometimes the classroom isn't out at Sac State, sometimes this is the classroom. And we have graduate students who are creating exhibits such as the farm to fork, a public history exhibit here in the museum where when the, wherever that happened, the sacramento stopped being the city of trees and started being the farm to fork capital of America, they wanted to go, well, what does that really mean? And so they did, you know, this exhibit that gave deep roots to that concept. The other thing we try to do is understand we're a museum without walls. So people think of the museum, they think of the brick building at the edge of town, but really, the museum's everywhere, right? It's. It's like, what is that? What is this track doing on our street?
What is it? What is that old railroad looking building over there?
[00:48:05] Speaker B: Right?
[00:48:05] Speaker C: I mean, the remnants are all around us, and so we're the hub of that, and we're the place that. That can inform that, but we need to connect the dots to, you know, people's backyards and where they are.
[00:48:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:18] Speaker C: And then also, we run a train. I mean, you know, read about history inside the museum. It's. I'd like to think it's experiential. It's getting more experiential all the time. But then also go ride history. I mean, get on the train and go down the Walnut Grove branch line, or at least part of it, and understand how that led to a more lasting gold rush. The second California gold rush that's been going on since the 1880s.
[00:48:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:41] Speaker C: And then the third thing is about community, you know, not just being a place that people visit, but a place where people enjoy concerts. So you can come here and enjoy a candlelight concert. We don't put it on, but we're a venue for it. But they get to see the museum in a different light. It's not just a place that you visit once when you're in fourth grade and then maybe come back if you have kids, but it should be a place that has activities and things that people can do and be involved in, not just passive in a passive sense, but in an active sense, building a place where people can inscribe their own experiences, not just read a book on.
[00:49:20] Speaker B: A wall, for sure. Well, I think that that will go a long way and continues to go a long way of what you were mentioning earlier about popularizing history and making it more accessible. So I think that tie is a great place to wrap up. Just wanted to say again, thanks for your time today, and thanks for all you do over there at the museum.
[00:49:40] Speaker C: My pleasure. It's an awfully important place in our community here in Sacramento. I always say this. There are some places in the world that don't even have one week connection to world history. And here we live in Sacramento, and our local history is world history. You know, Rush, the building of the first transcontinental railroad that connected the. Not just the nation, but the world in a way that it hadn't been before. And then all of this agricultural bounty and wealth and so, you know, all we're ever trying to do with the museum, all I ever try to do with any history course I teach is just a genealogy of the present, genealogy of, of how did we get here? And that strengthens, I think, everybody's sense of cohesion, identity and connection more than just about anything can.
[00:50:33] Speaker A: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Sacramento Historical Society's the American Attic. If you'd like to learn more about the society and upcoming speaker series, please visit sackhistoricalsociety.org. If you have ideas for topics and speakers we can engage, drop us a line at
[email protected] see you next time.
