An overflow crowd gathered at the Los Alamitos Museum on Los Alamitos Boulevard on Sunday for two purposes, first to formally recognize its two year transformation and to also induct Renaissance Man Joe Escalante into the city’s Hall of Fame (see related story).
For anyone who has visited the museum since it opened in 1976, gone is the carpet that was old as the building and its place is a shiny new red floor and painted adobe walls, courtesy of the City of Los Alamitos, who owns the building.
From left. Shelli Appling, Bonnie (Poe) Adrian, Debbie Kent, Myrt Perisho, Marilynn Poe, (hiding) Sharon Williams, Lesley Hale, & Adrianne Chavez. (Right) After the carpet was removed, city workers installed a beutiful, fire engine red floor.
“Nobody gets paid. We’re all volunteers,” said Museum President Debbie Kent, “and it’s a small board, but we have become really good friends.”
“We also want to thank our city (Los Alamitos) who helped us do all the heavy lifting and putting things up on our walls because none of us should be on ladders,” she chuckled.
According to long-time museum veteran and former President of the Board, and a former Los Al Mayor, Marilyn Poe, the almost year long renovation project was painstaking.
“Everything had to go,” she said in a pre-event interview. “We had to take everything down from the walls, take down the exhibits and pack everything in crates and boxes so that the inside of the space would be completely free of any valuable historic items during renovation.”
Courtesy photo
Ron Noda, the city’s Developmental Services Director also attended the event. He said city crews and contractors had a hard time with bubbles and other problems in the floor once the old carpet had been pulled out, but at the end of the project, the floor turned out well. It’s now smooth, and painted fire-engine red.
Kent thanked the city as she recounted the ordeal.
“We started last, end of June, beginning of July. We had to box everything up in this museum. We started boxing it up and it we were here Tuesdays and Thursdays every, almost every Tuesday and Thursday,” said Kent.
“The city came in one day and moved everything. We’re talking the piano…the host thing… the stove, the refrigerator. They took everything out, all the cases, and they either went into the pods or to the warehouse,” she marveled.
“So the city workers, and they got here at nine, they were done by two. It was amazing so just like everything, they did the floor.
“And then, like when you start something at your house, they did the floor, and we go, (to the city) ‘Oh my gosh, the walls look awful. You know, you got this brand new floor and the walls are awful,’” said Kent.
Kent said the city relented and said “we’ll paint the Adobe.” “So they painted the walls for us, and then it was all done, and we came back here, and I can’t tell you how exciting it was really. It was an awkward feeling because we came back here and it was so beautiful,” said Kent.
“No doubt it was beautiful, but this whole room was full of boxes that now we had to take out and rearrange our displays, which was hard, but it’s really a good thing to go through, like spring cleaning, you know.”
“We decided we wanted to do something, not just put things back in the display cases like they were. We wanted to do kind of a timeline,” said Kent.
Now, said Kent, visitors to the museum can start in one corner and sort of follow a timeline of historic events.
Kent said “nothing could be done without our board members” and she asked them to stand for recognition.
“We couldn’t do this without you,” Kent told the Board.
Current Los Al Mayor Pro-tem Shelley Hasselbrink said she was proud of the Museum and the work done by the city to renovate it.
“My husband and I moved here 32 years ago, when we got married, we raised our two new boys here. One of my goals when I came on the council in 2014 was to make sure that my children wanted to come back here and have their families and raise their families here,” she said.
“Our heritage is continuing,” she said, and that the city was so lucky to have a museum to preserve the history of local families. “We have a museum for a city our size that is also a landmark with the National Historical Society, it’ just really special to have that.”
Hasselbrink coined the term for the “fire-engine red floor.”
“We have some amazing things going on in this city,” said Hasselbrink.