Janette Williams, Staff Writer
03-18-2008
PASADENA - It's a link as complex as a strand of DNA stretching hack to the old country — and simple as a memory shared around the dinner table.
"Family Stories," a new project of the Pasadena Museum of History, will tap into the experiences of six families with generational roots in the city and the San Gabriel Valley, from six of the ethnic communities that helped build it.
Then, using photographs, letters, documents, oral histories, even vintage clothes, furniture, tools and artwork, the museum will illustrate each family's story in an exhibit planned for May 9, 2009.
"Actually, it's the complete fulfillment of the museum's mission — the history of our community," said Ardis Willwerth, the project director.
"We feel there are many untold stories" in Pasadena, she said. "We all know the kind of standard one: the rich cultural history, the wonderful architecture, the Arts and Crafts movement, the history of the Toumament of Roses. But we don't know about the lives of people who actually lived here from the very beginning. It's always been very diverse, and those stories have never been told."
The exhibit's focus will be on black, Armenian-American, Chinese-American, European-American and Japanese-American and Latino families here since the early 20th century. The museum has been awarded a $10,000 grant by the California Council for the Humanities toward the project.
Bill Deverell, a USC history professor who runs the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, is chairman of the advisory group. He's enthusiastic about the project and is sure some "remarkable family and social histories" will be revealed.
'You cannot find a family history that's not fascinating — it doesn't
exist," he said.
Inevitably, Deverell said, painful memories or family secrets will come out, moving tellers and listeners intellectually and emotionally.
"Our aim is not to go searching, hut it's going to be fascinating to see what families hold on to as important and meaningful," he said. "Just to listen to family stories written or passed down, and see how they resonate in people's lives today."
It's also likely that some family stories may not be true, or got embellished over the years, he said.
"I don't know if... our obligation is to check or verify the veracity of stories so much as to listen to the meaning," he said.
Projects such as this can be community-building, he said.
"But at the same time we have to be wary of painting the past too nostalgically," he said. "We can be moved without romanticizing. I fully expect to find painful memories, and that demands that all of us involved approach it with a great amount of respect and sensitivity."
The family story of advisory committee member Bemard Melekian — interim Pasadena City Manager and police chief for many years — is one that has its roots in tragedy.
His grandparents fled the Armenian genocide in 1918, he said, and came here with Melekian's father, the only one of five siblings to survive.
"I'm certainly familiar with my family's story," said Melekian, whose family opened a bakery at Mountain Street and Fair Oaks Avenue in 1921. "But the longer I'm here, the more I leam... I've been advocating for something like this for a while — it's very exciting."
Still, the project will be a challenge, Melekian said, especially zeroing in on just one family from each ethnic group.
"Pasadena has got so many stories.but it's usually only one that gets told — the Indiana Colony, the people who came and frankly put Pasadena on the map," he said. "But we have the oldest black community in Southem Califomia, Hispanics have been here for generations, Armenians since the tum of the 20th century. It's marvelous the way we all co-existed."
Advisory committee member Roberta Martinez said they hope to tap into "a vast pool of diverse experience."
The oral history project she was involved with at Pasadena Heritage showed her how many people wrongly think their stories are nothing special.
"They say, 'I have only an average tale to tell, I didn't live a front-page kind of life,' but what you find is the larger communal experience," she said. "I'm excited about what we're going to find out."
Martinez said much of the city's early history doesn't fit any stereotype. For example, many Latinos who came at the end of the 19th century were small-business owners, she said, and the family of Robert Owen, an African American and one of the wealthiest men in the country after the Civil War, gifted Pasadena with land in the Arroyo Seco.
Well, maybe, said Diane Siegel, the exhibit's co-curator."That's one of the things we want to get right — we don't really know for certain," she said of the Owen story.
Stories get repeated, Siegel said, and memory is complex. "But there's always a reason they get started... the threads are there."
For information on how to participate in the project, call Ardis Willwerth, (626) 577-1660, Ext. 15, or e-mail her at awillwerth@pasadcnahistory.org.
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