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Wanderung 8

Swinging Sweetly through the Sunny South.

January-February 2005

February 4, 2005 - San Diego Museums

Chris had told us that Balboa Park had several buildings from San Diego's 1937 World's Fair that had been converted into museums, and some of those museums sounded just to good to pass up. In particular, we wanted to see the Automotive Museum, the Aviation Museum, and the Museum of Man. That is, our goal was a 3-museum day, which, similar to a 3-dog night, was a very satisfying state of affairs somewhat similar to a 3-bank shot in pool, triplets, a banana split with 3 dips of ice cream, and many other good things that come in 3s.

We started off with the Automotive Museum, which was essentially one large hall filled chock-a-block with antique, classic, and exotic cars and motorcycles. Some of the sleek, low-slung Ferraris, Maseratis, and Lamborghinis were, of course, the kind of thing that make a young man's heart beat fast, at least they sure did mine way back when. It's probably a good thing I didn't have the resources to get one when I was young, because I might have done something very stupid with it. Even at my current, shall we say, mature age, The Monster in my garage (see the Prolog) occasionally whispers something to me like, "Wouldn't you like to go 140 miles per hour?" To set the record straight, I have not driven it that fast, but I know it is only turning 2,000 rpm at 70 mph and is redlined a 4,500, and you can do that math as well as I can.

As it was, of course, I managed to do stupid things with the vehicles I did have, and the motorcycles on display vividly brought back some of those memories. I saw several pristine examples of Indian motorcycles but did not see my Royal Enfield-Indian, with which I got into a tank-slapper speed-wobble at about 70 miles per hour. That's when the handlebars whip back and forth so uncontrollably that they slap the side of the gasoline tank, which means, in essence, that you are totally out of control. I recovered from that one without anything happening other than loosing my deodorant, so to speak, but I was not so fortunate with the smaller, seemingly more innocent, motorcycles.

The museum had a showroom perfect Honda Sport 65 from the 70s, and I once drove an almost identical Sport 90. The 90 stood for 90 cubic centimeters, and you wouldn't think with an engine that small you could get into much trouble, but it turned out if you were dumb enough, you could. I decided to see what the maximum adhesion of the tires would be in a tight turn and what kind of a sound they would make right before they broke loose. It turned out that the answers to those two implicit questions were "poor" and "none", and I was spit unceremoniously onto the pavement as the bike slid out from underneath me. The road to wisdom is for many of us a tortuous one, and that was how I learned that there are some questions for which it is advisable to not seek the answers, at least not by direct experimentation. Fortunately, the motorcycle and I both survived this escapade with only scratches to our respective hides, so that lesson was learned relatively inexpensively.

The museum did not, however, have some of the other odd clunkers (cars and motorcycles) I had owned or ridden. Terry's old Zuendapp motorcycle, for example, taught me to always carry a chain repair kit along on a motorcycle trip and for heaven's sake to be sure to ask the owner how to turn on the headlight if you might have to drive at night. Driving a motorcycle at night without a headlight turned out to be a whole new experience, and one I would just as soon never repeat. My old 1960 Saab 93B taught me to never start a car from the outside when your foot is positioned just in front of the front wheels. It turns out that if the aforementioned car has been accidentally left in gear, it will in fact run right over your foot after starting and proceed to hit whatever it is ultimately aimed at. It will do this without any further guidance or advice from you, unless you can manage to run up to a moving car, open the door, and jump in it in time to regain some semblance of control, which I could not. It was yet another valuable tidbit of wisdom, albeit one with an admittedly narrow range of applicability, somewhat similar to Confucius's rule never to spur a horse without having both feet in the stirrups, I guess. All that aside, the Automotive Museum did have a wonderful variety of old cars, motorcycles and even one of the luxury trailers from the 1950's.

About the only thing that could tear me out of a museum like that would be an Aviation museum, but since that was next on our agenda I bid a fond farewell to the vehicles and walked about a 100 yards over to the Aviation museum. From the outside, the building looked like a huge cylinder with Art Deco trim. The docent told us that Henry Ford had installed an assembly line there for the World's Fair where he actually assembled Ford automobiles. Wouldn't it have been a kick at that fair to buy a car that you had just seen assembled on Ford's assembly line?

Nowadays, however, the building's large, donut-shaped interior space has been converted to exhibits documenting the history of aviation. The exhibits included beautiful examples of aircraft both sitting on the floor and hanging from the ceiling. We joined a guided tour, which I would highly recommend, and the docent lead us through the entire building, regaling us with important facts and trivia about the aircraft and the people who designed, built, and flew them.

The Wright Brothers were, of course, represented right off the bat with a full-scale reconstruction of the Wright Flyer. A Wright Model B was also hanging from the ceiling, decorated like the Vin Fiz, the first airplane to fly across the USA from coast to coast. Of course, only one wing brace of the original aircraft actually made it all the way across the continent; all the other pieces had to be replaced in the multiple crashes along the way, but that's another story of inspiration, endurance, and sheer pig-headedness that I would highly recommend to anyone interested in the early days of aviation.

Glenn Curtis was represented by his pusher aircraft with which he had pioneered the use of ailerons, but I was surprised to learn that Curtis had lost the patent lawsuit the Wrights brought against him and therefore had to pay them royalties for each plane he produced. To my mind, ailerons were truly a unique idea for lateral control and different enough from the Wright's method of wing warping that their patent would not be infringed. Of course I'm no judge but I'm sure that judge was showing the same sagacity in regulating the future of aircraft that the U.S. Congress is currently showing in its attempts to regulate the future of the Internet. A possibly apocryphal story about President Coolidge, I think it was, related that when he was about to sign a bill authorizing the purchase of aircraft for the Army in the 1920s he asked why they didn't just buy one airplane and take turns flying it!

World War I was represented by a set of gorgeous aircraft including a Sopwith Pup, a Fokker Triplane painted with Von Richthofen's fire engine red colors, and a Spad. Our docent explained that the development of machine gun synchronizers that allowed firing straight through the propeller arc was the actual origin of the fighter, the first example of which was the Fokker Eindekker monoplane on display, a spindly-looking but deadly weapon of the time. Deployment of such airplanes by the Germans allowed them to dominate the air war for a period of several months, during which time the average life span of the Allied pilots sent to the front to fight them was about 2 weeks, if memory serves me correctly. With grim humor the Allied pilots referred to themselves as "Fokker fodder". A model of the German Zeppelins was also displayed along with an account of the origins of strategic bombing first started by those dirigibles. Fortunately, the war ended and aircraft could resume a peacetime course of development.

A Ford Tri-motor, a mail-carrying biplane, and barnstormer represented the peacetime development of aviation during the Golden Age of the 20s and 30s. They also displayed the first airplane used on an aircraft carrier and curiously, they had the same model of the aircraft carrier that I had seen the day before in the Maritime museum at the harbor. The Maritime museum, of course, gave a much more thorough presentation of the development of aircraft carriers up through World War II and the present, but I enjoyed seeing the real aircraft used on them as well.

World War II and the aircraft used in that conflict had, of course, their own area on the display floor. A Spitfire sat right beneath its nemesis, the Me 109. This Spitfire was real but museum only had a fiberglass mock up of the Me 109. Since I had just seen the real McCoy at the Confederate Air Force in Midland, Texas, earlier on the trip I didn't miss having that. Carrier aircraft included a Hellcat and a Dauntless dive bomber, I think, with its airbrakes deployed.

The final few yards of the display hall included post World War II jet fighters and spacecraft from Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Up on the ceiling was a reconstruction of a GPS satellite that mapped perfectly onto the glass-box mockup I had seen in the Alamogordo, New Mexico, space museum just a few days back, which was a nice tie-in. All in all, we had a great time at the Aviation museum and what finally chased us out was hunger, pure and simple.

For lunch we went back to the same delicatessen we had visited the previous day, but we each tried something else from the menu. Re-energized and realizing that we only had about 2 more hours until all the museums closed, we returned to museum row to attempt the Museum of Man.

The Museum of Man was, essentially, a museum about the origins of Homo Sapiens and cultures of the world. The section on the origin of our species was, I thought, done extremely well. The family tree of Homo Sapiens was documented quite well and the difficulty of establishing different progenitor species was clarified. As far as I could see they carefully presented the evidence and where opposing theories existed, they presented the pros and cons for each one so that the reader to make the ultimate judgment. I didn't see anything about Stupid Design theory, of course (that's the one that answers questions like, "Why do we have a useless appendix?"), but maybe that's too new to be up on display.


 

The museum's coverage of different world cultures was, however, spotty at best. Maybe that is inevitable given the number and richness of human cultures and the limited display area of the museum, but they focused in depth on about 5 cultures while essentially ignoring the rest. Fortunately they had very good exhibits on ancient Egyptian culture, and I very much enjoyed seeing real mummies and their accoutrements.


 

My brother Terry would, I think, have enjoyed the section about weaponry across human cultures more than I did (we won't even mention Monika), but I still thought that many of the items were quite interesting. The exhibits emphasized spears, shields, and bows and arrows, but beautifully carved examples of the Polynesian war clubs were also presented. Several nice examples of crossbows were there, but the exhibition essentially stopped with the development of gunpowder and projectile weapons. Given that the purpose was to show how cultures differed, I think that was a reasonable place to stop since cheap, effective automatic fire assault rifles like the AK-47 have essentially become cultural universals, beloved by thugs with guns everywhere. And by the end of all this we were pretty tired and the museum was closing for the day, so we finally had to stop.


 

On our way back to the truck, we took pictures of the beautiful World's Fair buildings. I enjoyed the intricate decorations incorporated into these old buildings. It gave them a unifying style, I guess, and also was just plain pretty, something that most modern buildings are not.

After arranging to meet us the next day, Chris drove back to his home in Los Angeles to look after his cats and we drove back across the mountains to get to our campground for the night. It was late when we returned and we just barely had a little time to download pictures and write a little in the journal before it was time to go to sleep. But during the day I had learned an important fact that suggested a course of action that I will now pass on to you, Gentle Reader.

For those of you tempted to visit San Diego and see these museums, let me recommend the following strategy. First, get a 1-week pass for all the museums around Balboa Park; we were told it was available for $30 and that, if you used it all week, would be a tremendous bargain. Secondly, make sure your visit includes Sunday afternoon from 12 to 4 p.m. when the little international pavilions in the park are open. Apparently they feature objects available from different countries and at least some of them reputedly offer some form of entertainment. Finally go to the outdoor amphitheater with the organ from 2-4 p.m. on Sunday and enjoy a free outdoor organ recital. To me that sounded like an eminently satisfying way to spend a Sunday afternoon, and I was only sorry that we couldn't stay another couple of days to do it. But we had already spent one more day than planned in San Diego, so we turned our attention to our next port of call, Joshua Tree National Park.

Copyright 2005 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

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