Road Trip, vol. 10

January 18, 1933 The next morning we went to Charley Lehnerts’ and read the mail that had accumulated for us while we were on the way. Later we walked about half a mile to the Olympic grounds. The greater part of the buildings had been torn down and moved away but the administration building was still there. It was of practically the same construction as the Exposition buildings in San Diego though by no means as large.

That afternoon we went through the museum at Exposition Park, which park also contains the stadium in which most of the Olympic Games were held. This museum had a great many exhibits; in fact, so many that it would take a person half a day or more to really see them all. It contained everything from a bird and animal exhibit to skeletons of giant prehistoric mammals and from art to an aviation exhibit.

The animal exhibit was really wonderful in the manner of its showing. They were placed in glass-faced booths in the sides of a great hall and were surrounded by plants and foliage of their natural habitat. Then the background was painted on canvas. The work was so expert that one could hardly detect where the real left off and the painting began. Two exhibits in particular were very interesting; one was of two mountain lions crouched in a tree. The booth instead of being lighted by white light was dark blue instead and seemed just like night. Then the lions’ eyes gleamed a fierce yellow and were staring right at you. The other was an exhibit of about eighteen different jungle animals that were placed together in quite lifelike positions. This one was indeed the masterpiece of them all for you couldn’t tell at all where the background began, nor could you truly estimate distances in the exhibit.

In another room they had a military exhibit, in another art, in another Indian relics, another pottery, another colonial costumes, in another a movie exhibit, and in another an aviation and travel exhibit. The movie exhibit was very interesting. It contained costumes worn by some well-known actors in equally well-known pictures. There we saw wax busts of some well-known actors who have passed away. Then it showed how many of the sounds were made for the talking pictures. There were many of the screen props, both of present time and of years ago. It also showed the evolution of film into the present sound pictures.

The aviation and travel exhibit contained one of the army planes to fly around the world some year ago. It also contained a fighting plane of the World War which seemed quite ridiculous compared to the planes we have nowadays. Here we saw two small replicas of steamers. One was about nine feet long and showed everything in detail, even to the lifeboats. The other was very good, even bigger, but was not finished in such small detail. As it was getting late we were forced to leave and go back to the apartment.