For a moment as historic as the 250th birthday of the United States, you would expect a place focused on history to do something special.
For the San Diego History Center in the heart of Balboa Park, that means a unique look at how the last 250 years have unfolded here.
“So this is quite an ambitious project for us, and actually for any museum, because the concept is San Diego history, 1776 to 2026, in 100 objects,” said Dr. Tina Zarpour, the History Center’s vice president of community engagement, collections and education.
So, how do you choose 100 objects to tell a 250-year-old story? Zarpour said that’s where community engagement and education came together — engaging with students from UC San Diego and San Diego State University to choose those 100 objects.
“We brought them in and took them through a whole training regimen, basically a course on how to understand objects, how to work with the public, how to write labels for objects, how to do object-based learning and interpretation,” Zarpour said.
The displays run the gamut; everything from the deadly serious old cannon that used to be at the Serra Museum to a colorful plastic Jack in the Box head! You might remember those from decades ago. When you used the drive through, you’d give your order by speaking to the clown head.
You may know Jack in the Box was founded in San Diego, and it’s still headquartered here.
Just steps away from Jack’s head, you'll find a voluminous book — a priceless artifact from a pivotal moment in San Diego history.
Zarpour explained, “This is the guest register from the 1915 Expo, and every single person that came signed their name in the book.”
Moments in San Diego’s architectural history are here, including an intricate models of the late San Diego stadium (also known over the years as Jack Murphy Stadium and Qualcomm Stadium). There's also a detailed model of Horton Plaza.
Zarpour then showed us a display from just a few years ago: a flag hanging on a nearby wall.
“This flag is one of our newer objects,” she said. “It dates from 2019 and this flag has the distinction of being the first flag of the Kumeyaay Nation that was flown over the Presidio in Balboa Park.”
Zarpour said it was important to the History Center to present as fulsome a picture as possible of our history. That includes dark moments. One display shows a couple of small pieces that tell of the Ku Klux Klan's presence in San Diego; an honorary ribbon and a taillight cover with those infamous three letters. It was donated by the son of a Klan member.
“He felt it was important to preserve this history in San Diego and we feel it’s important to interpret this history and, you know, show the good and the bad,” Zarpour said.
There are uniforms worn by members of the United States Navy — a nod to our military history. And there’s an unassuming little Smith Corona typewriter that was used to draft the founding documents of the Women’s Studies Department at SDSU, the first of its kind in the nation.
I asked Zarpour, “What do you hope visitors take away when it's all done? They come, they see it, they walk out those doors. What do you hope they think or talk about?”
She said, “First, that there is always a San Diego connection, right? Second, multiple narratives, multiple stories, not the single narrative ... Sometimes it's memory, sometimes it's nostalgia, sometimes it's something completely new that they've never encountered before. And that's what we wanted to embrace, is really people's relationship with the past through objects and artifacts. We're used to telling histories through timelines, through events, through people, through the written word, but this is telling history through objects.”
Objects that — with apologies to Ken Kramer — tell you a lot about San Diego.
