Tucson Mountain House
Bill Carr & Bill Woodin
Arthur Pack & Bill Carr in the early 60s
A Desert Museum Vignette Introduction
To provide some background for ASDM’s (Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum) Oral History Project:
Early on, Bill Carr recognized the importance of capturing the Desert Museum’s history. In 1971, he began to capture his early vision by working with Francis Colley, Arthur Pack’s secretary, who conducted a limited number of interviews with key Museum founders/sponsors. Then in 1976, Carr applied for and secured a grant from the Weatherhead Foundation to do more extensive interviews. He hired Margaret Gerow, a local school teacher, who interviewed, recorded and transcribed a series of interviews with early employees, members of the Board of Trustees and Pima County representatives, including Gilbert Ray and C.B. Brown — who is widely known as “the Father of Tucson Mountain Park”. Together, Colley and Gerow conducted 32 interviews.
Peggy Larson, ASDM’s Librarian and Archivist, carried the project from there. Peggy and her husband, Merv, were some of the Museum’s first ‘employees’ — Merv a paid, formal employee and Peggy an unpaid periodic ‘volunteer’. After a time, for personal reasons, Peggy and Merv left the Museum, returning for a while to California. But eventually, a longing for the Sonoran Desert brought them back to Tucson, at which point — Merv returned to work for the Museum.
Peggy went to work for Tucson Unified School District where she worked as a Librarian for 30 plus years. Upon retirement from TUSD in 1999, she approached Nancy Laney, then the Acting Director of ASDM, and told her “someone has to write about your history”. Nancy Laney’s response: “someone has to find it first’.
And so began Peggy’s return to the Museum and the quest to find and preserve the Museum’s history. She began searching for Museum artifacts for the Archives and reinstituting interviews with key board members and staff. During this period, Peggy conducted 14 interviews.
Around 2010, Peggy realized that the small cassette tape recorder tapes, which were fragile and easily broken, needed an update. At this point another volunteer, Anne Warner, joined the project. Anne began to digitize the previous cassette recordings. Fairly early on Anne commented to Peggy that people from the Museum’s past were being lost, geographically and some permanently.
This led to a more aggressive interview schedule to reach out to:
- Current and former employees
- Current and former board members
- Volunteers/Docents
- Representatives of Pima County
- Community representatives
- Donors
As of this writing, ASDM’s Oral History Project includes 168 interviews that span over 71 years.
About five or six years ago, we realized the importance of capturing and presenting the history and spirit of the Desert Museum as well as the people who are part of its history and present-day world. The vignettes are our way of sharing these with you. We hope you enjoy them.
For more information about ASDM’s Oral History Project and ASDM vignettes, contact [email protected] — Attention: Peggy Larson/Anne Warner.