To my surprise this compact museum located adjacent to the library and it wasn't about a museum about the history of museums in Santa Monica, but about the history of Santa Monica through the ages, duh!
(I didn't take notes, so this is all from memory and may be a bit wrong) Typically like most places where any people have lived, its life started off with people living there! Native Americans happily living in small communities, until the Spanish decided to come up from Mexico and kill them all. The ones left over were taught how to farm inefficiently European stylee, dude. The Spanish taught them all Christianity and left to get paella from somewhere else in the world, replacing them were the church missionaries who taught them a whole lot of other things, like church building and probably weight training, as time passed the locals chucked out all the missionaries and got replaced my government businessmen who built a railway a railway a mile into the sea, as their vision was to turn Santa Monica into a port town. This failed and the train track into the sea was taken over by Japanese fishermen that created a village out there, until it caught fire, classed condemned and fell into disrepair. The port town also failed because the majority of people coming here were tourists loving the scenery, climate and so a pier, funfair and a whole bunch of crap was thrown into the area. Nothing's changed much since the war (number 2) other than palm trees getting taller.
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| I'm not sure if spinach was the main inspiration for Pop-Eye |
Santa Monica also lays claims to the creation of pop-eye, modern skateboarding, the original muscle beach (back then full of acrobatic performers and then moved to Venice Beach as it wasn't considered "family" enough by Disney when they threw a load of money into the area). It is also where Route 66 or "America's Main Street" comes to an end from Chicago.
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| A skateboard |
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| A map |
The museum also has the entire archives from their local paper "The Outlook" - which shut down in 1998. It would've been amazing to sift through the entire archive like you see in the movies and unearth something incredible, but you can do the next best thing. Put yourself on the front cover of one of the stories that could've happened in The Outlook's life.
I picked a story that was me winning an Oscar (only a matter of time, really) though I probably should have payed more attention to the story and not just the headline of "Rupert Burr shines at Academy Awards"... as it continues to go on how I was discovered at a singing competition 3 weeks before the shooting of 'The Sound of Music' and replaced Julie Andrews as she fell ill with laryngitis. Someone said I put in an "Outstanding performance" - so, I probably deserved the award as I imagine it was quite hard for me to replace Julie Andrews.
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| Hot off the press |
Lets hope she doesn't find out I poisoned her food to give laryngitis.
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