Teetering on the desk of Bradley Peacock one morning last month was a stack of books on Hermosa Beach history, including Patricia Gazin’s “Footnotes in the Sand,” Ted Gioaia’s “West Coast Jazz,” and Chris Miller and Jerry Roberts’ “Images of America: Hermosa Beach.” Peacock is the new curator of the Hermosa Beach Museum, and is new to the South Bay, originally hailing from Georgia. Describing his level of familiarity with the town town before arriving, he said “Besides Black Flag, not much.”
He may have some catching up to do, but it’s not a bad place to start.
Peacock will helm the Community Center-based institution charged with preserving the city’s heritage, stretching through its 110 years of incorporation and back into the days when it was occupied by Tongva tribe. It is a challenging mission for a city that is both deeply connected its history, and undergoing rapid, substantial change.
But this is as much an opportunity as it is a challenge, Peacock said. When confronted with this dynamic, Peacock brightened and grew more effusive, like a suddenly unkinked hose.
“That’s a good narrative. And it’s connected to what’s happening in cities around the country,” Peacock said.
Local history devotees view Peacock as the right man for the job. Rick Koenig, director emeritus of the Hermosa Beach Historical Society, said that Peacock has a mix of intelligence and sociability that is essential for a town historian, but often hard to find.
“He’s got a good personality. He’s outgoing enough, and he’s willing to listen. A lot of guys that come into a job like this, they want to spend all their time telling you how smart they are,” Koenig said.
A graduate of the State University of West Georgia, Peacock arrives having most recently served as Assistant Curator at the Atlanta History Center. While there, he worked on a project reinterpreting the city’s history through the lens of various cultures, including the city’s Hindu and American Indian populations. Much of the work involved taking oral histories and translating them into compelling physical and digital exhibits.
This experience will be of immediate use at the Hermosa museum, where he plans to dive into the city’s oral history collection. But his job as curator forces him to take a broader view of historical resources, starting with talking to long-time residents himself. And for his first event as curator, the museum hosted food historian and Easy Reader writer Richard Foss for a discussion of the history of the Hermosa dining scene; in preparation, he found himself sorting through matchbooks from restaurants gone by.
In the short term, Peacock plans to improve the museum experience by sprucing up some of the displays and writing more engaging label copy. But he also will be working on a bigger project. In line with his participatory philosophy of history, Peacock will be helping make widely accessible an exciting primary source of Hermosa history: the Hermosa Review, a now-defunct newspaper that published from 1913 into the 1970s. The historical society had a complete set of volumes into the 1940s, and recently acquired a set covering 1945 to 1959.
“I got a call from a guy in Inglewood who was cleaning out a basement,” Koenig said. “I told him, ‘Where are you? Don’t move.’”
The museum is in the process of scanning and digitizing the volumes, with plans to eventually make them searchable for researchers. The project is exciting, but brings up a quandary facing public historians across the country: the role a museum should play, given the increasing availability of information on the Internet.
Peacock insists that the latest developments makes museums more relevant, not less. The notion of a museum as a still place with white walls where people go to quietly observe closely secured objects is long out of date.
This attitude informs his approach to future plans for the museum. He envisions future events that engage the community and bring the history of the town outside the four walls of the museum. He suggested Happy Hour with History events taking place outside of the museum, such as one devoted to the history of lawn bowling in the city at the lawn bowling green on Valley Drive.
Such an approach meets another goal of Peacock: broadening the population that is interested in local history. The majority of the society’s members, and many of the people who attend its events, are older. This hardly makes Hermosa’s society unusual, and to some extent it makes sense, because these have often lived the topic being discussed or the subject being exhibited. But this too is not insurmountable. The desire to engage with history, Peacock said, is in everyone.
“No matter where you go, people feel a sense of place, and the city, the community reflect it,” he said. “Even people who say they’re not interested, they still have a stake in time and place.”
