SAROYAN MEMENTOS PACKED INTO FRESNO WAREHOUSE
Tara Albert
Fresno Bee (California)
May 31, 2011 Tuesday
If you’re looking to locate some of the last traces of author William
Saroyan in Fresno, it’s best not to visit the county library or the
local museum. Instead, head to a cavernous metal warehouse on the
industrial side of southwest Fresno.
There, stacked on 19 packing pallets at the Ritchie Trucking Service,
behind cases of tequila and boxes of Payless shoes, lies the entombed
contents of a once-grand local museum exhibit that showcased Saroyan’s
life and times.
“It’s not much to look at from this angle,” said Bruce Lackey, owner
of the building.
The pallets hold, among many other items, Saroyan’s two player pianos,
a couch, trinkets, half-used cigarette boxes, matchbooks that he
collected on his world travels, and shards of glass, rocks and twine
that he gathered on his bicycle rides through town. The items were
once part of a history exhibit of Saroyan at the Fresno Metropolitan
Museum, but had to be relocated after the museum closed last year.
A storage warehouse might seem a heartless place for such a collection
to land, especially considering that Saroyan remains one of Fresno’s
most famous native sons and his short stories during the Depression
helped put the town, and its eccentric immigrants, on the map.
But for many Fresno residents, the name Saroyan isn’t synonymous
with a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright or short-story master whose
fiction they’ve read. It’s the name of a theater downtown.
“As far as his own home turf, the interest in him has just been lagging
for a number of years,” said Bill Secrest, a special collections
librarian for the Fresno County Public Library.
Looking on the bright side, Haig Mardikian, president of the William
Saroyan Foundation in San Francisco, said that the storage warehouse
at least protects the items until a museum or university might agree
to house them. “For the time being, the foundation is mostly concerned
with preserving the material,” he said.
That Saroyan’s possessions now sit in a warehouse gathering dust is
an indignity that the author himself might find amusing. After all,
Saroyan spent much of his life in a personal war with materialism.
According to legend, he lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to the
roulette tables and the racing ponies.
As is often the case with writers, Saroyan had a complicated
relationship with the city that defined his early life. Depending on
what Saroyan essay or short story you read, he either loved or hated
the place. By age 18, he wanted nothing more than to leave Fresno’s
small town “rot and decay and ferment,” he once wrote.
The town, in turn, regarded him with similar ambivalence.
Sure, Fresno held a centennial celebration of his life in 2008
that included photo and art exhibits, performances of his plays and
discussions of his books, not to mention a Saroyan wine made locally
and a bus with the visage of the author, his thick eyebrows and walrus
mustache, plastered on its side.
And yet the house he lived in after his birth on Aug. 31, 1908,
was long ago torn down to make way for progress. After his death in
1981, local libraries, museums and Fresno State had a chance to keep
a treasure trove of his published and unpublished manuscripts, his
artwork and correspondence and diary. Instead, most of the Saroyan
collection was allowed to slip away to the University of California
at Berkeley, and now Stanford University.
For many years, the items that remained in Fresno became part of a
highly regarded permanent Saroyan exhibit at the Met. It took up a
full room and included rare photographs and letters, his typewriter and
the Oscar he won for the screenplay of his novel, “The Human Comedy.”
“It was a very good exhibit,” Mardikian said. “If someone went to
that exhibit, I think they would’ve had a real flavor of the man.”
But even before the Met closed in January 2010, the exhibit was
drastically reduced to a glass-case display. Varoujan Der Simonian,
president of the Armenian Heritage Museum in Fresno, said many people
were disappointed when the Met underwent a multimillion-dollar remodel
only to dedicate a tiny slice to Saroyan.
“Here’s a man that represents Fresno the best, and he was down to
a small space in a museum that was supposedly representing Fresno,”
Der Simonian said.
Secrest agreed. “There is no native-born author from Fresno who has
achieved that type of renown,” he said “You’d think that there’d be
some type of memorial available for him, even with the Met shutdown.”
Unlike author John Steinbeck, who has an entire museum dedicated to
him and his work in Salinas, Saroyan’s imprint is only lightly felt
through Fresno: special collections stored away at Fresno State and
the Fresno County Public Library, a few plaques marking important
places in his life, a theater and elementary school bearing his name,
and a temporary display of pictures lining the downstairs walls at
the University of California Center, where the Armenian Heritage
Museum is housed.
In the mid-1990s, Stanford acquired the massive compilation of
Saroyan’s work that was once stored in Fresno. The Henry Madden Library
had a chance to secure it, but library officials chose to give it
up. Peter McDonald, current dean of Library Services at Fresno State,
said the dean at the time did not want the hassle of cataloging the
items and felt that the library did not have enough space — this
was before the expansion.
Fresno State has only about 100 titles of Saroyan’s first editions in
special collections. The Fresno County Public Library has some 3,000
items documenting Saroyan’s career, including books, pamphlets,
broadsides, plays and original manuscripts stored in several
six-foot-tall cabinets in the California History and Genealogy Room.
“It’s an extensive collection, but there’s just really no place to
show it right now,” Secrest said. The items, however, are available
for use by appointment “for any type of research purpose,” he said.
The county library’s collection doesn’t compare to the tens of
thousands of manuscripts, personal journals, correspondence, business
records, fan mail, books, drawings, family papers and memorabilia in
the collection at Stanford.
Limited local interest in Saroyan combined with financial struggles
for Fresno’s museums and a lack of community support for the arts
make it unlikely that there will be a significant Saroyan exhibit
any time soon, Secrest said.
“You get the sinking feeling that the people who are here just don’t
have a high-grade commitment to arts and letters the way you’ll find
when you go to any larger city,” he said. “And since that commitment
isn’t there, there’s no commitment to Saroyan.”
However, organizations dedicated to the writer hope for an exhibit
commemorating Saroyan. Whether it comes into fruition is yet to
be seen.
“I would love to see an exhibit like the one that was at the Met
mounted somewhere,” Mardikian said.
The Armenian Heritage Museum wants to have a weekend exhibit dedicated
to Saroyan every year, Der Simonian said. “He has his own legacy,”
Der Simonian said. “He did his part, and now we have to do our part.”
Tara Albert, a Bee student-writer and a recent Fresno State graduate,
wrote this story for her in-depth reporting class.