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Fresno: Saroyan Mementos Packed Into Fresno Warehouse

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  • Fresno: Saroyan Mementos Packed Into Fresno Warehouse

    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.

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