‘Mr Peanut has a life of his own’: San Francisco bids farewell to a curator who saw ads as art | San Francisco

The Jolly Inexperienced Large, Mr Clear and the Frito Bandito misplaced one in every of their most enthusiastic supporters final month with the passing of Ellen Havre Weis, a California museum founder and creator who acknowledged the mythology in America’s promoting characters.

Weis co-founded and directed the Museum of Fashionable Mythology, a as soon as famend San Francisco vacationer vacation spot the place a vinyl Michelin Man rubbed elbows with a lifesize statue of Colonel Sanders and a plastic figurine of the monocled Mr Peanut featured amongst 1000’s of different promoting characters.

The museum was open to the general public for a $2 admission payment from 1982 till it was pressured to shut by the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.

Weis, who additionally co-founded a PR agency and labored as an promoting supervisor, by no means gave up on her quest to discover a new residence for the quirky assortment. Simply earlier than she died of mind most cancers on 27 July at age 64, she and her household closed a deal on a brand new location for the museum’s characters, which can transfer to Van Nuys, California.

“We attempt to take these promoting characters out of their regular context of gross sales and have a look at them as anthropology,” Weis instructed the Los Angeles Instances in 1987. “Most of American society has been uncovered to those pictures. Actually the Jolly Inexperienced Large is extra recognizable than Zeus – or your state senator.”

The concept for the museum dawned on Weis whereas she was residing in a warehouse packed stuffed with lifelike replicas of promoting mascots. Simply out of writing college at College of Iowa, Weis and her then boyfriend, Matthew Cohen, had moved to San Francisco to dwell the “Boho, hippy” life, in response to Gordon Whiting, Weis’s husband of 25 years. They had been crashing in a warehouse live-work area, owned by mates, together with Jeff Errick, who collected promoting memorabilia.

“Ellen felt that every one these characters had been associated; they appeared to know one another and belong collectively,” stated Whiting, who added that Weis had studied mythology to learn to use its archetypes in her writing. “That sparked her creativeness that the explanation issues work as promoting is as a result of they’re mythological archetypes.”

Weis, Cohen and Errick fashioned the museum in a nook of the warehouse. Inside a couple of years, it had moved to its personal small area in downtown San Francisco and was incomes huge acclaim in publications starting from Folks journal and the New York Instances to the German newspaper Der Spiegel.

Weis would load up characters, such because the Doggie Diner head, an enormous fiberglass depiction of a grinning dachshund that when graced the signal of an American restaurant chain, in a trailer and take them on the highway to varied exhibits, together with a long-running show close to San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.

The film critic Leonard Maltin featured the gathering in his tv appearances on Leisure Tonight and have become a board member of the museum.

“Whereas Mr Peanut and Speedy Alka-Seltzer had been invented by someone on Madison Avenue, they, just like the Frankenstein monster, had a lifetime of their very own,” Maltin instructed the Guardian. “Ellen took them out of their regular setting, which was a TV display screen, and displayed them as one would artworks and developed a thesis that gave them unity.”

The museum’s ultimate 12 months, 1989, was a tough one. First someone stole the Doggie Diner head, from an out of doors storage lot in San Francisco. The factor was so large, standing greater than 9ft tall, that Whiting says he doesn’t know the way anybody may have moved it over the 10ft fence.

Then, the museum received discover from its landlord that it must go away the area it rented on the ninth flooring of a rickety 1906 constructing on Mission Road.

The ultimate blow got here at 5.04pm on 17 October, when the 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake despatched the historic constructing rocking and rolling whereas Weis was there transferring containers of collectible figurines round.

The museum’s constructing was condemned, with the founders given two hours a couple of days later to filter out their stuff. Weis rounded up a military of volunteers, who hoisted out the Jolly Inexperienced Large, the cardboard Dutch Boy cutout of paint-advertising fame, and lots of of containers containing everybody from the cigarette mascot Joe Camel to the Rice Krispies characters, Snap, Crackle and Pop.

For the next many years, the characters waited in storage whereas Weis looked for a brand new residence for the museum. Within the meantime, Weis based the agency WeisPR along with her husband, Whiting, raised her son Benjamin, and finally turned the promoting director of Bay Nature Journal. Alongside the way in which, the longtime East Bay resident co-authored the e-book Berkeley: the Life and Spirit of a Outstanding City and wrote fiction as a member of the Squaw Valley Neighborhood of Writers.

At numerous factors she was near securing permission to maneuver the gathering to the Smithsonian and Henry Ford Museum. However it wasn’t till after she was recognized with mind most cancers in January that the trail ahead for the museum assortment turned clear. Ten days earlier than her dying at residence in Altadena, California, her household received affirmation that the gathering will quickly be featured on the Valley Relics Museum in Van Nuys, Los Angeles.

“It’s going to experience once more,” stated Whiting, who labored with Benjamin, now 20, to finalize the plans for the gathering whereas caring for Weis, as her illness progressed this spring. “She was properly sufficient to learn about it and he or she was happy.”

Maltin stated he was thrilled to know that Weis’s dream of getting characters like Tony the Tiger, Mr Bubbles and their mates again collectively in entrance of the general public would quickly be realized.

“I’m a baby of Twentieth-century popular culture, so I grew up with many of those characters,” he stated. “However Ellen was the primary particular person I’d ever met, who – for need of a greater phrase – took them significantly.”