Robert Price: Why is a 1905, horse-drawn fire wagon moving in behind the Fox Theater?

May 29-- May 29--Peggy Cole Darling is finally getting it done.

After 20 years of waylaid plans and false starts, she finally seems to have found a solution for the potential-rich downtown building she owns that's situated right behind her beloved Fox Theater.

You know the one: the cavernous, old auto-painting warehouse at G and 20th streets that has been the subject of assorted plans and speculation since it closed in the 1980s.

Coming soon, after the t's are crossed and i's dotted: the Bakersfield Fire Department Museum. The plan is to house and display historical Bakersfield Fire Department artifacts and equipment, including a 1905 horse-drawn ladder, to be displayed in a setting that recreates a firehouse of that era.

The museum will include a fire safety center, a 9/11 education center, offices of the Bakersfield Firefighters Burn Foundation, a restaurant and event space. The restaurant lease and event hall rentals will pay for the museum's day to day operation.

Bakersfield firefighter Jason Johnson, president of the Bakersfield Firefighters Historical Society, can't wait to get started.

"Peggy Darling is so generous," he said. "She's going to leave a legacy. She was at the meeting where we first pitched it two and a half years ago, and right away she was on board."

Renderings produced by Ordiz Melby Architects portray a bright, red-pillared edifice with elaborate details that seem inspired by nearby Bakersfield Fire Station #1, which was designed by architect Charles Biggar and built in 1939 with New Deal-era Public Works Administration funds.

Johnson said the Bakersfield Firefighters Historical Society would lease the property for $99 a year until the project -- which doesn't yet have a final, official name -- is fully funded. Darling will then gift them the property. The Fox Theater Foundation would be granted a free sub-lease and use a portion of the building for storage and perhaps a green room for performers.

He expects the museum to open in three to five years, depending on how the fundraising goes.

Darling, who then, as now, sat on the Fox Theater Foundation board, purchased the 32,321-square-foot building at 1720 20th St. in 1998 for $250,000, mainly to forestall development she believed would be incompatible with the theater.

"They had been talking about (buying the land and) using it for apartments," Peggy told me Tuesday. "We just said, 'No, no no.' Who knows what they might look like?"

So, for 20 years now, the warehouse has been used for prop storage, the occasional pre-concert reception and little else. But to Darling, it's been worth the investment.

"I've been sitting on it for years, and I can keep on waiting, if necessary," she once told The Californian. Clearly she meant it: That was nine years ago.

She is happy to finally have the project all but nailed down.

"I believe in downtown Bakersfield," she told me Tuesday. "It's got a lot of warts and pimples, a lot of problems, but it has come so far. And that museum is going to be a great improvement. ... Downtown needs a shot in the arm, and it'll get one from this fireman's museum."

Darling, who is 92, has made quite a footprint on her adopted community of Bakersfield over nearly three decades as a patron of the arts.

She played a central role in the creation of the Fox Theater's Walk of Stars, a wide section of sidewalk embedded with stainless steel plaques that serves as a fundraising vehicle for the historic old theater.

In addition to her well-documented affection for the Fox, she has served on the boards of the Bakersfield Museum of Art and the Kern County Museum, and she has been a beloved and generous theater landlady for two decades.

In 1991, she and husband Curtis Darling, a prominent Bakersfield attorney who died in 2005, purchased the Hayden Building at 1626 19th St. It became the home of the Spotlight Theater in 1998, and in 2017 new management reintroduced the space as the Ovation Theater.

Curtis Darling was still hurting from the 1989 death of his wife, Jane Darling, when he ran into Peggy Cole, a former classmate, at a Stanford Law School reunion. She lived in Northridge and had recently lost her husband John.

Darling eventually convinced Peggy to marry him and move to Bakersfield, which must have taken some doing because, for one thing, she was so involved with and influential in the Los Angeles arts scene.

Among other pursuits, she was a member of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion board of directors and helped raise millions of dollars for the construction of that iconic music venue. She would later transfer that passion to the then-derelict Fox.

Entertainment, in a sense, is in her blood.

In 1904, her grandfather, Jacob Stern, moved to the tiny farm town of Hollywood, where he opened a hardware store. He also purchased eight acres on the corner of Hollywood and Vine, which were then dirt roads.

One day, years later, a young man knocked on Stern's door and asked if he could rent his barn to film a feature-length motion picture. The movie shoot became the 1914 film "Squaw Man" and the producer was Cecil B. DeMille. It was a nationwide success. Today, Stern's barn is the Hollywood Heritage Museum.

Darling has even been a literary agent of sorts.

While sorting through some boxes during the course of her move to Bakersfield in 1991, Darling found a bundle of letters from a cousin who had been a war correspondent for Time and Life magazines during World War II.

She gave the letters to a grandson, Bill Lascher, a journalist, and he turned them into "Eve of a Hundred Midnights," the story of war correspondents Melville Jacoby, Darling's cousin, and Annalee Whitmore Jacoby, island-hopping newlyweds who managed to stay just a step ahead of the invading Japanese -- and likely execution -- during the war in the Pacific.

Now she is back in the museum business, or will be soon. When the old Miracle Auto Painting building -- an "eyesore," she admits -- becomes the fire museum, she will have fulfilled a 20-year-old promise to the Fox and downtown Bakersfield.

Darling is not up and around much these days, and it's driving her a little crazy.

"A lot is going on and I'm missing it," she told me.

If she opts to stay home from the fire museum's grand opening, whenever that might be, perhaps to read about young, dashing war correspondents or legendary film producers, we'll just have to refer to something, in lieu of a speech, that she told The Californian in 2012 about community involvement.

"Everyone should do something to make the community better," she said. "If you live in a house you want it to look good and welcoming. If you live in the community you want it to be as good as possible and everyone should do what they can."

Contact The Californian's Robert Price at 661-395-7399, [email protected] or on Twitter: @stubblebuzz. His column appears on Sundays, Wednesdays and Saturdays; the views expressed are his own.

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