Plans move forward on museum in T.O. Library
By Nancy Needham nancy@theacorn.com

ROY THORSEN/Special to the Acorn RADIO DRAMA COMES ALIVE- Radio broadcaster Gil Stratton and comedian, writer, actor, director and producer Carl Reiner join actress Samantha Eggar at the Thousand Oaks Library to perform Norman Corwin's "The Strange Affliction." The Thousand Oaks Library Foundation presentation attracted about 250 people to a performance last month. It focused on fundraising and plans for building the American Radio Archives and Museum, an addition to the Grant Brimhall/Thousand Oaks Library.

The Grant Brimhall/Thousand Oaks Library is $1 million closer to adding an archives museum to hold priceless radio memorabilia.

The Bergen Foundation, a private philanthropic organization, has pledged $1 million to the Thousand Oaks Library Foundation's efforts to raise $30 million to build a twostory, 40,000square-foot addition to the library. The late Edgar Bergen was an early radio and TV star who worked with ventriloquist dummies named Charlie McCarthy, Mortimer Snerd and Effie Klinker. His family and advisers run the charity group.

The new addition will hold library collections that include documentation of the career of radio legend Norman Corwin. It will also include correspondence; scrapbooks; radio, television and motion picture scripts; sound recordings; video recordings; photographs; business records and contracts; press clippings; and other documents, most dating from 1938 to 1990. The collection of late entertainer Rudy Vallee, acquired by the library in the 1980s, will also be included.

In July, the Thousand Oaks City Council approved a proposal to build the museum. The Conejo Recreation and Park District has also approved the project. The park district owns the land. The city owns the library.

Since then, the library foundation, a nonprofit organization managing the project, has been preparing to raise the $30 million needed for what will be called the American Radio Archives- $25 million for construction and $5 million for an endowment fund.

"The funds will come from a national fundraising campaign being led by former City Manager Grant Brimhall," former foundation president Roy Thorsen said.

"The design kind of wraps around the north side of the building, where, amazingly, we did not plant oak trees," Brimhall said.

The library will only lose three parking spaces to build the museum, he said.

The Conejo Valley Historical Collection will be housed in the new building, as will a valuable collection of radio archives from the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters, which is currently in a sealed room in the basement of Washington Mutual Bank at Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street in Hollywood.

Those radio archives may have been contaminated by toxic polychlorinated biphenyls in 2004, when an underground electrical transformer caught fire. The bank was closed for months and cleaned of PCBs, but the vault with the radio collection has remained sealed, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power declining to pay the decontamination costs.

The matter is now going through the court system to determine who is responsible for cleanup costs to restore what the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters claim is one of the largest private collections of radio broadcasting memorabilia.

When the issue is settled and the collection is brought to Thousand Oaks, it will be protected in a humidity and temperaturecontrolled environment in the library. It is expected that the addition of the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters archives to the Corwin and Vallee collections and other items already in Thousand Oaks will result in the largest collection of radio archives in the United States.

"Our initial goal is for three years of fundraising. We'd like to shorten that," Brimhall said.