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By Mark Larks

Stockton’s Haggin Museum is known for its unique collections of art and historical artifacts related to the San Joaquin Valley.

What’s on display, however, is only part of the fun.

“There are three moose in this painting,” said Susan Obert, Haggin’s director of development, as she pointed to a canvas hanging on a wall near the museum’s main entrance. “We do a lot with our kids programs to find the animals in the painting, and it’s a way for parents to interact with their kids and find some interest in the painting and start seeing things.”

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Perhaps it’s fitting that one of the first pieces one will encounter at the Haggin is used to challenge the museum patrons to look for what’s hidden.

As visitors make their way through the Haggin, it’s likely they don’t realize that many of the floor tiles they are walking on were handmade in Belgium and lived in the old Stockton courthouse before finding their way to their current location.

It’s this sort of hidden-in-plain-sight phenomenon that defines the true essence of the Haggin; hidden treasures that aren’t completely hidden.

For example, there’s “Willy the Jeep”, a World War II era vehicle that sits on display in the museum’s Vehicle Gallery.

In 1942, students and faculty at Stockton High School raised $225,000 for the war effort. The money went towards purchasing Jeeps for the Army, and each Jeep was equipped with a small metal plate denoting it as a gift from Stockton High.

Over forty years went by before a car collector in Texas discovered one of those small metal plates—hidden in plain sight—inside a Jeep that had been in his possession.

The collector contacted the school’s principal and offered the Jeep back to the school. Eventually, it found its way to the Haggin, where it now sits surrounded by letters written to the students of Stockton High by the soldiers who drove “Willy”.

Of course, there are also things at the Haggin that are truly hidden.

Within the museum’s archives are more than 1,100 cartoons by Ralph Yardley. Yardley, an editorial cartoonist for the Stockton Record from 1922 to 1952, documented Stockton’s history through a weekly cartoon entitled, “Do You Remember?”. These cartoons are not on display, but reside in the Haggin’s library.

In addition to the archives, the museum also has a large number of items in storage. Some of these items have been on display at one point or another, while some have only seen the shelves of the storage area.

“Our collections department and our curator of history come down here on a much more regular basis than most of us,” said Obert of the storage room. “It’s [because] they’re looking for ideas or that they remember that we have something in the collection and they want to come fact find on that item because that will lead to another item in the collection.”

One item that has hardly “seen” the light of day is the box of fake eyes.

“It came from a local optometrist back in the latter part of the nineteenth or early twentieth century,” said museum CEO and Curator of History, Tod Ruhstaller. “When the company went out of business, it was a curiosity…I believe the donor was actually on our board of trustees, and so he wanted that to come to the museum.”

According to Ruhstaller, the eyes, which served as replacement eyes for those who had lost an eye, were on display once in a temporary exhibit devoted to “medical curiosities.”

“Items that are in the museum’s collection that are not on permanent display become that resource from which we can draw for some of our temporary exhibitions,” said Ruhstaller.

But until then, they remain hidden at the Haggin.

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