BY ANNE QUINN

Guests at Saturday’s ribbon-cutting reception at the SLO County Historical Museum will have to wait in line behind two men who crashed the original opening 44 years ago, when they were just boys.

Mike Benson and Kem Weber, the first and second visitors to the museum in 1956, are returning for the museum's re-opening, and they plan to be first and second to sign the register. Then they and other party-goers will step into a beautifully restored building–a nearly museum with almost nothing on display.

That’s because on Saturday, the building itself is to be on exhibit, according to County Historical Society president Eleanor Weinstein, who can’t wait to show it off. "It’s gem-like," she said.

Once dark and dank, hidden by overgrown bushes and trees, the former Carnegie Library has undergone a $1.4 million renovation funded by Community Block Development Grant funds.

The historic structure has been seismically retrofitted and acid-washed, and its once-leaky roof has been replaced, according to city engineering assistant Bridget Fraser. The Museum has a new entrance ramp, an elevator, and enlarged bathrooms accessible to people who use wheelchairs. Bright new windows replace many that were painted black.

Two overbearing pittosporum trees that obscured the museum from the street were removed in January.

There’s so much light now that Historical Society members say they’re noticing things they never saw before, such as how two stone fireplaces face each other across the building like bookends.

County Historical Society members are hoping that by seeing the room without exhibits on Saturday, visitors will appreciate the space and then advise the Society on how to fill it. There will be a few fine items on display, such as the Garcia saddle made in Santa Margarita in 1880. A hurdy-gurdy organ will play to entertain the children in the basement, which is where research archives will be located in the future.

But most of the collection, which Weinstein said numbers about 40,000 items, is stuffed into storage spaces around the city–stored at considerable expense to the nonprofit Society.

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When the museum opens its doors Saturday, it will be welcoming a community in love with history. There are museums in almost every San Luis Obispo County enclave. More pop up all the time.

Separate museums tell the histories of San Miguel, Paso Robles, Templeton and Atascadero, San Luis Obispo, Pismo Beach, Arroyo Grande, and Nipomo.

The Pioneer museum in Paso Robles has 989 different types of barbed wire. The Templeton museum has a working 1925 Model T, but no building to house it.

In SLO there's a whimsical museum just for children–the Children’s Museum–where kids can encase themselves in giant bubbles.

A little jewel of a museum occupies the lower part of the rotunda of Atascadero City Hall, built to be the civic center for the Atascadero Colony, the community planned and developed by Edward Gardner Lewis.

Children as young as five years old can be card-carrying members of the planned SLO Railroad Museum, according to its founder, Brad LaRose. The museum, which just received a half-million dollar grant from the City of San Luis Obispo, will be housed in a building in SLO’s historic railroad district. A donation of 650 feet of spur track will make it possible for a working steam locomotive to operate out front. "Children can ride in it, maybe even drive it," said LaRose.

Life-sized animatronic dinosaurs will roam the State Natural History Museum in Morro Bay State Park from November to January. "They’re very big and exciting. They roar and move," said curator Colleen Ray, who is especially happy to house the exhibit for the holidays.

Elsewhere in SLO County there are historic missions and adobes, homes turned into museums, even a fabled castle where zebras graze. There are specialty museums for aficionados of antique dolls, Navy fighter planes, railroads, and printing presses.

When the Navy told Glen Thomson of the Estrella Warbirds Museum that he could have a plane if he traveled to China Lake to get it, he didn’t know he’d have to build it himself. Thomson recalls being shown to a roped-off area where parts where strewn all over the ground and told to pick out his airplane.

Few people anywhere know that the printing press that published the San Francisco Chronicle right after the great earthquake of 1906 is in the Shakespeare Printing Museum, which is in the graphics department building at Cal Poly.

The Camp Roberts Museum tells the story of the 750,000 men who were trained at the facility to fight in World War II and Korea.

Helen Moe, 87, built the Antique Doll Museum on Highway 101 between Paso Robles and San Miguel to house her collection of some 800 antique dolls. Many of the dollars date back 100 years, and at least one is as old as 400.

The most interesting thing about the Reis Museum in the basement of the Reis Funeral Chapel, on Nipomo St. in SLO, is its dapper proprietor, Gene Reis, who is an eclectic collector–a pack rat of sorts, if truth be told–and the current patriarch of one of San Luis Obispo’s oldest families. In the basement of the Reis Funeral Chapel on is a cheerful collection of just about everything: buttons, bottles, banks, pocket knives, watches, tools, fishing lures.

Reis served as a supply sergeant in the Army and preserved a uniform shirt he’s had is shirt autographed by just about every famous person he came across. See the autographs of Frank Sinatra, Irving Berlin, Joe Lewis, and more inked into onto the sleeves, pockets, and collar of this single shirt.

Reis said that his wife, Irene, is not a collector like he is. "When I go, she’s going to have a heck of a garage sale," he said.

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The County Historical Society is not planning a garage sale. When it moves back in to its restored building it plans to be "very judicious about bringing exhibits in," said Eleanor Weinstein, so that "a sense of space remains.

"We have 20 wooden planes. Wooden planes are really neat–but 20?" she said.

Local nonprofits may benefit when the Society pares down its collection. Weinstein said that the Society cannot keep all of its 200 antique dresses and 150 ladies’ hats, and that the group would like to donate such excess items to another local nonprofit, which could sell them "if it would move their cause forward."

Certain to become a permanent part of the collection is the forest green flannel lady’s riding habit from 1890, and the silk brocade worn to President Garfield’s inauguration in 1870.

The Historical Society plans to open the re-open its museum with new exhibits next spring. Until then, there are plenty of other museums–ranging from the eccentric to the extraordinary–for SLO County history buffs to explore. Æ

Reporter Anne Quinn has a sordid history that isn't documented in any museum.