‘Mr Peanut has a lifetime of his personal’: San Francisco bids farewell to a curator who noticed advertisements as artwork | San Francisco

The Jolly Green Giant, Mr. Clean and the Frito Bandito lost one of their most enthusiastic supporters last month with the death of Ellen Havre Weis, a California museum founder and writer who recognized the mythology in American advertising characters.

Weis was the co-founder and director of the Museum of Modern Mythology, a once well-known tourist destination in San Francisco, where a vinyl Michelin man rubbed his elbows with a life-size statue of Colonel Sanders and a plastic figure of the monocled Mr. Peanut, among thousands of others Advertising figures could be seen.

Know with the Michelin man. Photo: San Francisco Chronicle / Hearst Newspapers / Getty Images

The museum was open to the public for an entry fee of $ 2 from 1982 until it was closed by the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.

Weis, who also co-founded a PR firm and worked as an advertising manager, never gave up on finding a new home for the quirky collection. Just before she died of brain cancer on July 27 at the age of 64, she and her family signed a contract for a new location for the museum’s characters, which will move to Van Nuys, California.

“We’re trying to get these advertising characters out of their normal sales context and see them as anthropology,” Weis told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. “Most of American society is exposed to these images. Certainly the Jolly Green Giant is more recognizable than Zeus – or your State Senator. “

Weis came up with the idea for the museum while living in a warehouse full of lifelike replicas of advertising mascots. Just finished writing school at the University of Iowa, Weis and her boyfriend at the time, Matthew Cohen, had moved to San Francisco to lead the “boho, hippie” lifestyle, according to Gordon Whiting, Weis’ 25-year-old husband. They crashed at a live workspace warehouse owned by friends including Jeff Errick, who was collecting promotional memorabilia.

“Ellen felt that all of these characters were related; they seemed to know each other and belong together, ”said Whiting, who added that Weis had studied mythology to learn how to use its archetypes in her writing. “That sparked their idea that the reason things work as advertising is because they’re mythological archetypes.”

Weis, Cohen, and Errick made the museum in one corner of the warehouse. Within a few years it moved to its own small room in downtown San Francisco and was celebrated in publications such as People Magazine and the New York Times through to German Spiegel.

The original gallery of the museum. Photo: Courtesy Gordon Whiting

Weis loaded characters like the Doggie Diner Head, a giant fiberglass representation of a grinning dachshund that once graced the sign of an American restaurant chain, into a trailer and took them on the streets to various shows, including a long-running one near by Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.

Film critic Leonard Maltin featured the collection in his television appearances on Entertainment Tonight and became a board member of the museum.

“While Mr. Peanut and Speedy Alka-Seltzer were made up by someone on Madison Avenue, they had a life of their own like the Frankenstein monster,” Maltin told the Guardian. “Ellen took them out of their normal environment, which was a television screen, and presented them like works of art and developed a thesis that gave them a unity.”

American Express gave the museum $ 10,000 and had its Centurion character brought into the gallery. Photo: Courtesy Gordon Whiting

The last year of the museum, 1989, was heavy. First, someone stole the Doggie Diner head from an outdoor bin in San Francisco. The thing was so big and over two feet high that Whiting says he doesn’t know how anyone could have moved it over the three foot fence.

Then the museum was notified by its landlord that it had to vacate the rented space on the 9th floor of a rickety building from 1906 on Mission Street.

The final blow came on October 17th at 5:04 p.m. when the magnitude 6.9 earthquake in Loma Prieta rocked and rolled the historic building while Weis was moving boxes with figures there.

The museums The building was condemned and the founders had two hours a few days later to clear out their belongings. Weis rounded up an army of volunteers who heaved up the Jolly Green Giant, the Dutch Boy cardboard cutout of the famous color advertisement, and hundreds of boxes of everyone from cigarette mascot Joe Camel to Rice Krispies characters Snap, Crackle and Pop.

In the decades that followed, the figures waited in the warehouse while Weis looked for a new home for the museum. In the meantime, Weis founded WeisPR with her husband Whiting, raised their son Benjamin and eventually became advertising director for Bay Nature Magazine. Along the way, the longtime East Bay resident co-authored Berkeley: the Life and Spirit of a Remarkable Town and wrote fiction as a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

Big Boy and Charlie Tuna come out of the camp. Photo: Courtesy Gordon Whiting

In various places she was on the verge of obtaining permission to move the collection to the Smithsonian and Henry Ford Museum. But it wasn’t until she was diagnosed with a brain tumor in January that the path for the museum collection was clear. Ten days before her death at home in Altadena, California, her family received confirmation that the collection would soon be on display at the Valley Relics Museum in Van Nuys, Los Angeles.

“It will be running again,” said Whiting, who worked with Benjamin, now 20, to finalize collection plans while tending to Weis as her illness progressed this spring. “She was well enough to know about it and she was satisfied.”

Maltin said he was thrilled to know that Weis’ dream of bringing characters like Tony the Tiger, Mr. Bubbles, and their friends back together in public, was about to come true.

“I’m a 20th century pop culture kid, so I grew up with a lot of these characters,” he said. “But Ellen was the first person I ever met who – for lack of a better word – took her seriously.”