PLAY: The graceful Haggin Museum traffics in all things fascinating, from Renoir’s paintings to a jeep named Willy.
Hidden gems are usually, well, hidden.
But for the past 84 years, the imposing, three-story Haggin Museum has presided over Stockton’s Victory Park, the museum’s grand brick edifice and 34,000 square feet of gallery space a graceful addition to this expanse of rolling lawns. Inside you’ll find the delicate impressionism of Renoir and the sweeping Yosemite vistas of Bierstadt — plus Willy the jeep.
So, yes it’s a gem, and also it’s a mystery how we’d managed to miss it despite repeated visits to Stockton over the years — for water polo tournaments, asparagus festivals, Delta outings and concerts at the University of the Pacific’s Conservatory of Music.
This time, we headed directly for the Haggin — an art and history museum whose major patron, Robert McKee, asked that it be named to honor his wife, Eila Haggin McKee, and her father.
Its grand galleries are painted in pale Wedgwood hues and lined with 19th-century paintings by French and American artists, including California landscape painter William Keith and German-born Albert Bierstadt. The museum’s historical exhibits range from the region’s pre-Spanish-California days through the Gold Rush, Stockton’s shipping heyday and caterpillar past.
Turns out Stockton entrepreneur Benjamin Holt created the first commercially viable “caterpillar” tractor with the signature tread, turning a theoretical idea that was — excuse the pun — gaining traction at the time into a market success. And it was Holt’s agricultural daring that made tanks possible for the United States and its allies during World War I.
You may not be an art buff, or a tractor buff for that matter, but do not leave this museum without seeing Willy, the lovingly restored World War II jeep with a charming backstory.
During World War II, when the homefront endured gasoline and food rationing, and people organized scrap-metal drives and did whatever they could to help the war effort, there was a program to help the military buy jeeps.
It was 1942 and Stockton High School’s students and faculty raised $225,000 — more than $3 million in today’s dollars — in a single year to send 275 jeeps to the war effort. Each Willy jeep was shipped with a small metal plate declaring it a gift from Stockton’s teens and teachers and asking for updates on how Jeep No. 81 or 76 (or whatever number) was getting along. And soldiers, lieutenants and military wives did just that, penning notes brimming with humor, charm and gratitude.
By the 1970s, the jeep project had become a hazy memory — until a Texas car collector found a plaque in No. 151, a jeep in his collection. He contacted the high school principal, who rummaged through the school’s archives and found a box of memorabilia.
Today that jeep, lovingly restored and delivered via helicopter and parade — with an official honorable discharge from the U.S. Army to boot — resides on the first floor of the Haggin Museum. On the wall above are enlarged copies of some of those letters from the front, with soldiers reporting on the status of their beloved jeeps — which they named Miss Stockton, Old Battle Ax and Her Ladyship, as well as Willy — and the morale boost their troops felt when they realized those trusty wheels were a gift from teenagers half a world away.
Go. See Willy. Read the letters. Bring tissues.