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William Parker Lyon was bigger than life, and his Pony Express Museum in Arcadia exhibited his outsized personality as well as his massive collection of Western memorabilia.
In 1936, two years after opening his Arcadia museum, Lyon ran for President wearing his trademark ten-gallon hat and sarcastically proposing $500 in monthly federal payment to every adult that would be funded by the sale of intentionally mismarked postage stamps to collectors.
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Pony Express Museum
by Scott Hettrick
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Running out of space at his home in San Marino in the early 1930s and anticipating the larger crowds that would be drawn to the planned Santa Anita Park horse race track, the retired Lyon bought six acres of Baldwin ranch property from Anita Baldwin across Huntington Drive from the east entrance of the new track. Lyon had made a fortune in the transfer and storage business before retiring and greatly expanding his hobby collection, including the purchase of the railroad station building that stood in Promontory, Utah at the point where the golden spike was driven in 1869 to mark the joining of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific to first link train tracks from the east to the west, according to Gordon Eberly's 1953 book Arcadia: City of the Santa Anita.
Lyon opened his new three-building museum with 24 themed rooms the same year the new Santa Anita Park horse race track opened in 1934, and charged 25-cents for admission, according to Burton and Gail Marshall's account in the 2003 book from editor Gary A. Kovacic, Visions of Arcadia: A Centennial Anthology. The Pony Express Museum eventually boasted more than one million pieces of memorabilia, including everything from a narrow-gauge train, stagecoaches, a jail cell, saloon, pawn shop, pharmacy and printing press to $2,000 in gold coins and gold dust, unused Pony Express stamps, Indian artifacts, signs, whiskey bottles, shoes, hats, clothing, saddlebags, pictures, chandelier, and chamber pots, as described and illustrated in the 2008 Arcadia Historical Society book Images of America: Arcadia, featuring five pages of photos and descriptions of the Museum from co-author Jack McCrea.
Lyon even used material to build the museum that was salvaged from Arcadia founder Elias J. "Lucky" Baldwin's original horse track in Arcadia from 1907-1909 and his famous Oakwood Hotel.
You can get a two-minute glimpse of Lyon himself showing off his enormously popular Pony Express Museum on the spot now occupied by the Santa Anita Inn by clicking on the image above to see a greatly abbreviated version of a Paramount Pictures featurette. The movie short was provided to Arcadia's Best by former City Councilwoman Gail Marshall, who included a longer version in an episode of her previous series of "Gail's Tales" programs on the City's cable TV channel. That episode of "Gail's Tails" is available in its entirety (including Marshall dressed in period costume near the Queen Anne Cottage introducing the featurette) at the Arcadia Historical Museum along with other programs in the series and archive photos and materials related to the Pony Express Museum. (Or click here to see related photos and information amongst other material at the Arcadia Public Library's History Room web site.)
Lyon lived into his 80s and died in 1949. Six years later in 1955 his collection was sold to Harrah's of Reno Nevada, and the museum was closed. A Flamingo Hotel opened on the property the following year in 1956, followed by the Santa Anita Inn.
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