History buff, who led Vista Historical Museum for 22 years, will retire (original) (raw)

Folks who stop by the Vista Historical Museum know that Jack Larimer has a story for just about everything there.

He’s got a spark for telling about Vista history. He grew up in the town and got to know the families of some of the history makers. For 22 years he’s led the Vista Historical Society and Museum.

Now, at year’s end, he’ll be retiring as its director.

“I’m getting older,” Larimer said. “Good Lord willing, and if the creeks don’t rise, I’ll be here ’til the end of the year.”

Larimer came to the Vista Historical Society in 2002, after working for the City of Vista’s planning department for 30 years. His mother, Adele Larimer, volunteered as a docent at the first Vista Historical Museum in the 1990s, when it was by Wildwood Park.

“I’ve always been interested in the history of Vista,” said Larimer, 76.

One of the favorite parts of his job, which he’ll miss most, is giving tours. “I like all the historical stuff and people’s questions,” he said.

The museum is filled with hundreds of items going back more than a century, to the first settlers and earlier to the Native Americans who lived in the area. Larimer has information about them all — it’s catalogued in museum files and Larimer has a lot of it in his head. Ask him the purchase price of the Alta Vista Gardens and he’ll pull out the City Council Agenda from May 29, 1990, outlining the proposed purchase.

“Who hasn’t heard Jack answer questions about Vista? Jack is the voice of Vista — our conduit to where we came from — a small quiet town, now a city, that’s getting bigger and louder and busier every day,” said longtime Vista resident and community volunteer Nancy B Jones, who was inducted into the Vista Historical Society Hall of Fame in 2017.

One of Larimer’s favorite objects at the museum is a permanent wave machine from the 1920s that was used to curl hair. He tells people that if the part that went over someone’s head got too hot for too long, their hair would burn.

“I tell stories to anyone who wants to listen — if they get bored, they leave,” Larimer said.

He’s known some of the people whose names are part of the city’s history — the Delpy’s, Couts, McDougall’s and others, many of whom have been honored in the Vista Historical Society’s Hall of Fame, which Larimer oversees. He went to school with some of their descendants.

Larimer’s family came to Vista in the 1940s from Chicago, where his father worked as a machinist at Western Electric and his mother as a cashier at Carson Pirie Scott department store.

In the 1960s his mother, then the principal’s secretary at Lincoln Junior High School, started volunteering for the Tri-City Hospital auxiliary as one of the Pink Ladies. She kept at it for 40 years. When she was in her 80s, and couldn’t drive, she walked a mile to get a bus to do her volunteer work at the hospital, where she also served on the auxiliary’s board of directors. She was inducted in the Vista Hall of Fame two years ago.

Larimer said he wasn’t born in Vista — there was no hospital there, so he was born at a hospital in Oceanside that is no longer there. He attended Santa Fe Elementary School and Lincoln Junior High School and then the Army & Navy Academy in Carlsbad.

Throughout his school years, he loved reading history books and cultivated a love of history. He has a BA in economics from UC San Diego and and MA in economics from San Diego State University with a minor in Latin American history and the French Revolutionary War.

The city opened its first history museum site in 1994 at Wildwood Park and in 2009 moved to its current site in a 90-year old adobe at Rancho Minerva, 2317 Old Foothill Drive, which the city of Vista leases to the Vista Historical Society.

Larimer managed both sites and oversaw the move. He runs the museum and the historical society.

“He works his tail off, but he loves it,” said his wife, Sharon Larimer, who has served on the board of directors of the Vista Historical Society since 2010. “He goes to the museum at 5 a.m. and comes back after 5 p.m. When we go on vacation, he takes his computer with him to make sure the weekly newsletter gets out on time and to work on the agenda,” she said.

Jack and Sharon Larimer were recognized with the Ben Dixon Award for excellence in history and their contribution to the preservation of the history of Vista by the Congress of History of San Diego and Imperial Counties in 2019. This year, he received the lifetime achievement award from the Vista Chamber of Commerce at the Heroes of Vista celebration.

“No one has done more to preserve, honor and teach Vista’s history than Jack Larimer. Thanks to his efforts, we can better understand our history which helps to shape our future,” said Rachel Beld, CEO of the Vista Chamber of Commerce.

His retirement is set for Jan. 3.

One of the top things he’d like to do when he retires is go to Disneyland on a weekday.

“We’ve been going monthly on Saturdays, but now we can go on a Wednesday and I don’t have to get up early on Thursday,” Larimer said.

Originally Published: August 27, 2024 at 4:01 p.m.