In 1985, The Bulletin published an article about Bob Boyd that said he “does not want his collecting to become more than a hobby because there are other things in life. He is an avid skier and hunter who intends to enjoy Central Oregon.”

Anyone familiar with Boyd’s work as the High Desert Museum’s curator of Western history for nearly 30 years knows collecting didn’t stay a hobby for long.

From the lovingly restored 1933 High Desert Ranger Station on the edge of the museum’s parking lot to the working Lazinka Sawmill in back of the museum — and at all points in between — evidence that Boyd brought history to life is everywhere at the museum.

Perhaps even more remarkable than the three-dimensional exhibits he pieced together for the museum is the fact that at the same time, Boyd was also working at his main career as a middle school teacher of history.

Boyd was already teaching at Cascade Middle School in Bend when he began volunteering for the museum in 1983. In 1985, it was official: He came on staff as curator of Western history.

Thousands of visitors have since had the opportunity to learn of the rich cultural tapestry of the High Desert and its inhabitants, from the lost Meeks party to buckaroos and Basque and Chinese immigrants. (See sidebar for a list of temporary and permanent exhibits curated by Boyd.)

As of Tuesday, Boyd, the museum’s longest-term employee, officially retired from the museum, finally walking away from the job he never intended to become a second career.

How does one juggle two jobs — while raising a family — for nearly three decades?

“I’d get to (school) before 7, leave a little after 3 and come out here (to the museum) till 5:30 or 6, and usually (work) one real late night,” explains Boyd, who has no plans to retire from teaching at High Desert Middle School in Bend.

Weekends and summer days would also find him at the museum, says Boyd, who emphasizes that he’s not complaining.

“That’s just how you make things happen,” he says. “It was a real time-management challenge, because you want to do both of them well.

“You know, you’re around 70, 80 kids, you’ve got the grading and planning and you need the energy for that. And then I’d come here at 3, and everybody else is kind of on the wind-down, and I’m like (claps hands), ‘What are we making today?’ ”

Artifact hunting

Boyd, who often traveled acquiring objects for exhibits, says he’s worked hard to keep his professional worlds separate. His love of collecting started early. He grew up in Ontario, Calif., and as a child, would accompany his father on trips to Owens Valley in the Eastern Sierra Nevada.

“We’d poke around and explore ghost towns. That was sort of the beginning of collecting things on my own and learning what the pieces of people’s lives are,” Boyd says.

“I just sort of began gathering stuff up, Western Americana, back in the ’60s — it probably cost more in gas to drive around and hunt it up than it did to actually buy it,” he says. “Other than Native American artifacts and firearms, most of it did not have any real value, so it was easy for a high school kid or college kid to obtain.”

Boyd went on to study history at Pepperdine University and earned a master’s in industrial education from California State University in Long Beach, Calif. In 1978, he was hired by Bend-La Pine Schools and began teaching industrial education and Western history at Cascade. In the mid-’90s, he moved to High Desert.

“When I started teaching, I found if I’d bring a few things in, they (the students) were really enthused to see the real thing: a California gold scale that they weighed the dust on at the assayer, or something as simple as a rusted-out ox shoe off the Oregon Trail.”

Boyd began putting together classroom kits with history themes such as the Western trails, the gold rush or fur trade, and began teaching additional community education classes to adults at Central Oregon Community College for a few years.

Before the museum opened, Boyd approached founder Donald Kerr at the museum’s office in Bend. “They had an office off Greenwood (Avenue) with a bunch of third-hand office equipment and a great-looking brochure,” Boyd says. “Its focus was going to be natural history and wildlife, so I said, ‘If you get to the point where you want to expand into history, I’d love to be involved and help you out.’ ”

Boyd had a chuckwagon he’d restored in his backyard, “so I asked them, if you’d like, I’ll bring it on out and do talks on High Desert range hand life and buckaroos. So that was my main, early volunteer role, doing talks out around the chuckwagon.”

Boyd lights up with enthusiasm when he recalls old-timers who would stop by his chuckwagon talks and could remember the early 20th century.

“They were still alive,” he says.

That relative freshness “is another part of High Desert history — the frontier here really didn’t end until the ’30s,” Boyd says. “As opposed to — think about it — if you’re doing the history of Colonial New England? There aren’t a lot of firsthand resources to talk to.

“Whereas here, you’re talking to people who were there or their father talked about it. So the history is so much more immediate.”

When interest at the museum began to expand to include cultural history, “I came in and did my whole Western history series here at the museum” for people such as Kerr. In the mid-’80s, he began helping with the Spirit of the West exhibit.

“The way I describe it to folks, it’s been this very rich, rewarding job that sort of stumbled into being, and kind of accidentally invented itself along the way,” Boyd says.

‘Serendipity’

“Bob is beyond special, and he made this museum special,” says Janeanne Upp, president of the museum, which will honor Boyd on Sept. 7. (See “If you go.”) But one can’t keep even the best employees forever. “We can only work them to death for so long,” she says, chuckling.

“It was serendipity that he came together with the museum,” she says, noting his unusual path into the museum world.

“He wasn’t trained in museums — I mean, he loved it, but he came from (an) academic world. Over the years, he’s taken that excitement and passed it on to someone. He’s created lifelong learners.”

Longtime associate William Lang, recently retired from his post as professor of history at Portland State University, has known Boyd for two decades.

“He didn’t come into this work as a museum professional,” Lang says. “He came as a teacher with a very strong interest in connecting with people.”

Lang says Boyd possesses a few traits that make him ideally suited to his second profession as a curator.

For one, there’s his clear-eyed lack of sentimentality. “I think Bob is to be given an awful lot of credit for avoiding sentimental views, of the 19th century especially. The tendency in museum and popular culture is to sentimentalize the relationships of human beings, the landscape and animals.”

Boyd would also go out of his way to find the material to support his exhibits, Lang says.

“Too often museums have a story to tell, but they have enormous gaps in material culture to support it. So they rely on two-dimensional art, photographs, drawings, paintings — imagery, really — to try to carry the story,” he says. “Because of his energy and his ability to talk to people, and not get their confidence so much as make them part of the effort, he was able to get them to offer up for sale — but sometimes gifts — material culture that supported the exhibit itself.”

Lang says that every once in awhile, “you’ll find people like Bob” working at state or regional museums. While “they’re not super rare … they’re few in number. And every institution that has one, they do everything they can to keep them.”

Says Upp, “(Boyd) captures your imagination about how this land was settled and what it meant when it was opened up. He just gets people wound up. That’s the power of Bob. Bob absolutely imbued that in this museum. He infused it.”

People skills

Boyd likens assembling exhibits to piecing together a puzzle, and says that “good history is really just good storytelling.”

To tell the stories, Boyd needed to travel. He and wife Karen have three adult children, and when they were young, “they got dragged into antiques shops a lot. To keep them focused … we tried to give them little missions.” During a trip to Canada, he had them looking for large brown, earthenware pots such as those in the Chinese mercantile in Spirit of the West.

“There were a lot of ways to work family activity into it. Because you look all the time,” he says.

Boyd also visited people and enlisted their help: beleaguered ranchers, older generations or descendents of Chinese and Basque immigrants, even forest rangers.

“These are groups and communities formed by their work or their ethnicity that are a little bit hesitant when you say, ‘Hey, I’m here from the High Desert Museum, and we’d like to tell your story.’

“So often, they’ll go, ‘Well, now, just what are you going to say?’ ” Boyd says. “You can’t really take a side, and so you stay strictly reportorial in terms of how their story and life unfolded.”

Some he met had never visited a museum. To gain their trust and confidence, he might show them a brochure from a previous exhibit and explain that it’s like putting together a puzzle.

“ ‘How can you help us put the puzzle together to tell your story?’ They’d go, ‘Ah.’ ” He’d ease people into the process, and eventually, on a return trip a few months later, “All of a sudden, someone gets out the album, or someone takes you to either the attic or the barn.”

When the exhibit Spirit of the West opened, he watched an old-timer go into the bunkhouse.

“I watched this guy kind of perk up,” Boyd says. “He leans on the railing and he’s looking at everything, just kind of nodding his head.

“It was like, ‘I think we must have done it right,’ Boyd says. “And I asked him. I think I said, ‘Look OK to you, sir?’

“And he said, ‘That’s what I knew.’ ”

Quitting time

He’s continued to collect rifles, shotguns, uniforms and other artifacts for an upcoming exhibit about firearms in the West, but Boyd will see it as a museum patron, not the curator who completes it.

“There’s a lot of mixed emotions,” he says. “It’s about timing. You don’t want to quit when something is full-on ready to happen, and something’s always happening. The thing about exhibits is that they’re often (on) a year-and-a-half, two-year cycle.”

The idea of staying on to see the exhibit through to completion “is tempting,” he says. “There are a lot of new exhibits that would be fun to do and stories to tell.”

Then again, if he were to stick around another 1 1/2 years, he’d be 65, says Boyd, who appreciates the career he’s had.

“Over the last 25 to 30 years, I’ve gotten to see lots of great landscapes, and the museum’s allowed me to connect with a lot of people” he would not have met otherwise.

“If you just went out and drove around in northern Nevada, you wouldn’t get onto certain ranches. In the process, you meet the most interesting, admirable folks still making a living out there just the way their grandparents did,” he says. “That part, I’m going to miss it.”

Boyd turns 64 in September and plans to “slow down life a little bit.” He and Karen have four grandchildren, with a fifth due by the end of this month.

Turns out there are other things in life.

“I’m going to maybe pick up the grandkids from the daycare or preschool and take them to the library or park. Get my kayak out more. I just had my 30-year-old Ross mountain bike rehabbed and dusted off, and I’m going to try to get back on that. Maybe focus more on a lot of the things I moved here for.”