Archivist, museum exhibit creator, costume maker, Web designer, historic activist, wry observer of human oddities—Pacific Grove’s Esther Trosow has one expansive resume. She’s also probably done more to preserve and celebrate the history of “America’s Last Hometown” than any one person.

“A love of John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts” brought Trosow to Pacific Grove in 1994, and within a few years she had developed the “Driving Tour of John Steinbeck’s Pacific Grove,” established 93950.com, a quirky portal Web site devoted to her new hometown, and been instrumental in convincing the City Council to change the name of High Street to Ricketts Row in honor of the legendary marine biologist whose original lab was on Fountain Avenue.

“That was a very contentious time with the City Council,” she remembers. “It seems like Ricketts Row was the one thing they all voted on unanimously.”

In addition to the driving tour, her Web site also hosts a walking tour of Pacific Grove and links to dozens of other PG-related sites. Then there’s the “other” content—pages with titles like “The Cinematic Hats of Geoffrey Rush” or “Colossus of Gold,” which features the wonderfully bizarre artwork and cartoons of Trosow’s significant other, Snick Farkas, the surreal artist and anti-political wag who serves as Pacific Grove’s unofficial gadfly.

“We definitely share the same odd sense of humor,” she admits.

Which explains their 24-year partnership. When asked why they never married, Trosow’s answer is simple: “I don’t want to be a Farkas,” she says.

But she doesn’t mind sewing lush lobster and squid outfits for Farkas to wear during straight-faced public spectacles that mystify and amuse.

“I made the lobster costume for no reason at all. It was like ‘If you make it he will wear it,’” she laughs. “And he did. When he put it on it was magic.”

Trosow admits she’s worn the lobster outfit a few times but refuses to put on the squid suit. “It looks like a big condom,” she explains.

Trosow tempers her contributions to surreal performance art with invaluable contributions to historic preservation.

At the age of 16, Trosow spent a year volunteering in Philadelphia’s famed Franklin Institute when a teacher’s strike closed her high school. The experience inspired her to specialize in archive work at San Jose State University’s library science program.

After moving to Pacific Grove, she worked as the gift manager at the Museum of Natural History for six years and created popular exhibits on Ricketts and the museum founders.

While working at the museum, she learned about the Tuttle Collection, an archive of 595 glass negatives that the museum had received in 1976 but had done nothing with. Trosow began pressuring museum director Steve Bailey to catalog, print and digitize the invaluable images of turn-of-the-century Pacific Grove.

“I was telling him it was a valuable resource. It was something that needed to be, at the very least, printed,” she says. “God forbid there might be some disaster and we’d lose them.”

The images, which were taken by photographer and pioneer pharmacist C.K. Tuttle (1859-1939) portray the people, places and vistas of early Pacific Grove. It’s a treasure trove of historical insight that captures Lighthouse Avenue, Victorian homes and gardens, early churches, Lovers Point, early transportation, institutions like the museum, library, schools and marine station, the rocky coastline and tidepools, tents and cottages from the town’s origins as a Methodist retreat, as well as special events like President McKinley’s visit to the town.

But most importantly, the Tuttle Collection captured the faces of early residents of Pacific Grove at work and play, from picnickers and bundled up sunbathers to men dressed in bizarre pregnant costumes, babies in clam shells, and headshots of the local Chinese population, who needed documentation to be properly discriminated against as part of the Exclusion Act.

The photos capture not only the hard-nosed pioneer spirit of the day, but also the photographer and his subject’s sense of humor. It’s a wonderful legacy that, without Trosow’s determination, would still be languishing in the museum’s basement. She says she battled with museum director Steve Bailey, and eventually quit over the issue.

After she resigned her position at the museum, Trosow took jobs as an administrator at the Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy (MIRA) and then as the center director of the Friends of the Sea Otter. Meanwhile, the Tuttle Collection became what Trosow describes as “a political hot potato.” In 1997, City Councilmember Susan Goldbeck even ran on a platform to have the Tuttle Collection printed.

Six years later, the City Council finally told museum director Bailey to preserve the Tuttle Collection. In a tremendous show of good will, Bailey hired Trosow back as a private contractor to do the work.

In 2004, with a new title as museum archivist, Trosow began a two-year process of cataloging, identifying, describing, printing and digitally archiving the entire Tuttle Collection. Today, over 700 images are available online and available for public use thanks to her work.

Last year she used many of the images to create her greatest exhibit, Pacific Grove: The Chautauqua Years, an insightful glimpse into the town’s history that now resides at City Hall.

Other outstanding Trosow exhibits at the Natural History museum include the 1906 earthquake exhibit that just came down, and the new permanent exhibit devoted to ornithologist Rollo Beck.

But Trosow says people seem to enjoy the Tuttle Collection the most.

“The secret to a good exhibit is making it attractive and compelling and keeping the verbage down,” she says.

Trosow is currently working on a new exhibit with Bailey which is built around a taxidermied condor donated by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

“It died at the San Diego Wild Animal Park,” she says. “It’s at the taxidermist being mounted right now.”

But this may be one of the last exhibits Trosow works on for the museum because she’s looking for other work and considering all offers. Just don’t ask her to put on the squid suit.

An online catalog of the Tuttle Collection is available at pgmuseum.org. For more information call 648-5716 x 17.