MUSEUM WATCH : Local Treasures

It was a twilight moment, above and away from the glare and blare of the city. A middle-aged couple with much to share but little to spend were celebrating their 10th wedding anniversary. He was Chicano, she was Comanche.

They had come to the Southwest Museum to hear a concert of American Indian love songs, played that night on a willow flute and sung by a slightly overweight, casually dressed, brown-skinned man who looked, just as they did, as if he had wandered in off the street.

The streets in Highland Park, along the Arroyo Seco, the cradle of Los Angeles culture, are streets where you can meet such a couple and such a man. And the Southwest Museum houses a collection of American Indian art that is of and for them as no other collection in Los Angeles can be or ever will be. This is why feelings run so high at the suggestion that the collection should leave Highland Park and move to a more modern facility.

The Southwest Museum has a talented new director, Thomas H. Wilson, who succeeds retiring director Jerome R. Selmer.

In the spirit of Charles Lummis, first city editor of The Times and an enthusiast for the cultural fusion of Spanish American and American Indian elements that had occurred in the Southwest United States, we welcome him. He is now the custodian of treasures that, in more senses than one, lie close to the heart of this city. With all due allowance made for the requirements of modern curatorship, we hope he will find a way to keep them there.