What are Hearst Castle tour guides doing during coronavirus closure?
Imagine trying to keep 87 highly trained Hearst Castle tour guides on the payroll when the San Simeon facility where they work is closed.
That was the conundrum facing State Parks’ San Luis Obispo Coast District leaders on March 16, when the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the world-famous museum and monument and its associated visitor center.
“Those were scary times,” Dan Falat, superintendent of the Coast district, said recently of the period immediately after the closure.
“In the beginning of the outbreak, we were all trying to figure out how we could be of use to humanity working at the Castle,” guide Shari Fortino wrote via email.
With the public barred from the museum, which gets typically hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, “the guides couldn’t guide,” recalled Cara O’Brien, Hearst Castle’s interpretive program manager. “We were pretty sad and pretty lost at first.”
“But we came up with a plan really fast,” she said, based on the guides’ unexpectedly free time to do “all those things that we hadn’t been able to do, because there wasn’t time to do them.”
Of course, Castle officials wanted to keep all their employees on the payroll. And while some of the others were assigned to special projects, most kept on doing their regular jobs, which had to be done whether the facility was open to the public or not.
Hearst Castle is still closed due to coronavirus
Some COVID-19 guidelines are easing in various areas. With San Luis Obispo County in the red tier under California’s Blueprint for a Safer Economy, meaning that coronavirus is considered substantial but not widespread, some museums have recently been allowed to reopen with limited indoor capacity.
Hearst Castle, the former estate of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, is not in that category.
Falat said Oct. 6 that there’s still no hint of when the state will allow museums such as Hearst Castle to reopen.
While most people attend traditional museums on their own or with family and friends, visitors to Hearst Castle are typically in mixed groups.
Falat said that social distancing at the Castle could be difficult, especially in tight quarters inside the estate’s hilltop structures, in the Visitor Center and on the tour buses that transport visitors to and from the former estate of the late William Randolph Hearst, media magnate and art collector.
Things still won’t be “normal” when the Castle does reopen, he said, because “our routes can, and likely will, be adapted for social distancing.”
Meanwhile, as they wait for the guidelines that will allow the Castle to open its doors to the public once more, Falat and his staff have been “making ourselves ready, constantly adapting to whatever the intricate conditions and modifications might be.”
COVID-19 brings digital tours and deep cleaning
Those adaptations are among the assignments that have been keeping Castle guides employed. The guides have taken on those new tasks with verve and professionalism, according to Falat and O’Brien, who oversees the many new assignments given to and subsequently mastered by the guides and others.
About 75% of the guides are still leading tours, but now they’re doing that online through several digital platforms and programs, many of which are geared toward a younger set that may not have previously been Castle enthusiasts.
O’Brien said guides not yet involved in the digital work have been assigned to various projects throughout the last six months.
Those include, she said, “Deep cleaning with the curatorial crew; mask making; practicing the new tour structure and timing to meet COVID-19 guidelines; scanning images for the digital film archive project; training and mentoring new guides; working in the library and working with the groundskeepers on the landscape.”
She said the digitally assigned guides have migrated to a wide range of projects and programs, some of which carry instantly recognizable names, such as the Smithsonian Institution.
Others are California State Parks Online Resources for Teachers and Students (PORTS), Castle to Coast Kids, Virtual Summer Camp, Parks PE, Virtual Mindwalks and Agents of Discovery.
Some of the programs, such as PORTS, have been around a while, and the Castle has participated in that one for about a decade. Others are new, and some were invented by the guides themselves.
What are park guides doing during closure?
Here are some of the experiences and thoughts about the last six months from six of the now-digital guides and interpreters.
Those guides, and the programs in which they’ve immersed themselves for the past six months, are:
• Shari Fortino and Mike Smothers, Smithsonian Learning Lab and Agents of Discovery;
• Robin Hazard, Virtual Summer Camp;
• Tracy Kosinski, PORTS and Castle to Coast Kids;
• Laura Lowe, Parks PE; and
• Ryan Treller, YouTube Videos.
Fortino, who has a special education teaching credential and a theatrical background, said she’s been “creating visual collections about Hearst Castle on the Smithsonian Learning Lab.”
After taking a Zoom workshop on digital applications “and learning how to use inclusion and diversity more in our video and social media,” she said, she brainstormed with her superiors on a collection highlighting the Castle’s unsung heroes, “the workers and craftsmen that helped make Hearst Castle what it is today.”
She also works on the learning application Agents of Discovery, which “allows children and adults to learn about our parks and to have fun doing it.”
The program is similar in some ways to Pokemon Go, and allowed Fortino to “apply creativity and use some of my teaching skills with the history of San Simeon to create a fun way to learn during the pandemic.”
In the process, she learned a lot “about producing video, copywrite laws, recording subjects, directing, editing video, game development and creating ways for students to learn at a distance.” She even learned about image recognition technology.
Michael Smothers, Fortino’s husband, is a musician who does art framing. About two years ago, he and his wife became Castle guides.
He’s worked with Fortino on Agents of Discovery, and his work time during the Castle closure has been split between that and continued organization of props and clothing for the historic estate’s Living History program.
That program outfits volunteer docents who, among other duties, get dolled up in period attire for special, night and holiday tours of the Castle.
Smothers said he’s also “researched and ‘starred’ in three videos about different aspects of Hearst Castle.”
Those can be viewed on the Castle’s YouTube website and the Smithsonian Learning Lab site.
Robin Hazard said she’s been doing “outreach and education on marine protected areas (MPAs),” segments of the ocean set aside to protect critters and their habitats. Hazard explained that the protected areas “are much like underwater parks. In California, we have 124 MPAs along our coastline, making up the largest network of MPAs in the world!”
According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, there are seven MPAs along the San Luis Obispo County coastline, including areas off Piedras Blancas, Cambria, Morro Bay and Point Buchon.
Hazard explores California MPAs with all ages, especially for the school programs, junior programs and virtual summer camps in which she educates children. She also participates in “social media livestreams, such as the #MPAMonday Facebook Livestream,” which target a general audience.
The San Luis Obispo resident said her students “find much joy in learning that a lot of our coastal resources are protected.”
She said her previous background in digital interpretation has been “very helpful for adjusting to a fully digital education platform. However, I have learned quite a bit about technology, social media and the best ways to connect with the public during this time” of Castle closure and pandemic restrictions.
Tracy Kosinski has worked on the PORTS program for several years.
“Since the COVID pandemic began, we had to shift the way we do things within our program to go from connecting with the classroom to connecting with students in their homes, using their own devices,” she said. “Let me tell you, kids are smart and adjust quite well to technology.”
Of course, “we had to adjust, too, taking extra steps to ensure the protection and privacy of the students and teachers that joined our virtual tours,” she said.
The response was “substantial,” she said, as “teachers all over the state turned to” the State Parks and Castle PORTS programs “to obtain quality curriculum-based tours and fun field trips during a time of stress and uncertainty.”
The Castle PORTS program offers four distance learning programs to support curriculum for students in kindergarten through 12th grade.
Kosinski has also received virtual tour requests from high schools and junior colleges, and senior centers — especially those with specialty programs for adults with developmental disabilities. She said the virtual tours have helped fill the gap created when the usual field trips and other activities were put on hold due to social-distancing requirements.
She also collaborated with coastal parks “to provide fun, junior ranger-type tours for kids.”
Kosinski said the Castle to Coast Kids tours “were streamed live to the SLO Coast District YouTube channel,” where they can still be viewed.
“This type of programming would not have been possible if things were normal at the Castle,” Kosinski said, so “that, I would say, is a silver lining” to the coronavirus-caused closure of Hearst Castle.
She said the students “seem very grateful to take these ‘trips’ and have a Hearst Castle experience.”
Their favorites? “The pools and all the gold,” Kosinski said. “They are wowed by the gold!”
Kosinski noted that one of her favorite responses from a kid was “thank you for showing us all the stuff about Hearst Castle. You spent your time with us, even during the coronavirus. You could have stayed home and tried not to catch the coronavirus, but you chose to teach us.”
Laura Lowe has created several specialty versions of PORTS, which take advantage of her extensive background in exercise and personal training. She’s finished 13 Iron Man-distance triathlon events — including five Hawaiian races, finishing in the top 20 twice — and has worked as a personal trainer.
Lowe holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees, has earned fitness-industry certifications in physical education and personal training, and had amassed seven years of online experience before becoming a Castle guide.
When the Castle shut down, Lowe and her supervisors launched PARKS PE, a “21st century-style program of conducting virtual PE tours at Hearst Castle,” she said.
The “kid-friendly” physical education tours, “with an emphasis on the Olympiad,” Lowe explained, link various fitness exercises with “Hearst Castle, its various marble statues, art pieces and the fauna” of Central Coast state parks.
The programs “fulfill both intellectual and physical education curriculum goals for children (in) grades K-12,” she said, “since the pandemic was keeping kids from attending school.”
With Lowe’s background, it’s no surprise that her favorite spot on the Castle hilltop is the outdoor Neptune Pool, and her favorite of Hearst’s notable guests is champion swimmer Gertrude Ederle.
Ryan Treller was an actor before becoming a Castle guide a year ago, so “while tours have been sidelined due to the pandemic, I’ve been able to put my on-camera skills to creative use by developing and presenting online video tours.”
He’s “always loved the Golden Age of Hollywood history at Hearst Castle,” Treller said, including some of the elite on the media mogul’s Tinseltown guest list, such as “Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Carole Lombard, Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland.”
Treller has put together “an in-depth, three-part ‘Hearst and Hollywood’ series for Facebook that covers the types of people who visited here in the 1920s and ‘30s, and the things they enjoyed doing when they got here.”
Those activities included horseback riding in the Pergola, tennis, swimming and animal watching at the zoo, which had about 95 species on display over the years.
Treller’s next project is “a new video tour project outlining Hearst’s occupation as the world’s first international multi-media mogul.”
He opined that his Castle coworkers “are some of the most kind, helpful, professional, thoughtful, curious, good-natured, good-willed and interested people I have ever had the privilege of working with. And as one of my most valued teachers once told me, ‘If you’re interested, you’re interesting.’”
Treller noted that, “while we are educating people, we are also constantly learning ourselves, every step of the way … a wonderful metaphor for life. I learn from the visitors every day.”
O’Brien, the interpretive program manager, said that “the guides are growing and learning, researching so much.”
“By the time we get back to doing in-person tours, they’ll have so much more to share. They’ll be a class set apart, a tighter team,” she said. “I can see them being very excited to share all that they’ve learned. They’ve had a chance to follow their passions, find out things they don’t normally have time to learn.”
Since the Castle’s COVID-19 closure began, “we’ve all been really grateful to be working,” she said, adding that the guides “are doing lots of innovative and creative stuff.”
“Everyone is just giving it their all,” O’Brien said. “They’ve been working very hard, doing a wonderful job in so many categories. It’s amazing … pretty cool to see what they can accomplish.”
“It’s nice,” O’Brien added reflectively, “that something this good can come out of this horrible thing, this pandemic.”
This story was originally published October 14, 2020 at 3:28 PM.
