Michael Biscan: Alumnus Gives Visitors A Look Back in Time at Ft. MacArthur Museum

On a sweltering July day, Michael Biscan (Class of ’96, B.A., History/Philosophy) is turned out in an authentic 1940s wool uniform much like the one his paratrooper uncle would have worn when he and the other soldiers of the 82nd Airborne joined the invasion of Normandy. Biscan’s vintage outfit marks him as a guide at the Fort MacArthur Museum and the Battery Osgood-Farley, which provided strategic support for the Pacific Fleet during World Wars I and II.

“We’re San Pedro’s best kept secret,” he says. “Visitors say that they did not know this ever existed. When we have events like Old Fort MacArthur Days, and the locals hear the field guns going off, they realize there is something here.”

Named for Lt. Gen. Arthur MacArthur, father of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Fort was built in 1914. The Museum is housed in the Battery, a two-gun emplacement that was used from the 1920s until the 1940s. A section of the structure was used as a radio station and fire control switchboard room, from which commands to shoot were issued, in World War II. After the guns were declared surplus and scrapped after 1946, the Army continued to use the fort for various purposes until it was decommissioned in 1976. It was turned over to the city of Los Angeles in 1982, and the Museum was established three years later. The Battery was later used to represent the Hiroshima naval base in the 2001 film Pearl Harbor.

Inspired by his history studies at CSU Dominguez Hills, Biscan strives to provide a true picture of what the fort was like when active, with fairness to varying points of view on war.

“Our teachers presented both sides,” he says. “It was like looking at history as a two-sided coin. As part of the education program at the museum, my job is to present what happened, and if there are various points of view, to express them.”

Biscan makes sure his tours are relevant by gearing his talks to different age groups.

“With adults, we talk about national security risks; with children, it’s more about what was and still is here, the features of the actual Battery,” he says. “With high school students, we focus on the plotting room, where it took about 19 soldiers doing math in their heads to figure out where a target was in minutes, something a sophisticated Texas Instruments calculator could do in seconds. It drives home the point that, yes, algebra really is useful.”

Biscan thinks that people’s fascination with war and military history reflects “a search for identity. It’s about borders, ideals, philosophy, and patriotism. My mother’s father and my grandfather emigrated from Austria after World War I and got a job in the steel mills as a die setter. When World War II came, he was investigated by the FBI because he came from a German country. My mother remembers the agents sitting in the living room, interviewing her father to find where his loyalties were, although he was working on machinery for the United States.”

– Joanie Harmon