Denny Anspach, a founding father of the California State Railroad Museum in Old Sacramento and a popular doctor whose love of locomotives and community helped create the Sacramento landmark, died Sunday after a bout with cancer.

He was 86.

Anspach was a driving force behind the creation of the Railroad Museum, which opened in 1981 but was decades in the making.

Anspach was fully engaged in almost every critical moment in the creation of Sacramento’s most popular museum attraction.

As a newly minted diagnostic radiologist, Anspach moved to Sacramento in 1966 and set up what became a thriving medical practice.

He moved to the state capital – in part – because Sacramento afforded him proximity to influential rail enthusiasts who were just as invested as he in the idea of keeping the mighty engines of California’s post Gold Rush from plunging into oblivion.

Reagan on board

The Railroad Museum was initially planned for the Bay Area but Anspach and his group helped guide it to Sacramento.

Anspach helped get the City of Sacramento excited about the idea. But how to pay for it?

The answer came in the form of another influential Californian: Gov. Ronald Reagan.

“It was a conspiracy,” Anspach said to Berkson-Brand. Anspach, Mott and Rodda combined forces to beguile Reagan, the former Hollywood actor and future U.S. president whose political career was built on stagecraft, romance and storytelling.

In this case, the romance of a vintage rail car romantically named The Gold Coast would serve as the setting for a secret, private dinner for Reagan – so secret it was not on the governor’s calendar so as to slip pass the prying eyes of capitol reporters.

The plan was that Reagan would be smitten by the elegance of the rail car and its link to California’s railroad history that he would green light the funding for a museum.

Reagan agreed, accompanied by wife Nancy and Edwin Meese, who was his chief of staff (and) later became U.S. attorney general. “The table was set,” Anspach said in the Sacramento State oral history.

“Carolyn Slobe provided the table settings, Tiffany glassware, I mean beautiful stuff, beautiful stuff. The napkins were silk screened on linen, were copies from the Silver Palace dining cars of the 1870s.”

The dinner was July 13, 1970.

“As a strategy we decided we weren’t going to ask for anything, you know,” Anspach said, recalling the evening. “ It was a social evening and we’ll answer questions...And the timing was they were only going to be there for a certain length of time, which just disappeared, because he was obviously having a good time. So we sat down at dinner, and I was worried, ‘how do you make small talk?’ There was no worry at all. Conversation just flowed.”

While the governor reveled by telling stories of his radio broadcaster days before becoming an actor, Anspach remembered that Nancy Reagan was a tougher nut to crack.

“The talk with Nancy Reagan was much less successful, and it was very difficult,” he remembered.

Anspach’s group made a presentation to Reagan at the end, outlined their vision for the museum, answered some questions and that was it. They made an impression. The governor liked the idea, the project was a “go.” Many key details were drafted at Anspach’s kitchen table.

Track record of a good man

Work began in the mid-1970s. Anspach was the “de-facto director” working with the city, Old Sacramento, state parks, the state Legislature.

It sounds mind boggling today and it seems improbable that a private citizen would play such an important role in a state-city project of such consequence, but it happened.

“They sort of relied on me to keep things straight, but I was working with so many good people, so many good people, who just stepped up to the plate,” Anspach remembered.

All the while, he was building a successful practice.

As breast cancer awareness grew, Anspach’s practice grew with it and he was known as a kind, caring doctor working with patients who would arrive feeling nervous or fearful in advance of their annual mammograms.

And he was the doctor who helped them through it, who in the best of circumstances would let them stay in the examination room until they could hear the comforting words: You’re OK.

He was a really good man that way, deeply empathetic.

Reading Berkson-Brand’s oral history, it’s hard not to smile as Anspach tells his story because his words jump off the page: He poured so much of himself into the project, but what comes through is his love of people and his community.

Gov. Jerry Brown officiated the grand opening of the California Railroad Museum on May, 2 1981.

Accounts in The Bee said that more than 200,000 people toured the grounds and free outdoor displays in the days after the grand opening.

“Denny was really the father of this,” said Bob Slobe, president of the North Sacramento Land Company.

“They took a boarded up skid row of Sacramento and turned it into what it is now...” he said. “He was also a superstar in his profession. He was a real champ, a wonderful man.”

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