1932test

1932 (1931) (1933) (1920-1930) (1930-40) Table of Contents

Sources

Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp., 1935, 1932, See Text

Harry Carr The West Is Still Wild, (Illustrated by Charles H. Owens) Houghton Mifflin Co., The Riverside Press: Boston and New York, 1932, 257 pp. See Text

Donald M. Cleland A History of the Santa Monica Schools 1876-1951, Santa Monica Unified School District, February 1952 (Copied for the Santa Monica Library, July 22, 1963). 140 pp., 1932 See Text

Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987, 1932 See Text

Tom Moran and Tom Sewell Fantasy by the Sea Peace Press: Culver City, CA, 1980 (1979) (Originally published by Beyond Baroque Foundation with a grant from the Visual Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts) 1924, 1932 See Text

Jeffrey Stanton Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987. 176 pp., 1932 See Text

Betty Lou Young Our First Century: The Los Angeles Athletic Club 1880-1980, LAAC Press: Los Angeles, California 1979, 176 pp., 1932 See Text

Note

1932 Los Angeles Olympics

Documents

Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp., 1935

Chapter XV Underneath the Surface

p. 186 "The bringing of the Olympic Games to Los Angeles was the result of more than five years' ceaseless propagands-including several trips to Europe by leading citizens of the pueblo. The technical arrangements-once the games were assured-represented two years work by experts. They turned out to be by all odds the most successful games ever held. At other games the athletes had had difficulty finding lodging; therre were no practice tracks; the newspaper men were driven to the verge of insanity trying to find out what had happened.

"The Olympic committee in Los Angeles erected a village for the athletes on Angelus Mesa-the old Baldwin ranch. Water of the exact chemical properties of their drinking water at home was provided for each team-also native cooks for each country. In front of each working sportswriter in the press stand was a stock ticker, continuously printing out the results and figures-not only at the track in front of his eyes, but at other places where boat races, horsemanship events, fencing matches were going on. The tracks were lightning fast; they were of peat-impossible in any country where rains are uncertain.

"Not only were nearly all world's records broken; but the games had a profound and beneficial effect upon the inter-[p. 187]national relations of the United States-especially as regards Japan.

"The Japanese cavalry officers were the first team on the ground. The bombardment of Shanghai had just occurred with unfortunate repercussions. The Japanese came with the defensive manner of a cat walking into a strange garret. They were received with open arms. They became the undoubted heroes of the games . . .

" . . .

"[p. 188] . . . Although our cheers for the Japanese were innocent enthusiams without guile, we learned a lot about internationalisms during the Games.

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Harry Carr The West Is Still Wild, (Illustrated by Charles H. Owens) Houghton Mifflin Co., The Riverside Press: Boston and New York, 1932, 257 pp. Dedicated in Ink to Travis Johnson, "With Best Wishes," Harry Carr and "Sincerely," Chas. HO (Bronco Stamp).

[I finished reading this two weeks ago, May 15, 2009, finding it barely relevant ot my task of outlining a history of Ocean Park, as it can be seen in my notes below. I finished reading the 1993 Smithsonian article about General Lea by Alexander a week ago, discovering there that Henry Carr was a good friend and a promotor of General Homer Lea. I have ordered other books by Henry Carr.]

p. 28 " . . . my Apache friends . . . they have summer house at Malibu at the end of a prehistoric trail, so in Palm Springs the movie people have come to play in what was an old civilization."

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Donald M. Cleland A History of the Santa Monica Schools 1876-1951, Santa Monica Unified School District, February 1952 (Copied for the Santa Monica Library, July 22, 1963). 140 pp., 1932

Chapter V School Development in Adversity

When Percy R. Davis became Superintendent of Schools in 1932 Santa Monica, like the rest of the nation, was already in the throes of the financial depression which characterized most of the decade between 1930 and 1940. Future prospects for the schools were unpredictable, for lack of funds, ordinarily accruing for school purposes from various tax sources, in addition to heavy indebtedness, harassed the Board of Education and the school administration. General conditions were by no means auspicious; yet to Superintendent Davis, adversity presented a challenge that a less able man might well have found it impossible to meet. With characteristic foresight and efficiency, he began immediately to examine the issues to which he had fallen heir. Then, less than a year after his assumption of office, disaster struck. The earthquake of 1933 overnight rendered most of the schools unsafe for occupancy and added immeasurably to the new superintendent's already numerous problems. How these problems were met and in what ways the schools were further developed during these trying years, is the subject of the present chapter.

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Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987, 1932


. . .
EM: Yeah, and I got pneumonia. I was in the hospital and it was double pneumonia, and so they finally got Dreiser and he got me some good attention at the hospital. A nurse; it was before antibiotics, and so it was more or less a nursing job, to keep the fever down. So then Bonnie, this friend, had been in California and she had set up some friends of hers at a bookshop, and so she wrote them, the Needhams, Ida and Wilbur Needham. She wrote them and asked them if they could put me up for a month and let me do odd selling, spell them on selling. So I did. I came out in '32.

JG: So this was part of the convalescence?

EM: Yes.

JG: And the thought then was that a warm climate would be good for your . . .

EM: Yes. I was just getting out of it for the winter, but I stayed on. I had letters from people saying it was still pretty bad in New York.

One terrible thing happened. The novel did not sell, but Scribner's had a competition for novelettes (I think they were about 10,000 words). So I cut my novel down. One of the things about it was they felt it was a little short, you know publishers. So I learned to write even shorter, though, you know, in time [laughs] with working hard at it. So [laughing] I cut it down from about . . . Anyway, I cut it. I've forgotten how many words it was in the beginning.
It went in, and I was at my sister's. She was in Denver, she was having a baby. That was on my way to California. And the word came that . . . I think it was four they were going to buy, print three, no, print two. Anyway, it was just out of the running--the last one. I think there were four, and I was fifth. And God, you know, how close, how chance, really. I had a letter from one of the editors saying how sorry she was, that she felt it was very, very nice, and it was a pity. So that made a hell of a difference, you know. God, that would have--to go back to New York with a . . .

JG: Book . . .

EM: And it paid, you know. So that would have . . . It was all I needed. But instead--and California was nothing, absolutely nothing. I'd done so much editorial work and research and there was nothing like that here. So I did get a job rewriting a book for a woman whose English was very poor; she was Russian. God, that was deadly. I got jobs like that, and then a couple of times I worked in a bookshop, you know Christmas rush. What's that big one down, who is it, the end of Olympic?

JG: Downtown?

EM: It was an old, famous bookshop. Well, it doesn't matter. And then I did a lot of reviewing here, because Wilbur Needham reviewed for the Times and for...

JG: The Los Angeles Times?

EM: Yes. He also reviewed for a magazine called Fortnight, I believe the name of it was. He would give me lots of books to review, but I wouldn't get paid for them and I couldn't keep the books, because they needed the books to sell. So I got nothing out of it, but I did get published. I remember one was Buckminster Fuller's Seven to the Moon.[ note: title is Nine Chains to the Moon] What is that book of Fuller's?

JG: I don't know it.

EM: I became very keenly aware of building here, of architecture.

JG: Why was that?

EM: Well, it was wonderful. You could see it in the houses. And I began reading on architecture, all the books.

JG: Who was wonderful at that time?

EM: Neutra, I learned, very soon. And oh--the first thing I saw that I liked were the Monterey houses, you know, of John . . . ?, in Santa Monica.

JG: Parkinson?

EM: No, not Parkinson, John Byers. Over on Georgina Street, in Santa Monica.

JG: These are traditionalized Spanish?

EM: Yes. And then from that, I would stop and look at houses that were under construction if they looked interesting, and I got to see a great many of them. And Neutra I found very early, and liked him. Harris I found very early. First week I was here I met John Entenza. He had nothing to do with architecture then.

JG: He had not bought Art and Architecture yet?

EM: No. That was '32.

JG: That was '32 that he bought it or that you were here?

EM: That we met.

JG: What did you find about the intellectual life here? Was there much of it, or . . . ?

EM: No.

JG: Not much, and you missed the conversations from back East?

EM: Yes, I did.

JG: But what did you like about the city?

EM: I loved . . . It was laughed at so, Los Angeles, in New York. And they thought no one came except the people to make money, and get their money and pick up and run. But when I got off the train in San Bernardino, I said, "What is that, what is that, what is that?" And [they] said "What's what?" "That wonderful smell." "Oh, that's orange blossoms."

God, you know, that was the beginning, and then I got to Santa Monica and the Needham's shop was half a block from the ocean. So I could go down every day and swim, and God, it was close to one of the inclines down to the ocean; it was on Santa Monica Boulevard.

JG: So, you were better by that time?

EM: I got better here, yes. It was so stimulating, and I've always liked warm climates anyway.

JG: You mean just that physical aspect is stimulating?

EM: Yes. And the mountains, too. To have the mountains and the sea so close together. That was just heaven.

JG: How is it that you came to Santa Monica, rather than, say, Pasadena, or . . . ?

EM: Oh, that's because they had the Needham's bookshop. I was going to stay with them. That was the agreement, with Bonnie. I think she'd put up several hundred dollars which, in Depression days, went . . .

JG: It was a lot of money then. Santa Monica in that time was a vacation town, a beachside . . .

EM: Yes, yes, it was always end of the line.

JG: So did you stay on for longer than you thought?

EM: I stayed there about a month, and that's when I got the job rewriting the book, the Russian woman. Her husband's family had a little shed with living quarters above it. It even had a bathroom in it. That was on Pico. So I lived there. Loved it.

Then I fell in love. John didn't come out, and John became something of an alcoholic, too. It was such a disappointment to him that his book was not taken. I think I can see now, you know, "the penumbra of your silence," why it may not, but I really couldn't understand it because it just seemed absolutely wonderful to me. He was hurt. I don't know, did I say this before? That when mine would get attention and his didn't, it really hurt him. He was writing when I was working in Newark, at the department store, and I can remember he would read what he'd written aloud to me, and I was exhausted, you know, and would fall asleep. And that would hurt him. So he became very, very sensitive, and then he began getting awfully drunk. He would sort of lurch out into the street.

JG: This was before you got sick with pneumonia?

EM: Yeah.

JG: And then when you came out here, he stayed there?

EM: Yes. And I really didn't want him to come because he was too comfortable in the position of my going out and working and his staying home and writing. Because he did feel that he was the writer in the family.

JG: So you supported the family?

EM: Briefly, briefly.

JG: So out here, then, you were here and then you met somebody?

EM: Yes. JG: And you stayed on.

. . .

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Aquatics

" . . . Wallace O'Connor . . . won gold and bronze medals in both the 1924 and 1932 Olympic games."

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Jeffrey Stanton Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987. 176 pp., 1932

"In May the Southern California water polo team, composed mostly of Venice swimmers, won the West Coast championship. Five Venice men including Wally O'Conner (captain), Phil Daubenspeck, Charles Finn, Herb Wildman and Bill O'Conner won positions on the United States water polo team. The team upset Brazil and Japan in the playoffs and tied Germany 4-4 in the semi-finals. But in the August 11th final match, they lost to Hungary 7-0."

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Betty Lou Young Our First Century: The Los Angeles Athletic Club 1880-1980, LAAC Press: Los Angeles, California 1979, 176 pp., 1932

11. The Tenth Olympiad
" . . . 1932 . . . The LAAC water polo team, which was chosen to represent the U.S., was unfortunately weakened when three of its strongest members were disqualified under AAU rules for working as lifeguards." p. 127
" . . . the Riviera Country Club was busy welcoming the visiting equestrians . . .
"Los Angeles greeted each national contingent in the spirit of La Fiesta: the Czechs were entertained at the Deuville, the Germans at the Surf and Sand . . ."

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