1949(1948) (1950) (1940-1950) (1950-1960) Table of Contents
Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971(1976), 256 pp., 1976, 1971, 1949, 1860s See Text
Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg Virginia & Truckee: A Story of Virginia City and Comstock Times, Howell-North: Berkeley, California, 1949 (1963), Fifth Edition, 67pp. 1949, 1963, 1860's, 1850 See Text
John Cage* Silence, Wesleyan University Press: Hanover, NH, 1961(1973), 276 pp. 1912, 1949, 1978, 1982 See Text
Raymond Chandler The Little Sister, Knopf: NY, 1949 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., 1949, 1948, 1946, 1940s See Text
James W. Lunsford The Ocean and the Sunset, The Hills and the Clouds: Looking at Santa Monica, illustrated by Alice N. Lunsford, 1983, 1966, 1949, 1933, 1913, 1910, 1908, 1890s. See Text
Lawrence Mace In Search of Whole Rainbows, Unpublished Manuscript, 1994, 1952, 1949, 1948, 1942 See Text
Jeffrey Stanton Santa Monica Pier A History from 1875 to 1990, Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1990, 1949 See Text
Betty Lou Young Our First Century: The Los Angeles Athletic Club 1880-1980, LAAC Press: Los Angeles, California 1979, 176pp., 1964, 1956, 1949, 1947, 1935, 1930, 1926 See Text
Notes:
KR: Russ Saunders* was the model for Dali's Crucifixtion which hangs in a museum in Scotland.
Documents
Reyner Banham Los Angeles:The Architecture of Four Ecologies Pelican: NY, 1971(1976), 256 pp., 1976, 1971, 1949, 1860s
" . . . the importance of Santa Monica Canyon is that it is the point where Los Angeles first came to the Beaches. From the garden of Charles {and Rae} Eames's house in Pacific Palisades, one can look down on a collection of roofs and roads that cover the old camp-site to which Angelenos started to come for long weekend picnics under canvas from the beginning of the 1870s. The journey from downtown could take two days, so it was not an excursion to lightly undertaken, but there was soon enough traffic to justify a regular stage-run, and a semi-permanent big tent that served as a dance -hall and could sleep thirty people overnight. . ." p.44 and 45.
". . . Within a few years of the discovery of the canyon mouth as a picnic beach, the railway had hit the shore at Santa Monica, but on the southern side of the flat-topped mesa on which most of the present Santa Monica stands. Along the top of the bluff where the mesa meets the sea is the splendid cliff-top park of Santa Monica Palisades, and behind it there have always been high-class hotels as long as there has been a Santa Monica. pp. 45 and 46.
{pp. 44 and 45 have photos of c. 1870 SM Canyon and the View from the Eames House.}
" . . . I discovered Charles Eames's house {1949} in an American magazine. . . . the Eames house has had a profound effect on many of the architects of my generation in Britain and Europe. . . . For most of two decades it has shared with Rodia's towers in Watts the distinction of being the best known and most illustrated building in Los Angeles. . . ." p. 223
{Eames house photo, page 224}
" . . . The houses and the automobiles are equal figments of a great dream, the dream of the urban homestead, the dream of a good life outside the squalors of the European type of city, and thus a dream that runs back not only into the Victorian railway suburbs of earlier cities, but also to the country-house culture of the fathers of the US Constitution, or the whig squirarchs whose spiritual heirs they sometimes were, and beyond them to the villegiatura of Palladio's patrons, or the Medicis' Poggio a Caiano. Los Angeles cradles and embodies the most potent current version of the great bourgeois vision of the good life in a tamed countryside . . . " p. 238
" . . . It is the dream that appears in Le Corbusier's equation: un rêve X 1,000,000= chaos. . . . not in Los Angeles, where seven million adepts . . can find their way around without confusion. . . . p. 239.
"The neon-violet sunset light that disquieted the sensibilities of {Nathanael} West's {Day of the Locust} hero by making the Hollywood Hills almost beautiful, is also the light in which I personally delight to drive down the last leg of Wilshire towards the sea, watching the fluorescence of the electric signs mingling with the cheap but invariably emotive colours of the Santa Monica sunset. It is also the light which bathes Bradbury's Martian evenings. The lithe, brown-skinned Martians, with their 'gold-coin eyes', in Bradburys's vision are to be seen on the surfing beaches and even more frequently on the high desert . . .
" . . . there are the canals by which the crystal pavilions stand, as they were meant to stand in the dream-fulfilment city of Venice; above all, there are the dry preserved remains of the cities of an earlier Martian culture, like abandoned Indian pueblos or the forgotten sets of famous movies long ago . . ." p. 240
Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg Virginia & Truckee: A Story of Virginia City and Comstock Times, Howell-North: Berkeley, California, 1949 (1963), Fifth Edition, 67pp. 1949, 1963, 1860's, 1850
Sing, therefore, O Muse of Tractive Force and Valve Gear, of the Virginia and Truckee, a railroad of such superlatives that, like the Comstock it served and the San Francisco it enriched, its name will be forever currency in the language of the trans-Mississippi."Tidings of precious metals in Nevada were nothing new to the Mother Lode. As early as 1850 a William H. Moore of Indiana, who had driven the first wagon ever to cross the plains from St. Joseph to California, reported a number of prospectors digging for gold in Carson Valley but that the biggest single piece of ore he had heard reported was worth no more than $15. But when it was reported on the strength of reliable assays that the samples of "blue stuff," long discarded by miners on the east side of Mount Davidson as worthless, ran to several thousand dollars a ton in silver the rush which, a decade before, had carried the tide of fortune seekers westward over the Sierra was reversed and the greatest wave of adventurers the world has ever known suddenly deserted the diggings of the Mother Lode and rolled eastward to the Washoe.
"Caught up in this mighty landfaring were such millionaires to be as John Mackay, Senator George Hearst, Adolph Sutro, James Graham Fair, Senator John P. Jones, Sandy Bowers, Jim Flood, Jack O'Brien, and mighty, bearded Senator William M. Stewart, perhaps the most persistent of all Nevada seekers and finders, who was to see the rushes to Virginia City and to the Reese, to the White Pine, to Panamint, to Tonopah and Goldfield and, at long last, to the ultimate bonanza of them all, Bullfrog, above the incredible wastes of the Amargosa, well after the turn of the twentieth century." p. 8
". . .
"The passing of the V & T will leave Nevada, in all truth, a graveyard of railroads whose only peer as a necropolis of short lines is Colorado. Forgotten by all but professional railroad historians is the Pioche and Bullionville which was to link tht fabulous mining community with Senator John P. Jones' ambitious San Pedro and Salt Lake line. Gone, save in its vestigial remnant, is the Southern Pacific's Owens Valley branch across the state line in California, the once wistful and momentarily opulent Carson and Colorado. With the snows of yesteryear are the Nevada-California-Oregon narrow gauge, the Eureka and Palisade of fragrant memory and the once riotous Nevada Central. Only grade rights of way in the southern Nevada deserts serve to remind of the life that once flowed along the Tonopah and Tidewater, the Bullfrog-Goldfield, the Tonopah and Goldfield and the Las Vegas and Tonaopah. Dead in the surveyor's reports is the proposed Nevada and Utah Railroad that was to run from Tonopah to the southern littoral of the the Great Salt Lake. Closely associated, in California, was the unsinkable Senator Jones' short line, unsurveyed but actually financed, that was to run from San Bernadino over the Cajon to the foot of Surprise Canyon at the height of the fantastic Panamint boom." p. 67
John Cage* Silence, Wesleyan University Press: Hanover, NH, 1961(1973), 276 pp. 1912, 1949, 1978, 1982
John Cage* was born in Los Angeles in 1912. He was recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for having extended the boundaries of music in 1949.
Raymond Chandler The Little Sister, Knopf: NY, 1949:
"Maybe you don't know Bay City, Mr. Marlowe."
"Ha," I said. "All I know about Bay City is that every time I go there I have to buy a new head." (p. 9)
" . . .
"You don't look at rooms in this town. You grab them sight unseen. This burg's so jam-packed even now that I could get ten bucks just for telling there's a vacancy here." (p. 26)
- a man vacating his room in a rooming house in Bay City
" . . .
"The little man counting money in the kitchen went nicely with the neighborhood. The fact that he carried a gun and a knife was a social eccentricity that would cause no comment at all on Idaho Street." (p. 32)
-Marlowe visiting 449 Idaho St. in Bay City
" . . .
"...Wyoming Street, which according to my map was not quite in the best residential neighborhood and not quite out of it." (p. 34)
" . . .
"On the right the great fat solid Pacific trudging into shore like a scrubwoman going home. No moon, no fuss, hardly a sound of the surf. No smell. None of the harsh wild smell of the sea. A California ocean. California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing." (p. 80)
-Marlowe in a bad mood
" . . .
"Don't be silly... They don't have gangsters in Bay City. They're all working in pictures." (p. 136)
-Marlowe
" . . .
"I've always had a swell time in Bay City - while I stayed conscious." (p. 169) -Marlowe
" . . .
"What makes you Bay City cops so tough?" he asked. "You pickle your nuts in salt water or something?" (p. 169)
- an LA cop to a Bay City cop
" . . .
"In Bay City," Maglashan said, "we could murder you for that."
"In Bay City you could murder me for wearing a blue tie," I said. (p. 171)
-Marlowe is in trouble for calling the Bay City police to report a murder anonymously and then leaving the scene of the crime.
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., 1949, 1948, 1946, 1940s
Part of the money derived from the bond issue of 1946 was allocated to complete the John Adams Junior High School plant, and from this money, in 1948-1949, there was constructed an auditorium with a seating capacity of 750, a large gymnasium with connecting facilities for the girls' locker room and showers, and a four-unit shop building for metal work, wood work, and mechanical drawing.
The new John Adams plant, both in structure and design, follows the modern trend, expressing simple beauty through line and color. Its buildings are of the rambling one-story type of construction, providing safety from fire and earthquake, and are connected by outside, covered corridors that surround two grass-covered patios.
James W. Lunsford The Ocean and the Sunset, The Hills and the Clouds: Looking at Santa Monica, illustrated by Alice N. Lunsford, 1983, 1966, 1949, 1933, 1913, 1910, 1908,1890s
Ocean Park
"10. Crystal Beach, foot of Hollister. Site of the former Crystal Pier, a popular amusement pier known also as the Hollister Pier, the Bristol Pier, the Nat Goodwin Pier (after the well-known Nat Goodwin Cafe located at the entrance). Built of oak, the pier was finally razed in 1949."
"56. Phillips Chapel, CME Church, 401 Bay Street. This may be the oldest continuously occupied public building in the city. Originally built in either 1890 or 1895 as the Washington School at Fourth and Ashland, it was later moved to this site and dedicated on October 4, 1908. It was remodeled in 1910 and again in 1949, but the original architecture of the building has been retained."
"58. Los Amigos Park, Fifth and Ocean Park. This three-acre city recreation park is the former site of John Adams Junior High School, which was built in 1913 and abandoned after the 1933 earthquake when the new junior high school was built at 16th and Pearl. The land was leased to the city for park purposes in 1949 after having been used by the Army as a recreation center and by the Navy as a training site. It was for many years the location of the Morgan Theatre, which occupied the former Army recreation hall as a community theater until it was destroyed by fire in 1966."
Lawrence Mace In Search of Whole Rainbows, Unpublished Manuscript, 1994, 1952, 1949, 1948, 1942
Chapter Twenty-five: Muscle Beach
"Several months after beginning Navy electronics school in 1949 at Treasure Island near San Francisco, I began to spend almost every weekend at Muscle Beach in Santa Monica near Los Angeles, four hundred miles south.
" . . .
"The four-hundred-mile trip to Santa Monica Friday nights typically required eight hours of hitch-hiking. . . .
"Santa Monica in 1949 was a friendly beach city located northwest of Los Angeles. Usually I arrived there about midnight Friday night. Several large hotels lined the beach at the top of hundred-foot cliffs called the Palisades. One of my beach friends was a night clerk at the Georgian Hotel. The lavish lobby was deserted after midnight and my friend allowed me to sleep there on a comfortable, overstuffed couch. He woke me when he finished work at six o'clock Saturday mornings.
"Deforest Most was in his early thirties, managing Muscle Beach for the Santa Monica Recreation Department. At eight Saturday morning, Moe raised an American flag over a small green utility building, officially starting the beach day. He allowed me to use the building to change into a swim suit and store my navy uniform.
"A nearby wood acrobatic platform was ten-by-forty feet, raised two feet above the sand. I helped Moe pull heavy, thick mats from a large, weatherproof compartment at the end of the platform, spreading them so that they covered the entire platform surface. I would then spend much of the next ten hours on most Saturdays on those mats, learning and teaching hand balancing and acrobatic adagio. My first year of weekends at Muscle Beach was one of the most rewarding periods of my life. I was beginning a twenty-year love affair with acrobatics and that fabulous place!
"There were many talented regulars at the beach every weekend. They came as much for fellowship as for exercise and practice. Some were current or former show buisness professionals from circus or nightclub entertaining. Often they had a particular expertise they practiced and performed at the beach, such as head-to-head balancing, or juggling while doing acrobatic tricks. Each did their own thing, while tourist onlookers applauded appropriately.
"Non-professionals, such as I, were often new converts to the brotherhood of acrobats. We came from gymnastics, weight lifting, body building, wrestling, or other athletic realms. These other activities at Muscle Beach each had their own group of enthusiasts, congregating in a particular areas surrounding the central acrobatic platform. Spectators assembled in the bleachers in front of the platform next to the beach boardwalk. They provided a powerful audience for any exhibitiionist who might be lured into learning hand balancing, adagio, or acrobatic pyramid tricks. A few, such as I, got carried away by it all and became acrobats for life.
"Some of the greats of Muscle Beach were in their prime. My friend Moe was renowned as the strongest bottom-man in the world. He could support enormous human weight. It was not his sheer strength that was crucial, but rather his ability to balance moving, shifting body weight of two or more people in towering tricks high above his shoulders. Steve Reeves had won the Mr. America contest about the time I began spending weekends at Muscle Beach. He weighed more than two-hundred pounds. Moe weighed only one-seventy-five and I weighed one-eighty-five. Once Moe and I took Steve atop a standing three-high. I stood on Moe's shoulders and pulled Steve upward, facing me, to stand on my feet. He then climbed upward, around me, to stand on my shoulders. Steve was a heavy body builder, not a skilled acrobat. It was a remarkable feat for Moe to support and balance so much inexperienced, moving human weight so high in the air above his shoulders.
"Harold Zenkin always had been my candidate as the greatest hand balancing acrobat of my early Muscle Beach years. He was a strong bottom-man like Moe. Also, he was an exceptionally valuable help to newcomers such as I. Everyone admired his skills and teaching talent. He had an inspirational effect, leading others to attempt and learn astounding, difficult feats.
"Russ Saunders was a Canadian competition diver and stunt man who dominated the Muscle Beach Acrobatic platform as his own domain from about 1949 onward. I did not get along well with Russ during my acrobatic beginnings, but I admired him greatly for what he could do and what he taught others to do. Usually, he worked with his own semi-closed group of associates on new stunts for professional purposes. I learned much watching him. He looked down upon me during this early period as an upstart, unworthy of his help or notice. I hated his egotism and pretense of self-importance.
"Little Frankie Vincent was five feet tall and weighed one-hundred-thirty pounds. He could do a hand stand anywhere. But also, he was an amazingly strong, all-around acrobat. Once Frankie, Moe, and I performed a three-high hand-to-hand, reversing the normal order. Frankie usually was a top man, but on this occasion he decided to take the bottom position. I thought he must be joking. Surprisingly, Moe stood on Frankie's shoulders, taking the middle position. I then climbed upward to Moe's shoulders and did the high handstand in Moe's hands on top of that strange looking, top-heavy column.
"Acrobatic adagio combines male-female dance movements with lifting, balancing, tossing and catching. There were always many attractive girls at Muscle Beach on weekends. I learned a few basic adagio lifts, then began to teach any comely young lady who wanted to learn. What fun I had every Saturday, lifting attractive girls, with the ulterior motive of finding a date for that evening! I was much more successful finding partners for adagio than obtaining dates.
"We usually performed acrobatic tricks and routines on the platform mats on Saturdays from early morning until it became too dark to see in the evening. Muscle Beach was located next to the long Santa Monica Pier were the Santa Monica Ballroom perched out at pier's end over the ocean. Spade Cooley, The King of Western Swing played there with his orchestra every Saturday night for many years. I would shower and dress at the beach Saturday evenings, then go to the ballroom to dance.
"The crowd was young and enthusiastic. From eight until nine o'clock it became a lively audience for the weekly Spade Cooley Television Show. After that, I had rollicking fun until two in morning as part of a group of regulars who came every Saturday night. I looked forward most to the fast numbers, mixing acrobatic adagio movements into the swing dance framework. It was an exhibitionistic feast. I was delighted when girls sometimes asked me to dance with them. Saturday evenings became continuations of what I had been doing during the day, but now it was all set to music.
" . . .
" . . . at the Santa Monica Ballroom, I got to know an auto mechanic named Ted Bacon. We were there one Saturday when he met a tall, beautiful blond named Ramona. I watched as they got involved during the next weeks. Ramona's best friend was Beverly Frank, daughter of a Los Angeles police officer, attractive and convenient. We enjoyed each other's company. She lived thirty miles southeast of Santa Monica. Several Saturday nights, at two in the morning, Ted, Ramona and I took Beverly home after Spade Cooley's. We would stop to eat, then stop again to park on a hill top. It was usually dawn when Beverly finally arrived home. She seemed to want a long-term, closer relationship with me, but I did not have similar inclinations. Soon, I found other girls for early Sunday morning company following Spade Cooley's. Ted and Ramona were married and started a family. They continued to be my friends for many years.
"I was usually among the first to arrive at Muscle Beach Sunday mornings. Again, I helped friend Moe pull the mats out onto the acrobatic platform. Sunday was much like Saturday, only more crowded. There were more performers and larger audiences of spectators. Sometimes, there was a virtual sea of faces for thirty yards around the platform as people sat in the bleachers and on the surrounding beach, watching the acrobatic entertainment. I would enjoy a second full day of exhibitionistic exercise and fun.
"Such Sundays always passed too quickly. Soon it was four o'clock in the afternoon. I would cold-shower next to the weight lifting area on the beach, put on my Navy uniform, then begin the long hitch-hiking trip north to San Francisco. First, I rode a Santa Monica local bus several miles east to Sepulveda Boulevard, then began to hitch-hike along this main route north. . . ." pp. 247 - 252
Jeffrey Stanton Santa Monica Pier A History from 1875 to 1990, Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1990, 1949
Chapter 5: Santa Monica Pier on the Skids (1941-1974)
"Santa Monica's harbor finally received official recognition as a government approved small craft harbor on January 31, 1949. It's approval by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and 11 District Coast Guard entailed no administrative changes . . .
". . .
"Santa Monica officials went to Sacramento and appeared before the State Parks Commisssion to ask for the remaining $255,000 of the $325,000 dredging fund that was set up in 1943. They planned to move the sand southward and widen the beach by 370 feet between the Santa Monica and Ocean Park Piers. State officials finally approved the plan on April 29, 1949.
"Six months later the federal government approved the breakwater as a barrier to curb erosion of the north beaches with the understanding that the city maintain periodic harbor dredging to replenish its south beaches. . . ." p. 108
Betty Lou Young Our First Century: The Los Angeles Athletic Club 1880-1980, LAAC Press: Los Angeles, California 1979, 176pp., 1964, 1956, 1949, 1947, 1935, 1930, 1926
"In July, 1930, a block of stock was purchased in the Santa Monica Deauville Club, a romantic Norman structure built in 1926 as an adjunct to a projected city club at Sixth and Flower streets. Reputedly patterned after the famous Casino in Deauville, France, the building had a choice location between the SMAC and the Santa Monica pier, a beach frontage of 250 feet, and was valued at a million dollars. No courtesies were exchanged with the LAAC, however, until full affiliation took place in the mid-thirties.
" . . .
"Los Angeles greeted each [Tenth Olympiad] national contingent in the spirit of La Fiesta: the Czechs were entertained at the Deuville, the Germans at the Surf and Sand. . . .
" . . .
"The sixth Allied Club, the Santa Monica Deauville, was added to the chain in 1935 when the mortgage (held by the LAAC), interest, and taxes all came due simultaneously. Architecturally attractive, the new club was famous for its handsome esplanade and for its plunge, the largest fresh water indoor pool on the coast.
"The original design for the Deuville had included a tower with athletic facilities and and guest rooms. When the City of Santa Monica decided not to let any structure interfere with the view from the palisades, however, the tower had to be deleted, taking away much of the beach club's year-round appeal. Joined in management with the Santa Monica Athletic Club, the two clubs could at least cooperate. The SMAC provided a limited number of rooms and some athletic facilities, while all of the food preparation was transferred to the modern Deauville kitchens.
"In summer business was brisk. "Club hopping" was a popular pastime in the thirties when a dozen beach clubs lined the strand, and swimming pools had not yet become backyard commodities. The Deauville provided a rendezvous for college students on Friday nights with dancing to Ted Miller's orchestra, a complete dinner for $1.50, and an economy-minded supper for $1.15." p. 142
" . . ."
"The Deauville Club, meanwhile, was having more than its share of troubles. First it lost its shorefront to accretion; now it was in danger of being hemmed in by city parking lots built on the artificially created land. Conversations were held with the city attorney to stop the construction, but a change in the law opened the way for the city to proceed.
"In spite of these drawbacks, the Deauville was sold to a group of local investors in 1947 and was operated briefly as the California Cabaña Club, an ambitious venture which ended in bankruptcy. Two years later it was acquired by a wealthy Texan, Frank S. Hofues*, who owned the nearby Del Mar Club. He confided that he had sailed past the Deauville one day, saw it as a potential competitor, and decided to take it over.
"After Hofues* died in 1956, another Texas group purchased an interest in the club as a legal springboard for a land development and golf complex in Tarzana to be called the Deauville Golf and Beach Club. The exact ownership status was still subject to dispute in April, 1964 when fire broke out and gutted the structure in a spectacular blaze."