1950 (1949) (1951) (1940-1950) (1950-1960) Table of Contents
Fred E. Basten Main St. to Malibu, Yesterday & Today, Graphics Press, Santa Monica, CA, 1980, 123pp., 1950 See Text
Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp., 1950, 1935 Edgar Rice Burroughs [1875-1950]
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., 1950 See Text
Alan Hess Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture, Chronicle Books: San Francisco, CA, 1985, 1950 See Text
Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956, Barry M. Heisler Introduction Santa Barbara Museum of Art 1990, 1950 See Text
James C. Miller, Ph.D. Obituary for Cecil R. Miller*, A.B., B.D., M.A., Ph.D. (1912-2002), 2002, 1965-1957, 1952-1950 See Text
Morris U. Schappes A Documentary History of the Jews in the United States, 1654-1875, The Citadel Press: New York, 1950, 762pp., 1950, 1925, 1897, 1857, 1856, 1855, 1854, 1853, 1852, 1850s, 1850, 1850-1800 1848, 1847, 1846, 1815 See Text
Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965, Photographs by Robbert Flick. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2002, 1960, 1950, 1939, See Text
Jeffrey Stanton Santa Monica Pier A History from 1875 to 1990, Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1990, 1950 See Text
Les Storrs Santa Monica Portrait of a City Yesterday and Today, Santa Monica Bank: Santa Monica, CA, 1974, 67 pp.,, 1950, 1950s See Text
Documents
Fred E. Basten Main St. to Malibu, Yesterday & Today, Graphics Press, Santa Monica, CA, 1980, 123pp., 1950
"Construction on the original central section of Santa Monica's County Building, on the grassy slope adjacent to City Hall, began in 1950. Shortly, after, the north wing was added. In 1964, the larger south wing was dedicated." p. 96
Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp., 1950, 1935
Chapter XXVI Our Literati
"Edgar Rice Burroughs [1875-1950], the Tarzan author, owns a small valley that pours into the San Bernando and, lives the life of a country gentleman in a house built by General Harrison Gray Otis. Burroughs wrote his first Tarzan story in a cheap room in Chicago when absolutely flat broke. His royalties probably exceed those of any other writer in Hollywood . . .
" . . .
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., 1950
" . . .
A new shop wing was added at the Santa Monica High School during 1949-1950, to provide more adequate space for the auto mechanics program. The addition was designed by Marsh, Smith and Powell, Los Angeles architects, and was constructed by the firm of Roy Beck & Sons at a cost of $18,800. This was the first new construction at the high school since the completion of Barnum Hall in 1938. [18. Board Minutes, Mar. 28, 1949.]
" . . .
The results of the preliminary study were consolidated in a set of specifications called Design Standards for the New Santa Monica City College Buildings. Upon approval of the design standards by the Board of Education, the specifications were given to the architects to complete the plans as specified. Director Johnson worked in close cooperation with the firm and the plans which finally emerged were considered most satisfactory.
The plans for the first group of buildings, about one-half the total needed for the City College, were ready for Board approval in June of 1950. Subsequently, bids were advertised and a contract let in August, 1950, for the construction of the administration building, the main classroom building, library, student activities building, speech arts building, art building, and music building. The total cost of seven buildings, including site improvements, approximated $1,200,000. [82. Johnson, op. cit., p. 67.]
The City College was, at last, assured of a permanent home. Ground was broken on September 11, 1950, for the construction of the first seven buildings. These are to be of reinforced concrete construction and of contemporary modern design. Off-street parking facilities will be provided for approximately 500 automobiles.
President Sandmeyer expressed his pleasure in at last having a college that will provide adequate educational opportunities for students on the junior college level and one in which the entire community can be proud:
"There had been so many plans made involving the moving of bungalows and the construction of less permanent buildings that in 1949, when plans were finally approved for the construction of a real city college plant, I knew that Santa Monica would have a City College campus second to none in California. [83. Personal interview with Elmer C. Sandmeyer, May 22, 1951; Santa Monica, California.]
But a half-finished City College could not fulfill President Sandmeyer's expectation, and to complete the college plant required funds. Thus, the Board of Education, upon recommendation of Superintendent Briscoe, authorized a survey of the population, enrollment trends, and school building needs throughout the district, realizing that the submitting of another bond issue to the voters was inevitable. [84. Board Minutes, April 10, 1950.] From the results of the survey, the board determined the needs of the district at all levels to be nearly $5,000,000 for land acquisition, buildings, and improvements. The bond issue was submitted to the voters in November of 1950, and met with their approval. As a result, City College will receive additional facilities through the construction of a large science building, a gymnasium, a cafeteria-homemaking building, an auditorium, and further additions to the music and art buildings. [85. Ibid., Sept. 11, 1950.]
Alan Hess Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture, Chronicle Books: San Francisco, CA, 1985, 1950
"Biff's, 1950, Douglas Honnold, [Architect, Santa Monica,] (remodeled or demolished.) With exposed neon tubing, steel channel decking, and glistening metallic reflections, the Biff's seem austerely high tech today. But the horizontal and vertical slabs, pinned together with oblique steel beams, created an elegant composition."
Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956, Barry M. Heisler Introduction Santa Barbara Museum of Art 1990, 1950
Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967), 1990, 1950
" . . . The child of a merchant, Fischinger was born on 22 June 1900 in the village of Genhausen, Germany. Upon his completion of school at the age of fourteen, he apprenticed himself to an organ maker for a year and then worked as a draftsman for an architect. Relocating to Frankfurt in 1916, he supported himself as a tool designer while studying at night for an engineer's license, which he earned in 1922. Later that year he opened a film production shop in Munich in which he explored filmic techniques. . . . he experimented with different media, including paper cutouts, tinted fluids and multi-colored wax.
"By 1928 Fischinger had settled in Berlin and was devising special effects for Fritz Lang at the U.F.A. Studios. . . .
"The year was 1936. . . . Fischinger fled to Hollywood . . . abstract films condemed as depraved by the Nazis.
" . . . Fischinger traveled to New York in 1938 . . . won the support of Baroness Hilla von Rebay, curator of Solomon R. Guggenheim's collection . . .
"At the insistance of Hilla von Rebay, Fischinger briefly joined the Anthroposophic Society of Ding le Mei in the 1940s.
"Upon his return to Los Angeles in 1939, Fischinger obtained a position at the Disney Studos through Leopold Stokowski. . . .
"During the late 1940s, Fischinger turned his attention to stereoptics. While reflecting the vogue for 3-D movies, his Stereo paintings stand distinctive as early ventures in Optical art. . . .
"Typically diptychs, the Stereo paintings consisted of like but unidentical images that represented left and right visual data. When seen through a viewfinder, the two depictions would merge into a single figuration that advanced illusionistically toward the beholder. . . .
{This wasn't far in advance of Bela Juelez's work at Bell Labs.KR}
" . . . He developed his Lumigraph, with its colored beams . . . in the 1950s . . .
"Long fascinated with the abstract play of pure colored lights, Fischinger . . . had experimented in Europe with a color-projection machine, In 1950, he brought his experiments to fruition with his remarkable Lumigraph, an apparatus resembling a piano that cast colored beams of light on a large white screen. While akin to the color organ that engineer-artist Charles Dockum of Altadena had earlier invented, Fischinger's Lumigraph was simpler and more compact, free of the complicated instrumentation that Dockum's required. Although the two artists were aware of one another's work-Hilla Rebay had at one time asked Dockum to spy on Fishinger-they seemed . . . uninterested in comparing notes.
"Among his friends . . . Leopold Stokowski and Edgar Varese, photographer and film historian Lou Jacobs, Jr. , experimental filmakers James and John Whitney, film director William Dieterle . . . At Disney Studios, Ub Iwerks, Robert McIntosh and Jules Engel. . . . sculptor-designer Harry Bertoia and his wife Brigitta Valentiner (daughter of the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and with Blue Four dealer Galka Scheyer. . . . U.C.L.A. librarian Kate Steinitz . . ."
Howard Warshaw (1920-1977), 1990, 1950, 1920, Foreword,
" . . .
" . . . Born in New York on 14 August 1920, Warshaw excelled in art as a youth and served as a cartoonist for his high school newspaper. At the age of fourteen, he began to take courses at the Pratt Art Institute, which he followed with studies at the Art Students League. There he trained with Homer Boss, a former pupil of Robert Henri, and with Howard Trafton, whom he credits with awakening him to what he termed "the history of graphic ideas."
" . . . [In the early 1940s]"Moving to Los Angeles where his parents had relocated, he supported himself as an animator at the Walt Disney Studio and painted in his spare time." [Selling several of his paintings to Vincent Price] . . . he returned to New York to focus . . . on his painting. . . "Back in Los Angeles at mid-decade, Warshaw obtained a job as an animator at the Warner Brothers Studio where he drew Bugs Bunny cartoons. His tenure at Warner's, however, was brief, as he had the good forturne to win again the support of Vincent Price. Not only did he live and work for a while at Price's Benedict Canyon estate, but in 1944 he enjoyed a one-man debut at the Little Gallery in Beverly Hills which Price ran with fellow actor George Macready. Located next to Del Haven's Bar on Santa Monica Boulevard . . . actors John Decker and John Barrymore, stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, and comedienne Fanny Brice, with whose son William Brice, Warshaw established a close working relationship. Also included in this social circle were Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Igor Stravinsky, and Eugene Berman, who became Warshaw's mentor in the 1940s.
" . . .
" . . . Images of abandoned buildings, animal skulls . . . expressed the war era's despondency. . . . he received national coverage in 1950 issues of Time and Life magazines. . . .
"Helping Warshaw earn this acclaim was his prize-winnning gouache . . . Wrecked Automobiles. A seminal piece . . . [moves away from]the neo-romantic ethos of Berman toward the Cubo-Expressionistic style of Lebrun. Overlapped and fragmented shapes, a moody palette of somber hues peppered with sharp tonal contrasts, and a post-Cubist structure of shifting planes . . .Warshaw . . . replaces Lebrun's theological icons with modern-day subject matter . . . the industrial waste of twentieth-century mass production. From a tangled heap of detritus-inspired by a junk yard near Pomona-a phantom cab emerges, riding the pile of fenders and hoods like a metallic ghost. . . .
"With its focus on the automobile the painting betokens Los Angeles living, legendary then as now for its private transportation. It belongs . . . to a series in which the artist explored the parameters of the region's vehicular culture. Related depictions of traffic signals and roadway disasters, some blurred as if seen from a passing car, were meant to invoke automotive travel and the signage on which it relies. . . . [In 1950] art critic, Jules Langsner, "Strongly influenced by the semantics of Alfred Korzybski, Warshaw is interested in the visual symbols which play such an important part in our life. In this vast and sprawling city, where one lives on wheels, driving constantly during the normal day, highway markings, traffic lights, wig-wags and striped curbs are silent guardians of our survival."
"Additionally, Langsner reports, Warshaw was swayed by John Dewey, whose view of reality as an ongoing process he tried to convey in this series. While Warshaw's absorption with process seems to relate to Action Painting, it springs from different intentions. For Warshaw, process entailed a description of the external world rather than an athletic display or a cathartic release of emotion. Intellectual in his approach, he sought complete formal control and therefore rejected spontaneous handling and its courting of chance. Thus, while flux was central to his conceptions, it expressed itself not through free-wheeling gestures but by overlays and dissolves that held points in common with motion pictures. . . .
"A filmic quality come to the fore . . . overlays of substance and shadow maintain cinematic analogies, as does its sequenced imagery, or what the artist termed "transactional figuration." "If one is thinking of observing the world in time, then those intervals [of space] change; they're not consistent . . . cubism . . . says, "I'm examining this by turning it over and looking at both sides of it, and the space goes with it" . . . If the vision of the observer is shifting, then everything shifts, not just some object in an otherwise static world."
". . . Warshaw portrays on canvas the shadowed projections of his subjective truths. Moreover, by holding mutable figures in a spatial grid, he invoked at once the flux of the world and his aesthetic constraints upon it. Concerned with signification . . . "There's a relationship between the fact of the painting and the references the painting makes to the experience out of which it grew that's not unlike memory . . . The memory is an overtone, a referential something that isn't here but which one must think about. And one thinks about it relative to the present moment . . . It is the present moment of the past."
"In the tethering of the past to the present, Warshaw refused to conform to the modernist mandate of novelty. Newness, as such was less crucial to him than bonding with history: "[The history of graphic ideas] isn't chronological in the sense that one idea leads to another in the way it does in fields of technology, in which one thing makes another obsolete. You get a faster fighter plane, and you don't continue to make the old ones. But T.S. Eliot doesn't obviate John Donne because he's more modern, any more than Picasso makes El Greco obsolete. Quite the contrary; he conforms El Greco's presence by finding him germinal, alive again in his own work. so this history is, as I say, not chronological: it's a set of graphic ideas that can constantly be interchanged, moved in their relative positions. It's a lacework, a network."
"It was thus through this chain of graphic ideas, which he learned from Trafton and found confirmed in Lebrun, that Warshow avowed and updated his ties with the past. While affirming his Cubist legacy with fragmented imagery, he linked it to current issues and themes. His cinematic treatment of form, his exposition of signification, his existential incertitude, and his recognition of modern-day life, conditioned by the automobile . . .
" . . .
" . . . Warshaw accepted a teaching position at the newly-established University of California in Santa Barbara where he settled permanently in 1956.
". . . he illustrated covers for Center Magazine, a publication of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and for Psychology Today. . . .
"During the early fifties Warshaw became involved with mural painting, . . . .Wyle Laboratories in El Segundo, California, . . . University of California campuses at Santa Barbara, San Diego, Los Angeles and Riverside as well as the Santa Barbara Public Library . . .
""Faith, belief, religion . . . exist for me in the life of painting without conflicting with my sense of reason . . . life is an animating spirit requiring material substance as a vehicle of its expression. I believe this same spirit of human life can animate such inert things as colored earth ground in linseed oil. I believe further that such animation may achieve a state of grace."" p. 156
James C. Miller, Ph.D. Obituary for Cecil R. Miller*, A.B., B.D., M.A., Ph.D. (1912-2002), 2002, 1965-1957, 1952-1950
"Dr. Cecil R. Miller . . . until 1950 as a Senior Vocational Counselor and Assistant Center Director at UCLA's VA Vocational Guidance Center while he pursued graduate studies in Clinical Psychology at UCLA. He interned in 1950-52 at the Psychology Clinics at UCLA and Kabat-Kaiser, Santa Monica CA. . . .
Morris U. Schappes
A Documentary History of the Jews in the United States,
1654-1875, The Citadel Press: New York, 1950, 762pp., 1950, 1925,
1897, 1857, 1856, 1855, 1854, 1853, 1852, 1850-1800, 848, 1847, 1846,
1815
118. Exploring the West with Fremont
Introduction and notes by Schappes to
Selections from a book of travels by Solomon Nunes Carvalho,
1857
"Fascinating
is Carvalho's account of one of the great adventures of nineteenth
century far western exploration. Born in Charleston, S.C., in 1815,
Carvalho was an artist and photographer who practised in Philadelphia
and Baltimore befoe he came to New York. In 1852 he was awarded a
diploma and silver medal from the South Carolina Institute for his
painting, The Intercession of Moses for Israel. An admirer of John
Charles Fremont, a man of his own age but already famous as an
explorer, a conqueror of California, and an anti-Slavery senator from
that State, Carvalho accepted Fremont's invitation on August 22, 1853
to accompany him on his fifth expedition across the Rocky Mountains.
Secretary of War Jefferson Davis having exhibited his preference for
the southernmost route to California as the path for a projected
railway, and having sent out other expeditions to demonstrate the
practicability of his plan, Fremont, privately financed by Senator
Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and his own funds, determined to prove
that a central route was also practicable and more desirable.
Carvalho was engaged to make daguerreotype photographs, and thus
became the first official photographer ever to accompany a scientific
expedition. After a couple of months spent painting portraits in Salt
Lake City, which he reached on March 1, 1854, Carvalho started out
for California on May 6, 1854 in the wake of a group of Mormon
missionaries, arriving over the mountains at San Benardino on June 9,
1854. He was probably the second Jew to cross the Rockies into
California. His book is the chief surviving source of information
about the expedition. He speaks simply but effectively of the
hardships of twenty-two men crossing the Rockies on foot in winter
across uncharted
"1) Incidents of Travel and
Adventure in the Far West; with Col. Fremont's Last Expedition Across
the Rocky Mountains: Including Three Month's Residence in Utah, and a
Perilous Trip Across the Great American Desert, to the Pacific,
New York, 1857, pp 96-103, 128-138.
Carvelho's preface is dated Baltimore,
September 1856, and the volume may have been planned to appear in
time to influence the 1856 elections in which Fremont was a candidate
for President, but the title-page bears the date 1857. However,
excerpts from Carvalho's diaries were published in John Bigelow,
Memoir of the Life and Public Services of John Charles Fremont . .
. New York, 1856, pp. 430-442, which appeared in time for the
elections and was published by Derby & Jackson, who later issued
Carvalho's volume.
" . . .
"5) The conquest of California from Mexico was achieved by the armed forces of Fremont and others between July 5, 1846 and January 13, 1847, when the treaty of victory was signed. On September 9, 1850, when California was admitted to the Union, Fremont became one of its first United States Senators, failing of re-election, however, because of his anti-slavery views.
" . . .
"9) Carvalho married Sarah Solis of Philadelphia; his first son, David Nunes was born in 1848 (died 1925); Jacob S. Carvalho; Solomon Solis was born in 1856. Carvalho died 27 May 1897 (age 83.)
Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965. Photographs by Robbert Flick. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2002, 1960, 1950, 1939,
On p. 201, Table 5&endash;2, gives the Santa Monica Median Family Income in 1939 as $2,667, in 1950, $3677, and 1960, $6845. {I'm not sure if these are adjusted dollar amounts.}
Jeffrey Stanton Santa Monica Pier A History from 1875 to 1990, Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1990, 1950
Chapter 5: Santa Monica Pier on the Skids (1941-1974)
"The city in July 1950 began to operate Pound's Bathhouse on the beach on the south side of the Newcomb Pier. Its one-hundred changing stalls gave patrons a place to change clothes when they arrived at the beach and a place to shower at the end of the day. The state bought the land for $35,000 and the city bought the building for $15,000. . . ."
Les Storrs Santa Monica Portrait of a City Yesterday and Today, Santa Monica Bank: Santa Monica, CA, 1974, 67 pp.,, 1950, 1950s
"Not too long after the end of World War II, in 1950 to be specific, the City Council began a very tentative consideration of the possibility of redevelopment of parts of Ocean Park, a section of the city in which lots ranged from 11 to 25 feet in width, and from about 90 to 105 feet in depth, hardly adequate for substantial development without the necessity of consolidating several such properties.
"Even when that was possible, and such assembling of lots usually encounters great difficulties, street widths were inadequate indeed.
"The then City Council therefore asked for, and received a summary of the manner in which the area could be improved under the provisions of the Housing Act of 1949, but many years were to pass before anything was actually accomplished [who benefitted by the delay?]"