1956 (1955) (1957) (1950-1960) (1960-1970) Table of Contents
Ken Juran The 2001 Meguiar's Award Popular Mechanics, March 1, 2001, 1956, 1930s, 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, 1956 See Text
SM-34 Beach, Los Angeles County Playground, Santa Monica, California, 1A-H359, Western Publishing & Novelty Co., Los Angeles Calif., 1956, SLL 2005 See Image and Text
Walter Mosley White Butterfly, Pocket Books: NY, 1992, 292pp., 1956 See Text
Jeffrey Stanton Santa Monica Pier A History from 1875 to 1990, Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1990, 1956 See Text
Les Storrs Santa Monica Portrait of a City Yesterday and Today, Santa Monica Bank: Santa Monica, CA, 1974, 67 pp., 1956 See Text
Documents
12 2003 Free Venice Beachhead issue 270
Christine Fulbright
Memories of Venice, 1956
Ken Juran The 2001 Meguiar's Award Popular Mechanics, March 1, 2001, 1956, 1930s,
J.B. Nethercutt*, founder of California's The Nethercutt* Collection car museums in San Sylmar, is the Meguiar's Collector Car Hobby's Person of the Year.
"J.B. Nethercutt*, 85-year-old dean of the car-collector hobby, has been named the 2001 Meguiar's Collector Car Hobby's Person of the Year. The award was presented at a gala ceremony at the Beverly Hills Hotel on May 10, 2001. . .
""Years later when I became successful in a business I had started, and we were affluent enough to afford one of those gleaming monsters we remembered so well, we found that most of them were in dreadful condition," said Nethercutt*. That was the beginning of a lifelong passion for Nethercutt* and his wife to preserve the cars from their youth. In 1956, the Nethercutts* decided that the only way they could get one of the cars they had so admired in the 1930s was to buy the best example they could find and have it restored. Out of this ambition has grown one of the finest automotive restoration shops in the world.
" . . . "
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, 1956
Barry M. Heisler Introduction
" . . .
"Turning the Tide surveys twenty artists, who between the years of 1920 (the year that Stanton Macdonald-Wright* organized Exhibition of Paintings of American Modernists at Exposition Park in Los Angeles) and 1956 (the year preceding the opening of the Ferus Gallery, whose artists, among them Edward Kienholz, Joe Goode, Ed Rusha, and Billy Al Bengston, gained Los Angeles its first international reputation) actively created modernist art in a climate of frighteningly conservative aesthetic taste. . ."
James W. Lunsford The Ocean and the Sunset, The Hills and the Clouds: Looking at Santa Monica, illustrated by Alice N. Lunsford, 1983, 1956
"12. County Building. 1725 Main Street, 1956. Situated midway between the City Hall and the Civic Auditorium, the County Building contains courtrooms and county offices. The original 1956 building, since added to, was designed by architects Robert Kliegman and Fred Barrienbrock*.
"13. Civic Auditorium. 1855 Main Street, 1956. Designed by architect Welton Beckett*, this modern auditorium is suitable for almost any type of event and was for many years the site of the annual Academy Awards shows.
"14. Santa Monica - Malibu Unified School District Offices, 1723 Fourth Street, 1956. Located on the western edge of the Santa Monica High School campus, the administration building was dedicated on April 27, 1956.
SM-34 Beach, Los Angeles County Playground, Santa Monica, California, 1A-H359, Western Publishing & Novelty Co., Los Angeles Calif., 1956, SLL 2005
SM-34 Beach, Los Angeles County Playground, Santa Monica, California, 1A-H359
SM-34 Beach, Los Angeles County Playground, Santa Monica, California, 1A-H359, Western Publishing & Novelty Co., Los Angeles Calif., 1956, SLL 2005
Walter Mosley White Butterfly, Pocket Books: NY, 1992, 292pp., 1956
[He] had cotton candy and caramel corn. . . . We went home feeling dizzy from the red flashing lights and bells . . ." p. 263
Jeffrey Stanton Santa Monica Pier A History from 1875 to 1990, Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1990, 1956
Chapter 5: Santa Monica Pier on the Skids (1941-1974)
"Santa Monica's beach front, like many beach fronts elsewhere, attracted numerous drifers, hustlers and petty criminals. But it was the runaways and perverts that were attracted to its famed Muscle Beach that worried city officials and the police department the most. Their worst nightmare occurred on November 21, 1956 when ten year old Larry George Rice's body was found lying in a pool of blood beneath the Santa Monica Pier. He died three hours later from thirty stab wounds." p. 121
"Two teenagers identified a tall, bushy haired, toothless man with arms of a blacksmith as the man seen with the local lad shortly before the murder. When police found Stephen Nash, a thirty-three year old drifter and pervert, shortly afterwards, they discoverd the blood soaked hunting knife on the man. He confessed to the sadistic knife slaying. and ten other murders in Long Beach and Sacramento.
"When he was taken back to the scene of the crime the next day, nearly one hundred menacing people gathered and would have lynched him on the spot. Nash said that he talked to the boy for five minutes, then pulled a knife. When the boy screamed he stabbed him in the stomach, then again and again. Nash was convicted and was executed in the gas chamber in 1959. The city, in an effort to prevent similar incidents, fenced off the area under the pier."
Jeffrey Stanton* Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987, 176 pp., 1960s
Chapter 8: Pacific Ocean Park (1958-1967)
[page 147 photo Neptune's Courtyard entrance to POP]
"In 1956 CBS and the Los Angeles Turf Club [who also developed Lake Arrowhead] were granted the lease on the Ocean Park Pier and they proposed to build a $10,000,000 nautical theme park to compete with Disneyland. They closed the [Ocean Park] pier after Labor Day, hired the best amusement park designers and Hollywood special effects experts they could find and began to design innovative new attractions for the theme park. In all 80 special effects men, scenic designers and artists worked for more than a year on the project. They like Disney, found corporate sponsors to share the expenses of some of the exhibitions. To save money they renovated existing buildings and incorporated six of the old attractions into the layout; the merry-go-round, roller coaster, Toonerville Fun House, Glass House, twin diving bells and Strat-O-Liner ride. They called the new park Pacific Ocean Park.
"The 28 acre park was decorated throughout in a sea-green and white moderne look, an evocation of the ocean itself. Its entrance set amidst fountains, sculptures and large sea horse and clam shell decorated frieze, set the mood of the wonders within. The ticket booth in Neptune's Courtyard was set under a six-legged concrete starfish canopy; plastic bubbles and sea horses adorned its top. All day admission was ninety cents for adults, less for children. This included access to the park, Neptune's Kingdom, the Sea Circus and the Westinghouse Enchanted Forest exhibit. Other rides and attractions were at additional costs."
Les Storrs Santa Monica Portrait of a City Yesterday and Today, Santa Monica Bank: Santa Monica, CA, 1974, 67 pp., 1956
"It is true that the Santa Monica Mall project was under way when he [Perry Scott] came to Santa Monica [1965], it having been suggested in the general plan which the city adopted in 1956 . . . a concept which was picked up enthusiastically by the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce, and especially by Paul Priolo, later an Assemblyman and then leader in the mercantile community.
" . . ."