(1940-1950) (1940sa)(1930-1940)(1950-1960)(1940)(1950) Table of Contents
Julian Aberbach, 95; Co-Founded Firm That Published Elvis Hits, Los Angeles Times, 25 May 2004, B11, 1940s See Text
Fred E. Basten Santa Monica Bay: The First 100 Years, A pictorial history of Santa Monica, Venice, Ocean Park, Pacific Palisades, Topanga and Malibu, Douglas-West Publishers: Los Angeles, CA, 1974, 227 pp., 1950s, 1941, See Text
John Cage An Autobiographical Statement, Southwest Review, 1991, 1940s, 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., 1952, 1950s, 1940s See Text
J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson George Dantzig* Biographies of Mathematicians http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Mathematicians/Dantzig_George.html 2005, 1952, 1940s See Text
Pat Hartman Spade Cooley Virtual Venice http://www.virtualvenice.info 2/5/2005b, 1940s See Text
Jim Heimann Sins of the City: The Real Los Angeles Noir, Chronicle Books: San Francisco, CA, 1999, 159pp., 1940s See Text
Mark E. Kann Middle Class Radicalism in Santa Monica, Temple University Press: Philadelphia, 1986. 322pp., 1940s. 1930s 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, 1940s See Text
Roger W. Lotchin The Bad City in the Good War, Indiana U. Press: 304 pages. Reviewed in the 17 August 2003 Sunday LA Times Book Review by Jonathan Kirsch, R2, 2003, 1960s 1943, 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, 1940s, 1930s See Text
Eric Mankin Strategies: You Can Win City Hall, Mother Jones, VI, no. X, December, 1981. p. 66. 1981, 1970s, 1950s, 1940s 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), 1940s See Text
Jenny Pirie,* Peter Kastner* and Jeff Mudrick* A Short History of Ocean Park, Ocean Park Community Organization, 1982, (With a 1983 update.) 15pp. 1983, 1982, 1940s, 1926, See Text
Cecilia Rasmussen, L..A. Then and Now : A 'Carny Kid' Tells Students How He Beat the Odds, Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2005, B2. 1940s See Text
Lionel Rolfe Literary L.A., Chronicle Books: San Francisco, 1981, 102pp., 1950s, 1941, 1940s, 1908 See Text
Andrea Schulte-Peevers and David Peevers Los Angeles, Lonely Planet: Oakland, 2nd ed., 1996(1999), 351pp., 1999, 1996, 1950s. 1940s. 1920s, See Text
Jeffrey Stanton Santa Monica Pier A History from 1875 to 1990, Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1990, 1940s See Text
Jeffrey Stanton Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987. 176 pp., 1950, 1948, 1947, 1946, 1945, 1943, 1941 See Text
Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1940, 1912, See Text
Les Storrs Santa Monica Portrait of a City Yesterday and Today, Santa Monica Bank: Santa Monica, CA, 1974, 67 pp., 1940s See Text
Betty Lou Young Our First Century: The Los Angeles Athletic Club 1880-1980, LAAC Press: Los Angeles, California 1979, 176pp., 1940s See Text
Betty Lou Young and Randy Young Santa Monica Canyon: A Walk Through History Casa Vieja Press: Pacific Palisades, CA, 1997, 182pp., 1940s See Text
Notes:
"Everything seems to depend on the whim or law of chance, accidental judgement by accidental authority and forced cause. And by chance and accident we live or die. To reflect this I attempt a personal intuitive expression." [early 1940s]
[In the early 1950s] "I am seeking art, perhaps, only to realize that it does not exist in itself. It exists only in the abstract, in different individuals' perceptions. Such perceptions must be deeply experienced and lived by, to keep it alive in its ever-changing flux, idea, belief, perception-all is flux . . ." -Knud Merrild, quoted in Karlstrom and Ehrlich, 1990 See Text
Documents
Julian Aberbach, 95; Co-Founded Firm That Published Elvis Hits, Los Angeles Times, 25 May 2004, B11, 1940s
"Julian J. Aberbach, 95, who with his brother, Joachim, founded Hill and Range, a music publishing company that published such familiar tunes as Frosty the Snowman, Save the Last Dance for Me, I Walk the Line, and many of Elvis Presley's hits, died May 17 of heart failure at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.
"Born in Vienna, Aberbach was living in Paris and trying to start a music publishing company but fled to the United States as World War II approached in Europe.
"He served in the U.S. Army and developed a love of country music during basic training in the South. After the war, he moved to Los Angeles and went into business.
"He signed a deal with fiddle player Spade Cooley* to represent Cooley's song Shame on You. The song was issued as a single by Columbia Records and hit No. 1 on the country charts. Aberbach's music business was on its way."
Fred E. Basten Santa Monica Bay: The First 100 Years, A pictorial history of Santa Monica, Venice, Ocean Park, Pacific Palisades, Topanga and Malibu, Douglas-West Publishers: Los Angeles, CA, 1974, 227 pp., 1950s, 1941,
On page 178 a photo shot from off the end of the Santa Monica Pier showing surfers, dated 1941, and showing the Monica Hotel (formerly the Breakers Club), the Kabat-Kaiser Institute (formerly the Edgewater Club-demolished in the '50s), and the then Del Mar Club (now Synanon).
John Cage An Autobiographical Statement, Southwest Review, 1991, 1940s
"I joined the faculty of Moholy Nagy's School of Design in Chicago. While there I was commissioned to write a sound effects music for a CBS Columbia Workshop Play. I was told by the sound effects engineer that anything I could imagine was possible. What I wrote, however, was impractical and too expensive; the work had to be rewritten for percussion orchestra, copied, and rehearsed in the few remaining days and nights before its broadcast. That was The City Wears a Slouch Hat by Kenneth Patchen. The response was enthusiastic in the West and Middle West. Xenia and I came to New York, but the response in the East had been less than enthusiastic. We had met Max Ernst in Chicago. We were staying with him and Peggy Guggenheim. We were penniless. No job was given to me for my composing of radio sound effects, which I had proposed. I began writing again for modern dancers and doing library research work for my father who was then with Mother in New Jersey. About this time I met my first virtuosi: Robert Fizdale and Arthur Gold. I wrote two large works for two prepared pianos. The criticism by Virgil Thomson was very favorable, both for their performance and for my composition. But there were only fifty people in the audience. I lost a great deal of money that I didn't have. I was obliged to beg for it, by letter and personally. I continued each year, however, to organize and present one or two programs of chamber music and one or two programs of Merce Cunningham's choreography and dancing. And to make tours with him throughout the United States.
". . . Whatever it is it gives me delight and most recently by means of Stephen Addiss' book The Art of Zen. I had the good fortune to attend Daisetz Suzuki's classes in the philosophy of Zen Buddhism at Columbia University in the late forties. And I visited him twice in Japan. I have never practiced sitting cross-legged nor do I meditate. My work is what I do and always involves writing materials, chairs, and tables. Before I get to it, I do some exercises for my back and I water the plants, of which I have around two hundred."
John Cage An Autobiographical Statement, Southwest Review, 1991, 1940s
"In the late forties I found out by experiment (I went into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University) that silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around. I devoted my music to it. My work became an exploration of non-intention. To carry it out faithfully I have developed a complicated composing means using I Ching chance operations, making my responsibility that of asking questions instead of making choices.
"The Buddhist texts to which I often return are the Huang-Po Doctrine of Universal Mind (in Chu Ch'an's first translation, published by the London Buddhist Society in 1947), Neti Neti by L. C. Beckett of which (as I say in the introduction to my Norton Lectures at Harvard) my life could be described as an illustration, and the Ten Oxherding Pictures (in the version that ends with the return to the village bearing gifts of a smiling and somewhat heavy monk, one who had experienced Nothingness). Apart from Buddhism and earlier I had read the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna it was who said all religions are the same, like a lake to which people who are thirsty come from different directions, calling its water by different names. Furthermore this water has many different tastes. The taste of Zen for me comes from the admixture of humor, intransigence, and detachment. It makes me think of Marcel Duchamp, though for him we would have to add the erotic.
"As part of the source material for my Norton lectures at Harvard I thought of Buddhist texts. I remembered hearing of an Indian philosopher who was very uncompromising. I asked Dick Higgins, "Who is the Malevich of Buddhist philosophy?" He laughed. Reading Emptiness-a Study in Religious Meaning by Frederick J. Streng, I found out. He is Nagarjuna.
"But since I finished writing the lectures before I found out, I included, instead of Nagarjuna, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the corpus, subjected to chance operations. And there is another good book, Wittgenstein and Buddhism, by Chris Gudmunsen, which I shall be reading off and on into the future.
"My music now makes use of time-brackets, sometimes flexible, sometimes not. There are no scores, no fixed relation of parts. Sometimes the parts are fully written out, sometimes not. The title of my Norton lectures is a reference to a brought-up-to-date version of Compositions in Retrospect:
MethodStructureIntentionDisciplineNotationIndeterminacy InterpenetrationImitationDevotionCircumstancesVariableStructure NonunderstandingContingencyInconsistencyPerformance(I-VI).When it is published, for commercial convenience, it will just be called IVI ."
" . . ."
"I found in the largely German community at Black Mountain College a lack of experience of the music of Erik Satie. Therefore, teaching there one summer and having no pupils, I arranged a festival of Satie's music, half-hour after-dinner concerts with introductory remarks. And in the center of the festival I placed a lecture that opposed Satie and Beethoven and found that Satie, not Beethoven, was right. Buckminster Fuller was the Baron Méduse in a performance of Satie's Le Piège de Méduse. That summer Fuller put up his first dome, which immediately collapsed. He was delighted. "I only learn what to do when I have failures." His remark made me think of Dad. That is what Dad would have said.
"It was at Black Mountain College that I made what is sometimes said to be the first happening. The audience was seated in four isometric triangular sections, the apexes of which touched a small square performance area that they faced and that led through the aisles between them to the large performance area that surrounded them. Disparate activities, dancing by Merce Cunningham, the exhibition of paintings and the playing of a Victrola by Robert Rauschenberg, the reading of his poetry by Charles Olsen or hers by M. C. Richards from the top of a ladder outside the audience, the piano playing of David Tudor, my own reading of a lecture that included silences from the top of another ladder outside the audience, all took place within chance-determined periods of time within the over-all time of my lecture. It was later that summer that I was delighted to find in America's first synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, that the congregation was seated in the same way, facing itself.
"From Rhode Island I went on to Cambridge and in the anechoic chamber at Harvard University heard that silence was not the absence of sound but was the unintended operation of my nervous system and the circulation of my blood. It was this experience and the white paintings of Rauschenberg that led me to compose 4'33", which I had described in a lecture at Vassar College some years before when I was in the flush of my studies with Suzuki ( A Composer's Confessions, 1948), my silent piece."
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., 1952, 1950s, 1940s
Currently, the subjects of the high school are divided into eleven departments: art, business, English, foreign languages, homemaking, mathematics, mechanical arts, music, physical education, science, and the social studies. The high school program prepares the student for entrance into college or university, specific courses being offered as preparatory to advanced study in such fields as architecture, agriculture, art, business administration, dentistry, home economics, law, librarianship, medicine, nursing, optometry, pharmacy, physical education, science and mathematics, and teaching. [70. Ibid., pp. 13-14.]
The Counseling Program
The high school counseling program has developed rapidly in the last ten years. With a competent staff and the time provided to insure the best results, the program has greatly helped students to plan future educational pursuits or to choose areas of vocational interest. Through the counseling program, the teachers and administrators have been able to provide classes that would meet the needs and interests of the present-day high school student in helping him to achieve his vocational goal. [71. Student Manual, p. 7.]
Students are given individual counseling by the same counselors throughout their high school careers. This guidance program begins in the 9A grade when the students make their plans for the senior high school, and is followed by one or more individual conferences each succeeding semester until graduation. In the counseling offices are files which contain information concerning grades, activities, standardized test results, interest inventories, and special interview records beginning with the seventh grade. With this information at hand, the counselors strive to assist the students in understanding their own abilities, aptitudes, and personality traits, and then to make choices of the school opportunities that will most likely lead to their best development.
Students are also given information concerning vocational opportunities and are assisted in the evaluation of their own interests and aptitudes for various occupations. In the 10A English classes and senior psychology classes, units of vocational study are presented. In addition, the counselors give further assistance in vocational guidance since the choice of courses, particularly in the major field, is closely related to the the student's vocational goals. Vocational materials are available in the library and in the counselor's offices. Special arrangements are made for students who wish to enter the special trades to take a portion of their work at the Santa Monica Technical School.
In the spring semester each year, vocational conference is held for all students. Over forty meetings are planned in response to students' interests and each student attends meetings of his choice. A business or professional man or woman who is experienced in each field describes the vocation and answers the students' questions. Following the conference, the senior boys and girls have an opportunity to get further firsthand information about the world of work by going out into the community on Boys' and Girls' Career Days.
" . . . A. Ewing Konold, principal since 1945, has been particularly successful in making the community aware of the excellent program that is carried on at Santa Monica High School. Many recent graduates have brought additional honor to the school by winning scholarships to colleges and universities with the state and throughout the the United States. [72. Personal interview with A. Ewing Konold, May 25, 1951; Santa Monica, California.]
The community has actively endorsed and supported a program of athletics in the high school. The physical education department has produced teams that have won many conference and statewide championships. The trophy case in the foyer of the administration building is evidence of the success and interest shown by the students in the accomplishments of the school.
An active student body program is governed by the Associated Student Body Officers and Cabinet. The elected representatives of the classes and other student organizations carry on a program of extracurricular activities including assemblies, rallies, boys' and girls' leagues and the like. The student cabinet sponsors and controls an active club program which is academic, hobby, honor, service, social, or vocational in character.
In a period of sixty years, the Santa Monica High School has become an established part of the community. By having only one high school, the support and pride of the community is vested in the one institution. The years have brought many changes in subject and personnel to the high school, but for the most part the community, the Board of Education, and the administrators of the schools have looked favorably upon the overall educational program and the results that have been achieved.
" . . .
A summary of the period of rapid expansion in the schools would be incomplete without again giving credit to the electors of the Santa Monica City School District who, insistently spurred on by the women of the community, gave their support to providing adequately for the large increase in school enrollment and the constant betterment of the educational program.
The present chapter begins with a description of a campaign waged by the Board of Education to establish a separate high school and remove the higher grades from their cramped quarters in the original Sixth Street school. Undaunted by the defeat of a bond issue to erect a high school, the Board submitted another proposition to the vote of the electors to build an additional grammar school. Upon the approval of the bonds and the construction of the Lincoln School , the Board proceeded to rent the new building to the high school. Thus was their original purpose achieved.
As the city developed, the board helped to solve the problem of increased enrollment in the elementary schools by securing the passage, in less than one year's time, of three bond issues totaling $135,000 and used the money for the construction of six new buildings in various parts of the district. Five of the new buildings were of brick construction, which not only made them considerably safer from fire but created jobs for local labor and industry.
" . . . Today, with community interest vested in one high school, the educational program at the secondary level is more nearly meeting the needs of all students. Not only does it prepare them for work in colleges and universities, but it provides also terminal courses in business, homemaking, and mechanical arts, as well as scholastic and cultural experiences that better equip the high school graduate for his role as an adult member of the community.
In Chapter IV, analysis will be made of the further refinement and expansion of the organization of the schools, starting with the establishment of two junior high schools in 1912 and 1914, respectively.
J. J. O'Connor and E. F. Robertson George Dantzig* Biographies of Mathematicians http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Mathematicians/Dantzig_George.html 2005, 1952, 1940s
"During my first year at Berkeley I arrived late one day to one of Neyman's classes. On the blackboard were two problems which I assumed had been assigned for homework. I copied them down. A few days later I apologized to Neyman for taking so long to do the homework-the problems seemed to be a little harder to do than usual. I asked him if he still wanted the work. He told me to throw it on his desk. I did so reluctantly because his desk was covered with such a heap of papers that I feared my homework would be lost there forever."About six weeks later, one Sunday morning about eight o'clock, Anne and I were awakened by someone banging on our front door. It was Neyman. He rushed in with papers in hand, all excited: "I've just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it out right away for publication." For a minute I had no idea what he was talking about. To make a long story short, the problems on the blackboard which I had solved thinking they were homework were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics. That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them. "
"When the United States entered World War II in 1941 Dantzig put his graduate studies on hold for a second time, although by this time he had already completed the coursework and written his Ph.D. thesis. He went to Washington and joined the Air Force as a civilian. From 1941 to 1946 he was Head of the Combat Analysis Branch, U.S.A.F. Headquarters Statistical Control. In 1944 he was awarded the War Department Exceptional Civilian Service Medal. He wrote of his time there:-
"My office collected data about sorties flown, bombs dropped, aircraft lost... I also helped other divisions of the Air Staff prepare plans called "programs". ... everything was planned in greatest detail: all the nuts and bolts, the procurement of airplanes, the detailed manufacture of everything. There were hundreds of thousands of different kinds of material goods and perhaps fifty thousand specialties of people. My office collected data about the air combat such as the number of sorties flown, the tons of bombs dropped, attrition rates. I also became a skilled expert on doing planning by hand techniques. "
"In 1946, after a break of five years, Dantzig returned to Berkeley for one semester, receiving his doctorate in mathematics from the University of California. He was offered an academic post by Berkeley but turned down the offer:-
"Berkeley made me an offer, but I didn't like it because it was too small. Or, to be more exact, my wife did not like it. It was a grand salary of fourteen hundred dollars a year. She did not see how we could live on that with our child David."
"By June 1946 he was in Washington considering a number of different possible jobs. His colleagues at the Pentagon asked him to take on the job of mechanizing the planning process. This appeared to fit in exactly with his interests so that year he was appointed Mathematical Advisor at the Defense Department to undertake the task.
"In 1947 Dantzig made the contribution to mathematics for which he is most famous, the simplex method of optimisation. It grew out of his work with the U.S. Air Force where he become an expert on planning methods solved with desk calculators. In fact this was known as "programming", a military term that, at that time, referred to plans or schedules for training, logistical supply or deployment of men. Dantzig mechanised the planning process by introducing "programming in a linear structure", where "programming" has the military meaning explained above. The term "linear programming" was proposed by T. J. Koopmans during a visit Dantzig made to the RAND corporation in 1948 to discuss his ideas. Having discovered his algorithm, Dantzig made an early application to the problem of eating adequately at minimum cost. He describes this in his book Linear programming and extensions (1963):-
"One of the first applications of the simplex algorithm was to the determination of an adequate diet that was of least cost. In the fall of 1947, Jack Laderman of the Mathematical Tables Project of the National Bureau of Standards undertook, as a test of the newly proposed simplex method, the first large-scale computation in this field. It was a system with nine equations in seventy-seven unknowns. Using hand-operated desk calculators, approximately 120 man-days were required to obtain a solution ... The particular problem solved was one which had been studied earlier by George Stigler (who later became a Nobel Laureate) who proposed a solution based on the substitution of certain foods by others which gave more nutrition per dollar. He then examined a "handful" of the possible 510 ways to combine the selected foods. He did not claim the solution to be the cheapest but gave his reasons for believing that the cost per annum could not be reduced by more than a few dollars. Indeed, it turned out that Stigler's solution (expressed in 1945 dollars) was only 24 cents higher than the true minimum per year $39.69."
"In [11] Dantzig wrote . . .:-
"Linear programming is viewed as a revolutionary development giving man the ability to state general objectives and to find, by means of the simplex method, optimal policy decisions for a broad class of practical decision problems of great complexity. In the real world, planning tends to be ad hoc because of the many special-interest groups with their multiple objectives."
"But he also modestly wrote:-
"The tremendous power of the simplex method is a constant surprise to me."
"The importance of linear programming methods was described, in 1980, by Laszlo Lovasz who wrote:-
"If one would take statistics about which mathematical problem is using up most of the computer time in the world, then ... the answer would probably be linear programming."
"Also in 1980 Eugene Lawler wrote:-
"[Linear programming] is used to allocate resources, plan production, schedule workers, plan investment portfolios and formulate marketing (and military) strategies. The versatility and economic impact of linear programming in today's industrial world is truly awesome."
"Balinski [4] writes:-
"Mathematical programming has been blessed by the involvement of at least two exceptionally creative geniuses: George Dantzig and Leonid Kantorovich."
"He then goes on to say that Kantorovich received the Nobel Prize for his contribution and expresses "outrage" that Dantzig did not."
"Spade Cooley-In the early 1940s, the Venice Ballroom was turned into a country-western joint called the Foreman Phillips County Barn Dance. The new hybrid sound, combining traditional and city slicker music. would entertain as many as 4,000 munitions workers and other displaced rural folks until dawn. It was the site of a monumental Battle of the Bands between Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, and Spade Cooley's outfit, which left Cooley holding the title "King of Western Swing." Cooley's story, like those of so many musicians associated with Venice, had a sad end. Suspecting his second wife of having an affair with Roy Rogers, he beat her to death (with their 14 year old daughter as unwilling witness) and died in prison less than a decade later."
Jim Heimann Sins of the City: The Real Los Angeles Noir, Chronicle Books: San Francisco, CA, 1999, 159pp., 1940s
" . . . After the war, . . .
" . . . beach front communities including Long Beach, Venice, and Santa Monica hosted "games of chance" that were just another form of illegal lottery. Bridge, keno, tango, and bingo parlors were everywhere. The thinly veiled gambling dens fed small-time bunco artists for a short period after the war but were slowly eliminated by the mid-fifties." p. 10
" . . .
p. 32 [Caption: "Exhibitionism and body worship. Hedonist pursuits practiced in earnest at Muscle Beach in neaby Santa Monica, a suburb favored as a location by fiction writers." Jim Heinmann Collection photograph of a bodybuilder, flexing in front of the platform's equipment locker which has been inscribed Phil B. and Bill R., with Frosty Cup, Leo's Place, Burgers behind the platform.]"
pp. 146, 147 ["The Venice Pier pulled in crowds of revelers looking for inexpensive excitement. Writers of the noir found it the perfect locale for fog-shrouded intrigue, ca. 1940. Top another front for penny-ante crime, mechanical horse races were shut down when investigators exposed their fixed wirings. Bottom."Bridgo parlors with exotic names such as Carneo, Vogue, Shamrock, and Canasto were a variation of the same old con game that kept popping up in beachfront amusement zones. The "sucker games" were wiped out in Venice in a clampdown of the racket in 1949."]
Mark E. Kann Middle Class Radicalism in Santa Monica, Temple University Press: Philadelphia, 1986. 322pp., 1940s. 1930s
" . . . As World War II approached, the relatively small Douglas Aircraft plant on the city's eastern extremity expanded to meet wartime demand, employing nearly 40,000 workers at the height of production. . . . " p. 38
" . . . Between 1940 and 1944 . . . Santa Monica . . . experienced a 40 percent population growth during the decade."
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, 1940s
Paul J. Karlstrom Modernism in Southern California, 1920-1956, Reflections on the Art and the Times
"The 1940s were, of course, dominated by the war; and for the duration art activity in Southern California, as was the case elsewhere decreased or was redirected. Most of the area's artists served in the armed services or some related activity. Temporarily, issues of conservation versus modernism were set aside as the arrts were enlisted in a common cause. Unable to participate directly, modernists such as Peter Krasnow, Knud Merrild, and Hans Burkhardt recorded the great conflict through changes of content and style in their work. The war affected the development of the fine arts as surely as it determined the content and mood of Hollywood movies. The painters responded to global upheaval through highly personal expression. In contrast, the filmmakers reflected direct and indirect pressure to serve national ends by forming public opinion. . . .
"Still, neither was exempt from the political forces that so dramatically shaped the creative climate of the period and infused American society with a regrettable degree of insularity, intolerance, and paranoia. . . . Hollywood was singled out as a particularly fertile area for "red-baiting." . . . postwar Southern California became a fairly heated battleground for the war on Communist-inspired art and "subversive" abstraction. The art world of Los Angeles in the 1940s and early 1950s was basically conservative, and, in alliance with anti-Communist crusaders, the dominant landscape school and academicians mounted an attack on the outnumbered and struggling modernists. . . ." pp. 26, 27
" . . . Novelist Leon Feuchtwanger's advice to Brecht that Hollywood was cheaper than New York and one could make more money there, did not apply to the likes of Mondrian, Ernst, and other artists who gravitated to New York at the same time. . . ."
Peter Krasnow (1887-1979), 1990, 1940s
". . .
"Born in 1887 in Zawill, a small Ukrainian village, Krasnow formed an attachment to craft early in life. As a child of six, he learned to grind and mix paint from his housepainter father, to whom he was apprenticed in his teens. In the wake of the Russian pogroms Krasnow fled to the United States, settling in Chicago in 1908 to study at the Art Institute. After earning his diploma in 1915 and working briefly as a children's art instructor at the Hebrew Institute of Chicago, Krasnow married social worker Rose Bloom and moved with her to New York in 1919. While his wife taught Hebrew classes, Krasnow labored at manual jobs and tried to establish himself in his profession. His efforts were rewarded in 1922 when the prestigious Whitney Studio Club mounted an exhibition in his honor. Yet despite the success of this debut, Krasnow felt dissatisfied with his work and with congested tenement life in Manhattan. Lured by gentle weather and open space, he ventured with his wife to Southern California.
"After six months of travel, the couple reached Glendale in the fall of 1922. In December of that year Krasnow participated in a four-person exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art. Two months later, in February 1923, he was invited by Stanton Macdonald Wright* to join the seminal Group of Independent Artists of Los Angeles Exhibition. This, together with his appearance in Whitney Studio Club Annuals of 1925 and 1926 and in one-man shows at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1927 . . . stamped Krasnow as a leading California modernist.
"During these years, Krasnow enjoyed an active social life, carousing with a small but energetic avant-garde. Included within his social orbit were photography critic Sadikichi Hartmann, architects Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, Kem Weber, and Gregory Ain, bookseller Jake Zeitlin, Blue Four agent and art educator Galka Scheyer, pioneer Synchromist Stanton Macdonald-Wright*, painters Lorser Feitelson, Knud Merrild, Boris Deutsh, and Henrietta Shore, film directors Lewis Milestone and Josef von Sternberg, art critics Anthony Anderson and Arthur Miller and photographer Edward Weston. From the Westons the Krasnows purchased a parcel of land on which Peter constructed a studio cottage in 1924. Headquartered in this simple shelter, he painted, sculpted, and dwelled for the next fifty-five years, intermingling his life and his art in a grand but spartan way.
" . . . in the late forties . . .
"Krasnow, however, veers from these painters[Gottlieb and Torres-Garcia] in his decorative élan and his more inventive palette, a quintessential product of Los Angeles. His juxtaposition of candied pinks and acquatic blues, henna mauves and grassy greens recalls the region's peculiar amalgam of the rustic with the plastic, the organic with the contrived. In his adroit handling of color, Krasnow rivaled Stanton Macdonald-Wright* who also devised daringly luminous spectral hues around which he built his compositions. Importantly, though, he avoided the hazy, transparent effects which characterized Macdonald-Wright*'s Synchromist work.
"If his radiant coloration approached that of Macdonald-Wright*, Krasnow's biomorphic forms real an interest in primal sources which the Synchromist shunned. . . .
"Krasnow's belief in archetypes was not exclusive to him but was shared by many artists of the 1940s, including Jackson Pollack . . .
"As for Krasnow, those strains included the special feel of Southern California, which he expressed through glowing coloration. It is here in hs unusual palette that Krasnow's achievement resides, for his hues are at once sui generis and indicative of the stunning chromatics for which the region is known. Not only are his pigments distinctive, but they seem to emanate phosphorescent light. "Californa for color, American earth for form," exulted Kransow as he explained his intent to reify the brilliant light and sturdy foundation of Los Angeles.
"At the same time that he praised his adopted city, Krasnow interacted guardedly with its art community. On the one hand he enjoyed social intercourse, and on the other he cherished his solitude, deeming privacy essential to his creative growth. Thus, during the 1940s and 1950s he limited personal ties to a small coterie that included art critics Jules Langsner and Frode Dann, novelist Irving Stone, artists June Wayne, Grace Clements, and Hilaire Hiler, sculptor Harold Gebhardt, musicians Fred and Frieda Fox and engineer-light artist Charles Dockum. Sequestering himself in his studio, he resisted subscriptions to magazines, rarely attended openings, and refused to join a gallery, believing that art was too sacrosanct to be subjected to the whims of the marketplace. Like Mark Rothko, he felt that art possessed a sanctity that demanded reverent care. Rather than compormise his values, he withdrew from commercial arena, showing his work in his studio and placing them with collectors who had earned his trust.
"With his anti-materialistic bias Krasnow would appear to have been a prescient neo-Marxist. Certainly, his assumption of control over the exhibition and distribution of his works foreshadowed the alternative space impulse of the present day. Notwithstanding his refusal to be co-opted by the system, Krasnow was too much the idealist, too little the collectivist to enlist in any creed's camp. His visionary faith in art and his dogged independence precluded his involvement with communal enterprise.
" . . .
"Krasnow's early celebration of the region's plastic glitz foreshadowed the "Finish Fetish" of the 1960s, also known as the "L.A. Look." By joining high-keyed chromas to quirky figuration, Krasnow also prophesied the spunky subjectivity of the 1980s. Moreover, his focus on ethnic content at a time when it was viewed as retrograde paved the way for artists such as Ruth Weisberg*, Carlos Almarez and Frank Romero. In a similar way, his embrace of Hollywood's tinseled charm, which most artists chose to ignore cleared a path that Billy Al Bengston, Ed Ruscha, Joe Fay, Peter Alexander, and David Hockney would later pursue."
{Note the relationship to Tom Jenkin's* work.}
Knud Merrild (1894-1954), 1990, 1940s
". . . Born on the island of Jutland off the north shore of Denmark in 1894, Merrild decided in his youth to become an artist. At the age of fourteen he apprenticed himself to a housepainter, learning the skills of his trade while he studied art on his own. In 1913 after seeing a Cubist exhibit in Copenhagen, he converted to modernism and became its proselytizer. When he found his views unwelcome at the art schools where he was studying, he formed the Anvendt Kunst society in 1917, a group dedicated to the merger of fine arts and crafts.
"In 1922 Merrild immigrated to America, believing that in this young industrious nation, modernism would take root. While in New York he established a friendship with Peter and Rose Krasnow and when they left for California later that year he followed suit. En route to the Pacific, he spent time as the guest of D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frida at their Taos, New Mexico ranch.
"Merrild arrived in Los Angeles on 11 May 1923. . . . he worked as a housepainter . . .
" . . . Between the 1920s and the 1950s his social orbit included artists Ejnar Hansen (a fellow Dane and partner in Merrild's painting business. Peter Krasnow, Lorser Feitelson, Grace Clements, and Man Ray, art critics Jules Langsner and Kenneth Ross, and collectors Ruth Maitland, Louis and Annette Kaufman, and Walter and Louise Arensberg who acquired several works by Merrild and hired him to paint their house. Merrild's fondness for literature, reinforced by his correspondence with Lawrence, led him to bookish coteries where he established ties with rare book dealer Jake Zeitlin and writers Dudley Nichols, Clifford Odets, Irving Stone, Henry Miller, and Aldous Huxley (who authored the preface in Merrild's memoirs of D. H. Lawrence.) Progressive in politics as well as in art, Merrild co-founded the Los Angeles branch of the American Artists Congress in 1936. . . . .
" . . .
"Merrild's involvement with Post-Surrealism led in the early 1940s into the realm of automatism. While exploring the subconscious, Merrild arrived at a novel, free-form technique which he termed "flux." As he described it, his flux technique consisted of pooling and dripping paint onto a wet surface and then angling the base board until the desired effects were achieved. Rejecting traditional palette knives and brushes, Merrild relied on the lesss conventional means of thrust and gravitational flow. With these tactics he brought into being what he poetically called his "automatic creation by natural law, a kinetic painting of the abstract.
"Merrild valued his method of painting by "remote control" because it signified untrammeled existence and enabled him to capitalize on intuition. In its responsiveness to chance, Merrild felt that his technique was paradigmatic of life. His courting of chance allies him with Dada as does his oath of alligiance to Nature's fortuitous ways: "Everything seems to depend on the whim or law of chance, accidental judgement by accidental authority and forced cause. And by chance and accident we live or die. To reflect this I attempt a personal intuitive expression."{early 1940s}
" . . .
" . . . Merrild foreshadowed Pollock's progression from archetypal imagery to free-form abstraction, . . . and also predicted his use of housepainter's tools and enamels.
[In the early 1950s, Merrild writes] "I am seeking art, perhaps, only to realize that it does not exist in itself. It exists only in the abstract, in different individuals' perceptions. Such perceptions must be deeply experienced and lived by, to keep it alive in its ever-changing flux, idea, belief, perception - all is flux . . ."
[And again] "We can then start afresh to be transformed in the "flux' . . . To place oneself in the realm of flux affords joy and liberation . . . In the abstract we are of all things and of all mankind."
" . . . Merrild . . . approached the unknown with enthusiasm and not . . . with existential angst.
" . . ." p. 142
Kay Kyser and his Orchestra Fun with the Ol' Professor '44-'47, Sony (A-70229), Col-cd-7575 2003, 1947, 1940s
Roger W. Lotchin The Bad City in the Good War, Indiana U. Press: 304 pages. Reviewed in the 17 August 2003 Sunday LA Times Book Review by Jonathan Kirsch, R2, 2003, 1960s 1943, 1940s
" . . . allows us to see how the war effort shattered the status quo and revolutionized the sleepy world of prewar California.
"'Separated by space, race, class, and occupational barriers, normally the aristocratic polo men, cowboys, and black soldiers had very little in common' . . . (But World War II was a) 'participatory conflict (and) 'their fear of totalitarianism united them in a greater effort.'
"The melting pot . . . was specifically urban. 'Americans have traditionally been very skeptical of their cities and often downright hostile to them, but cities and city people would contribute markedly to the overthrow and containment of totalitarianism. The 'bad city' came in very handy in the 'Good War.'""
". . . California was quickly turned into a vast arms factory and a staging area for the war effort . . . a map . . . showing a dot for every aircraft plant in Los Angeles County is solid black at it center because of the sheer concentration of war production."
"'Fortress California came of age in World War II . . .The overbuilt, overnight, jumped-up, 'improbable' California cities were an enormous asset to the American homefront.'"
". . .
"The sheer congestion brought its own social and cultural reverberations as soldiers and sailors, factory workers and young locals encountered each other in the hectic setting of bars, ballrooms and clubs all over California. The Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 . . . were the result of a clash between military men on liberty in the streets of Los Angeles and the young men they encountered there . . . 'the best known 'recreational' event of the war . . . both sides were out to amuse themselves.'
"Some of the gender and racial barriers that fell during World War II come as a surprise . . . the civil rights movement of the 1960s was rooted in World War II.
". . .
"The author is careful not to overstate his case, insisting that the war ought to be regarded as a 'heroic interlude' rather than a revolution. Some of the forces of change already were at work before the war was over. . . 'Races met, mingled, settled in grudgingly or willingly, or skedaddled ' . . . 'No one knew quite what to make of this mix; yet all seemed to agree that it was upsetting, different, and fascinating.'"
James W. Lunsford The Ocean and the Sunset, The Hills and the Clouds: Looking at Santa Monica, illustrated by Alice N. Lunsford, 1983, 1940s, 1930s
Ocean Park
"3. Neilson Way. The former Trolleyway, it was originally a railroad right-of-way with tracks which was converted to street use in the '30s. It is named for George A. Neilson,* a city commissioner of the '30's and '40's and an Ocean Park resident."
Eric Mankin Strategies: You Can Win City Hall, Mother Jones, VI, no. X, December, 1981, p. 66. 1981, 1940s
"This is not a humble statement, certainly. Can it be a true one? A little social history is needed to help evaluate it, as Shearer* and Goldway* walk, holding hands, from city hall to a nearby restaurant, to make their argument. Forty years ago Santa Monica was a staid, Republican suburb, depicted by Raymond Chandler in his mysteries (under the name "Bay City") as a master repository of hypocritical suburban corruption, a place that could be bought whole, "box and tissue paper."
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), 1940s
Prelude to War
"America was slowly seeing its way out of the Depression by 1942 . . .
[p. 81 black and white photo ; the WPA Edward Biberman's Venice Postoffice Abbot Kinney Mural]
" . . .
"Sewage from the Los Angeles outfall at Playa del Rey to the south had polluted the ocean water and signs along the Venice beach declared it off-limits to swimmers. . . ."
Jenny Pirie*, Peter Kastner* and Jeff Mudrick* A Short History of Ocean Park, Ocean Park Community Organization, 1982, (With a 1983 update.) 15pp. 1983, 1982, 1940s, 1926,
" . . . And the Second World War accelerated this change.
"The war resulted in an unprecedented demand for airplanes from the Douglas Aircraft plant in Santa Monica, as well as increased production at all the support businesses in the area that served Douglas. Wartime workers flocked to the west side, and Ocean Park took in its share. Since there was little or no building during the war, existing housing had to take the strain. From being the "Unsurpassed All-Year Playground of the West" (as a 1926 advertisement described the town), Ocean Park was becoming an "all-year" home for working people and their families."
Cecilia Rasmussen, L..A. Then and Now : A 'Carny Kid' Tells Students How He Beat the Odds, Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2005, B2. 1940s
Lionel Rolfe Literary L.A., Chronicle Books: San Francisco, 1981, 102pp., 1950s, 1941, 1940s, 1908
4. Thomas Mann: Faustus in the Palisades
" . . . [1950s] . . .
"My mother, Yaltah Menuhin, is a pianist, and she and Michael [Mann, son of Thomas Mann] had toured throughout Europe. . . .
" . . .
"Thomas Mann [and his wife, Katia, mother of Michael Mann] was the most famous of the many famous refugees from Hitler's Germany who sought out the untroubled blue skies over Los Angeles, so far away from the Holocaust in Europe. . . . Many of the greatest personalities, as well as egos, had come to L.A. to escape Hitler. Some were Jews, of course, but many, like Mann and Stravinsky, were not. Some were quite left-wing; others were conservative. . . . Yet they clung together . . .
" . . . [Menuhin lived on Pelham Avenue]
" . . . in the Pacific Palisades, . . . Mann lived at 1550 San Remo Drive.
" . . . Arnold Schoenberg [and his wife, Gertrud] . . . in Brentwood, at 116 N. Rockingham.
[A system for composing music is considered as unnatural.]
"It is surely not coincidence that in 1908 Schoenberg wrote some music for poems by Stefan George for voice and piano. Schoenberg regarded this work as his great "breakthrough"-melody and harmony almost completely drowned out by atonality-and he he believed hat he had finally succeeded in his . . . claim of emancipating dissonance with his work. . . .
"Like Schoenberg . . . George was a dedicated member of the so-called avant-garde, which was always searching for a "higher order." . . .
" . . .
" . . . Alma Mahler-Werfel, who had once been married to the composer Gustav Mahler . . . then remarried Franz Werfel, author of The Song of Bernadette, . . . is said to have pointed out the parallels to Arnold Schoenberg's music and career, in Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus, to Arnold Schoenberg himself.
Schoenberg . . . blamed musicologist and philosopher, Theodor Wisengrund-Adorno . . . who Mann had consulted . . .
" . . . Mann was sixty-six when he came to Los Angeles in 1941 . . ."
Andrea Schulte-Peevers and David Peevers Los Angeles, Lonely Planet: Oakland, 2nd ed., 1996(1999), 351pp., 1999, 1996, 1950s. 1940s. 1920s,
Painting & Sculpture
"The Otis Art Institute, another important college that survives, also dates roughly to this time. Major Modernists from the '20s to the '40s included Jackson Pollack, Charles White, Man Ray, Eugene Berman*, Albert King and Oskar Fischinger. While many were thematically inspired by the California landscape and sunlight initially, by the '40s and '50s, attention turned to the materialism, consumerism and technological progress that characterized the era."
Jeffrey
Stanton Santa Monica Pier A History from 1875 to 1990, Donahue
Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1990.
Santa Monica Pier on the Skids (1941-1974)
" . . . Sunday, December 7, 1941 . . .
"Sam Reed, the city's harbor master, . . . the following morning refused to allow several boatloads of Japanese fishermen to put to sea. The harbor had become home base to 46 mackeral fishing boats when naval activity in San Pedro caused them to relocate to Santa Monica. . . . [instructed by] the 11th Naval District Headquarters, he prohibited any boats from leaving the harbor and that afternoon a naval patrol was established . . .
" . . . FBI arrested suspected [people] Fourty-five Japanese were arrested in Venice and West Los Angeles on Dec. 8th, and hundreds more the following day.
"The harbor fog horn was mounted atop city hall . . . The city was blacked out at night . . . The first black out Dec. 11th at 9:50 p.m. . . . When neon signs and other lights continued to illuminate downtown buildings, angry citizens moved through the streets and smashed dozens of lights that had been left on when store owners closed for the day." p. 100
"A citizen's defense militia was formed along the beach front to guard against possible infiltration by the enemy . . . Men and later women stood watch in four-hour shifts at fourteen stations strung along Santa Monica's waterfront. The beach, protected with barbed wire entanglements, was effectively closed during the day. . . .
"The battery of the 3rd Battalion, 144th Field Artillery, was housed at the Municipal Auditorium in Ocean Park. Other army groups manning anti-aircraft batteries were set up at Clover Field to guard the camouflaged Douglas Aircraft plant that from the air resembled a suburban housing tract.
". . .
"Santa Monica's mackerel fishing fleet resumed operation on May 11th under the Coast Gurad's new rules." . . . and with no Japanesee American fishermen . . .
"By the summer most young men in the area between seventeen and thirty -five had either volunteered or were drafted into the armed services. But the piers and beaches still played host to thousands of soldiers on leave from nearby military bases and the cadre of defense workers at plants like Douglas Aircraft. Since most had never seen an ocean , the lifeguard service urged residents to publicize safety rules for beach visitors.
"The area's normally brightly lit amusement piers were forced to curtail operations after dark because of dimout regulations. Santa Monica's pier, which had far fewer amusements, had less of a problem remaining open in the evening. Dance halls on Venice and Ocean Park piers offered one of the few forms of evening entertainment and were especially popular with swing-shift defense workers whose shift ended at midnight. By October the city passed laws . . ." forbidding people under eighteen from attending swing-shift dances and those between eighteen and twenty-one had to leave by 2 a.m.
"Santa Monica's mackerel fleet was busy during the war providing food for the nation's war effort. In October 1942, a three ton weight limit was placed on pier vehicles due to a weakening structure. . .
"A series of winter storms wrecked havoc on the fishing fleet . . . on January 14, 1943 . . . then seven inches of rain during a 56 hour storm in late January and forty eight boats washed ashore . . . and then the fish market crashed going from 21 c to 13 c per pound.
"In February 1943, Security First National Bank sold the Santa Monica Pleasure Pier to Walter D. Newcomb, who was managing their pier under a lease agreement. Newcomb, who owned the pier's gift shop and arcade, had taken over management at the beginning of the war when Lt. Commander Harry E. Walker entered naval service.
" . . . the city . . . assigned Newcomb the bank's twenty-one year franchise that began on June 7, 1936.
[Johnny "Tarzan" Weismuller was a frequent pier visitor and an honorary captain of Santa Monica's Municipal Lifeguard service and actually leaped from the pier to save a tiring swimmer, August 6, 1943.]
"The city toughened its lease policy, limiting extent and cancelling leases that allowed alcohol sales. Olaf Olson had ben operating a cocktail bar, but had recently vacated the premises.
" . . . the Santa Monica area became a rest and recovery area for returning soldiers and airmen. In late November, the Army began leasing the beach club hotels, first the Grand Hotel, Del Mar and Edgewater Clubs. Later they leased the Miramar, Ocean Palms and Shargri-La to quarter 1500 men returning from combat service. The beach club hotels operated like hotels rather than like an army base, and rotated about 2500 men per month through 14-21 day periods.
"The La Monica Auditorium reopened in the spring of 1944 as the Palisades Dance Hall, considering its proximity to their hotels, it was only mildly popular with the visiting troops. Most soldiers preferred either Ocean Park's or Venice's more exciting amusement zones that offered roller coasters, fun houses, theaters, games of skill, and various spinning rides in addition to several dance halls. Santa Monica's Palisades Dance Hall closed several months later with . . . unpaid debts. When new management tried to reopen, the head of the National Musicians Union refused to sanction . . ."
"Both Pacific Mutual Life Insurance's beach erosion lawsuit, better known as the Carpenter case, and Los Angeles Athletic Club's beach accretion lawsuit were retried in April 1944 by the U.S. District Court of Appeals. The court ruled in both cases against the plaintiffs and for the City of Santa Monica." p.101
"The court found that the city was not responsible for either the erosion or sand accretion caused by the construction of the breakwater. It also ruled that the city had a legal right to protect its harbor and the property of others within its boundaries from the action of the ocean. In the Carpenter case it found that all the eroded beach in front of the Del Mar Club had been artificially created from 1875-1921 by man made structures in the Santa Monica Bay and that they belonged to the state and city, not the upland owner. Therefore it was state tidelands that had been damaged. . . .
[The ruling was appealed to the California Supreme Court who refused to hear the appeals.]
" . . .
"Los Angeles County's Regional Planning Commission had much more ambitious plans for the ocean front along Santa Monica Bay. T.D. Cooke, their division engineer, unveiled plans on July 10, 1945, that called for the elimination of the Santa Monica Breakwater and all the amusement piers along the coast. . . ." p. 102
" . . . Both Los Angeles City and County . . . insisted that all man-made sturctures. . . be removed because they interfered with the free movement of sand by the prevailing currents.
"Finally, . . . commissioners W.W. Milliken and D.C. Freeman opposed the plan. . .
"They would only support a plan that preserved the identity of Santa Monica's waterfront . . .
"In response to a proposal for even futher development north of the pier, protests included Morton Anderson who was the Santa Monica member of the State Shoreline Planning association. who said that to permit a carmival construction on the beach would be a "return to the horse and buggy days and would wreck Santa Monica's development as a leading resort city."
" . . ." p. 103
" The city . . . placed deputy city clerk Ralph Kruger in charge of all Municipal Pier leases in February 1946. He instituted new lease procedures that put expired leases out to public bid. The first was the Porthole Cafe . . . Then when Bay Fish Market . . . the Commissioners out of a sense of fairness overruled him and extended the lease until those of California Seafood and Santa Monica Seafood companies lapsed.
" . . .
"Beach activities were beginning to return to normal during the spring. The Army vacated all the hotels and beach clubs . . . and those that were owned by insurance companies were sold to private investors. . . . The Del Mar Club reopened in June and both the Grand and Edgewater Hotels remodeled in time for summer reopenings as a tourist hotel and beach club respectively.
"Santa Monica scheduled its first annual Santa Monica Fiesta at the Municipal Pier . . .Hundreds of thousands . . . while fifty combat aircraft from Alamitos Bay Naval Air Station . . .
"Foremost was the bathing beauty contest to crown Miss Santa Monica. Leo Carillo, a noted Santa Monica actor was the master of ceremonies. Judges, mostly from MGM Studios, judged the thirty eight contestants and crowned eigthteen year old Mary Joe Devlin . . . . Governor Earl Warren presented her with the trophy.
"The Monoa Paddleboard Club opened their show with a fifteen girl paddleboard ballet, then held races and an exhibiiton polo paddleboard contest in the calm waters north of the pier . . .
"Acrobatic and gymnastic exhibitions were featured at the playground several hundred feet south of the pier. This area that had become known as "Muscle Beach" was built in th early 30's as a Works Progress Administration "time-killer". The WPA built a weight lifting platform to provide work and recreation facilities for the crowds of unemployed and relief recipients who had nothing to do during the Depression. It was eventually taken over by the Santa Monica Recreation Department after the original users found jobs and moved on.
"These exhibitions, that were usually held on Memorial Day weekends since 1935, featured weight lifters, gymnasts, balancers, muscle control artists, and tumblers. some of the better known performers included Wayne Long, Glen "Whitey" Sunby, Pudgy Stockton "queen of the barbells" and Beverly Jochner who was known as the strongest girl in America. She could lift three people weighing 350 pounds overhead. Russ Sanders, the gymnastic coach would fill out the program with high school and college athletes. The Fiesta, however, marked the first time that they had staged a men's physique competition for the title of Mr. Santa Monica.
'Business on the Newcomb Pier increased during the first postwar summer. Band leader Spade Cooley rented the La Monica Ballroom and his style of country-western music attracted large evening crowds. Then business was also helped somewhat by the elimination of the competing Venice Amusement Pier. It had been forcibly closed down in the spring when the Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation refused to renew the Kinney Company's tideland's lease. The closing, however, deprived Walter Newcomb of much of the income that he needed to remodel his[the Santa Monica] aging pier and turn it into a modern tourist attraction. He had operated the merry-go-round and the popular Venice Fun House on the condemned pier.
"While Newcomb was preoccupied with removing his attractions from the Venice Pier, he found a buyer for his Parker carousel located in the Hippodrome building. He then moved his 1922 Philadelphia Toboggan carousel, PTC #62 from the Venice Pier into the building. He had purchased the carousel before the war for $25,000 from an amusement park in Nashville, Tennessee.
"The new carousel opened on June 27, 1947 after a two month long renovation by famed carousel builder, Rudy Illions. It was a fifty foot diameter, three abreast machine with two chariots and forty-four horses hand carved by John Zaler. It was illuminated by 750 electric lights and had a Wurlitzer band organ that played from punched rolls of carousel music. Robert Newcomb, Walter's brother, became manager of the ride.
" . . .
" . . . Myer Simon, president of the California Seafood Company . . .
" . . . the city's second annual beauty pageant in 1947 was staged almost two weeks before the Independence Day festivities. It began with a mile long parade from the Santa Monica Pier to Ocean Park's Casino Gardens. A crowd of 100,000 watched eighty horseback riders, numerous movie stars in parade vehicles, and two bands march past. Spade Cooley, radio western star, acted as Grand Marshal for the event. A panel of movie celebrities judged Susan Brown as the city's . . ." p. 105
"The Independence Day celebration at the pier was just a shadow of the previous year's festival. The Recreation Department staged its 2nd Annual Muscle Matinee on July 4th. A crowd of several thousand watched Charles B. Grayling, a 24 year old studio technician, win the title Mr. Santa Monica. . . .
"The Labor Day contest for the Miss Muscle Beach title was much more exciting and included a show by Pudgy Stockton's Beachettes and a Thrill Circus featuring outstanding Pacific Coast athletes. A sweating, yelling, whistling, hot dog munching, soda pop drinking mob of sun-burned men, women and their children gathered to 'ooh' and 'ah' at the nearly three dozen shapely contestants. The pageant was supposed to prove that a woman could pour beauty and biceps into the same bathing suit. Mirs. Vivian Crockett, a 22 year old housewife and free lance actress won the title.
"On September 3rd, the State Board of Health quarantined twelve miles of beaches from the Santa Monica Pier south to Hermosa Beach. This left Santa Monica with only 1.7 miles off swimming beach. The problem once again was Los Angeles' antiquated Hyperion Sewage Plant which had run out of chlorine again and was dumping large amounts of untreated swewage int the bay. While Santa Monica and Ocean Park's beaches reopened the following summer, Venice's beaches remained closed until the new Hyperion Sewage Plant began operation in June 1950.
" . . . .
" . . . City Manager Randall Dorton . . . " p.106
"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. Thye 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. . . ."
"Spade Cooley* "King of Western Swing" and his country-western dance band, which performed in the La Monica Ballroom on weekend evenings, had grown to enormous popularity. KTLA, Channel 5, began broadcasting the band in 1948 on Saturday night at 8 p.m. and by 1950 the show was the second most popular Los Angeles television program."p. 111
" . . . Eventually he formed his own band and his "barn dance' style entertainment caught on during the war."
Jeffrey Stanton Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987. 176 pp., 1950, 1948, 1947, 1946, 1945, 1943, 1941
"America prepared for war in 1941. The draft was enacted and nearly 200 local youth were serving in the armed forces when hostilities broke out on December 7, 1941. . . .
"A blackout was immediately instituted, and National Guardsmen patrolled the beach. Helmeted air raid wardens took their duties seriously as they inspected their blocks nightly for any stray shaft of light that might become a beacon for enemy warships and subs. The Douglas Aircraft factory was completely camouflaged so that it looked like a harmless housing tract from the air.
"The amusement piers were open thorough out the war except at night. Soldiers and sailors came to the piers and boardwalk on weekend leaves. . . .
"Dancing was a favorite way to meet local girls. Harry James and Benny Goodman played swing music at the Casino Gardens on the Ocean Park Pier. The Venice Dance Hall offered country and western music by the best bands in the west.
"By 1943, threats of invasion had diminished sufficiently to permit near normal operation of the amusement zone during the evening hours. The piers were also a haven for young Mexican-Americans who adopted a style of dress distinctly their own. The boys wore ducktail haircuts, flat pancake hats, peg-top trousers, reet pleats, long glittering watch chains and long drape coats. The girls, dubbed 'cholitas' wore tight fitting sweaters and black hobble skirts that stopped above the knee line. Going out in your best attire was called 'zooting'.
"It was inevitable that tension would develop between the 'zoot suiters' and the servicemen that congregated at the piers on weekend nights. On the night of May 8, 1943 rumors circulated along the beach that one of the 'zoot-suiters' had knifed a sailor and a clash began. Several hundred soldiers, sailors and local teenagers ran the Mexican-Americans out of the Aragon Ballroom on the Lick Pier. They clashed again after midnight along Ocean Front Walk at Navy Street in front of a crowd of 2500 spectators. Thirteen 'zoot-suiters' were arrested and 28 more were taken into custody following the battle.
" . . .
"The stage was set for another round of fighting the following weekend. Police roadblocks intercepted over a hundred 'zoot-suiters' bound for Venice, and arrested eight local youths who were discovered carrying concealed weapons. It ended the Venice wars but the clashes soon moved to downtown Los Angeles where worse racial violence took place.
"The war years weren't very good for Venice. In 1943 the California State Board of Health quarantined the beach as far north as Brooks Avenue because Los Angeles was dumping raw sewage into Santa Monica Bay. {Lifted in 1950.} . . ..
"The war ended on August 14, 1945. . . . ' p. 138
Chapter 7: Dismantling of Venice (1946-1972)
". . .
". . . the [Venice] pier closed at midnight on Saturday April 20, 1946." p. 139
"The beach widening project begun in 1947 resulted in the sluicing of over 14 million tons of sand from the dune site of the proposed Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant in El Segundo to as far north as the Ocean Park Pier. The width of the beach along the eight mile stretch was increased to a uniform 500 feet. But the summer of 1948 sluicing progressed as far as Brooks Avenue. It was strange to see the Sunset Pier completely landlocked, the beach stretching far beyond its outer pilings. The project, including the sewage plant, was completed in 1950. The beach quarantine was lifted the following year."
Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1940, 1912,
[p. 133] " . . . the [aeronautical] companies of Southern California possessed the mass and the depth necessary for large-scale production. By 1937 Southern California had surpassed New York, meaning Long Island, as the leading center of aircraft manufacture, , and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena had become the leading center of aeronautical research and teaching in the nation. In early 1938 General H.H. (Hap) Arnold, chief of staff of the Army Air Corps, met with Southern California companies and discussed the probability of a major gearing-up of the industry. Already, a number of companies were expanding to fill British orders. On 23 June 1938, for example, the British purchasing Commission headed by Arthur Purvis placed a $25 million order for planes from Lockheed. Within the next three years, the British had a total of $34 million in orders with Northrop alone. By the summer of 1940, it was forced to inaugarate a three-shift, aroud [p. 134]-the-clock schedule. . . .
[p. 208] . . .
" . . . bohemian writer and all-round rebel Henry Miller might very well [have disagreed with the promise of prosperity in 1940 California]. Life in Panorama City was just another example of the Air-Condidtioned Nightmare. Miller first used the phrase "air-conditioned nightmare" as the title of a book he completeted late in the war while living in Big Sur on the central coast. Based on a year-long auto tour of the United States from October 1940 to October 1941 and published by New Directions in late 1945, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare can be taken as a prophetic, anti-statement to everything that Panorama City stood for: conformity, routine, philistinism, sexual repression; the long, grey death, in short, to Henry Miller's way of thinking, of middle-class life in America.
"Born in Brooklyn in 1891, Henry Valentine Miller-Val to his friends and the intimates who were legion-had spent only a few months in Southern California in 1910, doing odd jobs in Los Angeles and San Diego, before returning to New York. Like Walt Whitman, whom he resembled in so many respects, Henry Miller, both the man and the writer, was hard to classify. Was he the last representative of the 1920s generation, so infatuated with Paris, as Edumund Wilson claimed? Was he a social critic of prophetic importance, warning against the increasing conformity and mechanization of American life? Or was he a cad, a heel, a shameless sponger, whore-mongering pornographer, a poseur and blowhard, the perpetrator of some two million words of stream-of-consciousness prose that seemed to be saying everything, hence nothing, simultaneously?
"The answer was yes to each query. In some vast and nearly impentrable way, Henry Miller was managing by the mid-1930s, when his autobiography Tropic of Cancer (1934) was published in Paris and banned in the United States, to have contained within himself all the contradictions and paradoxes that two of Miller's favorite writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, considered a salient characteristic of the free-thinking, free-spirited American man of letters as social and cultural critic. Whatever Henry Miller might have become by 1940, when he [p. 209] returned to the United States after a tour of Greece resulting in The Colossus of Maroussi (1941) which some believe his best book-hierophant or shameless lech, free spirit or sponging bum, ingrate or reformed visionary in the Americanist tradition-Henry Miller was well on the way, as man, writer, and legend, to becoming one of the most influential writers ever to be based in California, for what Miller wrote, together with what he acted out and stood for, would in time pervade the value system of an entire generation and shift the sensibility of the entire nation.
"All of this was a big order for [Henry Miller]a down-and-out writer nearing fifty in 1940, with only one important book available to the general public: a writer turned down by the Guggenheim Foundation when he applied for funds to tour the United States just as he had recently toured Greece, and wirite a book about his travels and observations. Thanks to an advance from Doubleday Doran, Miller made his trip anyway, after learning to drive in five lessons from aspiring poet Kenneth Patchen and buying for $100 a 1932 Buick sedan, which terrified him as he headed south toward New Hope, Pennsylvania, and from there into America itself.
[Note that Kenneth Patchen's The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Padell Press, 1941, was in its fifth printing when Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare was published. KR]
"In the course of this year-long journey of return and anti-homecoming, Miller drove, worked, crashed, and sponged his way across America: an over-age-in-grade Parisian expatriate returning to America along with a whole generation of emigres, the vast majority of them more solvent and respectable than Miller, which was not a difficult accomplishment. A decade later, another rebel, Jack Kerouac, would make a similar journey in part under Miller's inspiration; for the important thing about Miller's journey was that it brought him, once again to California, where he hung out with like-minded people-John Steinbeck's friend Ed (Doc) Ricketts in Monterey and Lawrence Clark Powell, a literary critic and former French expatriate, then settling into a career as librarian and writer at UCLA.
"Like so many expatriates, Henry Miller liked California-inasmuch as he could find anything to like about the the United States-and decided to settle there. Thanks to the generosity of two friends, Margaret and Gilbert Neiman, he could now do exactly that: settle into the Neiman's home in the Beverly Glen district of Los Angeles as a more or less permanent non-paying guest. Two years later, in May 1944, Miller accepted a further offer of hospitality, moving in with artist Lynda Sargent . . . in Sargent's Log House on the Big Sur coast, later famous as the site of the Nepenthe Restaurant . . . [p. 210] [The text goes on to say that Sargent sold the building to Orson Welles in May 1944, forcing Miller to move to Partington Ridge, further into the Big Sur mountains . . . ]
" . . . From one perspective The Air-Condiditoned Nightmare [which he had begun before Pearl Harbor] can be seen as a bitter, dismissive, contempt-ridden indictment of American life as ordinary men and womn lived it-or were being asked to die for it in wartime . . . He encountered the great American ugliness, the great American chill. "I didn't like the look of the American house . . . there is something cold, austere, something barren and chill, about the architecture of the American home. It was home, with all the ugly, evil, sinister connotations which the word contains for a restless soul. There was a frigid moral aspect to it which chilled me to the bone.""
"" . . . Topographically, the country is magnificent-and terrifying . . . Nowhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete. Nowhere [he had encountered] such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here in America. Here boredom reaches its peak. . . . To call this a society of free people is blasphemous . . . What we have to offer the world besides the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment."
" . . . [p. 211] Miller's work, "the dirty books of a generation, a call, however muddled, to transcendence and liberation through eros . . .
"Others, however, considered Miller's books purient-and worse, radical-trash, speaking with an especially corrupting power to the young. Already, well before the war had ended-indeed, because of the war-America was finding itself uneasy about its youth: not so much of the young men and women in uniform, but the half-generation just behind them, the pachucos and V-girls, the growing number of young offenders from the inner city. Writing in Look magazine in January 1946, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover predicted an outburst of juvenile delinquency in the post-war era. Already, Hoover pointed out, seventeen-year olds had the highest arrest rate of any age group in the country. Then there was the recently released veteran, only a few years older, to be watched, the sort who had made up the bulk of the motorcycle gang that had taken over Hollister in July 1947 . . . only jeans and a T-shirt and a mumbled way of talking could manage to express a massive rebellion and thus . . . hold a troubled identity together.
"Rebellion then was in the air and would grow steadily thoughout the next decade, and Henry Miller . . . was in some palpable way emerging as the guru and avatar of an emerging alternative vision . . . From Miller, . . . a generation of alienated young people, especially pacifists, but veterans as well, were imbibing "an engaging potpourri of mysticism, egoism, sexualism, surrealism, and anarchism."
"Accentuated and enhanced by Miller's own eclectic and chaotic religiosity, which emphasized astrology and the occult, a certain free-wheeling mysticism dovetailed easily withthe already flourishing tradition of religious cults in California . . .
[p. 212] " . . .
" . . . There was in Miller's worldview a hallucinogenic quality transcending drug-induced visions, although lesser beings would need drugs to get there; a view of the world, that is, as nightmarish and deceptive-and only true and beautiful on the other side, however one got there.'
" . . . as early as 1946, one observer at least was seeing in the gathering Berkeley-Big Sur bohemia the makings of an alternative view of American life that could in time become the makings of a mass movement. Over the next decade and a half, the attitudes described by Brady would emerge as the beat movement and this sensibility, in turn quickened by generational revolt and a hated war in Vietnam would become the hippie movement, the anti-establishment movement, the anti-everything movement: that congeries of resentments and shifting values and attitudes, in short, that would coalesce in the 1960s as a whole new way of looking at American life. . . .
Les Storrs Santa Monica Portrait of a City Yesterday and Today, Santa Monica Bank: Santa Monica, CA, 1974, 67 pp., 1940s
"As a result, the [Douglas Aircraft Co.] company was well prepared for the demands of World War II. At the peak of production in the war years, the company had a total of 160,000 employees in six plants, with close to 40,000 of them in the home plant in Santa Monica.
"As a result of this huge industrial development, Santa Monica's basic character changed from that of a quiet seaside residential community to something very different. Where previously almost all resdients had lived in single family homes, apartments began to appear in some numbers, a trend which was to be greatly accelerated in years to come.
" . . .
" . . . a group of Douglas scientists developed into the Rand Corp., and that from the latter sprang System Development Corp., . . ."
" . . .
Chapter Five: World War II and its Impact
" . . . December 7, 1941
" . . . the stunned reaction of the people, the sense of outrage, the feeling of urgency which sometimes bordered upon hysteria.
"Citizens of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and shipped on to internment camps at Tule Lake; anti-aircraft guns were set up in front of city hall and elsewhere; the great Douglas Aircraft Co. plant began a program of rapid expansion to fill military orders, the payroll eventually reaching nearly 70,000 persons; the plant and the adjoining municipal airport were effectively camouflaged; young men and some young women rushed to join the armed forces; blackouts were imposed lest there be an attack from the sea; volunteers were enlisted for all manner of duties in what was called "civilian defense."
" . . .
" . . . resulted in a burden upon local government and public facilities for which they were not organized to meet and in which they faced the additional problem of unavailability of supplies.
"Ordinary citizens attempted to fill the gaps as best they could, usually by volunteering for civilian defense duties. Citizen volunteer were trained by [for] police and fire duties, as well as for the strictly wartime services such as block wardens, aircraft spotters, and radio communications personnel.
" . . .
"The influx of thousands of defense workers created an immediate housing shortage, one which was to persist for some years after the war ended. Santa Monica officialdom did wht it had to do; it in effect suspended all zoning regulations and urged that accommodations be created for the workers, whether zoing violations resulted or not.
"Buildings intended to house one family . . . provided quarters for four. Camp trailers were parked in back yards, sometimes without adequate sanitary facilities, and used as housing.
" . . .
"The same thing was true of variances granted for wartime industries in areas not zoned for that purpose. Usuallly such variances purported to be "for the duration of the emergency," but even so, the end of the "emergency" was not declared for many years after the termination of the conflict.
" . . . the owners of the properties came to feel that they had a vested interest in whatever operation had been permitted, whether it was a boarding house, apartment at the rear of the house, or out-of-zone industrial operations.
"Such are the problems which arise in a genuine national emergency.
'Less dramatic . . . than [the civil defense volunteers], the[se] moves to accomodate a sudden increase in demand for housing were far more significant in the long run.
" . . . almost all supplies: gasoline, food, building materials, were rationed. Everything, including labor, was diverted to the war effort, and only the most basic of civilian needs were met.
"There was . . . no answer to the housing problem except "doubling up" in that which was available,
"New residents continued to come to Santa Monica,, public services deteriorated, both because of lack of money, materials and manpower and because of the inherent inefficiency of a form of government which had three administrative heads of equal authority, authority of which each tended to be . . . jealous.
"Municipal tax rates climbed as dissatisfaction increased, and even before the war ended a Board of Freeholders had been chosen to draft a new charter.
" . . .
[Storrs uses the analogy of a corporation and its board of directors when he describes the Board of Freeholders rationale, KR]
" . . . the Board believed that the council-manager form of local government provides the highest degree of efficiency and virtually eliminates political log-rolling."
" . . . the new city council was organized when the council-manager charter became effective in 1947. Maurice M. King . . . acting city manager. . . . city engineer uner the old government . . . the council then selected Randall M. Dorton, city manager.
""Dal" Dorton . . . served as city manager in Long Beach and Monterey.
An expert in municipal finance . . . reduced the tax rate and also city expenses, at a rate greater than the national inflationary spiral.
" . . . assessed valuation increased steadily [but not too rapidly for taxpayers] . . .
" . . . a heart attack brought his retirement.
"George Bundy, member of an old and respected Santa Monica family, had served under Dorton as assistant city manager . . . succeeded him . . . and he, too suffered a serious heart attack."
Betty Lou Young Our First Century: The Los Angeles Athletic Club 1880-1980, LAAC Press: Los Angeles, California 1979, 176pp., 1940s
" . . .the conversion to a wartime economy brought unexpected financial relierf.
"The Yacht Club was taken over by the Coast Guard, the Deauville by the Federal Government, and the Hermosa Biltmore by the National Youth Administration. The SMAC was sold to a private buyer , , ,
13. Pursuit of Excellence
" . . .
"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."
Betty Lou Young and Randy Young Santa Monica Canyon: A Walk Through History Casa Vieja Press: Pacific Palisades, CA, 1997, 182pp., 1940s
"During the forties, volleyball superseded surfing as the top State Beach sport and a whole new hierarcy fought for the honors . . . The sport of beach volleyball had its beginnings in the 1920s on a public court near Santa Monica pier and on courts at the various beach clubs. In the 1930s, two of the best public court players, Manny Saenz and Bernie Holtzman, supplemented their sparse earnings b playing the various club teams for small wagers . . . They both moved on to the court at State Beach, where competition was more intense . . .
" . . ." p. 123
"204-219 Chautauqua . . . a five-acre meadow between Chautauqua and Corona del Mar is significant In the early 1900s it was owned by Robert Gillis and accommodated several shacks, one used by his daughter, Adelaide's, mandolin teacher, . . .
"In 1932 the property was purchased by Will Rogers and held by the Rogers family until 1945, when it was acquired by John Entenza, publisher of Arts and Architecture magazine, for his Case Study Program. The plan featured houses of modern design, often steel-framed and utilizing low-cost elements in their construction. Today . . . four of these landmark structures, built from 1946-49, still occupy the original site. . . .
" . . . The Eames* house, designed by Charles Eames* and his wife, Ray*, is the best preserved in its natural setting and is notable for interior elements designed by Charles* and Ray Eames*. Both the Eames house and the nearby Entenza are on the list of Los Angeles Cultural Heritage landmarks."
"477 Upper Mesa . . . Architect Thornton Abell purchased a portion of the Kyte garden in 1937 and in 1942 built a small house on the property. Its first tenant was artist Richard Haines and his wife, Nona. who were on their way to Alaska to fulfill a contract for a mural when World War II intervened and the couple were stranded. . . . After seven years [1949] the couple moved to Amalfi. . . ."