1948 (1947) (1949) (1940-1950) (1950-1960) Table of Contents
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., 1948 See Text
Francis Frascina Art, politics and dissent: Aspects of the art left in sixties America, Manchester University Press: Manchester and New York, 1999, 248 pp., 1999, 1948 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, 1948 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, 1973, 1948, [late] 1800s See Text
Lawrence Mace In Search of Whole Rainbows, Unpublished Manuscript, 1994, 1952, 1949, 1948, 1942 See Text
Les Storrs Santa Monica Portrait of a City Yesterday and Today, Santa Monica Bank: Santa Monica, CA, 1974, 67 pp., 1948 See Text
Notes:
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial covenants in 1948. CR
Documents
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., 1948
Courses in driver education were first introduced [in the Santa Monica High School Curriculum] in 1948, the work in this field including the theory as well as the practice of safe driving. A dual-control car is used for training purposes on the road, while in the classroom, many instruments are employed to test observation, reaction time, and general ability in handling an automobile.
" . . .
The City College still needed a home. Expanding enrollments housed in the old, temporary bungalows; a slight drop in school building costs; and bond money which had been waiting five years to be spent for the development of the new City College plant, prompted the Board of Education and the new Superintendent of Schools, William S. Briscoe, to ask for speed in planning the proposed construction. In October of 1948, Superintendent Briscoe, with the approval of the Board of Education, appointed a director of educational planning, whose first assignment was to develop educational specifications and detailed requirements for the new buildings. [80. Johnson, op. cit., p. 9.] Milo Johnson, general trade coordinator of the Technical Division of Santa Monica City College, was the man selected to fill the new post.
Johnson began immediately to determine the needs of the various divisions and departments of City College that would be housed on the new campus. A faculty building committee was organized to collect information from various faculty members with reference to requirements for room size, storage facilities, lighting, and equipment. The new director worked carefully with the committee and the individual departments in coordinating their plans, and time to time called in consultants to advise on specific problems. [81. Ibid., p.25.]
Francis Frascina Art, politics and dissent: Aspects of the art left in sixties America, Manchester University Press: Manchester and New York, 1999, 248 pp., 1999, 1948
[p. 3] The phrase "think tank" has often been used to describe the RAND (Research ANd Development) Corporation, a research institution, a few miles down the coast in Santa Monica, with similarly high levels of financial backing and security [to the Getty Museums of Art]. Here since 1948 when RAND became a corporation with the help of various sources of funding including a grant of $1 million from the nascent Ford Foundation, researchers from different disciplines have been provided to stimulate them to communicate with each other and provide theoretical models on many different topics . . .
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, 1948
"Among those who attended Man Ray's exhibit at the Copley Gallery in 1948 were: Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, George Antheil, Igor Stravinsky, Leopold Stokowski, Josef von Sternberg, Luis Bunuel, Jean Renoir, Otto Preminger, René Clair, Edward G. Robinson, Fanny Brice, Harpo Marx, Feitelson, Lundeberg, Merrild, Berman, Krasnow, Henry Lee McFee, George Biddle, Hans Hofmann, Isamu Noguchi, Matta, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning . . . "
James W. Lunsford The Ocean and the Sunset, The Hills and the Clouds: Looking at Santa Monica, illustrated by Alice N. Lunsford, 1983, 1973, 1948, [late] 1800s
Santa Monica Pier-Arcadia Terrace
"The pier has special historical value, having been protected by an initiative in 1973 making its removal or alteration subject to a vote of Santa Monica citizens, and also having been designated an official landmark by both Los Angeles County and the City of Santa Monica. Frequently used for motion picture and television backgrounds, it was the site of the first live television broadcast of a musical variety program in 1948."
"Arcadia Terrace, the general area south of the pier between the Promenade and Ocean Avenue, derives its name from the famous Arcadia Hotel that once occupied much of the area. The hotel was named for Arcadia de Baker."
"10. Arcadia Hotel Bricks, 1653-1661 Appian Way. During the excavation for the foundation of this building in 1948, a number of bricks from the original foundation of the Arcadia Hotel, circa [late]1800s, were turned up, and one of the bricks was imbedded in the foundation of the new building."
Ocean Park
"21. Mishkon Tephilo Temple, 206 Main Street. This temple, dedicated in 1948, is the Mishkon Tephilo Talmud Torah Synagogue."
Lawrence Mace In Search of Whole Rainbows, Unpublished Manuscript, 1994, 1952, 1949, 1948, 1942
"High school gymnastics in Southern California was far ahead of Northern California in 1948. All schools in the Los Angeles area had gymnastics teams, and competition there was fierce. Often, I heard of new, impossible movements on the rigs and high bar that gymnasts were doing in LA.
"In particular, I heard of a place called Muscle Beach in Santa Monica, near Los Angeles, where the greatest of all high school gymnasts congregated on weekends to practice togeether. I hitchhiked four-hundred miles south one weekend to see the place for myself. The rumors were true. I was dazzled! In Oakland, I was a top gymnast. At Muscle Beach I was a novice again. I learned several movements that weekend that astonished my teammates the next week at Fremont High in Oakland.
"There were many other things going on at Muscle Beach that caught my attention. It was a Mecca for circus acrobats and night club performers from all over the world. They did stunts and tricks that amazed me, performing on a mat-covered wooden platform. It was raised above the sand with bleachers along one side for spectators who watched and applauded.
"Nearby there was a fenced weight lifting area. I watched several of the strongest weight lifters in the United States working out, lifting impossibly heavy weights.
"There was a full length mirror on one side of the weight lifting enclosure. The body builders were easily distinguishable from the weight lifters. They spent much of their time in front of the mirror, flexing particular muscle groups after pumping up those muscles by exercising with weights. They were training for muscular bulk and definition rather than sheer strength like the weight lifters.
"There was table tennis, played on concrete Ping-Pong tables. I watched the current US table tennis champion meet all challengers.
"There were chess boards attached to tables. I heard that the current world chesss champion played there sometimes.
"There were volleyball courts on the sand nearby. I had never seen volleyball played with only two players on each team. Defending players dove headlong into the sand to save and return a ball hit hard downward from above the net by an opponent. Two-man beach volleyball was invented at Muscle Beach.
"I met forty-year-old Deforest Most, Manager of Muscle Beach for the City of Santa Monica. Moe, in later years, became a hero and long time friend. He greeted me then for the first time, making me welcome immediately in the friendly fashion that was his trademark. I was impressed when he told me he held the world record for consecutive, bare handed giant swings on the high bar. He showed me the palms of his hands. They were like thick leather from performing on the bar."
Les Storrs Santa Monica Portrait of a City Yesterday and Today, Santa Monica Bank: Santa Monica, CA, 1974, 67 pp., 1948
"Under the 1937 ordinance, cettain variances were granted by the Planning Commision, others by ordinance of the City Council. There was no professional staff.
"As a result, the legal requirements for variances were largely ignored; dispensatins frequently were politically motivated or handled on a basis of expediency.
"The map of the city was dotted with uses not proper to the zones in which they were located.
"Even before the advent of the city council-manager form of government, the Planning Commission had taken two imporant steps:
"It had persuaded the City Council to employ Lester Brinkman and Jack Simon, two members of te Los Angeles City Planning Department, to draft a new ordinance, and to set up a budget for the employment of an administratior to handle the day-to-day work of zoning administration and enforcement.
"The new ordinance provided that variances should be the subject of public hearing and approval or disapproval by the administrator, and, in keeping with the growth of the city, the ordinance was more sophisticated than the earlier one.
" . . . the off-street parking requirements recommended by Brinkman and Simon also were watered down , , ,
"The new ordinance . . . became effective in 1948 . . . resulted in administrative improvement . . . served well for a decade . . . was again updated.
" . . . zoning in Santa Monica . . . the pattern for the ultimate growth of the city was established by the 1929 ordinance and confirmed by those of 1937 and 1948.
" . . .
"In these documents were written provisions which later caused the development of a very large portion of the city in apartment houses, which set aside the whole area bounded by Ocean Avenue, Wilshire Boulevard, Lincoln Boulevard and Colorado Avenue as the central business district, and allowed strips of commercial use on 26th Street, Montana Avenue, Wilshire Boulevard, Santa Monica Boulevard, Broadway, Pico Boulevard, Ocean Park Boulevard, 14th Street, and Lincoln Boulevard, which designated the airport as an industrial area together with the general area which roughly parallels Colorado Avenue and the Santta Monica Freeway. [Where is Main St. in this plan? KR]
"The ordinances . . . made inevitable . . . that in 1974 four out of five residents of the city would be apartment dwellers. . . . they also increased . . . the average age level of the residents. Young families prefer single family residences.
"With the post-war boom under way, and with population climbing steadily in the post-war years, Santa Monica entered upon a period of unprecedented physical change.
"During the time when housing was still in very short supply, a veterans' housing project was set up on the present [1974] site of the Rand Corp. buildings on Main Street. Temporary buildings once used by the army {what had the Army used them for?] were converted ito housing, and made available to ex-servicemen and their families only. George Bundy, later city manager, was in charge.
"Soon after this project was phased out, it became known that Rand, with its large payroll of scientists and other specialists, would be forced to leave Santa Monica if it could not find more adequate quarters than those it then occupied in the one-time Evening Outlook building on the southwest corner of Fourth and Broadway.
"Rand purchased its present property from the city. Proceeds were used against an area of badly deteriorated housing where the Civic Auditorium now stands.
"With dreams, largely to be fulfilled, of conventions and cultural attractions, money was voted for the construction of the auditorium, and the present site won out over a beach location by the margin of one vote in the City Council.
"The building itself was designed and then redesigned after competitive bids failed to come within the limits of the funds available.
" . . . the city got a building which has a capacity of some 2800 persons, and, thanks to a floor which can be either flat or tilted, may be made suitable for anything from basketball to Bach, from rock to Shakespeare.
"Parks were expanded, new parks added; libraries including the handsome main library at Sixth Street and Santa Monica Boulevard were built; Santa Monica High School was enlarged; Santa Monica College, once located in temporary buildings adjacent to the high school grew to its present proportions on the campus on Pico Boulevard.
"Innumerable buildings were erected by private enterprise, largely in the field of housing, but including also a number of major commercial and industrial structures.