In the Company of the Craigs

NOTICIAS Journal Of The Santa Barbara Historical Museum

Vol. LIV

No. 4

In the Company of the Craigs

J

ames Osborne Craig and his wife, Mary McLaughlin Craig, played key roles in Santa Barbara’s architectural renaissance during the first half of the 20th century.

Osborne Craig’s design for El Paseo with its iconic Street in Spain is one of the city’s most treasured buildings, while Mary Craig’s conception for Plaza Rubio, facing Mission Santa Barbara, is a superb example of small-scale urban design.

In this issue of Noticias, Pamela Skewes-Cox takes a look at the Craigs and their world through the eyes of their friends and clients. The couple’s work connected them with civic, social and business leaders both in Santa Barbara and beyond and in exploring the stories behind these connections, the author gives a unique perspective on these two important architectural figures.

THE AUTHOR: Pamela Skewes-Cox, granddaughter of the Craigs, is a graduate of Bennington College with a degree in art and architecture. She worked in a number of architectural firms and later taught at the Corcoran School of Art. She has been a ceramic artist for over forty years. She is co-author, with Robert Sweeney, of the book, Spanish Colonial Style: Santa Barbara and the Architecture of James Osborne Craig and Mary McLaughlin Craig.

Images are from the Craig Family Collection unless noted otherwise. Front cover images: James Osborne Craig and Mary McLaughlin Craig.

INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS: NOTICIAS is a journal devoted to the study of the history of Santa Barbara County. Contributions of articles are welcome.

Those authors whose articles are accepted for publication will receive ten gratis copies of the issue in which their article appears. Further copies are available to the contributor at cost. The authority in matters of style is the University of Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. The Publications Committee reserves the right to return submitted manuscripts for required changes. Statements and opinions expressed in articles are the sole responsibility of the author.

Michael Redmon, Editor Judy Sutcliffe, Designer © 2015 Santa Barbara Historical Museum 136 East De la Guerra Street, Santa Barbara, California, 93101 www.santabarbaramuseum.com Single copies $10 ISSN 0581-5916

In the Company of

THE CRAIGS

Pamela Skewes-Cox

Sun-kissed, Ocean-washed, Mountain-girded, Island-guarded, Santa Barbara.1 Santa Barbara does not see much of the rest of the world, but the rest of the world comes to see Santa Barbara.2 185

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AMES OSBORNE CRAIG’S trail to Santa Barbara led from Scotland; Mary McLaughlin’s from Deadwood, South Dakota.

James Osborne Craig, called “Osborne”, was born on November 2, 1888, in Barrhead, a small textileproducing town on the outskirts of las ow f icted with asth a fro a young age, it was serious enough that his step-grandmother took him on occasion to Spain to get away from the poor climate and air of industrial Glasgow. It would be these trips that planted the seed for his keen understanding and natural love of the Spanish vernacular. But for a handful of letters to his wife and his exquisite drawin s Crai s life was diffic lt to

NOTICIAS trace; the people who knew him best (patron Bernhard Hoffmann, fellow architects Carleton Winslow and Bertram Goodhue, his draftsman Richard Pitman, and his wife Mary), left little in the way of letters offering even a glimpse into the personal and professional life of the young architect.

After a brief stint in formal architectural training in Glasgow, Craig immigrated to America in 1905 at the age of sixteen. He at once focused on an architectural career, moving ambitio sl first to Colorado to ro e where he travelled and studied, then back to America prior to World War I Barrhead, Scotland, where James Osborne Craig was born in 1888. ©Courtesy RCAHMS. Licensor www.rcahms.gov.uk.

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IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS where he settled for some years in Flagstaff, Arizona, before moving to California in 1916. Reasons for his relocating are unknown, but his fragile health may have been a contributing factor. Southern California attracted a disproportionate number of architects who themselves, or family members, suffered from respiratory problems, among them Myron Hunt, Irving Gill, Charles and Henry Greene, and Gordon Kaufmann. Historian Robert Winter succinctly wrote that “architecture had a curious rendezvous with illness in the early part of the century.”3 Whether he came at the urging of colleagues, or for his health, Osborne Craig was settled in Santa Barbara by late 1916. He married Mary McLaughlin in November 1919, some three years after meeting her. Their only child, Mary Osborne Craig, was born in January 1921.

Mary McLaughlin was born in Deadwood, South Dakota in 1889.

The rough edges of this upbringing would be softened by her east coast associations and education in Washington, D.C., where she attended Georgetown Visitation Convent from the age of twelve to eighteen. Every summer she returned to Deadwood.

Her father, William Law McLaughlin, a lawyer associated with the great Homestake Mine, taught Mary to chop wood h nt fish saddle and ride a horse over the rough terrain of the Badlands, and to know in more ways than one how to hold herself up to challenges in a man’s world. Her ex-

James Osborne Craig in Flagstaff, Arizona, ca. 1915.

emplary education at the convent culminated in top honors in her graduating class. After the death of her father in 1911, Mary and her family moved to Pasadena in 1913. She was twenty-four.

Arriving in California, Mary found Santa Barbara far more alluring than Pasadena. Her aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Edward E. Paramore, and their two garrulous sons, Jim and Ted, had made Santa Barbara home since moving there from St. Louis in 1911.

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The McLaughlin family home in Deadwood, South Dakota, where Mary McLaughlin was born in 1889. Courtesy Deadwood History, Adams Museum Collection, Deadwood, SD.

(Mrs. Paramore and Mary’s mother, Sarah, were twin sisters.)

The Paramores made Mary’s entry into Montecito society seamless. Both of her co sins c t dashin fi res with their ood loo s fine dress social poise and privileged educations. For the next four years, spending less and less time in Pasadena, Mary found herself happily enveloped by numerous friends and the social norms of Montecito society. It would be these early friendships that contributed in large part to Osborne’s client base, and later, to Mary’s.

In the last year of his life Osborne Craig was working on nine private

and public commissions, including the restoration of Santa Barbara’s city center and redevelopment of Plaza de la Guerra, plans for El Paseo and the private residence of Bernhard Hoffmann. With his lungs aggravated by years of debilitating asthma, Craig died unexpectedly of bronchial pneumonia in Ojai on March 15, 1922.

The thirty-three-year-old architect was on the threshold of his career.

Only in the years after his death did his work gain in reputation; his houses appeared in several nationally recognized publications and in 1926 he would be one of only three American architects to be featured in the

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS 1926 British publication, The Studio Yearbook and Decorative Art.4 Mary Craig was remarkably decisive in the months following Osborne’s death; with little money of her own and thirty-two years old with a small child to support, she made the decision to carry on with Osborne’s architectural practice. By the mid1920s, having hired licensed architect Ralph Armitage, Mary Craig soon became a formidable presence amongst the long list of local talented designers he wor ed aro nd her deficit of being unlicensed; architect Ralph Armitage was indispensable to her, and at the same time it was in his best interest to remain in her employment.

For the next thirty years Armitage would partner with her, signing off on all of her plans and gaining for himself an extraordinary legacy as a skilled draftsman and engineer.

Mary Craig’s long career comprised over a hundred projects, including the house for Mrs. Colin Mary McLaughlin, right, with a friend and the family dog, Buster, in Deadwood.

189 Campbell (the Campbell Ranch House in Goleta, now owned by the University of California, Santa Barbara), the houses of Plaza Rubio for Mrs. Margaret Andrews, El Prado for client E.J. Miley (now the Immaculate Heart Center for Spiritual Renewal), and the W. C. Logan Building and Arcade on East Carrillo Street. These were followed by houses in Wilmington, Delaware, for Amy Du Pont and in Los Angeles for Hollywood producer Jesse Lasky.

Mary knew that strictly speaking, she was a designer, and not an architect. This distinction at times kept her marginalized, but it did not deter her.

190 Even though she was a woman in a man’s world and unlicensed, she challenged convention all along the way; the concepts were hers but it would be Armitage who would work out the details, get them down on paper and bring them to completion. Craig’s many clients over the years, and the houses she designed, more than validated her capabilities. Nevill Cramer, for whom she built a house in the 1950s, would later say of the partnership between Mary Craig and Ralph Armitage, “Neither one would have prospered without the other.”5 Mary Craig died in 1964, leaving behind an impressive legacy and some of Santa Barbara’s most beautiful houses. Although the totality of the Craigs’ work and lives is undeniably a Santa Barbara story, and a largely untold and si nificant e isode in the development of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture in the United States, their story is also intimately connected to a rich diversity of individuals who made California their home during the first half of the twentieth cent r t was a rare generation, not only defined b the ori ins of their af ence b t in enced b entre rene rshi western expansion, America’s rapid industrial growth, two world wars, the Great Depression, the rise of Hollywood, and a particular vigor in politics, art and literature. Some made their fortunes by their own efforts; others arrived with inherited wealth.

For some Santa Barbara became a permanent home; others came and

NOTICIAS went with the seasons. Whether looking for emotional refuge, a life of leisure, well-being, inspiration, or alternatives in life style, Santa Barbara, with its mild climate and Mediterranean aura of mountains and sea, offered a particular seduction.

Many of the Craigs’ acquaintances, representing the entrepreneurial spirit of nineteenth-century America, had remarkable and diverse histories.

Whether clients or literary and artistic friends, their stories make not only for a rich narrative, but represent lives of unusual character and circumstance.

The Paramores He was one of the most attractive men I have ever known, and one of the most admirable. When an artist or a writer dies, we are ordinarily consoled by the knowledge that his vision of life has survived, but in the case of Mr. Paramore, I have felt deep regret at the thought that all that world which he has seen and heard, which he had absorbed and recreated has vanished with him. While he was alive, I still had the feeling that the America of the old South and West was still within my reach, that I could come into contact with it directly, and now, since I have heard of his death, I have felt as if it had died too, and I should never know it again.6 From the time she arrived in Pasadena in 1913, twenty-four-year-old Mary McLaughlin found herself spending much of her time in Santa arbara with relati es the af ent

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS and colorful Paramore family, transplants from St. Louis, who in 1912 made Santa Barbara their permanent home. The Paramores exerted a decisi e for ati e in ence on ar and also assured her swift entry into Santa Barbara society. ar s ncle d dward erett Paramore (1861-1928), was married to her other s twin sister ar Clary Paramore. He had inherited his

191 money from his father who became rich after the Civil War conceiving and managing the Cotton Belt Railroad that linked St. Louis and Texas. After rad ation fro ale d wor ed for his father for a time but soon turned to other ventures. He never remained long with any one business pursuit, and loved roaming the country looking for adventure. A skilled yachtsman, he designed several, including the Endymion which he sailed throughout the world. Galveston Bay, Texas, was one of his favorite and most frequented spots.

His ring carried the Paramore crest, Sic itur ad astra (So sail following the stars). His passion for living, in pleasure or business, took in the gamut of American life at the turn of the 20th century, and his inheritance allowed him to live a comfortable life as sailor, vagabond, investor, designer of houses and stor teller ara ore wo ld not tolerate injustice to any man and if he witnessed it, he intervened. He was generous to a fault, lending money to almost anyone in need. At the time of his death in 1928, he had lost almost all of his fortune. n her ďŹ rst ears in anta arEdward and Mary Paramore. Mary Craig was extremely close to the family and the Paramores were an important conduit to Osborne Craig’s early clientele.

192 bara, Mary McLaughlin stayed with the Paramores in their house on Ocean View Avenue; built in 1914, it had been designed by Paramore himself.

Mary and Osborne were married there in 1919. Always restless for change, Paramore asked Craig in 1921 to draw up two schemes for a new house, one in the Spanish style and one English dor ho h the final ho se lan in Spanish Colonial style did not match Osborne’s, it did incorporate what Craig shows in both of his drawings: a sitting room and sun porch on the second oor ow ch Crai a e of his efforts in supervising the building of the house is unknown; he died shortly before it was completed.

Writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) became a close friend to young Ted Paramore when the both attended the ill chool in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Visiting the Paramores in Santa Barbara in the 1920s, Wilson came to greatly admire Ted’s father with whom he would spend long hours in deep conversation. Aspects of Ed’s life and personality were portrayed in a memorial tribute Wilson wrote and published in The New Republic in 1928.

Wilson was intrigued by the elder Paramore’s rich and varied experiences and, admiring his ability to “seize and hold all that he had seen” in his many years of travel, wrote: His relation to the West in particular can only be described as masterly. He had been everywhere and knew how to live

NOTICIAS everywhere and how to deal with everybody. He drank in the old-fashioned American style, and expected everyone else to do the same… His eyes… alight with a strange leaping and gleaming lapidary intensity of life… one felt that the singularity of his appearance was the sign of a deeper originality.

E.E. Paramore was a heavy-set and broad-shouldered man, with unusually small hands and feet, and a jovial rounded face. Meeting him for the first ti e eo le i ht incorrectl assume him to be an awkward and clumsy man, without physical agility.

Yet he had been an avid pugilist at Yale (he graduated in 1882), where he approached the sport more as an art for is class ate and close friend at ale enr iddle also a fellow pugilist, wrote to him, “You were the only man I could ‘hit’ as hard as I wanted to without being afraid of his getting mad.”7 Later in his life Paramore loved nothing more than to show others his nimble movements. Edmund Wilson remembers one day coming upon the sight of him in a room of his house in Montecito, “performing old-fashioned ballet steps for a little girl who had just come with her mother to call: Mr. Ed and the little girl had got off into the room by themselves and had been having a marvelous time.” That little girl, often entertained by her Uncle Ed, was Mary Craig’s small daughter, Mary Osborne Craig. Impressed by the sight, Wilson wrote, “What aston-

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS ished me most, however, was the fact that, in reproducing the old ballet routine, which he appeared to remember with accuracy, he had made me seem to see for a moment precisely the kind of thing that people had once admired in ballet dancing.”8 Uncle Ed’s wife, Mary, embraced her niece like a daughter. The aunt’s

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reocc ation with fine clothes social standing and the family’s carefree life of travel and entertaining held a particular spell over young Mary. With early introductions to their St. Louis, Santa Barbara, Yale and Harvard connections, Mary’s cousins introduced her to erica s af ent he in t rn comfortably made the introductions for Osborne’s early client base.

Though Osborne Craig never cared for their values or their lifestyle, the Paramores represented a si nificant lin to his earliest commissions.

Later these ingenuous connections also fueled Mary’s career. It would be the contrast and experience of these two opposing forces that would most powerf ll sha e and define her later life.

Mary lived with the Paramores for weeks at a time between 1913 and 1918. Ted and Jim were more like brothers to her, and she found their gay life seductive. Having followed in their father’s footsteps at Yale, they later went their divergent ways in terms of interests and persuasions, but they retained a special loyalty to each other, and to Mary, whom they had known well since childhood and considered their confidante ased on a rr of corres ondence among the three, Mary is Fun-loving Uncle Ed loved nothing more than showing seen as an engaging, vigorous off his nimble dance moves. and fun-loving woman, sought

194 after by many a young man. The ara ore bo s ďŹ lled with their nowled e of rench hrases literat re sic and oetr wrote her lon witt and dra atic letters ďŹ llin her in on their latest social esca ades n the years before she met Osborne, ar and i corres onded often o n er b onl one ear i offered ar san ine ad ice in the wa s of o n en s affections not hesitatin

NOTICIAS to write to her that she was the worst irt the worst ollier ha e e er listened to in life o wonder o ha e en fro all o er the co ntr writin o letters which o don t now whether to answer or not it is dangerous ar it is dangerous.�9 he a eal of her o n er co sin ed led ar down a ore n redictable ath artic larl concernin her ood friend ar aret ater an whose father ater an ade his estate Mira Vista the nchallen ed show lace in ontecito at the t rn of the last ed ara ore was cent r 10 nineteen when in he and ar aret fell in lo e and ar Crai was ri to the iss es s rro ndin the lon and t lt o s lo e affair which lasted between the two ntil ar aret s tra ic death in he relationshi beca e e en ore co le when d nd ilson fell in lo e with ar aret and arried her in ilson nreser edl reco nts the stor in his diaries b t al ost e er bio ra her of the fa o s an of letters incl des so e ersion of the trian lar dra a albeit not alwa s acc rate 11 ollowin ilson s death in a series of fo r boo s were blished titled The Twenties, Ted Paramore, ca. 1915. Rather wild as a young man, he later became a successful writer.

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS The Thirties, The Forties, and The Fifties, based on Wilson’s notebooks, diaries and letters that he left to Yale University. The books offer a unique perspective into Santa Barbara’s social fabric in the 1920s and 1930s, including generous commentary about the Paramore family and Mary Craig.12 Considering him generous and clever, Wilson described Ted Paramore as “infectiously amusing” and “well intentioned,” and his gustatory concoctions included “sweetbreads smothered in aspirin tablets” and “veal cutlet with sauce Veronal.”

Ted’s life in the 1920s, divided between New York and Santa Barbara, vacillated between riotous living, thoughtful writing and good deeds.

Until he found stability in the late 1940’s with his third wife, Anna Frenke Paramore, his often dissolute nature caused grave concern to the family. After Osborne’s death Mary was more than ever his confidant and also a respectful, loyal and stern critic.13 Ted Paramore’s wildness and lack of inhibition were made famous by Wilson. While living together in New York after college, Wilson found Paramore’s excesses not only instructive, but intriguing. Paramore would say of his roommate “I live, and Bunny [Wilson was called “Bunny” by his friends] writes my life.” In fact, Paramore later acknowledged that ilson s wor s of fiction I Thought of Daisy (1929) and Memoirs of Hecate

195 County (1946) did indeed expose his real life escapades.14 Though he returned to Santa Barbara often, Ted Paramore lived and wor ed ost of his ad lt life first in New York and later in Hollywood as a free-lance writer, theater and book critic and scri twriter is first real success, “Ballad of Yukon Jake,” a tribute and parody of a ballad by Robert er ice was first blished in Condé Nast’s Vanity Fair in 1921 and in book format in 1928. Soon his articles began appearing in the Baltimore Sun, Life, Labor Age, The Bookman and The Freeman.15 Intensely interested and thoughtful about constitutional issues, labor laws, and the world at large, Paramore’s intellectual acumen resulted in Yale graduates Henry R. Luce and Briton Hadden including him, along with Archibald MacLeish, Stephen Vincent Benet and others, in the launching of the new Time magazine in 1923. Paramore, with Harvard graduate Alan Rinehart, wrote on national affairs. His stint with Time did not last.16 After producing several plays on Broadway, including the well-received Set a Thief, Paramore decamped for Hollywood in 1929 and reinvented himself for the next eighteen years as a motion picture scriptwriter. He began at Paramount’s famous Lasky Corp, then went on to RKO, Columbia, Fox Film Corporation, Metro-GoldwynMayer, and Universal and Republic Pictures Corp. Paramore is credited,

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Ted Paramore’s book, The Ballad of Yukon Jake, was published in 1928.

all or in part, with thirty-three motion pictures, including The Virginian (1929), Three Comrades (1938), based on Erich Remarque’s anti-Nazi novel and co-written with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Oklahoma Kid (1939), starring James Cagney. In his autobiography Cagney gives credit to Paramore for concei in the stor for the fil and working with him on the early research.17 Like his hero, George Bernard Shaw, and influenced early on by his good friend Prynce Hopkins, Paramore was a liberal socialist and political activist. An early member of Hollywood’s Screen Writers Guild, he was outspoken even when black-

listing ran rampant in the 1940s. He made his politics transparent to everyone. Justice meant everything to him; if he saw anyone harm his friends through wrongdoing, he was their champion. He had tremendous integrity, as was played out when the Guild came under attack for its radical leanings and he was offered $3,000 to relinquish his membership.

He would not hear of it. A Hollywood agent said of him soon after, “He is the only ethical man in town.”

As a political reporter, the quality of his work was due to his ability to learn from the opposition, and like Shaw, he believed one could do anything with humor.18

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IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS Paramore suffered from long periods of depression, breakdowns, and heavy drinking. Wilson always said of his friend that with his ability to be impartial and totally honest, combined with his sophisticated humor and inventiveness, he should have become a political writer and journalist.19 Unlike his older brother, Jim, who was content in his conventional life as a San Francisco lawyer, Ted spent most of his life chasing his muse, never quite settling into a comfortable professional niche. Mary Craig’s fondness for Ted Paramore always won out over her urge to abandon him. Seeing her often in the 1930s, he further brought into her life an assortment of new acquaintances and clients.

Paramore’s last motion picture on which he collaborated, The Sea of Grass, was released in 1947. In the early 1950s he returned to Santa Barbara with his wife, Anna, and rented one of Mary Craig’s cottages on her property, One Acre. While Ted wrote, Anna spent time assisting Mary with her work, often driving her to her job sites. More than ever at the top of his game at the age of sixty-one, Ted Paramore died suddenly and tragically in 1956 when he fell onto his head from a lift he was riding in a multi-story parking garage. His wife later remarried, and then divorced, Marlon Brando, Sr. Ted Paramore is remembered as having all the charms of a “male Scheherazade.”20 Like the famous

Persian queen, and like his father before him, his wit, wisdom and sophistication were seductive. Holding close all the best of his memories as a young man, he considered Santa Barbara his refuge. His earlier days there with the young Mary McLaughlin, and later when he lived at One Acre in the 1950s, were some of his most secure. Believing it to be the only place he could really write, Santa Barbara was his muse. Despite his human frailties and knowing his was a life to deride as well as to praise, Mary Craig always remained loyal to her temperamentally brilliant, errant, and lovable cousin.

Bernhard Hoffmann He was quite free from the handicap of vanity or propaganda or the childishness of demagogy in advancing his ideas. He knew how to make goodness attractive and this not only in expression but by a spiritual quality of so pure a kind that it resulted in abstract formulation or conventional formulation. He did not want goodness talked about; he wanted to see it in action and had the art of so expressing it that his words gave creative energy to anything that he expressed.21 Born and raised in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Bernhard Hoffmann (1874-1949) was educated at Williams Academy (1891) and Cornell University (1895) where he received a degree in electrical engineering. In 1903, he married Irene Botsford of Chicago;

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Irene Hoffmann took the lead in connecting herself and her husband with James Osborne Craig. The result was commissions for the Hoffmanns’ Casa Santa Cruz and for El Paseo. Courtesy Caroline Hoffmann Williams.

Bernhard Hoffmann played a key role in Santa Barbara’s architectural transformation in the 1920s. Courtesy Caroline Hoffmann

Williams.

whose affluent and civic minded father, Henry Botsford, became a leader in the packing and provision industry.22 The couple had three children. Hoffmann’s work in the telephone industry and consulting kept him based in New York until 1919, when seeking life-saving medical attention for their young diabetic daughter, Margaret, the family moved to Santa Barbara.23 Though Bernhard Hoffmann has been called Osborne Craig’s “Medici,” it well may have been his wife who initially encouraged the relationship.

Irene Hoffmann was a woman of

strong convictions, and by all accounts she was a si nificant force in anta Barbara’s architectural renaissance in the years 1920 to 1928. Her reputation in 1931, only a few years after she and Bernhard removed themselves from the often contentious politics concerning Santa Barbara’s identity as a Spanish town, was based on what some considered “her interest in historic sites and buildings” which intuitively “drew her attention to the older adobes, and soon led her to undertake the preservation of the old De la Guerra

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS House…”24 One story recounts that it was Mrs. off ann who first et Crai hile ta in anish lessons fro elfina de la erra in the historic Casa de la erra she as ed her teacher for a nowled eable architect rs offann was directed the street to the office of the o n cot sborne Crai whose office was in the re a adobe restored recentl b Crai hi self hen r off ann referred to his and his wife s earliest ideas to reser e anta arbara s old ti e bea t he added witho t hesitation in realit this is rs off ann s drea Clearl both rene and her h sband wor ed to ether in their affiliation with Crai n the ears

Casa Santa Cruz, the home of Bernhard and Irene Hoffmann, designed by James Osborne Craig.

199 to when ernhard off ann had a stron hold on the town s ci ic or ani ations and co ittees rene off ann was al ost alwa s resent at the onthl eetin s 25 a nchin the little nown architect into the s otli ht the off anns relied on hi not onl to desi n their own ho se Casa anta Cr b t to be in lans for l aseo and e la erra la a i in for to the off anns ideas for the architect ral bea tification of anta arbara these were witho t do bt Crai s ost si nificant co issions hortl after Crai s death referrin to anta arbara s architect re as its o tdoor for s of art off ann wor ed do edl to con ince cit officials to en-

200 dorse Craig’s scheme for the new city plaza, which he believed would set the tone for a responsible and aesthetically sophisticated development.

Unfortunately these efforts fell on deaf ears.26 Osborne Craig’s intimate partnership with his patrons lasted for a mere twenty-seven months. As brief as it was, it had a permanent effect upon Santa Barbara’s architectural legacy.

Hoffmann worked energetically to enrich the local architectural environment by championing an aesthetic of simplicity and beauty. He faced enormous challenges, particularly in the years of reconstruction after the devastating earthquake of June 1925. He had his opponents, and he succinctly described the situation when he wrote to a friend that the Architectural Advisory Board was “going quite well, but we are in the position of the man on the surf board, if he stays ahead of the crest of the wave he may reach the beach, if not he gets a dousing.”27 Following the completion of his own house and El Paseo, Hoffmann turned his efforts towards the greater needs of Santa Barbara’s architectural identity; its business district he believed should be defined by its Hispanic roots in order to succeed aesthetically. From 1919 to early 1925, the city seemed to be enamored with propagating the Spanish themes. The earthquake of June 1925 left most of the newer buildings unscathed, providing the momentum and the opportunity to rebuild in the Spanish Colo-

NOTICIAS nial style on a grand scale. On July 5, 1925, the Morning Press reported on the recent travels of Mrs. Hoffmann and that the “Hoffmanns’ beautiful Spanish-type house suffered badly broken plaster all over the lower floor . . . .” due to the earthquake. Bernard Hoffmann, rarely expressing himself publicly, sent a strong retort to the editor, Reginald Fernald, the following day: The inaccuracies in the first part of the item are no exception to the general rule in this column and do not interest or affect us, but as to the reference to the damage to our house, feel ver differentl and ver strongl A wholl false statement of this nature might ordinaril go unanswered but in this instance it constitutes a libelous reection on the work of the architect who, unfortunatel for us, is no longer able to speak for himself t is further a re ection on the work of the architect who, after Mr raig s death, took over the work for the completion of the house, and most of all a re ection on the integrit of the work of the contractors who built the house and their foreman on this particular ob As the house stood unharmed b the uake, offering such a striking testimonial to the integrit of the design and the execution of these people, desire and expect a retraction and an apolog from the author of the statement, with the prominence which it deserves.28 An apology to Hoffmann appeared the next day in the paper. With

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS The Street in Spain, the iconic entrance to El Paseo, Osborne Craig’s most renowned creation. Photograph by Jessie Tarbox Beals. Courtesy Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

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202 the exception of Mary Craig, Hoffmann’s familiarity with Craig was beyond the scope of anyone else who came in contact with the young architect. Hoffmann’s words to Fernald represent one of the few times he offered up his sentiments for the man he singled out to carry forth his vision for Santa Barbara’s architectural heritage.

Following the earthquake, the establishment of the Architectural Board of Review and Community Drafting Room, largely conceived and controlled by Hoffmann, set in motion the idea that the destroyed downtown area of State Street should be reconstructed along Spanish lines. With the Hoffmanns pouring their money into numerous civic projects, it began successfully enough; with Pearl Chase commenting that “the idea of a uniform style of architecture… took like

NOTICIAS wild fire t it wo ld not be lon before city merchants, nervous about property rights even before the earthquake, began to complain. Hoffmann was not naïve concerning public opinion and he knew the review board would face criticism. He wrote to architect William Templeton Johnson some weeks after the earthquake, “The Board of Review has been able to function and so far has not been taken out and shot at s nrise 29 Often called upon to speak at local venues, Bernhard Hoffmann’s topic at one such event was the relationship between the artist and the business man: There has always been an unfortunate misunderstanding between the artist and the practical or business man. The artist has bewailed the fact that the business

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man misses many opportunities to enhance his work by higher vision and application of artistic principles. The business man, per contra, feels that the artist is an impractical dreamer and to follow blindly his guidance might end in disastrous results. As in everything in life, a combination of the extremes is indicated. The artist needs the practical business man’s aid and support and the business man can well profit b the artist s vision We all want to hitch our wagon to a star and we need an astronomer to point the way. It is for us to supply the motive power and effort.30

Architecture is the one fine art that is least generally appreciated. This deplorable condition, affecting that essential art, is due entirely to the lack of popular criticism, such as has been so potent in developing literature, painting, sculpture, music, drama, even the movies and the sports.

All artists, except architects, know that a poorly executed work will be severely criticized. The architect knows that no public criticism will be made of his work and that Americans generall have no fine sense of architectural values. The stimulus of criticism has been denied to him and the art has suffered accordingly.32

Certainly Craig and Hoffmann’s relationship epitomized artist and business man, but Hoffmann was not any ordinary business man, as articulated by what he believed to be a responsibility, and the essence of his ission cit that de elo s finel should delight the eye, feed the intellect and lead the people out of the bondage of the commonplace.”31 Hoffmann fervently believed that the public could be brought around to appreciating good architecture, and writing to architect Myron Hunt asking for his comments and advice, he quoted from a review of a recent book about architect Bertram Goodhue:

State Street represented the sanctity of property rights. For the upper class, it symbolized all that was bad in American ‘Main Street’ architecture.”

Hoffmann and his supporters would be confronted with growing opposition fro b siness and town officials largely represented by Thomas M. Storke’s editorials in the Daily News.

Though Storke had written a favorable editorial in 1922 supporting the Hoffmanns and Craig’s plan for a new city plaza, it was momentary praise.33 By 1926, possessing a powerful hold on public opinion, Storke believed that Hoffmann and his review board “represented a form of ‘aesthetic censorship.’” Gradually Hoffmann lost his hold on general opinion and a public who felt he and his upper class minority had become coercive and dictatorial.34 Even Pearl Chase wrote that there were “differences frequently develop-

EFT Another important figure in Santa Barbara’s architectural renaissance was Pearl hase, seen here at the office of the Plans and Planting Committee, Community Arts Association, 1925. Courtesy Special Collections,

Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara.

204 ing between the community service ideal and that of ‘High art’ and it was generally agreed that the Association suffered loss in community support when the latter ideal was pushed witho t s fficient consideration of the average person’s point of view, knowledge and wishes.” In March 1926, the Architectural Board of Review was abolished, yet Hoffmann continued his crusade by asking H. Phillip Staats to create and edit a major book on Santa Barbara architecture; Californian Architecture in Santa Barbara would be published in 1929. Not often discussed in historical and biographical writings of Hoffmann’s life, and despite the success of the newly published book, it was a demoralizing time for Hoffmann.35 At some point Storke reversed his earlier views under the urging of Pearl Chase, considered by Storke a “force of nature.” Chase worked closely with Hoffmann in the years 1922 to 1928.

Both had given tirelessly to the notion of beauty in public buildings, and the “word around town was that the only person T.M. feared was Pearl. When she arched into his office wantin something, she usually got it.” And once Storke ‘got it’ about the new architecture, he was a strong force for quality architecture in public buildings.”36 Worn down by the politics and an undercurrent of indifference and blatant opposition to his ideals, by December 1927 Hoffmann set the gears in motion for his resignation from all of-

NOTICIAS ficial d ties earl the forces of public opinion had risen to such a high crescendo of politics, press and money that Hoffmann withdrew entirely from all civic involvement. He and Irene began to divide their time between their homes in Stockbridge and Santa Barbara. Pearl Chase, havin ta en o er official d ties as the watchdog for civic beauty, would in the intervening years, often turn to off ann nofficiall for ad ice This very private man died in Stockbridge in July 1949, leaving behind fragmentary evidence of his personal and professional life.37 Architect William Templeton Johnson praised Hoffmann as “a practical idealist in the best American tradition…frail in body but abounding in spirit… a man who “worked with selfeffacing devotion for civic art, city planning, roadside beauty, better homes, music and drama, and many other cultural causes dear to his heart.”38 In 1949 Storke eulogized Hoffmann, “a quiet, kindly man,” for his courage in standing up to the forces, Storke once among them, working against him during the reconstruction years after the earthquake. The editor and publisher of the Santa Barbara News-Press, Storke wrote: He was an engineer by professional training. As a scientist he shrank from the semi-political efforts that many of his ideas needed to succeed. He tried to give more to Santa Barbara, even at the ex-

205

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS pense of his mental comfort. It can be said now, to his great credit and without his embarrassment, that among the things he studied earnestly, in his efforts to help this city, were ways of releasing himself from his natural shyness and his inability to ‘glad hand’ in behalf of the projects that were dear to him. No one can give more than the discomfort of their ‘natural bent’, in behalf of their service to others.

Bernhard Hoffmann organized Santa Barbara’s first attempt to control its building and development so that they would preserve for the city the most valuable part of its past, and the most valuable part of its natural advantages.

We have not carried on the dream as well as we should. We might, if we really appreciate what he thought out and what he did for this city, try to revive and strengthen his hopes for his adopted city.

He tried to perpetuate the best in the spirit of this city. This city might—in simple honest settlement of a debt—try to perpetuate here some of the best in the spirit of Bernhard Hoffmann.39 Bernhard Hoffmann accomplished much in the relatively short time he lived in Santa Barbara. Though his initiatives were sometimes rebuked by an architectural and merchant community which considered his ideals high minded, he remained long enough to have a profound and positi e in ence on the architect ral RIGHT: Margaret Burnes, ca. 1918, right, with daughter Lucile who had married Earl Armstrong. Courtesy Michael Oliver.

identity of the city. In the words of Mary Craig’s eccentric English friend and author, Aylmer Hunter, Bernhard Hoffmann was “a golden thread running through the tangled skein of controversy.”40 Mrs. James Nelson Burnes, III and the Armstrong Brothers Mrs. James Nelson Burnes of Pasadena purportedly asked James Osborne Craig, at a tea party, to build a house on the western edge of her property at Fernald Point. The next summer a French Norman farmhouse was there. As with all of Craig’s designs—such as El Paseo and the De la Guerra adobe additions, the Bernhard Hoffmann house, or the Harold Chase beach house at Sandyland—the new house had all the avor of a transplanted fantasy, with a solid natural relationship with its surroundings, to look as if it had always been there.41

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Mary McLaughlin was good friends with the Burnes family. Left to right: Meakin Burnes, Mary McLaughlin, Lucile Armstrong, and Margaret Burnes, Pasadena, ca. 1915.

Though Osborne Craig’s affiliation with ron nt in asadena between and has ne er been erified nt and sborne Crai wo ld be called on at different ti es to desi n ho ses for rs a es elson rnes nt desi ned and b ilt a rand ho se for the fa il in asadena in fter rs rnes rchased ro ert in ontecito at ernald oint in he desi ned a s er ho se b ilt between and earl to be shared b her lar e fa il r and rs a es elson rnes were considered one of the wealthiest co les in the co ntr when the first be an winterin in asadena fro their ho etown of t ose h is so ri ho h it is ossible that s borne Crai new rs rnes while nt s ernald oint ho se was bein b ilt Crai was in anta arbara in it is ore li el that it was ar who ade the later introd ction re s ltin in sborne s co ission to b ild another ho se for rs rnes in ar had nown the rnes fa il sociall since her arri al in asadena in

ar aret c ner nown as earl to her fa il was born e te ber in ad cah c a en Co nt ent c the second da h ter of ei ht children born to a es and li abeth c ner ne of her sisters ar lett c ner who beca e rs er an ettleroth sed to co e o t to anta arbara and sta at the ilt ore a il lore has it that she was dri en there in a li o sine fro o is ille b a cha ffe r who

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS doubled as a dancing partner when called upon. Another sister, Garnett Buckner McManus, lived for many years in Montecito, as did her daughter, Peggy Houghtaling.43 The Buckner family was well regarded, and Paducah had several of its finer ho es feat red in national architectural periodicals at the turn of the last century. Margaret, who by the age of eighteen was “a beauty with masses of upswept hair”, attended a social ball in Dallas and there met an Alabaman by the name of Mr. Arthur Powell Cary (1865-1901). Married in Paducah in 1892, they moved to Dallas where their four children, Joseph, Lucile, Elizabeth (Bess), and Arthur Jr., were born. Arthur Cary was a hardworking and much respected Dallas citizen involved in the commercial development of the city. Margaret Cary faced two personal tragedies on the same day, April 29, 1901, when her husband died at home of pneumonia, and her seven-year-old son Joseph, while fishin with friends died in a drowning accident at a nearby reservoir. Joseph and his father were buried together in one grave at Dallas’ Oakland Cemetery on May 1, 1901.44 It was a devastating blow to Margaret Cary, but when she recovered, she left for Europe. It was on the ship that she met and fell in love with Mr. James Nelson Burnes III (1853-1913), a graduate of St. Louis University, a bachelor and prosperous businessman from St. Joseph, Missouri. Marrying Burnes in 1902, with her three small

207 children Margaret began a new life in St. Joseph, moving into the Burnes estate known as Ayr Lawn, named for its expansive lawn that fronted the house.

She bore two children by Mr. Burnes; Mary Katherine (Meakin) born in 1904, and James Nelson Burnes IV, born in 1907.

Mr. Burnes came from an illustrious Missouri family, whose roots traced back to Scotland, and to the great poet Robert Burns. His father, Daniel Deerborn Burnes, and his two uncles, Calvin and James Nelson Burnes II, after receiving law degrees from Harvard, returned to Missouri where they exhibited an appetite for hard work and entrepreneurship. The three brothers formed the foundation of the rnes fort ne financin new rail lines and major bridges over the Misso ri i er and a in si nificant investments in land and the export of cotton. Founders of the National Bank of St. Joseph, they were devoted to liberal causes and James II and Daniel, staunch Democrats, were elected to Congress.45 Ayr Lawn, where Margaret Burnes spent the next eleven years, had an impressive past. It had been the Burnes family compound since 1883 and eventually passed into the hands of her husband on the death of his last surviving uncle in 1893. The estate, originally named Walnut Grove, sat high above the city of St. Joseph and looked down upon the wide Missouri River with expansive views in every direction.46

208 A far cry from Paducah or Dallas, Ayr Lawn’s large house resembled “an old Scottish castle” and “on the lawn there was a marble fountain of a little angel that resembled a Lazy Susan in a wading pool.” The Burnes compound was often filled with the n ero s siblings and cousins of Margaret’s husband and it became a center for frequent social and political acquaintances of the family.47 J.N. Burnes, intimately involved in the affairs of the Burnes fortune in St. Joseph, became publisher of the St. Joseph Gazette and went on to found the Empire Trust Company in 1905.

Like his uncles before him, he continued to work diligently at bettering the city of St. Joseph with his talents and his money. He was a private man by nature and as a philanthropist shunned the limelight.

Though Ayr Lawn continued to be their main residence, in 1906 the family began to winter in Pasadena, a growing mecca for Midwesterners.

Staying for several seasons at the Maryland Hotel, they soon purchased what was considered exclusive residential property on El Molino Avenue in Oak Knoll, on the western side of Pasadena. Owned originally by Henry Huntington, the area was already known for its stately mansions designed by such notables as Greene and Greene and Wallace Neff. Sometime between 1909 and 1911 Margaret Burnes commissioned Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey to design their house, and by 1912 pictures of the completed

NOTICIAS mansion appeared in several architectural publications. Burnes took an active role in Pasadena’s banking interests and began to make numerous land investments in California. With ar aret as the first resident the couple helped found Pasadena’s Sheltering Arms Home. The Burnes’ eldest daughter, sixteen-year-old Lucile, married Earl Van Ornam Armstrong of Pasadena in the fall of 1912.48 Soon the Burnes family discovered the charms of Santa Barbara and rented there findin it a ref e fro the intense summer heat of Pasadena.

The family returned regularly to Ayr Lawn, where Mr. Burnes was still absorbed by his many business dealings in St. Joseph. In June 1913 the family rented a house again in Santa Barbara for the entire summer. It was here in late July that Margaret Burnes faced yet another tragedy.

Young Arthur Cary, who was fourteen years old at the time, got into the front seat of the family car while Mr. Burnes began cranking the engine.

Somehow the car lunged forward, running over him.

Burnes was gravely injured, and the accident was kept a secret for weeks while he lay near death at the rented house. He died on August 22, with his wife, his brother ewis and his fi e children b his bedside. Though the obituary ran in several St. Joseph and Pasadena newspapers, details of the accident were never fully disclosed. Ironically, a week before his death, in the same house, a child was born to Lucile and

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS arl r stron the rnes first grandchild, a daughter.49 With her children committed to California, Margaret Burnes turned Ayr Lawn over to other Burnes’ family members. Though the Pasadena house remained her major residence, in 1914 she bo ht fi e acres of land at ernald Point in Montecito with plans to build a summer house. Ready for an engaging distraction, she called again upon the services of Myron Hunt to build a beach house on the new property. Hunt’s master plan for Mrs. Burnes’ property appeared in a feature article “The Work of Mr. Myron Hunt”

by David Allison in the April 1918 issue of The Architect and Engineer.50 By 1918 the Burnes and Armstrong clan were familiar faces amongst Santa

209 Barbara’s summer residents. Margaret Burnes, in her savvy and forward thinking manner also purchased additional land near Sharks Cove, in order to prevent the unsightly derricks and piers, already in large numbers along the water’s edge at Summerland, from moving westward and spoiling her views.51 Sometime in 1919, Margaret Burnes turned to Osborne Craig to design a second ho se on the ernald oint property.

Widowed and forty-six years old, Burnes was a strong indomitable spirit whose tragedies in her life had not dampened her desire to be energetically engaged with her future and that of her family. She was already a grandmother to Lucile and Earl’s two young children. With her

Osborne Craig’s only venture into the French Norman style was this house for Margaret Burnes, which the family christened Normandy Cottage. From The Architect and Engineer, August 1922.

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The Armstrong boys: Lionel, LeRoy, and Earl in Montecito, ca. 1918. Co rtes

other four children almost grown and the nt ho se often ďŹ lled to ca acit each s er she wanted to en o the co an of her fa il b t ha e the ri ac of her own ho se 52 rnes was a conte orar woman, down to earth, articulate and naffected he did not ďŹ t into the cate or of the s oiled and s erďŹ cial wo en that sborne had so eti es encountered with his commissions, and li e hi she had a reat lo e of literature, including the works of ran a who she new ersonall nown for her so thern hos italit she entertained often when she was in anta arbara ar c a hlin was among the guests who attended an o era recital held at the

ichael

li er

Burnes house in August 1919 where ar aret s sister rs c an s san and r c an s a co oser ianist acco anied her 53 ar aret rnes wish for her new ho se was that it be si le to r n et something that hinted of Ayr Lawn where she had s ent so an ha ears or and Cotta e as the ho se wo ld be called b the fa il was the onl ho se that sborne Crai desi ned and b ilt in the rench or an st le e added to it the touches of Ayr Lawn, incl din a s acio s lawn at the bac infor al ardens for owers and e etables a lo el broad ath to the sea and enticin iews fro e er window laced on the atio was a circ lar wadin

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS pool and fountain resembling Ayr Lawn’s, though at its center, instead of an angel spouting water, was a small bo holdin a fish fro whose o th came a plume of water. Burnes moved into Normandy Cottage in September 1920. Less than three months later, after a short illness, she died at a Pasadena hospital on November 15.54 From 1920 until well into the 1940s, the Burnes property at Fernald Point, with the houses designed by Myron Hunt and Osborne Craig, mimicked the earlier idyllic life shared by the Burnes family at Ayr Lawn at the turn of the century. Mrs. Burnes’ children and grandchildren, returning each summer for many years, found it idyllic. Some eighty years later it was written of the land and Craig’s house: “…it shows us how people of means lived in luxury and comfort on a small scale…Having so much land on the beach and sin it as a arden filled with the delights of nature and keeping the house appropriate for its use as a shelter within the setting, albeit in comfort, harks back to a time when money only needed to murmur rather than shout.”55 Osborne Craig’s association with the Burnes family would not end with the completion of Normandy Cottage in the fall of 1920. The subsequent marriage of Lionel Armstrong (1889– 1948) to Mrs. Burnes’ daughter, Mary Katherine (Meakin) Burnes, in 1921 resulted in his commission to build a house in Pasadena for the newly married couple.

211 Moving to Pasadena in 1913, the three Philadelphia-born Armstrong brothers were warmly embraced by Mr. and Mrs. Burnes. LeRoy, then twenty-six and father to a young daughter, was recently divorced. Earl, twenty-three, and Lionel, twenty-one, foot loose and fancy free, spent considerable time at the grand family house on El Molino, courting the three youthful Burnes daughters.56 The boys’ mother, Lillie Van Ornam Armstrong, died in 1901, when Lionel was eleven. Their father, Mylert Melville Armstrong (1851-1910), the son of a Pennsylvania farmer, had earned a vast fortune in the development of paper mills in the Philadelhia area where he first fo nd s ccess in the mass production of paper bags.

After setting up a mill in Lock Haven, PA., he and his brother, Lewis D. Armstrong, founded the Clarion Pulp and Paper Company in the small town of Johnsonburg in 1888. Mylert’s entrepreneurship and sharp business acumen turned the “Paper City” into a thriving commercial and manufacturing center. His keen sense of the potential of other local resources of coal, clay, white sandstone, timber and natural gas, in which he invested, brought Johnsonburg great prosperity, not only in the production of paper, but in coal, bricks, glass, and furniture.57 LeRoy, Earl and Lionel spent their early childhood in Philadelphia, and then moved to Orange, New Jersey, after their father remar-

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The dirigible, Pasadena, takes ight, ionel and eRo Armstrong financiall backed the venture Courtesy Michael Oliver

ried. While Lionel was in college, Mylert Armstrong died of a stroke while on a business trip to Johnsonburg on October 13, 1910. Inheriting a portion of their father’s vast fortune (Mylert had fathered three more sons from his second marriage) and on the urging of one of their father’s business partners, the three eldest Armstrong boys moved west to settle in Pasadena.58 Mrs. Burnes was very fond of the Armstrong boys and they undoubtedly found a kind and generous friend in the woman whose maternal instincts came easily to her. Mr. Burnes, orphaned himself at a young age,

would have been naturally drawn to the young men.59 The brothers often accompanied the Burnes family to Santa Barbara in the summer months. For some years, Lionel and Earl ran the Chandler Motor Car Company in Los Angeles, with Lionel its president in 1915. That same year the company sponsored a much publicized 2,000 mile non-stop run of the Chandler Six from Mexico to Canada. The car made the trip in a record fi e and a half da s he car was so popular that the Armstrong’s company “placed 684 cars in the hands of owners during 1917.”60 Earl and Lionel were both adven-

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS turous, but it was Lionel who earned a reputation as a pioneer in nonrigid dirigible flight. Prior to World War I and training from a base in Pasadena, he was affiliated and flew with famed American aeronautical engineer and aviator Roy Knabenshue. In 1913, Lionel and brother LeRoy backed the building and launching of Knabenshue’s Pasadena, the “first regular passenger-carrying airship line in the United States.”

The craft went on to offer passenger service between Pasadena and Los Angeles, but by 1914, with growing losses due to dwindling patronage, Knabenshue took the business to Chicago.61 With his passion for flying balloons, one day during the war years the twenty-two-year-old Lionel took Bess Burnes up in a balloon over Santa Barbara where, having fallen in love with her, proposed. Feeling she was much too young for marriage, she declined.

Lionel later turned his attentions to the youngest daughter, Meakin. By the time she was thirteen, she had fallen deeply in love with the older man who had been spurned by her sister. Though everyone in the family knew a marriage was inevitable and had great fondness for Lionel, Mrs. Burnes insisted that Meakin first complete her schooling in the east. By the summer of 1921, both Mr. and Mrs. J.N. Burnes had died, Lucile and Earl had three children, and Bess, with a young baby, was married to Lawrence Fox. Meakin, seventeen, was eager to be married.

213 On Friday, August 19th, 1921, the extended family, then at the family house at Fernald Point, found a note from Meakin with unexpected news.

A few days later the Santa Barbara Morning Press gave a generous accounting of the unusual set of events: Miss Mary Katherine Burnes and Lionel Armstrong were married in Ventura on Tuesday, July 19, 1921, the union being the culmination of a romance which began when the bride was a mere child.

The lengthy article in “The Daily Round of Society” continued: . . . the late Mrs. Burnes… was devoted to Lionel and for years he and Mary Katherine Burnes have known that someday they would marry, but because of her youth her mother and sisters opposed the idea of any but a future wedding day. The bride is but seventeen and it was the wish of her famil that she finish school before taking on the larger responsibilities of life.62 Her mother’s death in the fall of 1920 no doubt gave Meakin the freedom to make the decision to marry Lionel, then thirty-one years old, before she completed school, but knowing her sisters would disapprove, a “secret marriage” was arranged. A telegram from Meakin arrived for the family on August 22 saying she and Lionel had just sailed from San Francisco to Honolulu and the South Sea slands for their hone oon e ected

214 in the genteel accounting in the local paper, the family had clearly come to an acceptance of the inevitable culmination of the romance.

Soon after the couple returned from their honeymoon, Lionel engaged Osborne Craig to design a house in Pasadena on Lombardy Road. Lionel considered two plans, one in the Spanish style, the other more in keeping with the house plan for Mrs. Burnes. Choosing the Spanish style house at the end of 1921 Lionel gave Craig the go-ahead to build. When Craig died in March 1922, construction of the Armstrong house had only just begun. Carleton M. Winslow, chosen by Mary Craig to complete Osborne’s active commissions, supervised its completion in the spring of 1922.63 Lionel divorced Meakin in the late 1920s and sold the Craig house on Lombardy Road. In 1928 he engaged Roland E. Coate to design a second house in the Monterey style on West Foothill Boulevard in Arcadia. Lionel Armstrong died in Los Angeles in 1948.

The Lombardy Road house still stands, though it has been considerably altered. Earl and Lucile moved into Mrs. Burnes’ Pasadena house designed by Myron Hunt following her death in 1920, but by March 1923 Earl had engaged the firm of Johnson, Kaufmann and Coate to build another house in the Spanish Colonial style. Divorced from Lucile by 1930, he died in Santa Barbara in 1956. LeRoy, the eldest brother, remarried in 1922 and remained in Pasadena until the early 1930’s when

NOTICIAS

Nancy Leiter shortly after her engagement to Colin Powys Campbell (opposite). She broke family convention by marrying outside the English aristocracy. They were wed in 1904.

Courtesy Julie Campbell Folger.

he returned to Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. He died there in 1933.64 Nancy Leiter Campbell When you see the Campbells be sure and emphasize the fact that this was the only chance I had for rest as I would have to be in Santa Barbara continually the rest of the spring and winter. I do not want them to feel that I would not be up to undertaking their work should they really be considering me.

Osborne, in Palm Springs, to Mary, December 22, 1920.

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS In 1908, when Juliette Williams (1888-1942) married Joseph Leiter (1868-1932), son of Levi Zeigler Leiter, co-founder of Chicago’s retail empire Marshall Field and Company, a legacy for the Craigs would unknowingly be set in motion. Mary Craig’s early friendship with Juliette and her family while attending school in Washington D.C. led to the Craigs’ eventual entree into the world of Colonel Colin Campbell (1859-1923) and his wife, Nancy Leiter Campbell (1872-1930), sister of Joseph Leiter,

when the Campbells arrived in Santa Barbara in 1919.

Mary McLaughlin and the Williams sisters, Juliette, Dorothy and Mary Frances, attended the Convent of the Visitation together in the years 1903 to 1909. Dorothy Williams (18901950) and her husband, the Minister to

215 Ireland, Frederick Sterling (1876-1957), remained Mary’s lifelong and very close friends. Their mother, Maie Hewitt (Mrs. John R.) Williams, affectionately known as “Ma”, was entrepreneurial, down to earth and practical, and always made her house in Washington D.C. open to the girls from the Convent. In the 1930s, while visiting her daughter, then attending the Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia, Mary Craig often stopped in to see Mrs. Williams.65 hen nationall nown financier Joseph Leiter proposed to the twentyyear-old Juliette Williams, she retreated to her room and cried for days, feeling herself much too young for a man twice her age. Of large stature, standing over six feet tall, Leiter’s lifestyle and habits were as famous as his financial isste s the ti e he et Juliette, he had lost millions of his family’s money in a failed attempt to corner the wheat market, and then recovering, had made back millions more. President of a railroad and head of the Illinois Coal Company, by 1908 the family name was forever etched in his ancestral town of Leitersburg, Maryland, the town of Leiter, Wyoming, where Joseph managed large land and mineral holdings, and the model Illinois mining town which he founded and named “Zeigler,” his father’s middle name. His plans, exe lified b his wish at one ti e to buy the Great Wall of China and “preserve it for prosperity” were often grandiose.66

216 Telling her to pull herself together, Mrs. Williams prevailed on Juliette to accept Leiter’s proposal. She was not going to let her eldest daughter pass up the opportunity to marry this very unordinary man who would be more than able to provide a comfortable life.

Mary McLaughlin had a glimpse into the flamboyant tendencies of Joseph Leiter when on the day of his wedding the New York Times reported: “LEITER, JUST WED, SMASHES A CAMERA; Had Already Outwitted Three Photographers Before the Wedding Ceremony.

ATTACKED PHOTOGRAPHER. His Marriage with Miss Juliette Williams a Brilliant Event at Washington.”

The brilliant event was missed by Mary McLaughlin who left by train the day prior to spend her summer in Deadwood. Years later, in 1924, when oe eiter ana ed his sister s finances and the construction of her ranch house in Goleta, California, Mary would encounter him again, and develop a deep fondness for the man many found intimidating.67 With the married couple often in Washington D.C. during Mary’s last year at the Convent, she became well acquainted with the internationally famous Leiter family and the lives of Joe’s three sisters, Mary Victoria, Nancy, and Marguerite (Daisy), all of whom had married some years before their brother. Mary Victoria was married to Lord George Curzon, Marquess of Kedleston, who later became Viceroy of India. She became the Vicereine of India at the age of twenty-eight,

NOTICIAS and thus occupied “the highest position which any American, man or woman, has ever held in the British Empire.” Her extraordinary life, cut short by an early death from typhoid fever in 1906 at the age of thirty-six, has been recounted in numerous biographies.68 Marriage to titled Englishmen was just what Levi Leiter expected of all three of his Chicago-born daughters. The youngest, Daisy, became the Countess of Suffolk and Berkshire, but Nancy broke convention and married a major in the English army. She met Colin Powys Campbell, a Scot serving under Lord Curzon, while visiting her sister in India, and they found themselves kindred spirits right from the start. Colin Campbell proposed to her atop an elephant while they rode in a howdah, a caparisoned open compartment, awash with silk cushions. Their relationship was affectionate and respectful.

Colin Campbell’s career was far from ordinary. Having served in the Central Indian Horse Regiment in India and Afghanistan, he witnessed the atrocities of war first hand and fo ht valiantly as a commander during the siege of Chitral in 1895. Later, as Lord Curzon’s administrator, he played a si nificant role in or ani in the famous 1903 Durbar in India, which celebrated the coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra as the Emperor and Empress of India.69 Nancy’s father opposed the marriage, and she would not marry without his consent, but following Levi

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS Leiter’s death in June 1904, the couple married later that year. Campbell had retired from the army in 1904 as a major, though he re-enlisted at the outbreak of World War I, when he was elevated to the title of colonel. Living in England, they leased the large working estate Kingsgate Castle at Broadstairs in Kent, and here their four children were born. One child, Ian Drummond Campbell (1909–1911) died from meningitis as an infant. At the end of World War I, after overseeing Indian troops in France, Campbell retired for the second and last time. The couple, burdened with rising taxes on Mrs. Campbell’s inherited income, made the decision to leave England for Santa Barbara.70 The September 24, 1920 issue of Southwest Builder and Contractor reported that “Colonel Colin Campbell has purchased 265 acres of the Henry P. Balcom ranch on the Coast Highway, and it is reported that he will spend more than $1,000,000 on a residence and buildings and on improvements to the grounds.” This news would not go unnoticed

by Mary Craig.71 The Campbells had been in Santa Barbara since late 1919, staying first at the modest re-

217 sort cottages of Siamasia in Montecito. With Mary eager to make introductions, Colonel Campbell and his wife soon made the acquaintance of fellow Scot Osborne Craig. Setting his family up in the rented Bonnymede estate in 1920, Colonel Campbell spent most of that year transforming his Goleta acreage into a veritable city of pre-fabricated Hodgson houses, roadways, paths, water systems, trees, wells, and irrigated fields. The Craigs were regu-

The family was involved in the daily tasks of the working ranch. Here Col. Campbell tends to the chickens. Courtesy Alison de Frise.

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Col. Campbell was proud of his Goleta Valley property. Here he poses on an impressive piece of farm machinery. Courtesy Alison de Frise.

lar guests at Bonnymede and Osborne, an accomplished equestrian, enjoyed riding with the family. In October 1920, Mrs. Campbell wrote to family friend and solicitor, Mr. Laurence, that once they could move into the portable cottages they would be “so much more able to plant trees, and see that they are watered, and plan and plant our garden, and lay out the paths, do all this while the house is being built, and we have found a wonderful shale out of which we can make the very best quality brick on the place.”

Eventually, “700 apricot trees” and “417 walnut trees” would be planted.72 By late 1920 the Campbells had chosen an architect for the main

house, but it was not Osborne Craig.

Writing to Mr. Laurence, Nancy commented, “Of course the permanent house we have not yet got the plans for, they kept sending us such expensive plans, $191,000. and on to that the architect gets 15 per cent, and so we wrote and said that we did not want a palace, we wanted a plain living house, and to let us know if he could not undertake that kind of a place, and not to exceed $75,000. So now we are waiting to see….”73 The Leiters visited the Campbells at Bonnymede in October 1920. It would have been like Mary Craig to suggest they put in a good word about her architect husband, especially if she had heard about the discouraging “expensive plans.” Osborne, writing

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS to Mary from Palm Springs where he had been since late November 1920 in an effort to improve his health, was clearl thin in abo t the si nificance of a commission from the Campbells and asked Mary to consider having them for dinner upon his return.74 In January 1921, word was received of the tragic death of Juliette and Joe Leiter’s ten-year-old son, Joseph Jr. He had accidentally shot himself while hunting on his father’s game preserve in Louisiana.75 It was a devastating blow to all the family, especially because Juliette had already lost a child er first born child a bo died when he was only two weeks old. By the early spring of 1921, living in the portable cottages, the Campbells had rejected the idea of a “palace” and by all accounts placed their trust in Osborne Craig to take over the project of the main house. The commission came at an opportune time for the Craigs; a daughter, Mary Osborne Craig, was born on January 28, 1921.

By summer’s end, the many temporary buildings housed a library, laundry facility, a large bunk house for family and guests, chauffeur and butler’s cottages, and a stable.76 For reasons unknown, the Campbells delayed their plans for the main house throughout 1921 and 1922.

Nancy’s brother Joe Leiter managed all the Leiter money, and the delay could be explained by his emotional state of mind following the death of his child. More likely it had to do with the eiter fa il finances

219 Though Osborne Craig was well occupied during 1921 and early 1922 with his work for Bernhard Hoffmann and others, no known sketches by him ha e been fo nd to confir that a house was taking shape for the Campbells in 1921 or in 1922. Many projects were represented in the April 1922 Memorial Exhibit of Craig’s work, but a house for the Campbell’s was not evident.

Living quite comfortably in the simple portable cottages for over three years, the Campbells doggedly went after a style of living which was not marked by special privilege or made exclusively from the labor of others.

Nor was it watched from the sidelines.

It was as if Colin Campbell wished to be part of the “great American experiment,” right down to applying for citizenship within months of his arrival. Nancy wrote in late 1919: “Colonel Campbell commences to become an American citizen January, 1920.”77 He was willing to gamble on his investment of land that was considered by most to be sub-standard for agricultural purposes, and where he and his family could be actively involved in the day-to-day routines of managing fruit trees, poultry, bee colonies, i s fields of beans wheat and alfalfa and assorted ardens of owers and vegetables. This was not a gentleman’s farm; it was a ranch that exected to t rn a rofit Photographs of the family taken between 1920 and 1923 show the children out and about in practical ranch

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NOTICIAS

Juliette and Joseph Leiter. Joseph Leiter became quite involved in the construction of the main ranch house.

clothes, tagging after and assisting their parents as they went about the day’s operations. When not on a horse, the Colonel, accompanied by his dogs, with sleeves rolled up, is seen standing in muddy ditches, pondering machinery, or bending over a bag of chicken feed. The mere fact that so many of their English staff left their native land to join in the adventure speaks to the deep regard they had for the family. Colin also gave generously to the agricultural interests of Goleta and Nancy, spending one Christmas fully invested in hosting a party for the ranch staff and their children, wrote to a friend “It’s the greatest thing in the world—being able to make so many people happy.” As hosts, the Campbells were gracious and charming.78 Nancy Campbell, accomplished in her own right, was organized, conscientious, familiar with world affairs and a world traveler who spoke several languages. She not only resembled her father in appearance, more importantly she had his intellect. Frugal, good with accounts and business savvy, she took a great interest in the complexities of the Leiter family finances. This, combined with the experiences of her military administrator husband, made the two a

formidable couple for developing the ranch. Colonel Campbell did indeed love his polo horses and the game; he played whenever he could. Yet judicious, rugged and possessed of a hard work ethic as much as any Scot, he worked right alongside those who were transforming the property.

Though their upbringings had been markedly different and Nancy had led a far more aristocratic and cosmopolitan life, the similarities between Nancy Campbell and Mary Craig were striking. Their industrious

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IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS fathers had both singled them out as favorites. Both had married and been committed to exceptionally intelligent, hard-working Scots of sound character who failed to meet their wives’ families’ criteria for bringing social standing or money to the marriage. Tragically, the common thread holding the two women’s friendship together came full circle when Colin Campbell died unexpectedly of a heart attack on May 11, 1923, leaving both women widows. Mary Craig, holding the hand of the couple’s youngest child Audrey, was the only one outside of the immediate family to walk with Mrs. Campbell, who led the funeral procession of friends and staff to the family burial site on the ranch. There, on the bl ffs o erloo in the acific and marked by the tall Celtic granite

cross carved with ancient and legendary life symbols that the Campbells had brought from Scotland to mark the grave of their infant son, Ian, the Colonel was laid to rest. They were eventually moved by the family to Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C., though today the Celtic cross, as well as the house and barn, remain valued landmarks. Mary Craig, who had received the emotional support of the Campbells following Osborne’s death, would now, not only help her newly widowed friend through the diffic lt onths ahead b t be i en herself the reat ote of confidence b rs Ca bell to finall brin to completion the house that had long been in everyone’s thoughts.79 For Mary Craig, the Campbell anch ho se had artic lar si nifi-

The main house of the Campbell ranch, designed by Mary Craig. Collection Santa

Barbara Historical Museum, Gift of Joan Churchill.

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NOTICIAS

The simple exterior lines of the house belied the opulence of the interior as shown in the dining room. Photograph by Karl Obert. Collection Santa Barbara Historical Museum,

Gift of Joan Churchill.

cance. Though she had completed several smaller projects, the Campbell co ission wo ld be the first a or house designed entirely on her own.

She knew it had to succeed in order to prove her worth. Being the largest house she did over her long career, it became a testing ground for almost everything she had to grasp about client and contractor relationships, construction, cost, building materials, interiors space, form and function, light nat ral and artificial and li abilit Further, throughout the process,

Mary’s friendship with Nancy Campbell was never compromised; this unusual quality of character would be repeated many times in the years to come as Mary continued to design houses for friends and acquaintances.

Early on in the design phase, Campbell asked her brother Joe Leiter, alread in char e of her finances to work with her and Mary on the plans.

Always attentive and highly respectful of his sister due to their close bond, Leiter felt even more responsible for her well-being after Colin died. He

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS was more than willing to devote time to the ranch house and enter into a working relationship with Mary Craig, which between 1923 and 1925 gave her the leg up she needed at a very critical time in her career.

By September 1923, deciding to proceed with the house, Nancy asked Joe Leiter to come to the ranch and review the plans with her and Mary.

Dividing his time between Chicago, Washington D.C. and his country house in Beverly, Massachusetts, Joe Leiter still lived large, and his business life was as multi-layered as his personal life. It did not prevent him from focusing on the details of his sister’s house and he demonstrated a solid grasp of construction principles that even Mary Craig had not quite mastered.

Through handwritten notes, telegrams and letters, Leiter offered numerous suggestions, including the importance of locating all bathrooms in “stacks,” one over the other so as to keep the cost down. He also offered a sensible process for the timing of the ordering, making and delivery of building materials, and pointed out the importance of welldried adobe bricks before adding any wood trim or plaster. For economy’s sake, both he and Mary felt it was important to integrate some of the existing structures and courtyards into the new house. Mary concluded that if the adobe bricks could be made that fall, the house could be completed by the following May and “have a long dry summer to stand”

223 and be “rid of all dampness by September.”80 Construction of the house was well on its way by the spring of 1924. In early June Nancy left the ranch to visit the Leiters in the east, followed by an extended trip to China with her children. All matters concerning the house were left in the hands of Craig and Leiter. At some point Campbell placed deep into the first of the thick adobe walls a copper sealed box that revealed, when it was found many years later, the high regard she held for Craig; on her Campbell Ranch stationary she wrote “This house was built of Adobe from The Ranch- Adobe mixed with manure & straw—Builders Snook & Kenyon—Architect Mrs. Osborne Craig.” With the note were the union cards of the workers, photographs of the family, and a photograph of Mary Craig standing in front of a doorway of an old adobe. The photograph, with its unusual shallow arch and circular opening, shows the side door of the famous Convento building of Mission San Fernando Rey, an hour drive from Santa Barbara. Mary’s black mourning clothes date the photo, taken by Nancy Campbell, to the months following Osborne’s death in March 1922.81 Keeping her correspondence with Leiter both formal and sometimes light-hearted, Mary began her June 17, 1924 letter: “My dear Mr. Leiter, According to your instructions we are proceeding with all speed on the Campbell house. I hope it will please you to know that all the adobe brick

224 will be laid in ten days, and the framing of the roof will be completed by the first of l can see no reason wh rs Ca bell sho ld not ste into a co leted ho se when she co es bac fro China o r little s eech to r noo was st li e laddin r bbin his la and wonder if o wo ldn t li e the osition of eneral ana er of the Crai s office with a salar far in e cess of that s all i en s ch a osition o i ht e en draw the salar if o ca e o t se i ann all 82 Leiter, asking for weekly progress re orts shed ar hard to ha e the ho se co leted b the ti e Ca bell ret rned es ite the e traordinar s eed that the contractors noo and Kenyon delivered, the integrity of the ho se al ost ninet ears later wo ld attest to the alit of their wor en the earth a e co ld not b d e it eiter wrote to Crai in l t will be a lar e ad ertise ent for o if o ha e it done as ost of the eo le who b ild ho ses in o r art of the world want to approve the plans and ha e a ho se to li e in when the ret rn the lor will be so ch the ore so fl at it and win o r s rs or o r own sa e as well as for an s want this b ildin o eration to be a reat s ccess and also beca se ha e contrib ted ite hate to see a lack of efficiency in anythin ha e to do with 83 st the tile roof was on and Mary, thanking Leiter for his mastery in dealing with the contractor, wrote

NOTICIAS to hi hen went o t to the Ca bell ho se this ornin fo nd l bers and lasterers and ainters, and bricklayers, and masons, and millmen, and carpenters, and cement wor ers and oor la ers a crowd worth of the settin of the ower of abel li e the ho se a lot and st add what a tre endo s hel and how cor in o ha e been abo t the whole thin thin sho ld ha e wa ered on an an occasion if had not had o to lean on a s ea in fi rati el ishin to ee eiter ro erl a raised Crai too n ero s hoto ra hs of the ho se d rin the constr ction hase he i a es show the scale of the ro ect fro the lon neat wavy rows of adobe bricks drying in the s n the assi e ad ed ti bers sed for tr sses and bea s iles of red clay roof tiles made by the master crafts en of the n lo fa il to the complex wood scaffolding system for s ortin the adobe and the thic adobe walls before they received the final st cco coatin Crai followed the rocess caref ll if she had not ite astered desi n b she certainl new ore than ost abo t the se of adobe and tile circ lar dovecote, combining the traditional cottish desi n with red cla bric and tile is also attrib ted to ar Crai 85 t the ti e Crai established a wor in relationshi with ose h eiter, she was well aware of his someti es willf l and eni atic nat re en to fa il e bers the northo-

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IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS

Nancy Leiter Campbell, client and good friend of Mary Craig. Courtesy University of Cali-

fornia, Santa Barbara.

dox and irreverent, bad boy behavior caused alarm. But to Mary Craig Leiter was a gentleman, without arrogance, generous and respectful, and without a shade of male condescension. It was an unusual relationship; Leiter and his sisters had been brought up in the male-dominated world of Chicago where “women were decorative appendages, advertisements of their husbands’ success in business”, and certainly not considered equal to men. For Leiter, Mary Craig and his sister Nancy were exceptions.86 In 1925, while adding a unique two-story barn made of adobe and redwood, and assisting the Campbells’

close friend Dr. Harold Sidebotham in setting up his own cottage on the ranch property, Mary sought out Leiter’s advice in career matters. Despite being deeply embroiled in a highly publicized family dispute concerning his management of the Leiter estate, he served as a great mentor to her while she was cutting her professional teeth on the Campbell house. Though shrewd and determined to make a success as a designer, it was clear in those early days that she faced numerous obstacles with clients who may have been reticent to hire her, not only due to her lack of formal training, but also because she was a woman.

His thoughtful response to her included matters relating to clients, contractors, commissions, and record keeping, but nothing would have greater staying power over her lifetime as a business woman than the words he ended with: I am writing you these suggestions as I am much interested in seeing you make a success and feel that you can refer to a writing when your memory might not serve you as well. Finally, remember that being a woman, you have to do your business better than any man as there is a prejudice against a woman in business which you have to overcome.

Good luck to you, Joseph Leiter

It was not in Joseph Leiter’s makeup to regard women as his equal, but clearly Mary Craig had won her

226 “spurs” in building his sister’s house.87 In 1926, Mary Craig attended a party given by Nancy for her eldest daughter, at which Prince George, younger brother to the Prince of Wales happened to attend. On a trip arranged by his father King George V, the prince was asked to escort a British war ship while taking a tour of their possessions. Craig later told the story that it had been King George V who gave orders to the captain that his son, while docked in Los Angeles, was not to step foot into Hollywood or associate with Hollywood types. Of course (aided by Craig’s friend and neighbor Will Slater), George made the rounds of Hollywood soon after attending the Campbell party.88 Much has been written on the lavish lifestyle that the Campbells imported from England when they arrived in Santa Barbara in late 1919. In fact, though well-versed in social graces, by choice they never sought out the limelight of fashionable Santa Barbara society. Their small group of modest friends in the days before Colin Campbell died included the Marshall Bonds, the Sidebothams, Curtis Cate, the William North Duanes, Mrs. Howland Russell, James Marwick and the Craigs.89 The Campbell Ranch house interior was royal in its aristocratic furnishings and staff, and the polo horses, stable and manicured grounds spoke of wealth and entitlement. Occasional grand parties were given

NOTICIAS there, but Nancy Campbell led a mostly quiet and unassuming life, devoted to her children, the well- being of the staff, and ranch operations. She kept track of weather conditions concernin the cro s rofits and losses and irrigation issues. Mary Craig often visited on weekends, accompanied by little Mary, who remembers her mother telling her that much attention was paid to her as the child of Osborne Craig. She also remembers sleeping in one of the upstairs guest rooms and hearing the sound of bagpipes below her window. Several of the staff, Scots who had come over with the family from England and knew Osborne in earlier days, loved to play for Mary Craig and her child.

Nancy Campbell’s life in Santa Barbara was tragically short-lived.

Since the fall of 1929 she had been in failing health, and with her three children, she left for England the following spring with hopes of recovery.

Though an American by birth, Nancy Leiter Campbell never lost her love of England. At the time of her marriage she was described “in manner, speech, and dress as English as though she had never been outside the British Isles.” She died there on June 30, 1930 at Kingsgate, Broadstairs, Kent, where she and Colin Campbell had lived after their marriage. Years earlier she wrote of the ranch in Goleta, “I am glad to be here, in God’s wonderful world, all clean and sunshine, and honest—It’s the only way to live—one can die easily then.”90

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS

227 William Slater, Sr. and his wife, Ellen, aboard their yacht The Eleanor, ca. 1895. The family sailed around the world in the vessel.

Courtesy Mrs. William A. Slater, III and the Slater Memorial Museum.

Mrs. William A. Slater, Sr. The place is more beautiful than I had any idea of. The deed includes all of the lovely trees and rocks, in fact, I think that it is the most lovely part of the Irving property. Have no misgivings about the property you have taken! It is lovely and I think Willie is delighted. He told me last night he had never been so happy in any place, but I do think he misses you very much.91 Several of Mary Craig’s clients in the 1920s were endowed with inherited incomes and had ample means to build large elegant houses. The Montecito houses commissioned by Mrs. William A. Slater (Ellen) (1859-1941), one for her son Will in 1927 (just above Mary Craig’s property on Buena

Vista), and her 1929 house on East Valley Road, remain today uncontested examples of Craig’s talent.92 Ellen Slater, short in stature but commanding, was a woman accustomed to generosity and acts of kindness through the examples set by her late husband and his family. William Slater Sr. (1857-1919), born to one of the wealthiest men in New England, was the grandnephew of Samuel later fo nder of the first achine cotton factory in Rhode Island. In 1882 William’s father, John Fox Slater, founded the John Fox Slater Fund, a million-dollar bequest for the education of African American freedmen following the Civil War. One recipient was W.E.B. Du Bois who used the funds to study abroad in the 1890s.

Soon after receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard he went on to become one of America’s most noted sociologists, authors and activists.93 Described as a “quiet, unaffected, and kindly gentleman” who was “always impressed by the obligations of wealth”, Slater Sr. carried on with the family business, at the same time giving generously to many philanthropic causes, especially those in Norwich, Connecticut, the town of his birth. He spent several years with his wife and

228 young children sailing around the world on The Eleanor, a handsome sailing vessel commissioned by him and named for his daughter. Launched from the Bath Iron Works in 1894, it was considered up to that time “the largest steam yacht ever built in the United States.”94 William Sr.’s delicate health eventually resulted in his death in 1919, setting the gears in motion for Ellen and her son Will to move to Santa Barbara. Ellen’s decision to keep her house in Mt. Kisco, New York, was largely due to the ill health of her daughter Eleanor, married to Halsey Malone and living in New York. Unable to recover, Eleanor died in the late

NOTICIAS 1920s. Halsey Malone was a practical and hardworking eastern lawyer who managed the Slater estate. Mary Craig worked closely with him while the two Slater houses were being built.

Remaining a close and generous friend to Mary Craig throughout her life, Ellen Slater died in Santa Barbara in 1941. In the 1950s her East Valley Road house was owned for a time by David and Alice Keck Park.95 When Mary Craig travelled to Spain in 1927, a good part of her time was given over to the purchase of Spanish decorative items, as directed

by Ellen Slater, for the new house.

Working closely with Craig, both she and her son gave a great deal of input to the designs. It was at this time that Will asked Mary Craig to marry him. Though it was a tempting opportunity, in the end Mary turned it down.96 Adored and indulged by his mother, William Albert Slater, Jr. (1890-1962), described as a “raconteur” and “perfect dilettante”, grew up surrounded by art, literature, philanthropic causes and society.

Entering Harvard in 1910, he stayed only two years after being diagnosed with a mild form of tuberculosis. After his treatment and recovery in Arizona, he married in 1913, but following the birth of a son, John Will Slater with his son, William III, at his Montecito home, 1931. Courtesy Mrs. William Slater, III.

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IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS

The house designed by Mary Craig for Mrs. William A. Slater, Sr. on East Valley Road in Montecito. Photograph by Wayne McCall.

Fox Slater, the couple divorced. He married Frances Ames in 1929, and a son, William Slater III, was born in 1931. Selling his Spanish-style house, Will built a modern house on his adjacent lot just below it, designed by his wife’s brother, architect Preston Ames.

(In the 1940s Mary Craig designed a new dining room for the house.) Will tra elled e tensi el he s o e awless French) and his intellectual curiosity gave him a lifelong interest in the world at large. Knowing of good deal about architecture, in the 1950s he and Mary Craig were known to have rousing and often opposing discussions on the subject. Well-read and a natural conversationalist, he was a frequent guest at Montecito’s social 97 gatherings.

A serious gourmand, one of his

favorite haunts in the 1940s and 1950s was the Santa Barbara restaurant, Casa de Sevilla (known as “Pete’s”).

Owned and managed by his friend Pete Egus, Slater often gathered here with his Hollywood companions Ronld Colman and Herbert Marshall.

(Colman then owned San Ysidro Ranch.) When a Japanese submarine shelled the llwood oil fields st west of Santa Barbara in February 1942, Will and Pete took to sitting on the rooftop of a downtown Santa Barbara building to watch for further threats; it was here they dreamed up ways to upgrade the restaurant, largely funded through Slater’s generosity.98 Living just a stone’s throw from each other, Mary Craig and Will Slater remained life-long friends, despite Will’s penchant for removing on more

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NOTICIAS Jessie Tarbox Beals in the doorway of her studio in El Paseo, ca. 1929.

Courtesy Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

across ! her shoulder… whistling as she goes. She has become a familiar m e m b e r of Santa Barbara’s art colony.100

than one occasion and without asking, several of Mary’s massive eucalyptus trees that hindered his views. As was her nature, Mary did not take the offending act sitting down, but when the s ar s ew she was secretl leased 99 that she was saved the expense.

Jessie Tarbox Beals Almost any day Mrs. Beals may be seen swinging down a dusty lane, her camera

In the late 1920s Mary Craig’s professional life intersected with the well-established photojournalist Jessie Tarbox Beals, who in all likelihood was introduced to her through Pearl Chase, the then head of Santa Barbara’s Community Arts Association. In turn, Beals made the acquaintance of another friend of Craig’s, artist Narcissa Niblack Thorne, who with homes in Santa Barbara and Chicago, later encouraged Beals to set up a studio in Chicago after leaving California in 1930. The often overloo ed and for otten first woman photojournalist” Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870-1943) made a brief b t si nificant contrib tion to anta Barbara’s pictorial history in the late 1920s. Craig, seeking ways to better promote herself, hired the well-known New York photographer in the fall of 1929 to take formal photographs of her newly renovated house on Buena Vista Road.101 Beals’ early successes were largely due to her work as a press photographer and her portraits taken

231

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS of some of America’s best known citizens: Mark Twain, Carl Sandburg, Gutzon Borglum, Albert Herter, and presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Coolidge, Hoover and Taft. Her versatility and talent for taking photographs of children, animals, architecture and gardens broadened her client base si nificantly. Arriving in Santa Barbara from her bohemian home base of Greenwich Village in the summer of 1928 when work in the east was scarce, her

well-known garden photographs appeared in numerous nationally read magazines, including Arts and Decoration, House and Garden, Country Life, and House Beautiful. Santa Barbara’s Pearl Chase did not waste a moment in hiring Beals to photograph numerous local landmarks, including El Paseo and the newly constructed houses which the Community Arts Association felt adhered to the area’s building ethic. Beals’ photographs,

Narcissa Niblack Thorne was nationall known for her finel crafted miniature period rooms Courtesy Chicago Art Institute.

232 along with those by Karl Obert, J. Walter Collinge, Carolyn and Edwin Gledhill, P.H. Greene, and the Dwight Fauldings were featured in the 1929 book Californian Architecture in Santa Barbara by H. Philip Staats.

Setting up her studio in 110 De la Guerra Studios at El Paseo, many in town became familiar with Beals’ a nt aire owin s irt e e catchin hat attire and “snappy personality.”

Her Santa Barbara photographs include not only Mary Craig’s house,

NOTICIAS but photographs from the Santa Barbara estates of the William Slaters, Bernhard Hoffmann, J.P. Jefferson, E. Palmer Gavit, Amy du Pont, Oakleigh Thorne, Peter Cooper Bryce, Max Fleischmann, George Owen Knapp, and De Witt Parshall. In the 1930s many of these photographs appeared in American Homes, Building Age, Architectural Record and Architect.102 Beals’ daughter, Nanette, said of this time in her mother’s life, “In Santa Barbara, without an introduction, you were less than a tradesman.” After moving to Hollywood in late 1929, the grateful Beals wrote to Chase, “I can never forget your kindness to me, dear Miss Chase.” Both single women with a child to support, Craig and Beals debunked in very different ways the gender myth; whereas Craig worked in slow Beals’ artistic eye may be seen in her photograph of the patio at Mary Craig’s home, 1929. Courtesy France

Loeb Library, Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS motion, Beals was physically energetic and outwardly daring. She did share with Mary Craig a professional “persistence” and “pluck,” and both procured their work through an “ability to hustle.” For years drawn to the stimulating environs of Greenwich Village, Beals did not care for what she called the ‘deep freeze’ and ‘silence’ of anta arbara and left to find reater opportunity in Hollywood where she remained for some months in 1930.103 That same year artist and socialite Narcissa Niblack Thorne invited Jessie to come to Chicago, assuring her introductions to Chicago’s prominent families. Thorne’s husband was James Ward Thorne, heir to the Montgomery Ward fortune. Mrs. Thorne comfortably moved about in highly contrasted circles of society in both Chicago and Santa Barbara. She was a frequent guest at the Alisal Ranch, and dressed in her dusty riding clothes and tattered hat, it was hard to envision her holdin co rt in the entrified at ospheres of Chicago’s Lake Forest or Montecito. (The Thorne estate in Montecito, Montjoie, was designed in 1928

by Chicago architect Edwin Hill Clark.

Clark also designed their Lake Forest house.) Staying in Chicago for several years, Beals “latched onto the architects who thought her a dream girl for the way she photographed their beloved houses.” Thorne had been indispensable to her success.104 Curiously, Beals was to have taken all the photographs for Mrs.

233 Thorne’s upcoming book of her highly crafted miniature American interiors, including one of the George Fox Steedman house in Santa Barbara designed by George Washington Smith. Beals missed the appointment by one day, and Thorne hired another photographer.

The exquisitely crafted furnished period rooms, begun in the early 1930s and scaled one inch to the foot, became internationally known for their historical accuracy. Several went on display at the 1939 and 1940 world fairs in San Francisco and New York respectively. When an exhibition of the miniatures opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in December 1940, Mary Craig received a signed copy of the accompanying book, American Rooms in Miniature.105 Thorne’s generosity and her ability to help those in need went beyond her kindness to Beals. During the Depression years when work was scarce for so many, Thorne employed a large group of skilled studio assistants who went to work transforming her ideas from plans drawn up by the Chica o architect ral fir of idmore, Owens and Merrill, into her historically accurate miniatures.

Funded entirely by her, she chose artist Eugene Kupjack to be her collaborator. Working from a studio in Chicago, together they created over one hundred interiors, many of which are on permanent display today at the

234

Art Institute of Chicago. Kupjack, who had made a name for himself in his own right through a singularly successful career as a creator of miniature rooms, worked for Mrs. Thorne from 1937 to 1966, when she closed the studio. She died the same year, donating all of her work to charity.106 Returning to New York from Chicago in 1934 and fading into relative obscurity, Jessie Tarbox Beals died there at the age of seventy-one on May 31, 1942. Her artistic and sensitively conceived photographs, letters and little known self-published poems are archived at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, the New York Historical Society, and Harvard’s Loeb Library, Special Collections.

NOTICIAS

Mrs. Peter Cooper Bryce Marc Appleton to his grandmother, Mrs. Peter Cooper Bryce: “What was it like working with the great architect George Washington Smith?”

Mrs. Bryce: "Oh, he knew almost nothing about Spanish architecture—I had to teach him everything!“ In 1924 Mary Craig’s good friends Mr. and Mrs. Peter Cooper Bryce turned to George Washington Smith to design Florestal, a grand house in the Spanish Colonial tradition. Peter Cooper Bryce (1889-1964) was the greatgrandson of New York industrialist, philanthropist and Cooper Union founder, Peter Cooper. Peter and his

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IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS LEFT: Mrs. Peter Cooper Bryce expressed strong opinions when it came to architectural design. She is pictured here on the beach below her home in Hope Ranch. Co rtes arc leton

wife, Angelica (Girlie) Schuyler Brown Bryce (1890-1980), daughter of ban in ďŹ r e ber a es rown of rown rothers fa e o ed to anta arbara in eter s sister Cornelia arried conser ationist ifford Pinchot.) ro start to ďŹ nish it wo ld be rs r ce noted for her fe inine char nat ral bea t and blithe s irit who ade all the decisions concernin the lans for Florestal. i in ith ore than his share of challen es she was re e bered b

her architect randson arc leton as bein rather controllin when it ca e to callin the aesthetic shots n his estion to his randother abo t wor in with the reat architect eor e ashin ton ith he recalled that the re erential res onse he e ected ne er ca e n loo in bac on the incident leton noted f co rse acce ted this with ore than a rain of salt since ith had desi ned an anish e i al ho es before doin one for rand arents and Mrs. Bryce and Mary Craig collaborated on this fanciful beach cabana, reached from above by an elevator custom made by the Otis Elevator Company. Co rtes arc leton

236 knew a great deal. Being an architect myself, my respect for Smith's deferential patience with my grandmother, who could be rather imperious when she felt like it, grew even greater in the wake of her remark.”107 Peter Cooper Bryce, far less demonstrative than his wife, was ree bered as a iet and di nified man. Mary Craig admired and shared with him his life life-long interest in mining and they shared a mutual friendship with Boston based geologist Robert Livermore. Marc Appleton wrote that his grandfather “was forever prospecting—generally unsuccessfully—in oil and minerals. I'm sure he and Mary Craig would have enjoyed discussing the subject, and it was probably the thing that supported their friendship, since design, whether buildings or gardens, was always my grandmother's concern.”108 In 1931 Mary Craig worked with Mrs. Bryce to draw up plans for a beach cabana at Florestal. The unique design was inspired by old beach tent cabanas and in the words of her grandson, “typically striped in bright colors--in the Bryce case, white, blue/ green and yellow/orange alternating stripes. Even the scalloped facia picked up a traditional fabric awning detail. All, of course, in wood instead of fabric, and, as was typical for my grandmother, quite festive in 109 spirit.”

The design for the beach cabana would almost certainly have been a

NOTICIAS collaboration between Mrs. Bryce and Mary Craig, who would take care of the details and leave the engineering and siting challenges to her draftsman Ralph. Armitage. Due to the long steep descent to the beach, an enclosed teak-lined elevator, custom made by the Otis Elevator Company and painted to match the color scheme of the cabana, was installed for access.

The platform for the cabana was composed of eight bridge piers, composed of steel encased in concrete, and elevated to avoid tides and storms. A ladder for access to and from the beach took care of security issues.

Two stone walls on the beach were ingeniously designed so that if the tides came in, one could still be on the sand. Seventy-eight years after construction, the critical siting and quality of engineering were noted in a 2010 report as being responsible for the longevity and excellent condition of the oorin and the two foot wide piers.110 The Bryce cabana was designated a Santa Barbara County Landmark in 2012.

Jesse and Bessie Lasky Mrs. Lasky has just spent the night with me and find her ver charming What an entr e we would have had in the moving picture environment if had known her during the Easter holiday! They know ever one and ever thing of importance in Holl wood When went to Mr ask s office, found signed photographs of all

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS the Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt down to the present, Thomas Edison, and all the great singers and actors. He has a kind of telephone in his room that he just talks at and voices come out of the wall and answer. Presses buttons and every amazing kind of thing happens, and of course, I am very diverted by it all. As a matter of fact, Mr. Lasky impresses me as a fine capable person and one of the great show-men of the era.111 So wrote Mary Craig to her daugh-

237 ter in 1937, soon after meeting Hollywood’s Jesse L. Lasky. Lasky (of Lasky Feature-Play Company), in a merger with Cecil B. DeMille, Samuel oldfish who later chan ed his na e to Goldwyn) and Adolph Zukor, created Paramount Pictures. Prior to his Hollywood career, Lasky was the leading high class vaudeville producer in the co ntr with offices in ew or and abroad. Playing a pivotal role in the rise of the motion picture industry in Hollywood, he was indeed the showman Mary characteri ed ot onl had both Lasky’s and Mary’s grandfathers, in search of gold and better opportunity, travelled west by covered wagon along the Oregon Trail, a fact in which both took great pride, Lasky had a rather unique perspective and understanding of architecture as it related to his work. He wrote, “Architecture and motion pictures go hand in hand. One helps the other. Good architecture in settings makes for improved pictures . . . . “ With an architectural staff of over twenty men at FaHollywood director Jesse Lasky, at right, with author W. Somerset Maughm. Courtesy Marc Wanamaker/Bison Archives.

238 o s la ers as ďŹ fteen were re istered architects is article n ence of ood rchitect re on o in ict re ets a eared in the an ar iss e of The Architect and Engineer.112 t it wo ld be rs as with

NOTICIAS who Crai c lti ated the reater friendshi while the two wo en wor ed in to desi n a lar e fa il ho se on orth altair en e in os n eles esse had alwa s left all decisions abo t their li in arran eents to his wife essie as had

Bessie Lasky at work in her studio.

Co rtes arc ana a er ison rchi es

239

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS The home Mary Craig designed for Jesse and Bessie Lasky. Courtesy Los Angeles Public Library Photograph Collection.

trained as a professional concert pianist, but after moving to Hollywood she became a painter. Studying diligently, followed by numerous gallery and museum exhibits of her still lifes and landscapes, she quickly earned a national reputation. Interested in art, poetry and metaphysics, she also collected fine antiques from many trips abroad. Bessie was described by her daughter as a woman who “led her own life”, though she also cultivated many friendships through Jesse’s large circle of Hollywood celebrities.

A gracious hostess at many parties at the Saltair house, guests included the Cecil B. DeMilles, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks,

George Gershwin, Somerset Maugham, Scottish dramatist J.M Barrie, and numerous other celebrities. Gary Cooper, who lived across the street, starred in Lasky’s 1942 film, Sergeant York, winning Cooper his first Academy award.

Bessie most appreciated the time she had to paint, write and design her gardens. The Path of Vision, published

by Dryden Press in 1945, was a book of evocative paintings she described as “the fusion of three arts: music provides the inspiration, painting the vision, and poetry the comment.” Her paintings of the California missions in the late 1940s, including Santa Barbara, brought her well-earned acclaim.113

240 After they met, Bessie gave Craig her book of poems, Songs of the Twilight. It is inscribed: “To Mary Craig, May you like my songs. With many happy moments of human understanding out of which may bloom a house of sheer beauty. Bessie Lasky, May 1937.”114 The Lasky’s house, completed in 1938, was surrounded by an avocado grove and grazing sheep, and sat on three acres of open land with views to the ocean efore final lans were made, Bessie invited Mary Craig to stay with the family at their rented Holmby Hills house for two weeks to e erience first hand how the li ed During that visit, Craig was introduced to the Lasky children, one of whom, Billy, was interested in everything reptilian and wild. Craig recalled her horror when introduced to his vast collection of live snakes housed in his bedroom. Soon after moving into the new house, Billy set up an outdoor snake pit for his growing collection and purchased a falcon.

His sister Betty often did her homework with a boa constrictor wrapped around her waist and bats hanging on the nearby curtains. They were fed a daily diet of termites which Billy also raised; Betty always inspected her sheets before climbing into bed. She said of her brother, “When Billy took the falcon on his first hone oon knew the marriage was doomed.”

Not only remaining a herpetologist and important lepidopterist all his life,

NOTICIAS he was an enthusiastic leading member of the Audubon Society, and an animal consultant and assistant director in the movie industry. Older brother Jesse, Jr., screenwriter, novelist and poet, was one of the writers for the 1956 screenplay for DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.115 Mary Craig followed through with Bessie’s wish to design a house along the lines of the rented Colonial style house on South Mapleton Drive, though Craig incorporated a less formal look at the back of the new house with a Monterey-style second story covered porch. Bessie later wrote in her biography that she designed it, calling it “a Georgian English house… perfect in design, beautiful, broad arches, a delicate white rounding stairway—the house built and designed around my collection of years of searching.” Noting the celebration of its completion in the spring of 1938, leading movie gossip columnist Hedda Hopper described it as “Georgian and yet modern, with a Persian tone thrown in for good measure.”

Selling the house in the late forties, Jesse Lasky told his wife, “… I never thought you would live without your Queen Anne house.”116 Though Jesse Lasky lost much of his fortune during the Depression era, and in 1933 his position at Paramount, he had recovered his losses by the time he and his wife commissioned Mary Craig to design the house on Saltair Avenue in 1937. Following the

241

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS success of Sergeant York, Lasky, along with other fil ersonalities was accused of tax evasion. The cost of the lawsuit, which he lost, forced the Laskys to sell the Saltair house in 1948. ar Crai hel ed essie with the distrib tion and sale of so e of the anti es bdi idin the ro ert the e t a s aller arcel ho h essie called on ar Crai to do reli inary drawings for a house of 4,000 s are feet essie chose another architect Corres ondence indicates that Mary Craig was unaware of just how dire the financial sit ation was for the as s ett as wrote of her father in a bio ra hical s etch he enial entle anl show an who re resented oll wood at its best died heavily in debt…Maintaining his co ra e and enth sias to the end he said, ‘You’re never broke if you have an idea 117 Jesse Lasky died in 1958. Painting and exhibiting her wor al ost ntil the da of her death, essie as died in 1972. er e oir Candle in the Sun was bNevill Cramer, ca.

1950. Courtesy

Cra er a il Collection.

lished in 1957. Though the 1937 house stands today unchanged, with the ori inal lans archi ed at the ibrar of Congress, Craig’s drawings for the 1948 house were not saved.

Nevill Cramer I know very little about Mary Craig’s work, actually, but the few things of hers I have seen I thought charming. rchitect brose Cra er to his son e ill Cra er ebr ar

In 1952 Mary Craig was given one of her ore n s al co issions b e ill Cra er the son of her close friend race ee er Cra er lo d orn in and ha in rown in Montecito, Nevill had known Mary Craig his entire life; he, his brother rosie and Crai s da hter ar s ent an ha ti es to ether as

242 children. Remembering his mother’s beautiful house on La Vereda, designed in 1924 by Craig, he had long admired her work.

Nevill’s father was Ambrose Cramer, the famous Chicago architect who for a time was associated with David Adler.118 Ambrose Cramer had designed Constantia in Montecito in 1930 for his in-laws, the Arthur Meekers, whom Mary had known since 1913 when she first arrived in Santa Barbara.

Arthur Meeker was a late nineteenthcentury capitalist, whose vast fortune was made in the meat packing industry.

His four children, Katherine, Grace, Mary, and Arthur, Jr. were Mary McLaughlin’s contemporaries and had been seasonal visitors from Chicago since they were children.119 Wishing for a change of scene, and impatient and bored by Montecito, thirty-year-old Nevill Cramer, an aspiring writer, and his new wife, Louisa, and Louisa’s young son, Piero Fenci121 moved to Monterey in 1948.

There they purchased the historic Gordon House, adjacent to Colton Hall, on Pierce Street. Nevill enjoyed the simplicity and style of the house, and he and Louisa set about restoring and improving the interior, which was in bad need of attention. The boardand-batten house had been built in the s and was one of the first all wooden houses in California. The lumber was milled in Australia, shipped to England, and sent again around Cape Horn to Monterey.122 Nevill and Louisa enjoyed the peace and quiet of Monterey and the en-

NOTICIAS

Famed architect Ambrose Cramer, ca. 1952, the year his son, Nevill, decided to move back to Santa Barbara and build a home.

Courtesy Cramer Family Collection.

chantment of the Gordon House.

They had no trouble making friends, among them, Alice Larkin Toulmin, whom Cramer described as “a massive woman in every sense,” and her English husband, Henry W. Toulmin (Harry), “a charming, little man.”122 Alice Toulmin (1879-1963) was the granddaughter of Thomas Oliver Larkin (1802-1858), a self-made man who made his fortune in California as a financier erchant and land s ec lator. In 1843 he was appointed the first and onl erican Cons l to Mexico and California. Stationed in Monterey, he built a house there in 1835 that is now considered one of the first e a les of the ontere style.123 In 1922, while living in New

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS

243

England with her husband, Alice heard that the Larkin House, long after it had been sold by her family, was once again for sale. She moved west, bought and restored the house, and settled in Monterey.

Nevill Cramer and Alice Toulmin were an unlikely pair; Cramer was devoutly liberal, Toulmin exceedingly conservativ. “She was an Oscar Wilde duchess type, a Tory, and though I loved her for many good reasons I had to be careful what I said in her presence,” recalled Cramer. Despite their differences, Alice and Henry Toulmin saw the Cramers regularly in Monterey. Keeping his political views to himself, Nevill and Alice developed a fondness for each other in those years they both lived in the quaint little town often referred to as the “Plymouth oc of the acific Coast.”124

As a young boy, Nevill had been surrounded by his staunch Republican maternal grandparents, Arthur and Grace Meeker of Chicago. He had learned from an early age to keep silent when it came to family political discussions. Nevill said of his mother, Grace, who in her life-long adoration of her father chose a very conservative path, “She would rather die than vote for a Democrat.” For reasons well clarified b hi e ill Cra er fro the time he could remember, found this aspect of his mother and his grandparents unacceptable. His liberal views did not originate at the Cate School or at Harvard, which he attended for several years, but from a

Ralph Armitage, at lower left ca. 1918, was Mary Craig’s right-hand man for some thirty years. Armitage was working for Francis T. Underhill at the time this photograph was taken.

Pictured at upper right is Richard Pitman, who worked for Osborne Craig for a time. Courtesy Art,

Design and Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara

244

NOTICIAS

The house designed by Mary Craig for Nevill Cramer under construction. Note the mansard roof. Courtesy Cramer Family Collection.

much earlier age, when he read voraciously, collected James Joyce, and developed a sense of idealism. He later said, when thinking about his early years, “I just knew inherently that fairness and justness were what at the time Democrats, not Republicans, seemed to embrace.”125 At Christmas time in 1951 Nevill and Louisa visited family in Santa Barbara. They found themselves charmed once again by the area, feeling that it had changed for the better. In a January 1952 letter, one of many to his father Ambrose, then retired and living in Maine with his second wife Mary Meeker Cramer, the younger sister of

Nevill’s mother Grace, Nevill wrote that he and Louisa found themselves “rather wistful about returning.” He went on to write, “We began to wonder if we might not be happy in Santa Barbara if we could escape the Montecito thing, which has always rather bored and depressed me in its various aspects.”126 It was on this Christmas visit that the couple was made an astounding offer by Alice Toulmin, who was also staying in Santa Barbara over the holidays. She told the Cramers that she owned eight acres of property behind the Riviera, just below the Mount Calvary Monastery. She had

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS owned it for more than twenty years and had visited the remote site periodically, planting trees and shrubs and generally making it more appealing. Taking the Cramers to see the property on El Cielito Road, she told them she was going to build a house there that coming spring, designed by Chester Carjola, and she wanted to offer them an acre just below her site to build on as well, for nothing.

Of Mrs. Toulmin’s offer, Nevill wrote to his father: The whole thing fitted so ueerl with what we d been thinking about that we decided all omens were favorable, and so with great excitement we ve decided to take her up on it, if we possibl can t would be our idea to build something modest in construction board and batten, for instance and tr to give it charm ould ou possibl , possibl give us ideas when ou come out in March Then our cup would be full The onl house ve thought of which combines charm with extreme econom of construction is a house Mar raig built in Santa Yne in the s, which ve alwa s loved t s like a more farm like and more livable ordon House the whole thing is too good to be true 127 Ambrose Cramer wrote back to his son that he felt the project to be a wonderful opportunity but had to decline the offer to get involved. “I would rush to offer you my enthusiastic services but actually there are good reasons that would keep me from it, the main one being that I’m too old

245 fashioned and it’s too late to learn new ones and then it is a nuisance to deal with an architect who is so remote and, thirdly, I no longer know about all the materials and devices.

But do let me advise you and criticize sketches and plans and be of what help I could in that way.” Warning him of the risks of having a “parent” architect, he went on to add that having one’s own architect, allows one to have someone to “kick around,” someone who “has to be subservient to get his fee.”128 Nevill, “cruelly disappointed” by his father’s “architectural defection” but understanding, wrote to his father that he had chosen Mary Craig to be his designer.129 Ambrose knew Craig to some degree; they had seen each other occasionally during the times he came out to supervise the construction of onstantia. Later Nevill would recall that Mary Craig gave some of her best parties when Ambrose was in town in the 1930s and 1940s.

Nevill Cramer was more than confident in his choice of ar Crai and she would not have to be subservient to get her fee. It was clear that, even with Ambrose Cramer offering advice to his son from afar, Nevill would have nothing but a pleasant relationship with Craig as the project moved along. Craig dissuaded Cramer from using board and batten due to its high price at the time (Cramer was hoping to build a house for under tho h the final cost ca e to $27,000) Though he did like stucco, he would recall later that he felt in

246 1952 “there were too many Spanishstyle houses in Santa Barbara.”130 He and Craig together came up with a pavilion idea, French in feeling, with Craig suggesting a metal mansard roof for the living room. In February, Cramer wrote again to his father of his great excitement for the project, “I can’t tell you what fun the whole project is. I’m in an absolute tizzy, I wake up every morning at six and take long nervous walks before breakfast. The excitement is almost unbearable… when we get farther along in our plans, I’ll send them on to you. I think Armitage has done a very good job of fittin a lot into the s all s ace and we’re looking to Mary to make the whole thing pretty.”131 Over the next six months, Cramer worked with Craig and Armitage, incorporating a good many of his own ideas into the plan. On his father’s advice he had poured through every back issue of Progressive Architecture, House and Garden and House Beautiful for ideas, and he continued to send off sketches of the house to his father. In March, Nevill wrote that Mrs. Toulmin and he would begin excavations in April for the two houses. He went on to say “In about two weeks Mr. Armitage, who is 95% of the architect known as Mary Craig, will have our lans and s ecifications done read for our contractor’s bid. And then I will have him send a copy of the plans to you for criticism.”132 In 1952 Ambrose Cramer was far removed from the grand houses he had designed in Lake Forrest, but he

NOTICIAS did find his in ol e ent with his son s first ho se irresistible itho t being intrusive or overbearing, he followed its progress and Nevill appreciated the give and take of ideas. Ambrose’s sensitivity to Mary Craig’s ownership of the project is evident in his comment to his son: “You don’t need to intimate to dear Mary that her work is subject in any way to review and she should not know anything about the matter but, with free and somewhat experienced advice craving to be given, it seems odd not to get it, even though it is not necessary to accept it.”133 The Cramers, with a baby due soon, had been renting one of the cottages, designed by Mary Craig in 1923, on the J.P. Jefferson estate, Mira ores. Framing in of the Cramer house began in mid-September, and it was completed by early 1953, following the birth of their daughter, Kendal Cramer, in late December 1952. Now living at the El Cielito house Cramer was brie in ol ed with the obero Theatre, managed by the newly appointed Leighton Rollins. In the fall of 1953, hired by the Laguna Blanca School, Cramer taught there until his retirement in 1978.134 Ambrose Cramer, the man who had basked in the limelight of designing some of the largest and most architecturally significant houses in Lake Forest, Illinois, in the 1930s, had no doubt taken great pleasure in making some imprint on the modest house of his son. Though it was a house created through the combined efforts of four talented individuals,

247

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS

The East Valley Road house, designed by Mary Craig and sold by her to Rhoda Prud’homme in 1957.

Mary Craig, Ralph Armitage, Nevill Cramer, and Ambrose Cramer, it would be Mary Craig who would deserve to take the credit for the inevitable and final charm of the house.135 Except for Armitage, Mary Craig had never worked collaboratively with other architects, but her daughter commented many years later that it is certain that her mother would have felt only delight in knowing that Ambrose Cramer had had a small hand in her handsome French pavilion.136 Rhoda Seligman Prud’homme Dear Rhoda: Enclosed is your check for $75 which you sent in payment for working drawings made by Mr. Armitage for an addition to your garage, which neither he nor will accept n twent five ears of work, have never before had a client

arrange the fee for services rendered our fees are all based on ethical practices established by the American Institute of Architects. Please deal directly with Mr. Armitage know ou will find him absolutely fair. His integrity is unassailable. I feel certain there has been some misunderstanding.

Sincerely yours, Mary Craig137 In her early forties, while on her first h ntin safari in frica in hoda s first shot felled a char in bull elephant.” So begins the tale of one of Mary Craig’s more colorful friends and clients, a woman described as “stunningly attractive… sleek as a thoroughbred racehorse, and possessed with the same dynamic energy.” While in Africa, despite her comfortable life in New York married to ew or financier and hilan-

248 thropist Frederick Lewisohn with whom she had two daughters, Rhoda met and fell in love with a provocative Frenchman and bachelor by the name of Gabriel Prud’homme.

Prud’homme, fifteen years younger than Rhoda, was an avid big game hunter who owned his own airplane and eked out a living as a safari guide.

A divorce agreement with Lewisohn in 1937 left Rhoda financially secure, and marrying Gabriel in Paris, the couple returned to Kenya. In his small airplane, from which Rhoda insisted they find the ideal location for a new home, she spotted a lovely clearing sloping down to the Nanyuki River and within sight of Mt. Kenya.

Soon after, she made the purchase of the five thousand acres, and put herself in charge of building a massive French chateau she named Mawingu, a Swahili word used to describe the cotton ball cloud formations that formed on the slopes of the mountain.138 A romantic at heart, Rhoda was swept away with the exotic tones of Africa, its wildlife and natural beauty.

The presence of international tourists in the late 1930s, people with interesting backgrounds who, like Rhoda, felt drawn to seeking life alternatives, equally fascinated her. Wishing to fill her house with a constant flow of friends (there were eight guest rooms on the first floor, each with its own fireplace) she set about to define Mawingu as the ultimate in comfort and luxury. It was completed in one year, and she took the utmost care to fill it with tasteful furnishings and fine an-

NOTICIAS tiques. Exotic woods were used throughout the house and the toilet seats were said to be “adorned with mother-of-pearl.” Gabriel was given the den for his book collection, which included unique miniature books of pornography and erotic poetry bound in leather. They were his one vice, which with amusement Rhoda tolerated, and overnight guests gleefully borrowed for their evening read. The formal gardens, lawns and ponds spread impressively out from the house, and Rhoda, wishing to make part of the landscape her own private wildlife sanctuary, brought in an assortment of animals which accompanied imported peacocks and two pet cheetahs.

Life for the Prud’hommes and their many guests in this “spectacular oasis of exotica” was sadly shortlived. When war broke out in 1939, they left Mawingu and came to Santa Barbara to wait out the conflict.

Gabriel soon went off to fight for France, leaving Rhoda in Santa Barbara. Time and circumstance cast a shadow on the once loving couple and in 1941 when Gabriel returned from the war, he and Rhoda divorced. Gabriel died in a plane crash in Khartoum in 1947. Mawingu, whose legal ownership had been transferred by Rhoda into Gabriel’s name as a wedding gift, was eventually auctioned off, and later became the Mt. Kenya Safari Club.

Rhoda Prud’homme lived the rest of her life in Santa Barbara, and curiously, cast off all pretenses of wealth

249

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS and luxury. (Her sister, Gladys Seligman van Heukelom, also lived in Santa Barbara, and in 1951 commissioned Mary Craig to renovate her newly purchased Italian villa originally designed in 1916 for Ralph Isham.) Whether by intention or necessity, Rhoda lived far more modestl than she had in frica first b ing a beach house on Fernald Point in Montecito. In 1957, she bought Mary Craig’s small house on East Valley Road for $35,000.

While spending much of 1957 to 1959 in New York in her Fifth Avenue apartment, Rhoda asked Mary to make major renovations and additions

to her Montecito house, adding a new dining room, kitchen, carport, maids’ rooms, and a card room (later rumored to host Rhoda’s gambling parties and roulette games). A swimming pool was also added. The numerous letters between the two women show that Rhoda drove a hard bargain; she had after all, masterfully supervised the construction of her African chateau, completing it in a record twelve months, and took a certain pride in Rhoda Prud’homme, left foreground, was a familiar figure in Montecito societ in the 1940s and 1950s. Courtesy Mrs. William Slater III.

250 her knowledge of building.

Her method of paying Mary was to send a check before the bill came, in hopes of settling the matter on her terms.

In 1951 while Prud’homme was still living in her beach house, Mary came to know Rhoda’s business tactics after doing some preliminary drawings for a small addition. Abandoning the project, Rhoda contested the fee.

In several letters, Mary pushed back politely, quoting from the recent AIA Document No. 177 for 1950-1951 which clearly outlined standard policy for payments to architects.

By 1958 the two had worked out the earlier “misunderstanding.” Later however, Rhoda complained to Mary again about the commission fees. Mary Craig was not only a consummate business woman, but a skilled communicator. Even with her close friends as clients, she never dropped her professional standards, always beginning her letters with “I wish to advise you of my fee.” She wrote to Rhoda: About my commission, as long ago as our office alwa s charged for alterations The sum involved is never as large as building a new house and the work considerabl more, in as much as ever thing has to be measured and one often runs into unforeseen difficulties have checked with Adrian Malone in San Francisco, and with utah Riggs talked to utah last night she sa s she alwa s charges for alterations and then does not break even value our friendship far

NOTICIAS more than the mone involved and would not be happ working if there is the slightest dissatisfaction Building toda is difficult enough and spending other people s mone is alwa s a worr to me But if take the ob, and ou wish me to, will give it m undivided attention n the other hand ou ma find someone who will do it for ou more cheapl and ou ma prefer to have them would continue to work with ou and give ou all of m best ideas and an criticism of the plans as ou ma wish 139 Despite their differences, the renovations and additions continued under Mary’s full supervision, right down to a small herb garden that Mary put in herself. Having convinced Rhoda of her talent and professionalism, and doing everything to make her friend happy, except giving in to requests for discounts, Mary’s friendship was never compromised.

Rhoda had not forsaken her penchant for keeping her pulse on Montecito society. Whether entertaining herself, or being entertained, she loved being in its midst. When aviator and author Beryl Markham arrived in Santa Barbara in 1945 with her then husband, Raoul Schumacher, Rhoda welcomed her old friend whom she had known in Kenya, and invited her to her “impressive parties.” But the two charismatic women, perhaps too much alike, “were alternately close friends one week and at loggerheads the next.”140

251

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS Often attending the same events in the 1950s, Rhoda and Mary Craig were particularly fond of the elaborate costume parties given by Frances and Will Slater which appealed to their whimsical side and, under the proper circumstances, their ease with the outrageous. Rhoda had always been a progressive thinker, and when she turned to the world’s deeper social issues and causes, she was thoughtful and generous. She served as a nurse’s aide during World War II, was a patron of the arts and music, and founded the Santa Barbara chapter of the United Nations. Never abandoning her love of Africa, she became a strong advocate for wildlife preservation, and on that subject, arranged for local lect res and fil s i in thirt seven years in Santa Barbara, Rhoda Prud’homme died at the age of eightynine on May 14, 1978.141 In a tribute to her life it was written that as a world traveler she was “guest at some of the grandest balls and parties the world has seen in this cent r er da hter dre ewisohn Spencer said of her life that it “seemed to be one costume party after another.” Yet she brought to Santa Barbara some of the most distin-

guished thinkers of the time, including Chester Nimitz, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, and Ralph Bunche. The tribute ended with the words: “Mrs. Prud’homme expected no accolades for being a decent, civilized human being. She championed causes she believed in whether popular or not.

She made her life count.”142

Conclusion The Craigs’ commissions, spanning the years 1915 to the early 1950s, were inextricably tied to the vast fortunes that had been procured by some of America’s earliest business entrepreneurs between 1850 and 1930.

Santa Barbara would be especially inenced b these earlier efforts hether rand in scale or defined b what author Marc Appleton refers to as “picturesque simplicity,” the Craigs and other architects often had to credit their clients’ parents and grandparents for making their commissions possible. Whether capitalist, railroad baron, ind strialist ban er financier or ollywood mogul, these were such examples among many that lay at the heart of Santa Barbara’s architectural renaissance.143

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NOTES Unless noted, all correspondence cited is held by the Craig family. James Osborne Craig is identified as J Mar Mc aughlin is identified as MMc Mar raig is identified as M Material from the Pearl hase ollection, ommunit Development and onservation ollection, Special ollections, Davidson ibrar , Universit of alifornia, Santa Barbara, is identified as hase Papers Documents from the Architecture and Design ollection, Art, Design Architecture Museum, Universit of alifornia, Santa Barbara, are identified as AD orrespondence from the hicago Histor Museum, evi eiter and eiter Estate Papers is identified as HM Introduction 1 From an undated real estate brochure, office of arold Chase Chase a ers ond he Coast of California Motor amper and Tourist, November a

C

elloli ed ron nt The Search for a Regional Architecture anta onica ennesse n alls

eoffre ol e hirle ain wri ht The Studio Yearbook and Decorative Art, ondon he t dio td Crai s le ander ho se was feat red alon side wor s b hiladel hia architects ellor ei s and owe ew or architect o is ee s ritish architect ir dwin t ens and strian architect and desi ner osef off ann e ill Cra er in disc ssion with a thor ril

The Paramores ro d nd ilson s e lo r d to ar Crai s ncle ara ore r which first a eared in The New Republic, l ara ore to enr iddle an ar enr iddle a ers ecial Collections and ni er sit rchi es ni ersit of re on ibraries ene re on d nd ilson The Twenties ed eon del ew or arrar tra s and iro i ara ore to c arch a id ric Montecito and Santa Barbara, olume ,The Da s of the reat Estates lendale California rans n lo oo s ed ara ore to ar c a hlin ece ber ee d nd ilson s The Twenties and The Thirties ed eon del ew or arrar tra s and iro and ilson The Twenties nna ara ore rando in disc ssion with a thor ril The Ballad of Yukon Jake incl ded whi sical en and in drawin s b oc well ent who si ned hi self o arth r ale l ni estionnaire l an scri ts and rchi es ale ni ersit i e n ortant nderta in b ale rad ates in the ield of ee l o rnalis Yale Alumnae Weekl , an scri ts and rchi es ale ni ersit ee ational ffairs Time Maga ine, arch

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS 17 James Cagney, Cagney by Cagney (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 84.

18 Anna Paramore Brando in discussion with author, May 11, 2009.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

Bernhard Hoffmann 21 Amy Wesselhoeft to Gertrude Hoffmann, following Bernhard Hoffmann's death in 1949, courtesy of Caroline Hoffmann Williams. Amy was the sister of Gertrude Hoffmann (wife of Bernhard's brother Ralph).

22 Newton Bateman, Paul Selby, and J.S. Currey, Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois: Biographical, Memorial, Illustrative, Volume 2 (Chicago: Munsell Publishing Company, 1920), 674-675.

23 Michael J. Phillips, History of Santa Barbara County California Volume II, (Chicago: The S. J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1927), 104-105. See also Michael Redmon, "Bernhard Hoffmann, The Father of Architectural Planning in Santa Barbara," Santa Barbara Independent, May 1, 2014.

24 Pearl Chase, "Friends of Santa Barbara An Appreciation," The Western Woman, March 1931, 22.

25 Tanny Keeler-Hodgetts in discussion with author, April 8, 2008. "To Take City Back to the Golden Days of Yore," Santa Barbara Daily News, February 6, 1922, 1. See CDCC, Minutes of the Community Arts Association, of Plans and Planting, and of the Santa Barbara School of the Arts, 1922-1928, Chase Papers.

26 Morning Press (Santa Barbara), March 26, 1922.

27 Hoffmann to Nina Moise, September 2, 1925, Presidio Research Center, Santa

253 Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation.

28 Hoffmann to Reginald Fernald, July 6, 1925, CDCC, Administration Records Series I, CAA, 1920's, Box 500, Chase Papers.

29 Pearl Chase to Charles Sumner, July 23, 1925, CDCC, P/P, Outgoing Correspondence, 1922-1925, Chase Papers.

Hoffmann to William Templeton Johnson, August 4, 1925, Pearl Chase Papers, MS-01, Presidio Research Center, Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation.

30 Bernard Hoffmann, "Luncheon Talk, School of the Arts", May 26-28, 1926, SBHC, MSS 1 CDCC, Personal/ Family, Pearl/People/Hoffmann, Chase Papers.

31 Pearl Chase, "Bernhard Hoffmann Community Builder", SBHC, MSS 1 CDCC, Personal/Family, Pearl/ People/Hoffmann, Chase Papers.

32 Hoffmann to Myron Hunt, September 23, 1925, Pearl Chase Papers, MS-01, Presidio Research Center, Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation.

See Charles Harris Whitaker, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue - Architect and Master of Many Arts (New York: Press of the American Institute of Architects, Inc., 1925).

33 See Pamela Skewes-Cox and Robert Sweeney, Spanish Colonial Style, Santa Barbara and the Architecture of James Osborne Craig and Mary McLaughlin Craig (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2015), 71-73, 164, 168-169.

34 Raymond D. Tracy Jr., "The Reconstruction of State Street," March 1970, 7, 30, Community Development and Conservation Collection (Local History Essay Files), SBHC Mss 1, Chase Pa-

254 pers. Tracy's essay offers a unique glimpse into Bernhard Hoffmann's life in Santa Barbara before he returned to Stockbridge in 1928.

35 CAA, Bound Minutes Books, 1921-1928, January 26, 1926, Chase Papers. See Gibbs Smith with Pearl Chase, "Oral History" (Santa Barbara, 1972), tape 3, side 1, Chase Papers.

36 Carol Storke, granddaughter of Thomas M. Storke, email message to author, April 14, 2010.

37 CAA, Bound Minutes Books, 1921-1928, December 15, 28, 1927, January 19, 1928. Chase Papers.

38 Journal of the American Institute of Architects, September 1949, 127.

39 Thomas Storke, "Bernhard Hoffmann Left His Own Memorials Here," Santa Barbara News-Press, July 9, 1949.

40 Aylmer Hunter, England's Reawakening (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1923), 12.

Mrs. J. N. Burnes III and the Armstrong Brothers 41 John Murray Look, "James Osborne Craig's French Norman Beach House," Santa Barbara ndependent lassifieds, May 31, 2001.

42 The society page of the March 6, 1916 Pasadena Star News mentions Mrs. J. N. Burnes "spending the season" in Montecito where she "has a handsome estate." A professional relationship between Myron Hunt and Osborne Craig has been speculated, but never confir ed n an article written in January 1926, only four years after Osborne Craig's death, Hunt wrote: In Santa Barbara, three men, two of them originall amateurs, have signall in u-

NOTICIAS enced the whole community, and through that community, more or less rejuvenated a whole state. The late James Osborne Craig, in the few years which he spent there, left onl a few finished buildings, but, fortunately, he left a series of drawings for his Paseo Group in the hands of a client, Bernard Hoffman [sic], so appreciative that the posthumous buildings of this brilliant young architect are the mecca of everyone who visits Santa Barbara, tourist and architect alike.

Hunt went on to write about the other two whom he also held in high regard, Francis Underhill and George Washington Smith, both of whom he referred to as "amateurs." Certainly Hunt acknowledged that Craig was not an amateur, but his understanding of him stops there. Had Hunt employed Craig, even for a short time, surely he would have known that he spent more than "only a few years" in Santa Barbara. And he would have known that Craig left far more than "a few finished b ildin s erha s Craig did in fact spend a short time with Hunt in Pasadena (there is a small amount of evidence that he did), but that following his departure Hunt paid little attention to the progress of the young architect. Any association would have been brief, at best. Myron nt ersonal o rces of acific Coast Architectural Development," American Architect, January 1926, 5154.

43 Unless otherwise noted, the lives of Margaret Burnes and her family were shared with the author by her granddaughter, Diane Fox Downs from 2007 to 2010.

44 "Father and Son Dead," Dallas Morning News, April 30, 1901.

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS 45 Howard L. Conard, ed., Encyclopedia of the History of Missouri, Vol. 1 (New York: Haldeman, Conard and Co.,1901), 434.

46 The large house at Ayr Lawn, built in 1868 for John DeMond, was designed by architect W. Angelo Powell (1828owell ade a si nificant contribution to the architecture of St. Joseph from 1868 until his death.

47 Quotes about life at Ayr Lawn are from an undated and unsourced radio script "Know St. Joseph," heard on the radio by one of the Burnes relatives in the 1980s and sent to the author by Diane Fox Downs.

48 Pasadena Daily News, August 23, 1913; St. Joseph Gazette, August 23, 1913; St. Joseph News Press, August 22, 1913.

The Burnes' house in Pasadena appears in The Architect and Engineer, March 1912, 41.

49 Correspondence with Diane Fox Downs, March 26, 2010.

50 Ayr Lawn was eventually sold, and after many years of neglect, it was torn down sometime in the 1930s. No photographs of the house are known to exist. Property ownership records, 1914, Santa Barbara County Courthouse.

51 See "Fernald Point, The Comfortable Luxury of Seaside Montecito" by Judy Pearce, Montecito Magazine, Spring 1997.

52 "The Daily Round of Society," Morning Press (Santa Barbara), August 23, 1921.

53 Morning Press (Santa Barbara), August 3, 8, 1919.

54 Pasadena Star News, November 15, 1920.

55 Look, "French Norman Beach House."

Normandy Cottage was inherited by Margaret Burnes' daughter, Elizabeth Cary Fox and not sold until the 1950's.

255 The house and property remained lar el nchan ed for another fift years. Sometime after the year 2000, the house was moved to another location on the property. With the addition of a large and architecturally incompatible new wing, the overall exterior was altered si nificantl owever, the original house and garage were required to maintain the exterior appearance as Craig had designed them. The Hunt house, shared by the two Armstrong families for many years, was eventually divided and made into two houses in the 1960s, remaining in the family until the late 1990s when the last original Burnes property was sold. The Pasadena mansion became the home of Earl and Lucile Armstrong for a time after Mrs. Burnes' death. Extant today, it remains one of Myron Hunt's more notable designs.

56 Obituary of Lionel Armstrong, Santa Barbara News-Press, April 5, 1948. Diane Fox Downs in discussion with author, 2007.

57 William Charles Conrad, "Development in Extractive Communities: Ridgway and St. Marys, Pennsylvania, 18501914" PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2008. Soon after its founding, the Clarion Pulp and Paper Company changed its name to the New York and Pennsylvania Company. The paper mills of Johnsonburg are still in operation today. Johnsonburg Illustrated Review, J. W. Johnston, pub., Board of Trade, undated, 23, 38.

58 Obituary of M. M. Armstrong, Johnsonburg Press, October 14, 1910. Diane Fox Downs in discussion with author, 2007.

59 James Nelson Burnes III was fourteen

256

NOTICIAS

years old when his parents died within a year of each other. He and his ďŹ e siblin s were ado ted b his uncle, James Nelson Burnes II, the father of two sons himself.

60 Motor West, ebr ar ee also "The Chandler Car Makes 2000Mile Run from Mexico to Canada," The Movie Magazine, Vol.2 - No. 2, Noe ber bit ar of ionel r stron Santa Barbara News-Press ril irst irshi ine Pasadena Daily News, arch nabensh e iri ible till a in ched led Trips," Aero and Hydro, ol o an ar oodb e to irshi Pasadena Daily News, March 62 Morning Press

anta arbara

st

Southwest Builder and Contractor, May California Arts and Architecture, March The Architectural Forum, arch arl and cile r stron had three children cile arl r and or an ionel and ar atherine ea in r stron had two children atricia and ar aret he r stron s rofessional li es in the late s are not nown he cens s lists arl as a to dealer and a asadena tele hone director lists ionel as reas rer o e t dios Nancy Leiter Campbell r Colonel illia s rad ated ďŹ rst in his class at est oint in ose h eiter ies Chica o Ca italist New York Times, ril New York Times, ne

i el icolson Mary Curzon (New or ar er ow i eart ttac rin s eath to r Ca bell Morning Press anta arbara a ohn radle ed Lady Curzon's India, Letters of a Vicereine o ins l ic ar etin Cor oration ee Charlotte Cor he elhi rbar e isited The Sunday Times, Dece ber ccordin to Ca bell s randda hter lie ol er at the o tbrea of orld ar Ca bell was bro ht bac into the ar beca se of his orani ational s ills New York Times, o e ber radle Lady Curzon's India, esidences Southwest Builder and Contractor, no e te ber anc Ca bell to ece ber th Chica o istor se e i eiter and eiter state a ers see o older o older and the e i eiter hoto Collection older which incl des sna shots ta en b ar Crai of the Ca bell anch o se nder construction. anc Ca bell to r a rence oe ber C he architect of was ne er re ealed in correspondence.

C to C ece ber ose h eiter r illed b wn n New York Times, an ar ated st the str ct res are shown on an lo rno r e or a of the Ca bell anch ro ert C anc Ca bell to r arr ndated late C t a ears that Ca bell did not beco e an eri-

257

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS can citizen.

78 Nancy Campbell to G.B., December 30, 1922, CHM. Two informative accounts about the Campbells in Santa Barbara are Gary B. Coombs and Phyllis J. Olsen, The Grand Manor (Goleta: Institute for American Research, 1987) and Anita Guerrini, "The Story of the Campbells, from Montecito to Goleta and Back," Montecito Magazine, Spring/Summer 2010, 58-66.

79 "Honors Paid to Colin Campbell," Morning Press (Santa Barbara), May 17, 1923.

80 MC to Joseph Leiter, September 18, 1923, CHM. 81 The box and its contents now belong to UCSB. The author wishes to thank California mission historians Judith Triem of San Buenaventura Associates and Julia Costello, co-author of The California Missions (Los Angeles, Getty Publications, 2009), for identifying the location of this structure.

82 MC to Joseph Leiter, June 17, 1924, CHM. 83 Joseph Leiter to MC, July 15, 1924.

84 MC to Joseph Leiter, August 8, 1924, CHM. The word "corking" derives from the slang word "corker," a person or thing of excellent or remarkable quality.

85 See Ronald Nye's 2008 study of the Campbell Ranch dovecote for the Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara.

86 Nicolson, Mary Curzon, 12.

87 Joseph Leiter to MC, March 3, 1925.

88 Mary Craig Skewes-Cox to author, January 24, 2012; Skewes-Cox and Sweeney, Spanish Colonial Style, 109.

89 See the Marshall Bond Photograph Albums, (PA 24 B, C), Gledhill Library, Santa Barbara Historical Museum.

90 "Mrs. Campbell Passes Away While Abroad," Morning Press (Santa Barbara), June 23, 1930. "Mrs. Campbell Dead; Was A Leiter Heiress," New York Times, June 23, 1930. "Miss Nancy Leiter Weds," New York Times, November 30, 1904. Nancy Campbell to G.B., December 30, 1922, CHS. Transcriptions of Nancy Leiter Campbell's handwritten letters are courtesy of her granddaughter, Alison de Frise.

For their personal remembrances and assistance in sharing valuable information about the Campbells, the author would like to thank Julie Folger and Alison de Frise, granddaughters of Colin and Nancy Campbell, Mary Osborne Craig Skewes-Cox, daughter of James Osborne Craig and Mary Craig, Allen Snow and Joan Churchill of Santa Barbara, Janis Johnson, Manager of External Affairs, Devereux California, Goleta, California, Chuck Klein of UCSB, Anita Guerrini, Ph.D., Horning Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History, Oregon State University and Adjunct Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Jenifer Dugan, Associate Research Biologist with the Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara.

Mrs. William Slater 91 MC to Mrs. William E. Slater, April 14, 1927, ADC. 92 Landscaping for both houses was done

by Lockwood de Forest, Jr. (1896-1949).

See the Lockwood de Forest Collection, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley.

93 "W.A. Slater Dies in Washington," Nor-

258 wich Bulletin, February 26, 1919. See the Slater Memorial Museum, Norwich, Connecticut. See the W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts. See John E. Fisher, The John F. Slater Fund: A Nineteenth Century Affirmative Action for Negro Education (Lanham, MD.: University Press of America, 1986). See "Educating the Freedman, The Charitable Purpose of John F. Slater," New York Times, April 13, 1882.

94 "Launch of the Eleanor," New York Times, May 9, 1894.

95 At the time she married Halsey Malone in 1914, Eleanor was a widow and mother of two young children from her three-year marriage to Baron Boris de tr e of ssia he later files at the ADC include correspondence between Mary Craig and Halsey Malone. Halsey and Eleanor's son Adrian married Joan Skewes-Cox, sister of Bennet Skewes-Cox who later married Mary Craig's daughter, Mary Osborne Craig.

96 Wire, MC to Ralph Armitage, September 25, 1927, ADC. Jessie Tarbox Beals' 1929 photographs of the Slater ho ses in ontecito re ect not onl the many Spanish decorative items that Mary Craig picked out for the later ho ses b t llen s fine taste in both art and furnishings. Will Slater's marriage proposal to Mary Craig is confir ed b ar s da hter ar Osborne Craig Skewes-Cox. 97 Mary Slater Conrad in discussion with author, October 10, 2012.

98 Ibid.

99 Mary Craig Skewes-Cox in discussion with author, August 20, 2015.

NOTICIAS Jessie Tarbox Beals 100 Alexander Alland, Jessie Tarbox Beals, First Woman Photographer (New York: Camera/Graphic Press, 1978), 88.

101 Descriptive Summary, Jessie Tarbox Beals Photograph Collection, New York Historical Society. See House Beautiful, June 1930. See The Papers of Jessie Tarbox Beals, Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University; Beals' appointment books show entries for Craig in October 1929 and for Slater in November 1930.

102 Alland, 56.

103 Beals to Chase, September 22, 1929, CDCC, Incoming Correspondence, Chase Papers. Alland, 53, 87-88. New York Historical Society, Beals Collection, Biographical Note.

104 Alland, 89-90.

105 Alland, 89. See Mrs. James Ward Thorne, American Rooms in Miniature (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1940).

106 "Eugene J. Kupjack, 79, Creator of Miniature Rooms for Museum," New York Times, November 16, 1991.

Mrs. Peter Cooper Bryce 107 Marc Appleton, email message to author, February 25, 2013. See Rexford Newcomb, Mediterranean Domestic Architecture in the United States with a New Introduction by Marc Appleton (New York: Acanthus Press, 1999), v-x.

108 Appleton to the author, February 25, 2013.

109 Ibid.

110 J.P Yochum in discussion with author, May 5, 2011. J.Patrick Yochum, an en ineer at enfield and ith in Santa Barbara, worked on the engineering study of the structure in 2010.

IN THE COMPANY OF THE CRAIGS Jesse and Bessie Lasky 111 MC to her daughter, May 26, 1937. esse as n ence of ood rchitect re on o in ict re ets The Architect and Engineer, January 1929, 99-102. essie ona as The Path of Vision ew or r den ress oreword he ission aintin s were donated b essie to the os n eles Co nt se of at ral istor in as a e orial to her late h sband essie as Songs of the Twilight oll wood tanle ose ett as in disc ssions with a thor an ar st and ril C C in disc ssion with a thor arch Cine a Colon lite ttend o sewar in Los Angeles Times, ril essie ona as Candle in the Sun os n eles e orss and Co an ett as fro her initial ro osal for the re ision of her father s e oir I Blow My Own Horn (New York: Doubleda to be titled The Forgotten Mogul: The Incredible Story of Jesse L. Lasky, First Gentleman of Hollywood, sent to the a thor e te ber essie as to C o e ber Nevill Cramer a id dler desi ned a ho se on e er ill in ontecito for resident a id ones ilt alon the lines of a alladian illa accordin to a id ric and co leted in it was considered one of ontecito s ďŹ nest ansions ee ed b a new owner as too lar e to aintain it

259 was re rettabl torn down in ee ric Montecito and Santa Barbara, Volume II, ee e ill Cra er Montecito Boy, An Irreverent Memoir 1923-1940 anta arbara ithian ress for an n s al and entertainin ersonal acco nt of rowin in ontecito and the Cra er and ee er fa ilies of Chica o Cra er a ifted h orist with e traordinar wit was a i ht na i ator in the ir orce d rin orld ar f his in da s he said the ti e o ďŹ nd o t where o are o re so ewhere else he a thor is indebted to e ill and his wife at for sharin Cra er fa il letters and hoto ra hs abo t anta arbara ee eidi oll e ill Cra er d cator riter d ocate Santa Barbara Independent, ebr ar iero enci son of en o enci an talian sc l tor was born in anta arbara in n acco lished artist he is the head of the cera ics de art ent at te hen stin tate ni ersit in aco doches e as ro the ontere area blication What's Doing, ol o ril nter iew with e ill Cra er oe ber 123 Guide to the Larkin House Collection, htt www oac cdlib or ďŹ ndaid ar t ontere tate istoric ar rocessed b ori indber ii iii n after li in in the ho se for ears lice ar in o l in donated the historic adobe and its contents to the tate of California as a e orial to her randfather n the ho se was desi nated a ational istoric and ar e in tarr Material Dreams, Southern

260 California Through the 1920's (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 280, writes that Alice's uncle, Thomas Oliver Larkin, Jr. was born in the HillCarrillo Adobe in Santa Barbara in April 1834, and was considered the ďŹ rst white California child born to American parents. Alice's father, born in Monterey, was Alfred Otis Larkin (1847-1917), ninth and last child born to Thomas and Rachel Hobson Larkin.

Alfred received his education in the East, including some time at the Harvard Medical School.

124 From the History of the Royal Presidio Chapel, www.sancarloscathedral.net.

125 Interview with Nevill Cramer, November 2, 2009.

126 Nevill Cramer to Ambrose Cramer, January 7, 1952, Cramer Family Collection (hereafter referred to as CFC).

127 Nevill Cramer to Ambrose Cramer, January 7, 1952, CFC. 128 Ambrose Cramer to Nevill Cramer, January 17, 1952, CFC. 129 Nevill Cramer to Ambrose Cramer, February 5, 1952, CFC. 130 Interview with Nevill Cramer, April 22, 2008.

131 Nevill Cramer to Ambrose Cramer, February 5, 1952, CFC. 132 Nevill Cramer to Ambrose Cramer, March 8, 1952, CFC. 133 Ambrose Cramer to Nevill Cramer, May 7, 1952, CFC. 134 Nevill Cramer to Ambrose Cramer, May 22, 1952, CFC. The Lobero Theatre fell on hard times in the early 1950s, and Rollins was hired to bring it back from its uncertain future.

Writer, director, and for many years the head of his own acting school in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Rollins engaged Cramer to put out a maga-

NOTICIAS zine for the theatre called Audience. It was a short-lived project, with only one issue appearing in late 1952. Selling the El Cielito house in the late 1950s, the Cramers built a new house at Sandyland Cove. They divorced several years later.

135 The Cramer house and the Toulmin house miraculously survived the Tea Fire of 2008. The nearby monastery was destroyed.

136 Interview with Mary Osborne Craig Skewes-Cox, May 17, 2011.

Rhoda Seligman Prud'homme 137 MC to Rhoda Prud'homme, October 10, 1951.

138 Unless otherwise noted, all quotes and information on Rhoda and Gabriel Prud'homme's lives in Africa are from Lucinda de Laroque, Paradise Found, The Story of the Mount Kenya Safari Club (Nairobi, Kenya: Camerapix Publishers International, 1992), 13-41.

139 MC to Rhoda Prud'homme, February 1, 1959.

140 Mary S. Lovell, Straight On Till Morning, The Biography of Beryl Markham (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 247.

141 Obituary of Rhoda Prud'homme, (1888-1978), Santa Barbara News-Press, May 15, 1978.

142 Beverley Jackson, "Farewell to a Friend," Santa Barbara News-Press, May 15, 1978.

Conclusion 143 Newcomb, Mediterranean Domestic Architecture, xv.

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