by Paul R. Spitzzeri
As the end of 1925 came, eight and a half years after the Temple family began receiving the royalties on oil providentially found on their nearly 60-acre ranch near Montebello leased to Standard Oil Company of California, a financial statement of Walter P. Temple’s assets and liabilities was produced.
The document showed only minor changes from the report issued not long after the halfway point of the year, with total assets of just north of $2.3 million and liabilities not far south of $200,000. On the face of it, these figures made it seem as if Temple was in more than a sound financial condition and, yet, there was more to the situation than these broad numbers.
For one, cash on hand was $3,370, a 40% drop from July. Moreover, royalties due from Standard for the many wells producing at the Temple lease comprised $12,680, but this was a decline of one-third from what was received five months earlier and was part of steady downward trend of crude emanating from the shallow field that had spectacular results from its 1917 opening—at one point, the Temples were taking in around $50,000 a month.
Additionally, the lion’s share of the current assets, some 70% of nearly $373,000, comprised mortgages receivable, these generated from loans made by Temple and for which mortgages were used as collateral by the borrowers. As previous posts here have observed, he made quite a few loans to family and friends—the question is whether how many of these loans would be paid back and, if not, how quickly could he realize those mortgages.
Another $55,000 were from accounts receivable and the same matter of getting those accounts settled was at hand. The last item involved just over $41,000 in government bonds and there were another $8,100 in other bonds, principally, his stake of $5,000 in the Mission Play Association, which oversaw the planning and construction of a new theater for the popular and romanticized passion play held at San Gabriel, and $3,000 for the San Gabriel Country Club, of which Temple was a member.
Further assets were held in corporation stock, totaling $225,000, and of which 55% was held through shares in the Temple Townsite Company, which Temple and associates Milton Kauffman (his business manager), George H. Woodruff (his attorney) and Sylvester Dupuy formed to manage the Town of Temple—celebrating its centennial this year. Another 30% of his stock was vested with the Central Finance Building Company, which constructed the Great Republic Life Building in Los Angeles, headquarters for Temple’s companies, including the Temple Estate Company and Walter P. Temple Oil Company.
Nearly $18,000 of stock was owned in the Talbert and Argonaut oil companies and another $11,200 was invested in the Yosemite National Park Association, which ran most concessions in that famous California beauty spot. Smaller amounts were owned of the stock of Southern California Edison, the El Monte Plunge Association for a community pool in that town, the Big Four Truck Company with its assembly plant in Puente, Samson Tire and Rubber Company with its well-known manufacturing site, now the Citadel Outlets, in City of Commerce, and the newly formed Temple National Bank in the Town of Temple.
Real property, totaling just above $1.7 million, of almost three-quarters of the assets, involved ten tracts, including the Temple oil lease; Temple Theatre and Utter and Sons Mortuary in Alhambra; that city’s post office and adjacent structures; a lease on Alhambra land being developed for the Temple Estate Company building of a half-dozen stores next to the theater; another lease for adjacent property on the east and where the Edison Building was constructed; 15 lots across from Mission San Gabriel on which Temple built three structures (the Arcade, Temple and post office edifices); the Rialto Theatre property in El Monte; a half-interest in about 150 acres in Owensmouth, now Canoga Park, in the San Fernando Valley; the Rowland Hotel, built in 1886 when the town of Puente was being established; and the 93-acre “Workman Homestead Rancho,” which was “planted to walnuts,” but where there was the Workman House, El Campo Santo Cemetery, many outbuildings, houses for Temple’s sisters Margarita Rowland and Lucinda Zuñiga, and La Casa Nueva, then under construction.
As for those liabilities, the comprised some $93,000 in notes due, $101,000 in mortgages payable, and about $1,650 in trade acceptances that were owed. Net worth was pegged at $2.112 million, but, again, this has to be looked at in terms of what was mentioned above, as well as the fact that many of those properties, while they had capital-producing elements in the form of rents and leases, were nowhere near realized in terms of proceeds matching costs of development. Then there was the matter of oil development projects pursued by Temple through his own company, in which extensive outlays were made in the hope of finding that next gusher. The continuing development of the Town of Temple and the expensive construction of La Casa Nueva were also major factors in Temple’s complicated finances.
A summary of his activities in 1925 shows that, while these were not as frenetic and frenzied as earlier in the decade during the latest massive development boom in greater Los Angeles that peaked two years prior, there was plenty taking place that provide some specificity to Temple’s economic picture. It was at the end of February, when the Temple Estate Company signed the Nye and Hollywood Security leases for the tracts that became the single-story estate company and the four-story Edison buildings.
The former was designed by Roy Seldon Price, who was the architect completing work on La Casa Nueva, and he used elements from the latter for the former, including distinctive blue-and-yellow ziggurat tile and the cast-iron balcony “cage” over the entries of both. The latter, however, was the work of Albert H. Walker and Percy Eisen, who designed most of Temple’s commercial properties and who prepared the early drawings for La Casa Nueva (thereby earning them credit on the house’s dedication plaque to the late Laura González Temple, Walter’s wife).
Notably, there were discussions with the Alhambra Elks of Lodge 1328 about occupying the upper two floors of what was proposed to be six stories, but this idea was abandoned and the lodge ended up buying a property from Temple across from his former residence on the east side of town and building their lodge there—the structure remains though the lodge ended up leaving for more modest and affordable quarters. The Temple Estate Company Building was finished in spring 1926 and the Edison Building, the last of Temple’s real estate projects and so named because Southern California Edison became the main tenant, followed a year later.
With respect to the Town of Temple, as his residential community was called until 1928 when the name was changed to Temple City, the Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News of 24 May, reported (or, more likely, was paid to advertise) that
Temple, a community of homes located three miles east of Alhambra, is now in the midst of a great building boom. Almost 50 homes have been contracted for in the past 30 days and the building program now contemplates starting a home each day . . . There are more than 1500 people living there now, and within a year it is expected . . . the population will exceed 5000.
This latter was far too ambitious an estimate, though Temple City had around 3,000 residents by the end of the decade. There were other major changes afoot in the town in 1925, including the establishment of the Temple National Bank, launched in June with a modest capitalization of $25,000, and the beginning of work on the community church (situated where the Methodist Church is now).
In early March, the town hosted the meeting of the Associated Chambers of Commerce of the San Gabriel Valley at the South Santa Anita (now Longden Elementary) School. Among the speakers was Woodruff, then president of the Temple Chamber of Commerce and who gave the welcome address; Kauffman, also as an official with that organization; and Perry Worden, who was supposed to write a Temple family history that went uncompleted and who was identified as president and director of the California Archives for the Collection and Preservation of California Historical Data. The latter two “made short talks on behalf of Mr. Temple, founder of the City of Temple [sic] and a California pioneer.”
The keynote speaker was Leslie B. Henry, a Pasadena stockbroker, who told the assemblage, “I smile as I think of the figures submitted here to show the marvelous growth of the town of Temple. These things mean that you intend to do things.” Henry added that “nothing ever just happens. Somebody puts it over. Men with enterprise, power and will to accomplish are making Southern California.” Speaking of putting things over, however, Henry ended up pleading guilty a decade later to embezzlement in his absconding of investment funds of his client, Charlotte Shelby, mother of the famous actor Mary Miles Minter and oft-accused of being the perpetrator in the 1922 murder of director William Desmond Taylor, purportedly because of the relationship between Taylor and Minter.
Other 1925 news involving the Town of Temple included the completion of a major Southern California Edison substation that enhanced power supply to residents, businesses and the Pacific Electric Streetcar line that ended at a depot next to the town park (this is where the City Hall now stands), and discussions to extend Main Street (Las Tunas Drive) east from town to Baldwin Park, where it would connect with the Arrow Highway, projected to run from San Bernardino to Los Angeles—though, in fact, Arrow ended up terminating in Irwindale with its connection to Live Oak Avenue, a main Temple City thoroughfare in its south side.
Concerning the Walter P. Temple Oil Company, there were a pair of projects under development by that firm during 1925. At Montebello, the company was drilling a wildcat well, meaning one that was in an area not geologically proven to be in reliable oil territory. At the end of November, the Whittier News and Los Angeles Times published the same brief report that a pumping test was underway “and is making a considerable amount of fluid with some showings of oil” at close to 4,800 feet.” The field reports added that the well “is said to have some encouraging formations, but efforts to make it a projective project are not meeting with much success,” and the well did not prove to be a success.
Meanwhile, from July to October, the firm embarked on a redrilling of the Ocean View #2 well at East Whittier in the lower reaches of the Puente Hills. The Los Angeles Express of 25 July recorded that “it is the intention of the Walter P. Temple Oil Company to drill about 200 feet more hole . . . and see if there is not something better a little deeper.” At not far over 4,100 feet there was “a little oil and water” and “on account of the good gas showings it is thought that the opening up of more formation might result in something better in the way of oil production.”
The 16 September edition of the News commented that the firm’s “deep sand test well is looking good and may create something of a surprise for the old field.” Boring down to nearly 4,800 feet, the company reported that “the last 100 feet of the hole showed a lot of very excellent looking oil bearing sand.” Two weeks later, the Times added that the company, “trying for many months to extend the Montebello field,” detected a little amount of oil while bailing water from the well “and while it was small [it] was sufficiently encouraging to warrant a continuance of the test in an effort to develop a possible productive zone.” Here, too, however, it seems that nothing came out of this effort and the expense at Montebello and Whittier had to have been considerable.
There was, as well, the long-running and increasingly costly construction of La Casa Nueva. Although little has been found in the local press concerning the project, the Times of 22 February ran a feature on the architect, Price, and his use of Latino laborers—we’ll dedicate a post to this in a couple of months—and in which it was observed,
Mr. Price is now building another house [following his well-known mansion for film studio owner Thomas Ince] for Walter P. Temple, a house of pure Spanish-colonial architecture with adobe walls thirty-eight inches thick. It is located at Puente on the old Workman place.
Also located for 1925 was a public note for a foreclosure sale handled by the county sheriff emanating from a lawsuit filed by Temple against Elena R. Gastelum and her two minor children over the default of a loan of over $2,700 and for which there was a mortgage on land owned by Gastelum, formerly married to a member of the Sánchez family which, in the 19th century, owned Rancho La Merced with Temple’s father. Remembering that Temple had a substantial sum of mortgages receivable listed under his asset, it bears noting that legal proceedings for foreclosure was time-consuming and costly.
In fact, it would be another seven years when Temple was at the defendant’s end of such a foreclosure suit, filed by the California Bank over the “Workman Homestead Rancho,” and which ended, in July 1932, with the bank taking possession of the last of Temple’s once-substantial holdings and the one of greatest personal value to him and his family. Not long after this financial statement was prepared, Temple and his associates decided to take out bonds to pay for Temple Estate and Temple Townsite development a nd, while this raised cash to complete work, it obviously entailed debt.
By the time the 1920s ended with the onset of the Great Depression, management of the ever-rising debt incurred by the two firms, as well as the oil company and Temple as an individual, was no longer possible. As has been stated here previously, this was a common phenomenon of the Roaring Twenties and Walter Temple’s story was mirrored by untold numbers of the same general tale throughout greater Los Angeles and more widely.
Having documents like this in our collection, donated by family members and those connected to them, enables the Homestead to better interpret the history of Workman and Temple family and the region and we’ll continue to offer posts based on these artifacts.