by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Along with the artifacts the Museum’s collection has which cover the context of greater Los Angeles history from 1830 to 1930, we are fortunate Workman and Temple family members have also contributed a great many objects related to their ancestors during that period. Being able to position the family within the region allows us to present a fuller historical picture and sharing this through this blog is a key way for us to get the collection out to the public instead of most of it being confined in storage.
As has been noted here before, Thomas Workman Temple II (1905-1972) was a sedulous correspondent during more than a decade largely lived away from home as he attended a variety of schools, chiefly the University of Santa Clara, where he attended the preparatory high school and where spent most of his undergraduate years between 1918 and 1926, and at Harvard University, where he completed work at the prestigious law school from 1926 to 1929.
We have featured quite a few of his letters from these schools, mostly written to his father, Walter P., Sr., who relied mainly on telegrams before finally penning some missives in the late Twenties. While much of what Thomas wrote concerned his education, he often talked about his siblings, including sister Agnes and brothers Walter, Jr. and Edgar and sometimes got into some notable family affairs, personal and business.
Very few of his many pieces of correspondence, however, get as deeply into Thomas’ psyche as the featured artifact for this post, an 8 January 1923 letter to his father. It was written from the California Institute of Technology, now one of the most acclaimed higher institutions of learning in the world, in Pasadena, to the family home in Alhambra. Even though it was just four miles away, Thomas might well have felt the he was four hundred and four thousand miles distant because of the family tragedy that had taken place just eleven days prior.
This was the death of his mother, Laura González Temple, who died on 28 December 1922 in Angelus Hospital in Los Angeles after a recent operation and who had battled colon cancer. Through all of the ups and downs the Workman and Temple family, like all families, experienced, few were as critical during the century of our interpretive period as her passing, as it had the obvious and inevitable transformational effect of the future directions her widow and children would take.
Letters written to her by Thomas generally referred to her as “Meema” and there is no doubt through them that the bond between mother and son was very strong and close. It is small wonder, then, that the profound loss experienced by the young man, who turned 18 five days before the letter, pours out in profusion in an unburdening to his father. No one who reads this missive can be unaffected by the emotion and anguish, as well as the professions of faith, that Thomas expresses.
He was beginning the second semester of his freshman year at CalTech and began with a show of strength and resolve as he wrote, “I am back again to some real work and am glad to don the harness.” Thomas enrolled at the rigorous college to study petrochemical engineering with the apparent plan that he would help Walter, Sr. in his independent oil prospecting business, which over about a decade involved projects throughout greater Los Angeles, including Whittier, Signal Hill and Ventura.
Thomas continued that “the boys were glad to see me back as was also the house mother here” in the dormitory where he resided. After noting that tuition was paid and a receipt for it obtained, he added, “there are 450 boys here now—several new student[s],” today there are over 1,000 undergraduates and not far under 1,500 graduate students, “and 2 new buildings nearing completion.” Note the reference to the “boys,” as no women undergraduates were admitted until 1970, though Dorothy Ann Semenow, who is still living, was the first female PhD awardee, earning her doctorate in 1955.
The new structures were likely the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics, named for a major regional figure previously covered here in a post, and the Ronald and Maxine Linde Hall of Mathematics and Physics and the school, just over three decades old, which was renamed in 1920 from Throop (pronounced Troop) College of Technology, was heading into a remarkable period of growth and development under Executive Council Chair Robert A. Millikan, who took the position in 1921. Later in 1923, Millikan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, becoming the first CalTech staff member to do so.
Having made these remarks about his education, though, Thomas turned to the emotions churning through him and which needed to get out. He told his father,
Only now am I beginning to realize the great loss which we are about the sustain. Never before have I thot [sic] that the loving arms and kind words of a mother would be once denied to me. God! what a thot! But the facts are here. Now there is no one at home to attend to my every need, to pray for my success in study, to love me as my meema did. She has left a place which only trust in God and confidence in ourselves can fill.
There was, he continued in the pious expression of his devout Catholicism, a new mother in their lives, the Virgin Mary, “who ever watches over us.” It was to her that the Temples must turn and “have confidence in her, have recourse to her” so that she would “before the throne of her divine Son” obtain the confidence and strength the family needed “to carry on this work” of life and “obtain as well the peace of our mother’s soul.”
Thomas then commented “Dad, she gave us all that was hers and more. All her love, her energies, her spirit” and asked his father if that was deserved and if her husband and children “merit the great love, care and devotion she had for us.” Although he answered that there were times when this was so, he also felt “certainly we were at times unworthy of all her love & her prayers, unworthy of her, who Almighty God, in His Infinite Goodness and Mercy, has seen fit to take from us.”
Writing that the family had to take courage and be brave in the aftermath of their profound loss, Thomas again told his father that they had to trust in the Lord and the Virgin Mary and have, beyond confidence and trust, the “power of will to carry out these ideals, these truths, these principles which we know by Nature to be true & right.” This in mind, Thomas added,
I promise you dad, that I will do all I can, to live up to the boy she wished me to be, to imitate the model she so often placed before my eyes, then, having done this, I know I shall have carried out her ideals, her dreams. I shall have pleased you and been a credit to the name I bear.
Not infrequently in his correspondence did Thomas refer to the family name and the responsibilities which he felt were attached to “Temple.” Moreover, he went on, “I tell you Dad, I made a great Promise to Our Lord, the night we went into town [to see Laura for the last time.] On the way over I realized it was one life or another. I thot there was nothing to great to sacrifice for my mother, she who had gone thru [sic] Hell to rear me & the rest.”
On this fateful journey, Thomas wrote, “I promised God that if He would spare my dear meema’s life, I would surrender my life to Him, as one of his priests.” This was not to be and the letter continued, “But Dad, I am afraid I was unworthy of that honor. He took meema from us. But he is Just, as well as Merciful, He has other work for me & for the rest.”
Turning to his siblings, with the sense of duty and obligation befitting the eldest child, Thomas wrote that “Agnes is young yet, very young,” the only daughter in the family and who turned 16 in August. He counseled that “she must take care of herself, both Morally and Physically that she may bloom in the Lily White flower of Womanhood as Meema & as we all want to see her.” She would be watched over by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet sponsors of St. Mary’s Academy, the all-girls Catholic school, now in Inglewood, that Agnes attended from 1918 to 1925, but he reiterated “but she must take care of herself tho[ugh] she have [sic] 3 brothers to protect her.”
Thomas and Agnes were very close and, though a year-and-a-half that separated her from Walter, Jr., who had more distance, 22 months, between him and Edgar, the younger Temples were seen as “the children” or “the boys” by their elder siblings. Accordingly, Thomas stated to his father that “the children Barely realize the Golden Measure they have lost” and as “they are young,” being a month from turning 14 and recently turned 12, respectively, “can soon adapt themselves to these new circumstances.”
With this, Thomas concluded, “I have little more to say” other than that he’d been ruminated on these impressions in recent days and that it was time to reveal them to his father. To Walter, Sr., the eldest Temple child exhorted,
Have courage dad, in what is right & what you know to be right. It is not too late to get God on your side again. Pray to Him, for strength, for forgiveness of your sins that he may give you the blessings of heaven which the family needs, in these days of our bitter need.
Walter Temple was deeply invested in his business dealings, with a major announcement just three days after Laura’s death of his involvement in the Great Republic Life Building, an eleven-story, height-limit commercial structure in downtown Los Angeles and where his companies’ headquarters would move when the edifice was finished early in 1924.
The Pasadena Post of 4 January reported that “the foundation is laid for the big new building of five stores being built by Walter P. Temple” in San Gabriel, the Arcade Building being part of a block of three structures Temple constructed (and a lot donated for a city hall designed by his favored architects, Walker and Eisen of Los Angeles, who also did the plans for the Great Republic Life Building) across from the mission.
The Post of the 10th, two days after this letter was written, observed that Temple was undertaking another important commercial project in the downtown of burgeoning Alhambra, the new parlor of funeral directors, F.A. and Leon Utter, who made the arrangements preparatory for Laura’s funeral at the Mission San Gabriel’s old stone church and her interment at the Walter P. Temple Memorial Mausoleum at the Homestead. The “splendid new building [is] to be erected at the northeast corner of Fourth and Main streets” and the paper added,
Mr. Temple, always with the thought of the development and advancement of the city in mind, will construct a beautiful and attractive building in keeping with the progress of Alhambra, making it possible for the local firm to have quarters which will be a credit to the entire valley.
Walker and Eisen designed this structure, as well, and it was added that the building would provide for all the modern elements of the funeral home industry, including “a handsome, commodious chapel,” showroom, offices and others and construction was expected to begin in a few weeks for a building which lasted about 75 years until it, along with the adjacent Temple Theatre and Temple Estate Building, was razed in the late 1990s.
In May, another major project was announced: the creation of the Town of Temple, a short distance east of Alhambra and which became Temple City in 1928 and is now celebrating its centennial year. With all of this activity, coming during the latest regional boom, which peaked in 1923, Thomas clearly felt compelled to counsel his father, closing with “I hope and pray that everything and every one is well at home & that things are again running smoothly.” He added, “keep in mind that I am ever praying for you and the children” and that he had “no other words by those of encouragement and love.”
In a late October 1922 letter to his parents, Thomas noted the rigorous curriculum at CalTech and predicted that he would know in three months whether he could continue to successfully navigate it. Not long after this missive, he realized that he could not remain there, but, of course, he had the additional grief over his mother’s death to grapple with. Moreover, Santa Clara allowed him the emotional and religious support, familiarity and, perhaps, physical distance to better manage his mourning. Thomas, then, returned north and completed his bachelor’s degree there in 1926.
As I read this post, I could see each family face. My Uncle Tom was very special. I loved the smell of his pipe. He loved deeply.
My family knows how fortunate we are to have the Homestead and Paul to keep our story and those of the people that came before us alive. THANK YOU
Hi Ruth Ann, thank you for your comment and your mention of seeing the faces of you father, aunt and uncles is an important one, because we’re trying put a “human face” through the Workman and Temple family on the region’s history. Letters like these really help thanks to donations from you and other descendants.