by Paul R. Spitzzeri
It has become almost routine for so many artifacts from the Homestead’s collection to have a usually clear or obvious surface value, but for there to be additional elements not so readily apparent that take the interpretation of the object in a completely different direction. Such is the case with the highlighted item for his post, a two-page cartoon submitted by Gus Meins and published in the February 1918 issue of Cartoons Magazine, a Chicago-based publication established in 1912 by Henry Haven Windsor, previously publisher of Popular Mechanics.
For most of its decade of existence, the magazine focused on political editorial content with its motto being “a symposium of world caricature.” True to form, the issue here does that just with a great deal of focus on the ongoing First World War and the reprinting of cartoons from America and abroad dealing with the horror and heroism of the horrible conflict. Yet, there is also material dealing with the Russian Revolution; the “home rule” movement in Ireland; the British seizure of Jerusalem, evoking the Crusades of centuries before; the political situation in México; “alien enemies” in the United States; and the American government’s wartime seizure of control of railroads.
It is the Los Angeles cartoon that Meins, however, that takes center stage for this post. It is a remarkable aggregation of vignettes that combines boosterism with a bit of humor, including the artist’s appreciation of Angel City women. It is not only the work of a talented cartoonist and one with so small amount of a sense of comedy, but it covers a fair amount of ground for those elsewhere in the country about the fast-growing region.
As for the artist, Meins (1893-1940) was actually born Gustav Peter Ludwig Luley in Butzbach, Hessen, Germany, north of Frankfurt-am-Main. When he was seven years old, his mother, older sister and he migrated via Hamburg and New York to St. Louis, where his father, Johann, had gone several months before to get established. After a few years, however, the patriarch abandoned the family and Gustav’s mother Mathilde married Freidrich Meins, the surname eventually adopted by Gustav.
By 1908, the family, with another divorce evidently undertaken for Mathilde, was in California and she married Augustus Timms of the family that once controlled Timms’ Landing at San Pedro long before the modern port was established there and at Wilmington. Gus worked at local shipyards, experimented with flying aircraft and worked at early motion picture houses in Los Angeles as a teen.
By the mid-Teens, Luley began to be well-known locally for his dancing, acting, magic act and other entertainment talents. He was occasionally reported in the San Pedro Daily Pilot as appearing at fraternal and other societal events as a performer and, in 1913, submitted a winning entry in a cartoon contest for the Los Angeles Express. Early in 1916, the Pilot reported that
Gus Meins, a San Pedro boy, is making quite a hit with his illustrated jokes in the eastern magazines. He has had a number of full-page comics in the Motion Picture magazine of New York and the Photo Players of Chicago. He has also sold a number of comics to Scribners and other high class publications . . . [After noting his boat-building avocation and airplane interests] He has been devoting a good deal of his time to art for several years. He began with pen drawings but lately has been making wash drawings in black and white and colors.
At the end of 1917, the paper briefly noted that Meins was working as a cartoonist for the Los Angeles Herald “and his signature can be found in many drawings that appear in that paper.’ When he registered for the draft in June that year, just after American entered the war, he listed his occupation as “artist” and as self-employed, so the gig with the Herald was fairly recent when the article came out that December.
This leads to the two-page cartoon with a heading in which the title is above a sweeping panorama of the City of Angeles, from downtown on the left to the harbor at the right. It is no surprise to see that the first images on the left page have to do with a question Meins asked, “Did you know the 80% of the world’s movies are made in & around here?”
One of the trio of vignettes shows a rambunctious set shoot with an explosion sending people flying over a studio wall, smoke billowing into the sky, and a car crashing through that barrier with the caption “A Quiet Day Around The Film Camps.” At the center are shoots of a western and a police chase with the wording “You’ll See Scenes Like These Any Day In The Downtown Streets Of Our City.” At the right is a fine rendering of comedy star Charles Chaplin with the comment “The One Resident I Envy.”
Just below is a comparison of population, comedically exaggerated, showing the large portion “connected with the movies” compared to those either indirectly or completely not so. Beyond the film industry, Meins emphasized that “Los Angeles Has More Motor Cars Than Any City Its Size” while adding that, “And Speaking of Roads,” there were mountain routes for 20 miles “And When You Think Of Present Gas Prices?”
With respect to prominent buildings, he included excellent reproductions of the County Court House and the Federal Building and Post Office, while also depicting “The Kind Of Foothill Bungalows We Have Here,” though hastening to clarify, “I Say We, Not I.” Meins also included a rendering of “A Quiet Little Street Called Sixth St.” filled with pedestrians and vehicles among the commercial structures in the expanding commercial district.
On the right page, the cartoonist extolled the virtues of greater Los Angeles’ climate and agricultural productivity, showing a vignette in which “A Man of Forty, Feels Like Twenty While Strolling Down Our Palm-Lined Streets,” while another comedically exaggerates how crops planted on Monday are harvested by the weekend. As to the weather, he employed a common trope of comparing winters with back east by noting “When They Take In Coat Back East” to stay warm indoors, “They’re Taking In Ice Cream Out Here” in the balmy outdoors, as well as enjoying boating year-round.
Being a long-time resident of the harbor area, Meins depicted large cargo ships near a wharf as ”A Scene In Los Angeles Harbor—Where Canal and Orient Steamers Load And Unload” and showing the 11.000-foot long breakwater there. Bringing himself into two of the vignettes, the artist placed himself at a work table next to a palm tree under a laughing sun and with a dog at his side and the caption “Any Day In The Year,: while, in drawing a pair of women with the statement “These Also Are The Effect of Climate” he combined that with one of him sketching while eyeing a woman through a window and exclaiming “Ah! She For Me!” and adding “Speaking of Girls—Ah!—I Oughto Know—I Picked Mine Here.”
Cartooning turned out to be a hobby within a short time, however, as Meins got into the Hollywood film industry he highlighted in his drawings for Cartoon Magazine. His hometown paper reported in June 1919 that he was appointed an assistant director for the William Fox studio and it added “his job is to lay out the funny situations in the comedy scenario department and aid in directing the scenes” while he was working on a picture in which “he himself created the comic situations.” Later in the year, the Pilot noted he’d completed work on two short films for Fox starring Polly Moran and Slim Summerville, one of which also featuring Jackie Cooper, and started work on Chester Conklin’s The Great Nickel Robbery.
By the mid-Twenties, Meins was among the roster of “laugh-pagers” who were “making the world safe for comedies” at such studios as those run by Al Christie, Hal Roach and Mack Sennett. Among the “merry authors” at Sennett’s operation were Meins and an unknown who would go on to great directorial success, Frank Capra, with one Los Angeles Record mention in 1925 noting that Meins was penning a thriller from Del Lord, later known for his work directing films for The Three Stooges.
In 1926, Meins was finally at the helm of some films produced by Abe and Julius Stern, who made low-budget comedies for distribution by Universal, including Les (also known as Syd) Sailor in a series known as “Let George Do It” of which Meins was director for at least eight installments through the end of the decade, as well as Ethelyn Claire. In 1928, he worked for Christie and directed Jack Duffy (known for his role as Grandpop Teen in the smash Harold Teen comedy) in a short issued by Paramount Pictures.
Toiling as he did in the film industry, Meins did achieve some measure of success beyond the “B-pictures” that marked most of his work. In 1934, he was co-director with Charles Rogers of Babes in Toyland (also known as March of the Wooden Soldiers), starring the famed comedy duo of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy and which was well-received critically and at the box office, while becoming a holiday film staple for many years.
Early that year, after Bob McGowan stepped down following fourteen years of directing all of the “Our Gang” (“The Little Rascals”) comedies for Roach, the Los Angeles Times of 16 January reported that “Gus Meins, who has guided many of the outstanding kiddie comedies in the early days of the picture industry, succeeds him.” For two years, Meins directed thirty of these popular shorts, starring “Spanky” McFarland, “Stymie” Beard, Darla Hood, “Alfalfa” Switzer and other child stars, though, after a falling out with Roach, he left.
Just prior and during his “Our Gang” years, Meins also directed short films in series staring ZaSu Pitts and Thelma Tood and then, when Pitts left in a contract dispute, Todd and Patsy Kelly. He then entered the last phase of his career with Republic Pictures, including 1937’s The Hit Parade, starring Frances Langford and Phil Regan and in which the jazz composer and pianist Duke Ellington and his orchestra performed. The following year he directed Charles Ruggles in His Exciting Night and in 1939 helmed The Covered Trailer, starring the Gleason family.
On the last day of July 1940, however, Meins was at dinner with his wife and son when police officers arrested him on a charge of molesting three young men, apparently in the basement of his home at the northeast corner of the Los Feliz neighborhood adjacent to Griffith Park. More than three decades before, the 16-year old Gus Luley was arrested on a charge of the attempted rape of a six-year old girl, though it does not appear the case was prosecuted. Given his years of working with children in Hollywood, including with “Our Gang,” this purported history is more than disturbing in an industry containing a great many dark elements.
Meins protested his innocence and, after he put up $5,000 in bail, claimed the charges were “an effort to undermine my reputation. He failed to appear at a preliminary hearing, however, and his 22-year old son reported that his father left home telling him “you probably won’t see me again.” Three days later, his car was found parked next to debris catch basin under the San Gabriel Mountains in La Crescenta—a rubber hose was attached to the tail pipe and into the vehicle causing carbon monoxide poisoning (the same means by which Thelma Todd died five years prior.) A note found with the body included the claim “I had no chance to combat this thing because I am a German.”
When this magazine was purchased, it was because the cartoon of Los Angeles in 1917 was found to be interesting and well-executed, but there was, of course, no indication or idea what the story of its creator would turn out to be. It continues to be remarkable how often artifacts from the Museum’s holdings have these unexpected and surprising tangents attached to them and we’ll certainly have many more examples in future posts on this blog.
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