by Paul R. Spitzzeri
As Women’s History Month comes to a close, we return for this third part of a post highlighting the sole edition of Women of the West, a register of prominent women from several Western American states. Issued in 1928 by Max Binheim and his Publishers Press in Los Angeles, the book contains the mini-biographies of many local residents and we are picking up here with Clara Bradley Burdette, a 72-year old resident of the Hotel Maryland in Pasadena who was originally from New York State and a graduate of Syracuse University.
Burdette, as with so many local denizens, came to California for her first husband’s health, though he died within a short time and her second spouse passed away after just three years of marriage. In 1899, she was wedded to Robert J. Burdette, a well-known writer, speaker and Baptist minister who was featured in a prior post here, and they were together fifteen years until his death.
Identified as a “Lecturer, Philanthropist, Clubwoman,” Burdette had a long list of affiliations and accomplishments including as a contributor to magazines and newspapers and as a speaker “on social and civic questions.” She was the first president, in 1900, of the California Federation of Women’s Clubs and was a major Crown City figure, including as donor and builder of the city’s maternity hospital as well as president of the Women’s Civic League. During the recent world war, she headed the food conservation program in the state and also served on the state Republican Party central committee and was a delegate to the 1920 national party convention.
Elizabeth Eaton Burton, also a widower, was born in Paris to Helen Mitchell and Charles Frederick Eaton, who went to the City of Lights to train as a painter but whose health issues led him to a career as a furniture restorer and make of fine furnishings, including bookends, candlesticks and lamps. Burton’s health problems, as well as her mother’s, led the family to move to California in 1886, with Charles becoming a landscape architect and Burton developing into an artist.
Her work include watercolor painting along with bookbinding, leather working, metal work and stained glass. Married to the late real estate figure William W. Burton and mother of a son, the Hollywood resident came to this area in 1909 and opened a studio in downtown Los Angeles. After her husband’s 1920 death she traveled the world including a stay in Paris for further training in art with the book denoting her as an “Artist and lecturer,” as well as a former head of the Drama League and a writer along with her artistic endeavors, including leading, for a dozen years the Creative Studio of Decorative Art.
Lucretia “Crete” Carey Cage hailed from Des Moines, Iowa and was married twice before she wedded John M. Cage, an inventor of middling success, after coming to Los Angeles with her parents and siblings. The Cages, who had a son, resided in a modest bungalow in the Glassell Park neighborhood of the Angel City and the book described Crete as a “very active club woman” who “held various secretarial offices in women’s societies.” These included the local district of the state federation of women’s clubs and the Long Beach Ebell Club. Her 15-year old son, a student at Los Angeles High School studied piano but had literary ambitions, though he went on to be the revolutionary composer John Cage.
Gladys Caldwell, a native of Massachusetts, was younger than most of the women profiled in the work, and came to Los Angeles as a toddler. After earning her degree in 1922 from the University of California, Berkeley, Caldwell attended the Los Angeles Library School and went to work for the city library, becoming the principal of its art and music department, a position she held for over a quarter century. In addition to library affiliations, she was a women’s committee director of the Philharmonic Orchestra, involved with the state music club federation and an advisory board member for the Hollywood Bowl.
Sadie Callan as from Kansas and settled in Los Angeles in the early Twenties. Married and the mother of two children, Callan had the distinction of owning an advertising agency and worked as a publicity and campaign manager, along with having “done considerable newspaper work for the last 20 years.” This included formerly working in the ad department of the Los Angeles Herald, while a current connection was as field secretary for a clinic for disabled children.
Artie Mason Carter was from Missouri and came to the coast in the mid-teens, settling eventually in Hollywood with her physician husband. The book stated that she was “formerly [a] pianist and teacher,” and she studied in Vienna when her spouse spent some years there, but her local renown was that she established the summer concert series at the newly opened Hollywood Bowl. Carter was also involved for eight years in the Tinsel Town’s community music program.
Leila Simon (stated as “Semon” in the book) Castberg was not the usual representative in Women of the West. Born in New Orleans and a graduate of Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she was in Cincinnati where it was said she “built . . . the largest New Thought Temple in the world and where she married Bjarne (rendered Biarne Castberg, a native of Norway who was an attorney. The couple resided in the Hollywoodland community (the advertising sign for which is the world-famous Hollywood Sign). Castberg was stated to have been an English and Drama teacher in Ithaca, New York as well as member of a lyceum and drama conservatory in Paris and then went to Cincinnati. After settling in the Angel City, which had a wide variety of religious organizations, she established the Church of Divine Power, while her husband wrote on esoteric subjects such as “pragmatic psychology.”
One of the few Orange County entrants in the book was Aurelia A. Dunning Caitland, who was also set apart because she was a Golden State native, hailing from Woolsey Flat, a gold mining town northeast of Sacramento. She was married to Osgood Catland, who was in the hardware business in Santa Ana, where the family, including four children, moved in 1902. Catland was “much interested in civic work and the County Social Service Ass’n” and also active with the Ebell Club and Daughters of the American Revolution, as well as serving on the board of the juvenile court for several years.
Bessie Chamberlain was born in Muscatine, Iowa, but migrated with her family in her early teens to Pasadena where her father was a wagon driver. After completing her education in the Crown City, Chamberlain was hired as the municipality’s deputy city clerk and served in that position for several years. In 1920, she moved into the top position, being one of the few women in the publication who was a civil servant, and she continued in the role for over a quarter century.
Another unusual occupation was engaged in by Evelyn Volmer Champlin, who wasn’t quite 30, but was said to be a “builder of small homes.” A native of Chicago, Champlin came to Los Angeles with her husband, Harry, a credit manager for a building materials company. In addition to her work, she was also secretary of the California League of Women Voters and president of the City Panhellenic Association, comprised of members from several college and university sororities, along with being secretary of the Women’s University Club.
Adeline Beatrice Clark, who went by her middle name, hailed from Arkansas and lived in Kansas and Colorado, attending state universities in the latter two, before coming to this area and settling in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1924. Clark worked as a bank teller and then was a languages teacher and principal at the Hylward School for Girls, with students from first grade through high school. In summer 1927, she assumed the role of principal at the San Marino Hall School for Girls and remained there for about 35 years.
Whittier resident Artilissa Dorland Clark, one of the older entrants at age 75, was born in Salem, Iowa and lived in Chicago and Olympia, the state capital of Washington before coming to the Quaker City in the fledgling days of that town in the early Nineties with her husband, Aretas, who ran a drug store before his death in 1903. Her brother, Chester, was a minister and a mayor of Monrovia in the early 20th century, but Clark had many Whittier affiliations, including with the city library, a district health and welfare association, an associated charities group, and local women’s clubs until her death in 1940.
Ella Estelle Gates Clark was from Indiana and came to Los Angeles with her husband, Oliver, and their son. Oliver was secretary of the powerful Title Insurance and Trust Company and Clark was noted as “active in civic and political affairs,” including as a two-time president of the Friday Morning Club, a preeminent women’s organization in the Angel City, as well as the founder and president of Resthaven, a home for women with mental health issues and which was designed to keep its charges out of the state insane asylum. Clark was also a committee member for the Republican National Committee since 1923.
Another denizen of Whittier among the Women of the West roster was Bertha Lindley Coffin, who was born in Minneapolis but came to Los Angeles as a child, residing on a farm in the Ballona Township west of the city. Married to a furniture dealer, Coffin was a former had of the woman’s auxiliary of Whittier College and held many offices for the Angel City’s Y.W.C.A., as well as a charter member of the Los Angeles Ebell Club and a past president of the Quaker City’s woman’s club.
Florence Parmelee Collison was a rare Los Angeles native in the volume, she being the daughter of Eliza Goldsworthy and Zelotes L. Parmelee, who has been featured here in a prior post and who ran a store that sold electric, gas and oil appliances and fixtures. After graduating from the University of Southern California, Collison was a high school teacher for a few years in the mid-Teens and, at the end of 1917, married John Clyde Collison, who set met at U.S.C. and who was a professor of music and bandmaster of an artillery band during the First World War, but less than a year after the wedding, he was one of many military personnel and Americans generally who died in the 1918 flu pandemic.
The young widow, who never remarried, turned to her faith and, from 1919 to 1922, was the secretary for the Pacific Branch of the Methodist Episcopal Church’s Woman’s Foreign Society. She followed this with three years in Chicago as a church Life Service Commission member and, returning home in 1925, became superintendent of the Young People’s Department of the Pacific Branch of the Woman’s Foreign Society for the M.E. Church. For years, she lived with her widowed mother and sister and, later in life, was secretary for a home run by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and remained active in her church until her death in 1975.
Marie Lyon Colwell was from Arkansas and came west in young adulthood with her family in the early 1880s. She married chemist James O. Colwell at Fresno in 1890 and the couple soon moved to Los Angeles, where they had three children. The publication noted that she was “active in all civic affairs” including directing for three years the Los Angeles County Farm Bureau; presiding over the Exposition Park Civic Association; serving as vice-president of the Los Angeles Pension Commission; being president of the Wilshire Woman’s Club; serving as a director of the West Adams Women’s Club. Colwell was also a member of the League of Women Voters and United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Covina resident Mary Meriam Coman was unusual in that she was born in 1861 in Bulgaria, where her parents Susan and William were Congregationalist missionaries. On 2 July 1862, however, the family was returning from Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey to the ancient city of Phillipopolis, where they resided and which is now Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second largest metropolis, when they were attacked by robbers. William was shot and killed and while Coman and her mother survived, but the latter died just three weeks later of premature childbirth while carrying twins, who did not survive.
Coman was raised by her father’s brother at Cambridge, Massachusetts (her father was a Harvard University alumnus) and, in 1884, married Charles Coman, an Ohio farmer. The couple and their family, which included five children, came to this area after a decade and were Pasadena citrus growers until they relocated to the Azusa area in 1909. They remained there until Charles’ death at the end of 1920. Coman, however, took over management of the orchard, something few women did at the time.
The book identified her as an “editor and writer, also grower of Sunkist Oranges” and noted that she was a member of the county welfare commission; former president of the Pasadena Shakespeare Club; a “lecturer on current events and books;” editor of the “Southern California White Ribbon,” the monthly newspaper of the California Women’s Christian Temperance Union for a quarter century; and “actively engaged in P.T.A. work,” along with many memberships. When she died in 1950, she was remembered as “Mother Coman” and a “Public Citizen Number One” in Covina.
This will likely be a record post of multiple parts given that we haven’t even reached the end of the “C” portion yet! But, there will be future Women’s History Month opportunities to continue sharing these remarkable stories of local Women of the West.