by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Last Sunday morning, I was given a deluxe tour of the Sierra Madre Villa community tucked in between Pasadena and Sierra Madre at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, with my guides being long-time residents Marlene Griffith and Gregory McReynolds, who have also long worked on a book detailing the history of their remarkable neighborhood. A main point of interest for me, beyond the general background of the area, including the Sierra Madre Villa hotel profiled here previously, is that George H. Woodruff (1873-1944), Walter P. Temple’s lawyer and colleague in real estate and business investments during the 1920s, resided there for more than three decades on a 10-acre estate.
Woodruff has been oft-discussed on this blog, especially in his various roles with Temple’s business enterprises, and some of his background provided, but we’ll go into greater depth here, as his story is an interesting and notable one on multiple fronts. He was born in Watertown, Connecticut, a town northwest of New Haven, where his father was a farmer, but, after receiving his early education there, Woodruff, for reasons unknown, but which may have concerned his health, ended up in 1891 on Vashon Island, in the Puget Sound near Seattle.
He attended the brand new Vashon College and graduated there in 1894 as one of just nine students matriculating from the institution. He was then hired as an instructor and took on the vaunted title of “Professor,” which did not then have any automatic linkage to the possessor of a doctorate degree, while being in charge of the commercial department, meaning business. Woodruff, who was on the track and field team and the second squad on the football team as a student, also managed the latter while teaching there.
In 1897, Woodruff headed south to Palo Alto, California, and studied at Stanford University, though in his second year, he had eye trouble and had to postpone his studies while he came to southern California to recover—this may well have opened his eyes, so to speak, to future possibilities. This delayed his education by a year, but Woodruff left Palo Alto in November 1898 when, a local paper reported, “he has become heir to an estate valued at $75,000,” which certainly brightened his future prospects. He returned to Stanford and garnered his bachelor’s degree in law in 1900 and the end of the 19th century brought him another important distinction, meeting his future wife Nellie Brittan, also a Stanford graduate.
Immediately after earning his diploma, Professor Woodruff was hired to take on the position of the dean of the boys’ department at the state reform school at Whittier. In October 1901, he and Brittan married and Woodruff spent a couple of years at the institution. Already a public speaker of no small distinction, including serving on a Washington state oratorical association, Woodruff gave talks while there, including one in Los Angeles on the subject of “What California is Doing for Delinquent Boys.” Another of his presentations for a Farmers’ Institute in the Quaker City concerned “Oil in Southern California,” timely because of the boom then underway in petroleum prospecting, but also given his future connections to Temple—in fact, the two young men may well have made their acquaintance in Whittier at the dawn of the 20th century.
As summer 1902 came to a close and, after his second year at the reform school, subsequently known as the Fred C. Nelles institution, Woodruff and his wife returned to Palo Alto, where he conducted post-graduate studies at the Stanford Law School. In preparation for his further academic efforts, Woodruff was admitted to the bar the prior spring. Completing his course of study, apparently over the fall semester, the young barrister returned to Whittier and was promptly elected its city attorney, serving one term in 1903-1904.
Moving to Los Angeles early in 1904, however, Woodruff was the target of a vendetta harbored against him by a former reform school inmate in a story that received some extensive coverage in the Los Angeles Times of 2 February. The paper, relishing sensational stories it hoped would enthrall enraptured readers, began its piece with,
A young thug, who was locked up yesterday, confessed to the officers that he had come from San Francisco to assassinate George H. Woodruff, Esq., a well-known lawyer of this city.
Woodruff used to be an officer of the Whittier state school when this Mexican boy, whose name is Louis Mesa, was an inmate.
Ever since his discharge a year ago the boy has been nursing the vengeance which he hoped to wreak in pay for some vigorous discipline got a Woodruff’s hands.
An employee of the reform institution noticed Mesa skulking around the grounds late at night and the paper noted that “there is a special statute against reform school graduates hanging around the grounds,” on which grounds the young man was charged. At the Quake City lockup, Mesa reportedly confessed his intention to “fix” Woodruff, apparently bringing with him two accomplices from the Ione reform school in the northern part of the state, though he was unaware that the former “professor” was no longer employed at the Whittier institution.
After being handed a 20-day sentence for vagrancy in the Quaker City, Mesa was transported to Los Angeles, while the current superintendent of the reform school told the Times that his former charge “hasn’t the nerve to do it” because “he is a born coward,” adding that “he was a boy we had much trouble with while he was here.” Moreover, the head of the Whittier school continued, “Mr. Woodruff is a Stanford athlete and I think he could make it highly interesting for him.”
Interviewed at his Angel City residence, Woodruff told the paper that he went down to the county jail to see Mesa and “told him that if he wanted to try ‘doing me up,’ I would be happy to have him try it at his earliest convenience,” agreeing with the reform school head that the young man was a coward and that “he was a hard boy to get on with” and “I used to be pretty severe with him sometimes.”
The reporter followed up by observing that “Mr. Woodruff is a splendidly-built man, and could wring the young Mexican’s neck in an open fight.” Notably, it was remarked that, having graduated from Stanford with “used-up eyes,” Woodruff was hired at the Whittier school as a security officer and “then became principal of the educational department.” His current position was as an attorney for the prominent Title Insurance and Trust Company, later known commonly as TICOR.
As for Mesa, it was reported that he’d run away on a few occasions while at the school, including one incident on Catalina Island, while the young men were at a military camp there. The paper went on that “the discipline he was made to endure by Mr. Woodruff was not excessive or of a brutal character” and that, purportedly, it merely involved “extra work and guard duty.” While kept at the county jail, he “preserves a stolid silence” and was adjudged “a tough-looking prisoner,” but nothing was located about what happened to him subsequently.
By the end of 1905, Woodruff was employed at a newly established TICOR rival, the Union Trust and Title Company, though he and his family returned to Whittier and lived there until early in 1907, when another move was made back to Los Angeles, first near downtown off Wilshire Boulevard and then in a fine residence further west on that increasingly important thoroughfare near the corner of Harvard Boulevard in what is now Koreatown and where their neighbor was Ontario founder and irrigation guru George Chaffey. An advertisement from him in the Whittier News of 25 February informed readers,
I wish to announce that I have recently engaged in the general practice of law in the city of Los Angeles . . . where I shall be pleased at all times to see my friends of the Whittier community . . .
As attorney for the title companies, my work touched nearly every branch of the law, but I became especially familiar with real estate law, probate law, the law of mechanic’s liens [seeking property in the absence of payment for services rendered], and corporation law. I mention this merely that you may know something of my preparation at this time to enter the general practice of law.
I assure you that any legal work entrusted to my care will receive prompt and faithful attention.
Later that year, the attorney entered into a partnership with corporation lawyer Frank D. McClure, but, Woodruff quickly displayed a penchant for entrepreneurship in this period. In November 1907, he and McClure were founding members of the Big Six Oil Company and two years later Woodruff joined a new chocolate shop enterprise and, also in 1909, a Glendale automobile and machine firm.
One of his more successful endeavors was with The Investors Company, incorporated in July 1911 and which dealt in real estate and first mortgage securities issued to finance building and development projects. The firm was deemed distinctive in that it paid no salaries to officers or directors, relying instead on compensation from dividends when the company performed well financially.
In March of that year, another entity he helped form (and one wonders if he was given director positions and shares of stock for legal work conducted in the formation of these firms) was the Merced River Land Company, with his partner McClure among the incorporators—the company owned 2,600 acres of farm and ranch land on the old route Walter Temple’s father, F.P.F. Temple and grandfather William Workman (whose son’s father-in-law, George Belt, ran a ferry there on the river for such travelers) used decades before to run cattle to gold rush towns like Columbia and Sonora in the southern mines of Tuolumne County.
It was only rarely that Woodruff’s name was found in press accounts relating to his work as a lawyer. In April 1911, the Times of the 4th reported that he and another man were trustees of the Red Cloud Mine, near the Salton Sea in eastern Riverside County, and that Woodruff and his compatriot tried to sell the property for the complainant, who alleged that that the pair sought to take the mine for their own. Nothing, however, could be found as to the disposition of the matter.
Whatever the success of these various business endeavors, they were something of dress rehearsals for what was to come, especially during the Roaring Twenties and its booming business world in Los Angeles and environs. His legal work was likely quite lucrative, as well, or at least enough so that, by 1912, he and his family made another move, this time to the Sierra Madre Villa tract. The Woodruffs settled on a ten-acre tract in what was known sometimes as Kinneloa Mesa, referencing a landform at the base of the mountains, and Pasadena Glen, which borders to the east, while today’s Eaton Canyon Golf Course is just to the south.
A few late 19th century houses are tucked away within the Sierra Madre Villa community and the Woodruffs acquired a single-story cottage from that period which was then expanded with a second floor and given architectural elements that transformed it into something of a Neoclassical structure. The land was also planted to citrus and avocados, the latter becoming a prominent crop in such places as the newly founded North Whittier (Hacienda) Heights and, later, the adjacent La Habra Heights.
We’ll return tomorrow, however, and continue the story then, so please return to hear more about George H. Woodruff and his family’s house and property at Sierra Madre Villa.