by Paul R. Spitzzeri
The highlighted object from the Homestead’s collection for this post is one of those where the interpretive interest is less about the surface content than about what can be found by “Reading Between the Lines.” The artifact is a 20 August 1926 letter from Bernal H. Dyas, a prominent Los Angeles merchant, to developer Phillip Doddridge Rowan, and, while there is a film industry connection to the missive, we’ll look more at the history of Dyas and his department store, which had a forty-year history in Los Angeles from the early 1890s to the early 1930s.
Dyas wrote to Rowan, using the latter’s nickname of “Dodd,” with the latter being president of R.A. Rowan and Company, the prominent real estate an development business formed by George D. Rowan, who ran a grocery for a short while before selling it to Benjamin F. Coulter (see below for another tie) and, after a stint in San Francisco, getting into real estate, including during the feverish days of the Boom of the 1880s.
After George Rowan’s death at age 58 in 1901 (from the tuberculosis that led the family to move from Chicago in the mid-1870s), son Robert took over the business and incorporated it a few years later. The early years of the 20th century comprised another boom period and there were others to follow with Robert Rowan making a name for himself with downtown and suburban property, including his development of the Windsor Square neighborhood. In 1918, however, at just 43 years of age, Robert succumbed to a stroke.
“Dodd” Rowan, who was a decade younger, assumed the presidency of the business and steered it into the next decade and another massive boom, which peaked in 1923, though he died of a heart attack while on a 1930 hunting trip near Bakersfield. Dyas’ letter began with the statement that it was “in answer to your verbal inquiry regarding the Montclaire Ranch, property of Mr. B.B. Hampton.” While some fairly diligent searching failed to find anything about the ranch, Benjamin B. Hampton (1875-1932) was a notable figure in the motion picture industry.
Born in Macomb, Illinois, not far east of the Mississippi River and the son of a printer, Hampton followed that profession and then became a newspaper publisher and advertising agent before moving to New York City at the dawn of the 20th century. There, in 1908, he purchased a magazine and named it after himself, operating it for four years, before joining the American Tobacco Company as its vice-president and helped found the Liggett drug store chain.
Earning a substantial fortune during his brief tenure with the tobacco giant, Hampton sought to make a big splash in the movie business by trying, in 1916, to engineer a consolidation of several studios, such as Essanay, Selig, Mutual and others and it was reported that he offered “America’s Sweetheart,” megastar Mary Pickford, a yearly salary of a half million dollars to join forces with him.
These efforts failed, but Hampton became an independent producer and then, as the Teens came to an end, as president of Great Authors’ Pictures, which specialized in adapting popular books to film, most notably with famed Western writer Zane Grey. He worked extensively with actor Claire Adams and the couple were married in 1924, residing in a neighborhood near Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue around the time this letter was penned.
As for the ranch, Dyas told Rowan that it was between 125 and 150 acres and that Hampton “planned Montclair as a permanent home and the property is now offered solely because his business interests require his presence in New York.” A house, said to be of a “‘rambling’ type of architecture and running over 100 feet in length was described, while two guest houses, stables, a garage, blacksmith shop, bunk house, hay barn and other elements were also mentioned. So, too, was a water supply brought by three tunnels from a mountain, while Dyas highlighted that the work at the ranch was from day labor, not by those hired by contractors, while the quality of the construction was said to be 25-35% better than in Los Angeles.
The letter is on the letterhead of the B.H. Dyas Company, which was formerly the Ville de Paris department store long operated by the A. Fustenot Company and which had a Dyas corporation as the parent firm. Above Dyas name and title of president is a rendering of the store, situated at the southeast corner of Olive and Seventh streets with the building still standing and comprised of retail and office space.
The Ville de Paris opened in October 1893, during a year of severe depression in America, on Broadway across from the Los Angeles City Hall as a branch of a San Francisco store of the same name, which received its moniker from the ship that was charters founders Emile and Felix Verdier to the booming Gold Rush metropolis in 1850 to bring goods to sell there. A San Diego branch opened in 1886 and the Angel City one was under the ownership of Gaston Verdier and was managed by August Fustenot, a partner in the parent firm.
By the end of 1897, the Los Angeles store was under Fustenot’s ownership and, during the boom years of the first part of the new century, it grew to the extent that a new location was required. The aforementioned store building founded by Coulter was razed for a new structure constructed by Homer Laughlin and an expanded Ville de Paris reopened there in October 1905. Two years later, Fustenot, who served as French consul for the Angel City since 1898, died of a heart attack at age 56, and was succeeded by a son, Georges, who ran the store for eight years, selling it in 1915 to A.B.C. Dohrman, owner of The Emporium, another well-known mercantile establishment in San Francisco.
In 1917, another major move and expansion took place as the Ville de Paris, the president and general manager of which was W.S. Lord, relocated to the six-story structure shown in the letterhead, as well as a 1934 view included here. In February 1919, Dyas acquired the business, culminating a rather remarkable two decade rise in the Angel City’s mercantile world, and we’ll focus the rest of the post on him.
Bernal Hubert Dyas was born in 1882 in St. Louis, Missouri to Jessie MacEwan, a native of Mobile, Alabama and Richard Jefferson Dyas, who hailed from West Virginia. Richard was a grocer and then, in 1890, established a successful real estate firm, but, at the end of the decade and century, he became interested in mining along the Colorado River. In summer 1899, the family, including Bernal, vacationed in Los Angeles and, while there was a return to St. Louis, the Dyas clan migrated to the Angel City. While his parents returned to Missouri after several years, though, once again came back to California, specifically San Diego County, Bernal stayed.
He took a job with the William H. Hoegee’s sporting goods store, founded in 1889 and the largest in Los Angeles as more leisure and disposable income led to the great increase in sports and outdoor activities, the latter including the tremendous rise embodied in The Great Hiking Era of the 1890s through 1930s. Dyas started as a delivery boy, working his way into sales, and becoming a valuable figure with the enterprise.
After several years, he joined forces with William H. Cline to open the Dyas-Cline Sporting Goods Company, with its store on Third Street between Main and Spring streets where the Ronald Reagan State Building stands today. Opening day was 11 September 1905, with departments for awnings, baseball, bicycles, cricket, flags and pennants, football, guns and ammunition, outing suits, tennis and special ones for women and repair of items sold in the establishment.
Dyas was an outdoor enthusiast, frequently cited in newspapers for fishing and hunting trips, playing golf and other sports and for encouraging fitness, including for men who were tied to work lives sitting in offices and other indoor locales. He was a founder of a regional chapter of the American Athletic Union (A.A.U.) and the Southern California Swimming Association and, when it came to fitness, the New Year’s Day 1912 edition of the Los Angeles Times quoted him as stating,
The way in which the average business and professional man abuses and neglects his physical nature is nothing short of criminal. From now on I have resolved to do everything I can to promote gymnasium and athletic work among men engaged in sedentary work. As a starter I have organized a club of twelve men and tomorrow we are going to pledge ourselves to devote an hour every other day to gymnasium work.
The Los Angeles Athletic Club was already a long-standing institution, but Dyas seems to have been promoting something much more specific, though it is not known if it had a long tenure.
Dyas was also keen on patriotism, especially during the First World War, which America joined in spring 1917 nearly three years after the conflict exploded in Europe. He was a key figure in the movement to sell Liberty Bonds in the region and was on the committee for an October 1917 Liberty Day. A second parade for October 1918 was cancelled because of the flu pandemic that wrought havoc around the world as the war mercifully approached its end and he appears to have had some involvement with draft boards. A July 1918 Allied War Exposition at Exposition Park was led by a Liberty Fair Association of which he was a core member.
Dyas’ purchase of the Ville de Paris was hailed by the local media. The Times of 26 February 1919 remarked that the new owner came to Los Angeles at age 8, but he was actually 18, though it added that he went to school and a business college, that also not appearing to have been the case. The paper did observe that “eight years ago he became the pioneer merchant on Seventh street,” which quickly became the Angel City’s shopping thoroughfare, much as Spring Street was the financial one and Broadway the mecca for theaters. The article concluded that Dyas’ “purpose is to make the Ville de Paris under his ownership stand out as a distinctively high-grade establishment.”
The next day’s Los Angeles Express editorialized about the acquisition calling it “an event of significant importance” specifically noting,
Mr. Dyas has spent the greater part of his life in Los Angeles. Still young, he has not only been the witness of, but a constant contributor to the city’s growth. Every movement that had for its purpose the forwarding of the public interest has found in him, for 25 years [almost 20, actually], a steadfast supporter.
Shrewd, enterprising, courageous and yet a keen analyst of conditions, thoroughly familiar with every circumstance affecting the city’s prospects, it is the judgment of Mr. Dyas that the long-waited turn in the tide is now at hand—the ebb is at an end, the flow sets inward. When one so capable of judging reaches that conclusion and backs his careful judgment with his capital, the confidence he manifests is happily contagious. It diffuses itself throughout the community. Such examples tend to put an end to doubt and apprehension. New courage is given to others who but await the hour of opportunity themselves to act. Optimist is healthfully stimulated and the pessimism bred of uncertainty hunts cover.
The breathless piece concluded with the claim that “this notable transaction may well be regarded as dating the revival of the brave, hopeful spirit to which Los Angeles owes everything it is and may yet become.” While it was the case that the local, national and world economies were in recession immediately after the war, followed by some improvement during the time this editorial was composed, a much worse economic environment came with the onset of 1920 and lasted a year-and-a-half.
After summer 1921, however, the next big boom came and, as noted above, reached its apex two years later, though the generally unbridled optimism that marked most of the Roaring Twenties continued. The B.H. Dyas Corporation and its subsidiary operating the store reflected the rising tide of financial success and this included the opening of a Hollywood store at the southwest corner of the prime intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in what is now called the Broadway Hollywood Building.
A wildly romantic advertisement from February 1928, just prior to the debut, with glorified graphics promoted the new store along with the downtown one and talked about “Faith—The Builder, The Romancer,” and citing the historic tradition of the Phoenicians, the Venetians and the movement across the American continent to the Golden State. Here it was asserted, “probably no country has ever more fully justified such faith than has California, no city more than Los Angeles.” Dyas, moreover, migrated to the Angel City nearly three decades prior with “a proud faith in his heart” and “further success now brings its inevitable accompaniment, GREATER OBLIGATION—a privilege” of “GREATER SERVICE” through the opening of the Hollywood branch.
While the name B.H. Dyas Company had long been allied with the Ville de Paris, it was now decided to retire the latter, though it was added that “the two stores will be individual institutions, functioning independently.” With the pair of establishments in “two metropolitan centers,” the ad concluded by proclaiming that, in serving patrons “smartly and efficiently,” the duo were “truly the vindication of a great faith—faith in the people, faith in Los Angeles, faith in Hollywood.”
These sentiments embodied so much of that unbridled enthusiasm and unalloyed optimism that drove boosterism in the Angel City and nationally, but all of that came to a shattering halt with the crash of the stock market in New York City in late October 1929 that ushered in the Great Depression. In 1931, The Broadway department store took over the Dyas location in Hollywood, while the Los Angeles store limped along until receivership was ordered. While there was a reorganization in 1932 as the Depression worsened considerably among massive national waves of bank failures, the store failed and an August 1933 auction took place of carpets, equipment and fixtures.
Dyas had just turned 50 years old, but never returned to the retail industry. He did follow his First World War service by becoming chair of a civilian defense council during the Second World War and lived much of his remaining years on the coast in Malibu and then in Holmby Hills where his next door neighbors were film stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. A Rotarian, leading official of the Shriners, and member of many outdoor-related clubs, Dyas died at the start of 1959 at age 76.
The Museum has a Dyas store catalog in its collection, as well, so we may well return someday to share more of the story of the establishment and its owner, a major Angel City figure for the first three decades of the 20th century.
As noted in this post, the movie producer Benjamin B. Hampton offered in 1916 the then megastar Mary Pickford a yearly salary of half a million dollars, which is equivalent to nearly $15 million today. This pay level would easily place her among the five highest-paid actresses even by today’s standards, especially considering that in 1916, only one movie grossed over a million dollars in box office revenue. Additionally, another source indicated that by 1916 Pickford collected $10,000 per week plus 50% of the box office take of her film. However, despite amassing a net wealth of over $50 million, she left only $50,000 to each of her three children after her death.