by Paul R. Spitzzeri
A presentation tonight to about 60 people before the Chino Hills Historical Society focused on two of the neighborhoods established when the city was heavily developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, these being Gordon Ranch and Laband Village. The latter was named for Walter Laband, who migrated to this region from Europe after the end of World War II and acquired ranch land in Chino Hills in 1959, while the former, adjacent to the south, was purchased about two decades or so prior by Huntly L. Gordon, who came to Los Angeles with his family in the early 1890s. Because of the notable activities of him and his father, Hanford, this post focuses on them and their activities through the mid-Teens.
Hanford Lennox Gordon (1836-1920) was born in Andover, New York, a small town not from the Pennsylvania border, west of Elmira. An avid scholar, he took up study of the law after the death of both parents when he was still in his teens. He relocated to Minnesota and enlisted in the Union Army with the outbreak of the Civil War and was captured at the First Battle of Bull Run, though he bravely escaped from a prisoner of war camp. Discharged from the service, he returned home and served as county attorney, though he returned to the Army and fought in wars against indigenous people in the upper Midwest.
Hanford was long in private practice and one of his clients was the railroad baron James J. Hill. Having made a small fortune, he moved with his family to California and settled in San Jose, though, after shooting another man and being convicted twice for that crime, he managed to evade imprisonment and settled for a lesser plea after he moved to Los Angeles in the early 1890s.
Immediately, Hanford invested heavily in local real estate, including property at Artesia, Azusa, Gardena and in downtown Los Angeles, where he acquired a lot on the southeast corner of Broadway and 2nd Street where he built a three-story commercial building, the Gordon Block (torn down in the mid-1950s), as well as acquired the Hammam Turkish Baths, which has been featured here before in its previous location on Main Street.
Hanford divorced his first wife in San José and one of his two sons from that marriage was Huntly (1882-1967), who was given his father’s middle name. The young man appears to have moved in with his father in Los Angeles shortly after the turn of the 20th century and been given the management of the baths. He soon married and had two children, while also pursuing an avid interest in automobiles, leading to his becoming a dealer for the Stearns Motor Car Company.
This, in turn, blossomed into a passion for auto racing, which was a new sport in the Angel City and environs as the first decade of the century neared a close. In late 1908, Huntly took out an advertisement in the 27 December edition of the Los Angeles Times announcing that his Stearns stock car, driven by Charles Soules, won an open race of 25 miles at Ascot Park in South Los Angeles, thereby “creating a new world’s record for distance,” at least by his reckoning.
Early the following year, Huntly challenged H. J. Leavitt, dealer of the Locomobile (Walter P. Temple had one of these luxury cars in the 1920s) to a 100-mile race for a $1,000 prize, but the latter responded that he wanted a 500-mile contest for $5,000. While Gordon offered Ascot as the venue, Leavitt balked at the idea of having Soules, a professional, driving for his adversary.
An agreement was reached by which a 150-mile run on the Ascot track was to be conducted with amateur drivers on 28 March and late season rains turned the course quite soft. Bert Latham was behind the wheel for Gordon’s Stearns and would have prevailed had it not been for a pit stop for gas and oil that took just over a minute-and-a-half. Murray Page, driving the Loco, did not have to make any pauses and ended up besting his competitor by just over 48 seconds.
About a month later, Gordon took the wheel of a Stearns and set out to smash a record driving between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. As reported by the Los Angeles Record of 29 April, however, he achieved his aim and reached his destination in three hours and ten minutes, but the daredevil driver “was arrested twice and paid a fine of $100 for each offense.” This gave him the distinction of receiving the largest such penalty imposed to date in Santa Barbara, which also determined to “pass an ordinance making it a misdemeanor to engage in a record run through the Channel City.”
Over a period of several years, Gordon competed in several major races in greater Los Angeles, including in Santa Monica, San Diego, Corona and one in Glendale that was also previously discussed in this blog. In July 1915, reported the Record under the headline of “At Last It Wins,” the “Gordon Special,” deemed to be a “landmark in Southern California automobile racing history,” apparently because its owner had it built from his own specifications, captured a 50-mile victory at Portland, Oregon.
The paper added that “Huntley [sic] Gordon’s speedster is about as familiar to Los Angeles race fans as the Santa Monica race course,” which was prominent regionally in the early days of the sport, “and in its many appearances in Southern California it never succeeded in getting the first checkered flag.” Notably, in February 1914, the Times briefly characterized Gordon as a “dilatante,” remarking,
Huntley Gordon, who is to drive his own Mercer [this being the “Special”], is a sportsman pure and simple. He is a young man of refined tastes, he never comes on the course with his car dusty or covered with mud. He wears his goggles and racing clothes as a Beau Brummel [a term for a fashionable gent] wears a dress suit. He has been compared to the semi-pro breaking into baseball, or the preliminary fighter in his first twenty-found match. He has all the daring of a man who is doing it for fun.
By the time he prevailed at Portland, however, Gordon was winding down his race driving career, having competed against the likes of Louis Nikrent, Ralph DePalma, Teddy Tetzlaff, Barney Oldfield and Eddie Rickenbacker (who went on to be an American air fighter hero during the First World War). Moreover, he went through a brutal divorce, with his first wife accusing him of cheating on her and providing great detail on the supposed affair—notably, Hanford, too, went through a similar brutal battle with his much-younger third spouse and both suits were concluded around the same time.
It may also be that losing a significant share of an estate valued at close to $200,000 had the effect of leading Huntly to engage in quieter pursuits with his third wife (the woman with which he was said to have had the affair). Meanwhile, Hanford, who declared bankruptcy in 1906, during which he owned Huntly and his other children William and Mary, substantial sums, as well as a bank, lived largely out of the spotlight in his later years.
In 1920, the elder Gordon, who published volumes of poetry and a study of the Upper Midwest Indians with whom he fought, died and left a highly unusual set of instructions for his funeral. He wrote in his will that “I agree with the Chinese philosophy [that] it is better to give a cup of water to the living than a feast for the dead,” so he ordered “that my remains be buried in the cheapest and poorest suit of clothes in my possession” and “that I be buried in a straight redwood box . . . and that it have no plates or handles thereon.” Lastly, he stipulated “I desire the cheapest funeral possible, and burial without the service of any priest or clergyman,” specifying the total cost of his interment at Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles to be no more than $100.
As for the younger Gordon, he took, in 1917, ownership of his father’s ranch at Artesia, where cattle and horses were raised (the area became very well known soon after as a dairy center) and he resided in a house on Del Amo Boulevard in what is now a corner of Lakewood just off Interstate 710. He found another type of racing in which to expend his energy, this with horses and he entered some of them at Los Alamitos and Inglewood Park, among other courses during this career.
Another major ranch was in the desert in the northern extremes of Los Angeles County and, sometime in the 1930s, he acquired his property in the Chino Hills area, which he stocked with race horses and over livestock. As development surged regionally after the Second World War, most of the Artesia property was sold for residential and industrial development, part of this in the city of Cerritos, though the ranch house was kept in the family for some years afterward. Gordon, however, maintained his primary residence at Chino Hills, where his holdings grew to some 3,500 acres (a portion of it was sold to Whittier industrialist Shelley M. Stoody, covered in a post here) and died there on the last day of 1967 at age 85.
In an obituary, it was mentioned that “his hobby was racing cars,” though it can be certainly said that there was more to it than that, likely more a passion, and he deserves more than a passing reference in the annals of early Los Angeles region auto racing. Moreover, his interest in the sport was passed on to descendants. Grandson Robert Gordon became well known as “Baja Bob” for his prowess in off-road racing, while his daughters Robyn and Rebecca (known as Beccy) became well-known in the field and his son Robbie was particularly distinguished both in NASCAR and off-road racing in his long career. Robbie’s son, Max, just sixteen years old, is now a professional racer, mostly in off-road events.
Residents and visitors driving along Chino Hills Parkway in the relatively new City of Chino Hills may notice the signs that were placed in the late 1980s when the city was developed into several villages, not unlike the earlier planned communities of Irvine and Valencia (Santa Clarita, that read “Laband Village” and “Gordon Ranch.” In the case of the latter, however, there is a broader regional history to Hanford and Huntly Gordon that is notable in terms of real estate, ranching, building and early auto racing.
As for Walter Laband, whose life in greater Los Angeles is well out of our interpretive time period of 1830-1930, he was born in 1900 in Wroclaw, Poland, then known as Breslau, Prussia, within the German Empire. He became involved in banking and investments, including some two decades, starting about 1926 with the New York City firm of Wertheim and Company, the Amsterdam office of which Laband opened and managed.
He resided in England during much of the Great Depression and then throughout the Second World War and migrated to greater Los Angeles just after the conflict’s end in 1945. With his third wife, Francine, a native of France, he settled in West Covina and appears to have used his proceeds from retirement from Wertheim to open the General Air Conditioning Corporation, based in the City of Commerce, and which looks to have been quite successful.
Among Laband’s philanthropy was support for the Casa Colina facility for disabled children and Queen of the Valley Hospital in West Covina. He owned his Chino Hills ranch of well north of 1,000 acres for some three decades until his death in 1989. Notably, the obituary for Francine, who died in 2010, stated that they met at Versailles during the war when she was a MASH unit nurse and he was a British Army officer with a role in intelligence—intriguing given his origins.
For a city like Chino Hills, incorporated not quite 35 years ago, there is a broad assumption that there cannot be much history in so young a municipality, but there is actually, as in virtually all places, plenty of interesting aspects to its past. Next up this week is a Wednesday evening talk for The Westerners, an association of history enthusiasts, on Josephine M. Workman, granddaughter of Homestead founders William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste, and her career as a Hollywood film star during much of the 1910s.