by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Continuing with our sharing of some of the great material from a recent donation by Vincent Hurteau and his family of photos and scrapbooks related to the “Los Angeles branch” of the Workman family, specifically Vincent’s grandmother, Mary Workman Dugan (1911-1981), we’ll look at some interesting recollections she and her father, William Henry Workman, Jr. (1874-1951) provided about their lives and those of the family generally and which are included in a “Loose Leaves from the Family Tree” binder that Mary passed on to her descendants.
Between 1961 and 1968, she composed a typewritten “Memories of my Background and Childhood” particularly “for my children and grandchildren so they may know how I lived fifty years ago,” this now being a century or more, though she warned that her document was “not to be shown, ever, to anyone older than I.” Of course, there is no one left alive under that criteria, but whatever we share that might have led to the warning is leavened, hopefully, by the fact that, in all families, differences arise for many reasons, including personality differences.
Because part one focused on a photo album of Mary when she was a child and focused extensively on the house in which she was raised, we’ll pay special attention to that topic, especially because we’ve been commemorating the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Boyle Heights neighborhood, established by Mary’s grandfather, William H. Workman, Sr., where the residence was situated. This is also where her narrative begins, as she noted that a recent article (10 April 1961) in the Los Angeles Times mentioned the 50th anniversary of the Jewish Home for the Aged at that location, something we mentioned in part one.
Mary continued that, as she was also turning 50 that year, “it behooves me to write down all I can remember about that mansion,” meaning the 1860s Boyle House, or what the paper called the “Guardian Mansion,” as both she and her father were born in it and that her grandparents resided in the dwelling before that—though, as we’ll see, what was left after 1910-1911, was quite minuscule.
In any case, she went on that “when the Jewish Home purchased the entire property—about five acres—they tore down Grandfather’s “new” house,” this being a residence constructed between 1878 and 1880 and razed in 1921 when it was acquired for the Home, “and erected large brick institutional type buildings on its site.” She accounted this “a pity” because “it was a real relic: two full stories plus a cupola and cavernous attics, with porches half the way around, and carved wooden fretwork.” Mary also noted a “‘tower room” within the cupola at the attic level, which was “reached by a narrow and winding stair from the second floor hall” and she reminisced that “I loved that room, and used to lug books up there to read in complete privacy.”
The home built by William, Sr. and Maria (pronounced Mar-aye-uh) Boyle, “was ugly, by our standards, but a fascinating pace for a child” and she loved to hide in a large linen pantry and behind a parlor sofa. She went into some further details about the layout of the house, some of its décor and room uses. Entering the front door, there was a parlor at the left that was used regularly by the Workmans, while a pair of parlors at the right were closed except for special occasions, such as its owners 50th wedding anniversary in October 1917.
Mary recalled that the entrance hall was wide and extended through the entirety of the structure and she heard imitations by family members of William, Sr. bellowing to his daughter, “Mary Julia! Mary Julia! No clean towels! Dammit, can’t a man have clean towels in his own house?” In back of the left parlor were the stairs with a curved rail (perfect for children to slide along on) and, at the front off a shorter center hall than downstairs, was Maria’s bedroom; the family bathroom with a large tub; the linen closet in which to hide; and the narrow stairs to the cupola.
Also upstairs were a guest bedroom, that of her uncle Tom (the youngest of the seven children and whose reminiscence we’ll look to share) and aunts Mary Julia and Elizabeth. At the rear were servants’ and storage rooms, with one having a staircase down to the kitchen, and “Grandfather’s suite—a large bedroom and almost equally large bathroom, used only by him.” Mary remembered William, Sr. as “quite imposing,” though always carrying peppermint candies and loving hot chocolate after Sunday dinners.
William, Sr. was a tall man, while Maria was petite, though “a bit awesome to a child,” while she spoke her of Aunt Julia, who died in 1964, during the period of these recollections, as “a remarkable woman, a pillar of the community,” while very serious like her mother. Elizabeth, like Mary Julia, wanted to be a nun, but their father refused approval, but the former, Mary recalled, deeply religious and kept convent-like hours, very early to bed and to rise, while also devoting much of her time to the Maryknoll Sisters—the order came to Los Angeles in 1914 to work with Japanese immigrants and became Dominicans.
Mary’s uncle Boyle was kindly, but, she remembered, “pompous” and unexciting and relied heavily on the considerable skills of his wife, Frances Widney, whose father, Robert, was a prominent attorney, judge and real estate figure, as well as a co-founder of the University of Southern California. She also recalled her cousins, Eleanor and Audree, the latter, sadly, came to a tragic end, which we’ll look to discuss in a future post that shares her story with those of other family members in similar circumstances.
Aunt Gertrude was recalled as having moved to the East Coast by the time Mary was old enough to have many memories, though her acting career, covered here in a prior post, was discussed before her marriage. Uncle Tom, the youngest of the seven Workman children, was away for much of Mary’s childhood, at Stanford University, working as a cowboy, and serving in the Army, but “was always fun to be with, uproariously good-humored.”
The last, Charlotte, was the one Mary could “hardly describe, as I’ve never really known her,” as she was described as aloof and distant, while also temperamental. When William, Jr., apparently jesting, joked that Charlotte’s husband, who sought advice on how to handle some domestic storms, might employ some corporal punishment, Charlotte, Mary related, never spoke to her brother again.
A brief section concerned the servants of William, Sr. and Maria, including “a series of paisanos, directed by Grandmother in staccato ‘kitchen’ Spanish;” a man known only as Hayes and who sported a beard dirtied by chewing tobacco; and “Chinese for quite a while” in the kitchen. Mary then remarked,
I mostly remember a huge and wonderful negress named Mary Stevens, from New Orleans. She spoke English with a French accent, and many French interjections. I used to poke fun at her and then run; she was too ponderous to catch me, and had to content herself with shaking her fist—or a knife—at me, with imprecations in French. She worked for me briefly when Mary Dee [Mary’s eldest child with Paul F. Dugan] was an infant, and I recall my astonishment at hearing her use perfect French on the telephone.
After a section on her mother’s family, the Gowans, Mary turned to Boyle Heights for Part III, and began with the observation that “Grandfather gave Daddy the old Boyle house when Daddy married,” but, whereas part one of this post made reference to a renovation, Mary stated that
It was torn down to the ground, leaving the extensive foundations and the Boyle wine cellar, complete with the great arched door on the west—it opened on the lower terrace—through which AAB’s [Andrew A. Boyle’s] wine casks were rolled. On those old foundations Daddy built a two-story Italian villa, completely designed for gracious living—for two. By 1910 Mother had lost (at birth) two Haskins babies [from first husband, Thomas Haskins, who died in China in 1908 while serving as consul], and Daddy’s first child, so it seemed to both of them that they would never have a family.
Mary was born in a second-floor sitting room, which became her bedroom, and an early memory was a third birthday party thrown by her grandfather. As she approached her next birthday, brother William H. III was born and she reflected on the natural feelings she had at the intrusion of the interloper! She did note that she got along well with him and sister Anne, but not so with sister Betsy—again, this would almost be expected with most families.
Then it was “back to the Boyle Avenue house,” which was “completely gracious, and so were its furnishings.” There was a wide entrance hall with a curved staircase at the back and, at the left, a drawing room with a fireplace, as well as a large Persian rug and “Mother’s concert grand Steinway” piano. Venetian mirrors in gilt frames were at either end hung over console tables, while silver handles were on the doors and French doors led out to the front.
French doors opposite the ones to the front led to a bookroom, with a wall in glass facing west to the city and the rest featuring bookcases, while there was wicker furniture and a Korean chest with brass details. At the back behind this room was a terrace with a roof and cement floors, with potted plants for landscaping as the family “often ate there on warm evenings, listening to the steam engines far below, down by the river” in the “flats.”
Opposite the drawing room was the dining room, with a solid blue rug, silver sconces with Wedgwood blue medallions and a screen hiding the swinging door to the service area. This included a butler’s pantry and a galley kitchen, north of which was a service porch with tubs and a back door which had the old steps leading down to the Boyle-era wine cellar, while a maid’s room and bath completed this section.
On the second floor, were the sitting room which became Mary’s bedroom; a guest bedroom and bath; a linen closet where Mary was sometimes sent when bad; another bathroom; dressing rooms for her parents, with one having a laundry chute to the first floor and another a shower for William, Jr.; a sleeping porch; and above the bookroom, a small porch that was not utilized, but where “more than once I was found out there in my nightie, dancing in the moonlight.”
Mary exclaimed, “It was quite a house!” She noted that her parents often entertained “all the elite of Los Angeles, including clergy (hand-picked), and many foreign visitors, people mother had known in China.” The children generally were excluded from these functions, except “during the cocktail our, to curtsey and be seen and not heard.” An Austrian widow named Anna was “the moving force of the whole establishment” for a dozen years as Mary’s mother was not a housekeeper by nature and was frequently sick. Moreover, Anna sometimes worked solely for board “some of the times when Daddy was strapped” financially.
After recording that there were few family pets, Mary remarked that, being quite a bit older than her other siblings (four to ten years), she was often alone, with few playmates aside from occasional “rather formal” visits to cousins in the next block in the Keller family (noted Los Angeles winemaker Mathew Keller married Maria Boyle Workman’s aunt). She had a playhouse in a single-room brick building that was the old Boyle House kitchen, but “mostly I remember being outdoors,” where,
There was the long front lawn, and the gravelled perron [stairs] in front of the house. The lower terrace [in back], grassed, with a hedge of rambler roses. The orchard, tennis court, and its summerhouse (Daddy and Tom used to play), the two-story barn, where there was usually a mess of [ferall kittens . . .
Grandmother’s gardens were extensive; there was even a greenhouse. Over towards the 4th St. side was another summerhouse, much used by the family, covered with roses [see part one for this structure]. There were holly trees and magnolias, pepper trees, Scotch broom, quince trees (Grandmother was a great jelly-maker), palms of course, and always lots of flowers. At the top of the cliff (and there it was a real cliff) near the 4th St. side was an expanse of very old cactus . . . By grandmother’s back door was an enormous rubber tree, up in which I spent hours at a time—the younger kids couldn’t climb it. It was quite a domain, for a child, and I enjoyed every inch of it.
After a brief mention of her education at the St. Mary’s Catholic Church school, Mary recalled that “the street at the bottom of our property, called Bodie St. (now the Santa Ana Freeway), was inhabited entirely by Russian immigrants,” these known generally as Molokans and residing in much of the “flats.” She added that “the women all wore scarves on their heads, and the men sang beautifully,” though “they also often removed small items from our back terrace. Mary also remembered “the Chinese vegetable man, who came daily with his horse and wagon” and got into shouting matches with Anna.
There were occasional social calls and shopping trips with her mother and, lunch with her father, at the California Club’s quarters at Hill and 5th streets (the current club building on Flower Street, completed in 1930, was designed by Robert Farquhar, architect of the remodeled house of the William H. Workman, Jr. family). A rare treat was a downtown dinner at the California Club or the Victor Hugo, called “the best [restaurant] in town.”
Mary also discussed downtown parades, trips to Long Beach and Redondo Beach, the Selig Zoo in Eastlake (Lincoln) Park, or flying kites with her father where the large Sears building was built near the former Sisters’ Orphanage. Summer vacations of a month or longer were taken to Del Mar or Laguna Beach and Mary well remembered going to the theater with her father, with her mother occasionally joining to see musicals, after which Elizabeth “would come home and play us all the songs.” Mary added, “mother’s piano-playing, incidentally, is an integral part of my childhood memories—that, and the attention given to anything French, especially speaking it. She really played beautifully, Chopin and the like.”
Part Four concerned the home on St. Andrews Place in the West Adams/Jefferson Park section southwest of downtown to which the Workmans relocated, with Mary unhappy with the move of which she wrote, “they said it was because the [Boyle Heights] neighborhood was running down.” She allowed that this was the case “but we had our own enclave” and added “I suspect finances were also much involved” in buying a smaller house, which no longer stands. Mary briefly described it, noted that she then went to the Bay Area for seven years of schooling at the Sacred Heart Schools in Atherton, lasting from 1921 to 1928.
She mentioned that “our lives were in a state of considerable upheaval, especially mine, as I missed Boyle Avenue so badly,” continuing that “I never felt as happy again, after we moved.” There was a 1927 trip to Europe that was to include visits to England, Italy and Spain, but her mother was ill for much of the period and “money was tight,” so most of the time was spent in Paris, where Mary had several months of education at a finishing school. After returning home, there was completion of high school at Sacred Heart and, though Mary was a legacy entry for Stanford University, her parents enrolled her at University of California, Los Angeles, where she attended classes at the new campus.
Lastly, there was a fifth part concerning “family myths and legends” including about Dugans and Gowans, as well as Andrew Boyle’s adventures during the revolution in Texas in 1836 and the famed Kit Carson being an apprentice to Mary’s great-grandfather David Workman. She then addressed an issue that caused some tense correspondence among the “Los Angeles Workman” clan in the 1950s and which concerned David’s brother William. Mary related,
[William] is supposed to have bought a twelve-year-old Indian girl, named Nicolasa, at Taos, brought her to California, had two children by her, and after many years, married her when the priest put her up to faking a deathbed scene.
That Nicolasa, of course was Tom [Thomas Workman II] Temple’s great-grandmother. In the last twenty-five years, she has acquired a last name—Uriarte— . . . Now, if Tom Temple, and my uncle Tom, wish to give the old gal some respectability, that’s fine—but I prefer the story the original way.
The account ended with her relating that Tom Workman was late for dinner at Maria Boyle Workman’s house and was “laughing so hard he couldn’t explain” then settled down to say that he was held up because of a historical parade in the Pasadena area and that “what panicked him was that one of the floats carried a beautiful girl in Spanish costume, and the legend ‘Nicolasa, daughter of the dons.'” Apparently, this joke was in comparing the young parade participant with Señora Workman.
Thomas W. Temple II, however, was correct that his great-grandmother did have a Spanish-language surname, generally been rendered as Urioste, but it also seems very likely that she was at least part Pueblo Indian. She was, however, born in 1802 and was well into her twenties when she and William Workman began living in a common-law marriage (a common occurrence in New Mexico, largely because of high fees charged by priests for church marriages.)
Moreover, her children were born in 1830 and 1833 in Taos (and were baptized in the Pueblo church, not the European one where William was baptized). William and Nicolasa were married “in the Church” in California in 1844, not in a dramatic fantasy deathbed scene, which, in any case, would have been impossible, as William, in despair over his failed Temple and Workman bank, committed suicide and died instantly.
It should also be noted that Mary’s aunt Mary Julia, in a 1929 letter, asserted that William could not speak Spanish and Nicolasa did not know English, which is plainly impossible, especially given that William ran a store in Taos for many years and lived in Mexican territory for two decades. These kinds of myths, though, should also not be a surprise nor the attitudes attending them, while it is also worth mentioning that Joseph, the son of William and Nicolasa, lived with and next to the “Los Angeles Workmans” in Missouri and at Boyle Heights and was close to his cousins, Thomas, Elijah, and William Henry.
We will be back this weekend with more from “Loose Leaves from the Family Tree,” so check back for that!