by Paul R. Spitzzeri
The Homestead is fortunate to have in its collection a goodly number of archival material pertaining to the Workman and Temple family so that we can better interpret their lives and the history of greater Los Angeles during our interpretive period of 1830 to 1930. Key to this was the dogged determination of Thomas Workman Temple II (1905-1972) to gather and preserve a great deal of artifacts, though other family members did, as well, including his uncle John Harrison Temple (1856-1926).
Thomas was also a significant contributor to the objects we have in our holdings, thanks in large measure to his disciplined letter writing to his parents, Laura González and Walter P. Temple, Sr., something he continued for about a decade from the late 1910s to late 1920s, though we have other missives from beyond that period, too.
Almost all of these pieces of corresponded were written when Thomas was away at boarding schools, principally the University of Santa Clara, from which he completed the preparatory high school in 1922 and then earned his bachelor’s degree four years later, with an emphasis on legal studies, and Harvard University, where he attended the prestigious and demanding Law School, finishing his studies there in 1929.
Thomas wrote letters most every week, while his father largely relied on telegrams to communicate and his siblings Agnes, in her sophomore year at Dominican College in San Rafael, north of San Francisco, and brothers Walter, Jr. and Edgar, at that same level for high school at Governor Dummer Academy, also in Massachusetts, were much less frequent in their missives to home or to each other.
We’ve shared quite a few of Thomas’ letters to his father in the “Reading Between the Lines” series of posts featuring other missives in our collection, often coupled with our “Getting Schooled” set of entries focusing on education. This combined post shares a 2 June 1927 letter that is somewhat brief, but we’ll supplement it by bringing in some of Walter, Sr.’s activities during the year for context.
Penned on Harvard letterhead, Thomas’ letter refers right away to the rigors of his coursework, telling his “Dadup” that
Tuesday [31 May] was my first examination and I haven’t quite recovered from the strain. It certainly was the stiffest paper I’ve seen in my college career. The remaining ordeals are spread over the remaining weeks [in the semester] and if I’m not a wreck before I get thru we’ll be pulling out of Boston the 18th inst.
That date would be the long train trip home across the country for a well-deserved summer break at the Homestead and, to this end, Thomas informed his father that, while brother Walter spent the prior weekend with him and Edgar was with friends, “they get out the 11th and I expect to see them around.”
He added that Grace Dennison Bancroft, married to the Temples’ cousin, Edward, “is wondering what has become of me for I haven’t seen them since Easter.” The Bancrofts, along with Edward’s mother, Ellen, who was Walter, Sr.’s first cousin (their fathers, Abraham and F.P.F. were siblings) and sister Edith, served a vital role as family members offering their homes and companionship for the California Temples. Thomas’ intensive workload, however, clearly kept him from more frequent visits.
Returning to inter-family communication, Thomas informed his father that he had yet to hear from Agnes “since she’s been home,” which indicates that she completed her semester well before her brothers. He acknowledged his father’s telegrams and, as a testament to how busy he was, apologized that “I haven’t written sooner than this.
After a brief diversion concerning the fact that his brothers were going to take a pair of trunks home with their clothes and other belongings, while leaving winter clothes in the other two they had, Thomas recalled that “last year at this time Agnes and I were home and the kids still at Belmont,” this latter a Catholic school northwest of Santa Clara.
The next item concerned the elder Temple’s 58th birthday, which was on the 7th, and Thomas added that, the prior year, it was the day before Walter Sr.’s natal day that he journeyed from the Homestead to the Bay Area to travel home with his brothers. He then remarked that he was “sorry we won’t be there to celebrate it together, but I can assure you that we shall make up for it” when at home “and our thoughts will be with you on that day.”
Clearly showing his anxiety to finish the trying semester and get home, Thomas commented “you don’t know how fast the days are going and how we count each day off,” adding “no doubt Woodruff,” this being Walter, Sr.’s attorney and business partner George, “will have us go on the Santa Fe” route. He remarked that he hoped to go through St. Louis, as he’d received a letter from “little Martha Busch, Mr. Busch’s little girl you remember them on the boat” which carried the Temples to Massachusetts in summer 1926 for both a vacation and enrolling the three boys at their respective schools.
It appears that these were members of the famous brewing family and Thomas sought to stir his father’s memory by noting that “they stopped off at Guatemala City and lent us their rain coats,” while observing that “if we go through St. Louis, they want to meet us at the station.” It would be interesting to know if that took place, as well as what connection they had with the beer barons, who also had a famous garden at Pasadena in those days.
The missive concluded with Thomas telling his father,
We all send our love and wish you many happy returns of the day. May you live long and prosper, happy in the happiness of your children who love you dearly and appreciate your tender care and thoughtfulness, some day to repay it by good example and a credit to your name.
With regards to George Woodruff, a prior post here features a 9 April letter to Thomas that was filled with praise for the young man’s academic efforts, a recommendation that he spend some time working for Woodruff at his newly established firm to learn more about the law, referred to winter flood damage, and discussed the opening of the Temple Estate Company’s Edison Building in Alhambra.
Woodruff was a key figure in the efforts to restructure the finances of the estate firm and the Temple Townsite Company, developer of the Town of Temple, including the creation of bonds in 1926 that raised capital, while also involving long-term debt with respect to interest payments, as the Edison Building and oil drilling projects at Long Beach and Ventura were pursued at the time.
One of the many problems that arose, however, during this period was that, while there was some initial success in production with oil wells drilled by the Walter P. Temple Oil Company at Signal Hill, just a short distance from the 1840s adobe built by his uncle Jonathan at what was the Rancho Los Cerritos, early 1927 brought news of the abandonment of five wells there, evidently because further expenditures could not be justified. The next field of operations, however, was in an area north of Ventura on the road to Ojai, where considerable funds were expended in the couple of years to try to bring in gushers and right the financial ship that was taking on too much water.
At the Town of Temple, where lot sales after its spring 1923 founding were solid, but also apparently largely speculative as early buyers sought quick profits on rising values during that peak year of greater Los Angeles’ latest development boom, the passage, two years later, of Mattoon Act to fund infrastructure, but which required adjoining property owners to pay defaulted assessments of their neighbors, proved highly problematic, especially as those bonds were created.
There was a renewed effort early in 1927 by the Temple Townsite Company to promote the project, with one stating that an unnamed figure previously invested $70,000 and was buying mor property, while another remarked that “Temple is a well located, young town that is now booming and will surely make wonderful returns to those who own property inside its boundary.” A third touted “that new, fast growing young city” with “a grand future” that was “ideal for children” and with a quarter-acre lot expected to return $1,500 in a year.
A large advertisement by the Temple Chamber of Commerce in the Long Beach Press-Telegram of 25 March included a photo of the downtown section looking north on Sunset Boulevard (now Temple City Boulevard) just south of Main Street (today’s Las Tunas Drive) and proclaimed the town was “IN THE HEART OF THE SAN GABRIEL VALLEY.” Ten main points were highlighted, including that it was “a COMER” and “the natural center for a great city. Moreover, it was declared very healthful, free of fog and flood and claiming that “people living in Temple are not bothered with asthma or throat trouble.”
The soil was declared “wonderfully fertile” and there was “NO ADOBE,” while the town boasted “an abundant supply of pure mountain water.” In a rather disparate grouping, the ad emphasized that,
TEMPLE has a public park and playgrounds, an elegant Community Church, artistic business buildings, modern homes, and is well protected by racial and building restrictions; it can never become a shack town.
The racially restrictive covenants were nearly universal in the Los Angeles area at the time, but, given that Temple was lavishing his La Casa Nueva mansion, rapidly approaching completion at the time, with abundant references to his Latino heritage, the contrast between the two is more than striking.
Also featured were the more than two dozen trains running to and from town on the Alhambra line of the Pacific Electric Railway streetcar system, though ridership was in rapid decline due to the rise in automobile ownership and use. It was added that “TEMPLE is in one of the best school districts in Los Angeles County, for which a new $100,000 building,” this being the South Santa Anita (now Longden) elementary school, which comprised its own district, with junior high and high school students attending Woodrow Wilson Junior High and Pasadena High schools in Pasadena.
For about eight months, however, little promotion in the press was located, with a resumption taking place in November, including one in the Pasadena Post of 19 November that featured a photo of a “Modern English Stucco Home,” with landscaping and sprinklers (notably, there were no fire hydrants for fire protection) and available for $4,950 with 10% down in cash and $45 per month including interest. The Temple Townsite Company took out this ad and listed amenities such as the 20-minute streetcar ride, cheap water, “rich garden soil,” a town newspaper, 31 stores, gas and electricity service, no city taxes and “Valid Race Restrictions.”
An article in the paper on the 17th titled “TEMPLE OFFERS NEW INVESTMENT” reported that “business activity and transfers of property during the last month in the Town of Temple have been greater than for the whole of the preceding year.” Hope was placed in the completion of Arrow Highway, slated to run directly from Los Angeles to San Bernardino (though only portions were completed) and which was expected to increase property values, so “homeseekers and investors are preparing to reap the harvests of early investment.”
It was added that the townsite company was offering four houses on large lots and at “unusually reasonable prices,” with it added that,
The homes are on sale at these prices because of a desire of the company to clear up the remainder of a mortgaged indebtedness which remains upon them. The properties have been repossessed, but are in excellent condition.
This revelation might be indicative of some of those issues referred to above regarding the firm’s financial position, though it was noted that the quartet of dwellings were close to the small downtown with 23 (not 31?) stores “and profitable industries of diversified types.” A bakery and new building for the substation, one of five, of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. When 1928 dawned, the townsite company hired the Davis-Baker Company of Pasadena to try and jumpstart sales and development, though to little avail.
As has been mentioned in this blog before, September brought an effort to change the name of the town because of purported confusion with other places that had the name of Temple in it. A contest drew more than 60 suggestions and a team reviewed them and revealed in October that the winning entry was “Santa Rita.” Shortly afterward, however, a protest, though by whom was not reported (perhaps Walter Temple?), arose and, in 1928, a compromise was reached in which “Temple City” was selected.
The Temple Estate Company, meanwhile, had one major project left to complete and, in early April, the Edison Building, a four-story business edifice on leased land at the northwest corner of Main and 3rd streets in downtown Alhambra, was finished and opened. The $200,000 structure, with seven ground-level stores and 76 office spaces, with Southern California Edison’s occupancy giving it its name, is one of the only remaining ones built or owned by Temple and his associates that remains standing.
His first real estate and building project, just west of the Edison, was the Temple Theatre, opened at the end of 1921 and leased by a veteran theater operator for the next five-and-a-half years. It may be, however, that financial pressures led the Estate Company to divest itself of the building, which was sold in late June 1927. The Los Angeles Times of the 27th reported, from an Alhambra correspondent, that,
On July 1 the Temple Theater, one of Alhambra’s leading motion-picture houses, will pass into the control of Principal Theaters, Inc., of which Sol Lesser and M[ike] Rosenberg are the heads.
Lesser (1890-1980), a native of Spokane, Washington got his start as a teen with his father’s nickelodeon and he and Rosenberg ran many theaters under the Principal name, including the Orpheum, though he became a noted film producer with his Principal Pictures and as an independent, including 1922’s Oliver Twist with child star Jackie Coogan, the Tarzan series starring Johnny Weismuller, Stage Door Canteen (1943) and Kon-Tiki, the 1951 documentary that won an Academy Award.
Another year would pass before Temple and the estate company sold off the rest of the Alhambra properties, including the Edison Building, as a further sign of financial stresses. There is, however, one more interesting item to review that took place just before Thomas and his siblings returned home for their summer vacation and which was discussed in the Covina Argus of 1 July.
That city’s Business and Professional Women’s Club had a recent meeting in which was a discussion concerning “a belief that the stones used in the first mill in the San Gabriel valley, located on the John Rowland ranch [on Rancho La Puente], had been ruthlessly thrown away” while it was added that “even though covered with the dirt of some thirty-five or forty years, the club decided to make an attempt to find them.” A committee was formed for this purpose and it embarked on its hunt, but,
It found the club was several years too late—the treasures had been discovered and would soon be utilized in a beautiful fountain at the old homestead of William Workman, now owned by Mr. Walter Temple of Puente, a descendant of this historic family . . .
Mr. Bernardo Rowland [grandson of John] disclosed many interesting facts of history, and advised the committee that Mr. Walter Temple had secured one of the mill stones from a rancher who had stumbled on it while plowing, and suggested that [the committee members] go to the old Workman ranch and see the stone. It was found that Mr. Temple not only had the large stone, but the smaller one, some two and one-half feet in diameter, and is now using them in the construction of a fountain in the patio in his new home, being erected by the side of the old Workman homestead [House].
Through the courtesy of Mr. Temple and his daughter, the guests were shown through the old house, with its thick adobe walls and inset windows, the massive lock and key, and with every room in the old mansion restored to its former glory.
The new home is not only carrying out the Spanish type of architecture to a wonderful degree, but is embodying the record and spirit of the great pioneer, William Workman, as well as the early missions of Southern California. A beautiful palm towers above all the other trees, transplanted though stupendous efforts from the San Gabriel mission. Long arbors of grapes skirt the sides of the grounds. The guests were taken up an exterior stairway to the roof garden, where a magnificent view of the Spadra [San José] and San Gabriel valleys was seen, as far as the eye could reach.
There was some confusion in the reporting, as the “massive lock and key” is actually on La Casa Nueva’s front door, but it is interesting to hear references to both residences, as well as the transplanted palm, which died several years ago, the Mission Walkway with its grape arbors, and the second-floor patios, which were enclosed in 1930 as the Temples left and leased the Homestead to the Golden State Military Academy.
We will certainly continue sharing Thomas’ letters, as well as others in the Museum’s holdings, in the “Reading Between the Lines” series, so keep an eye out for those.