Monthly Archives: January 2012

“Take It on the Chin”

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Image of a Studebaker like “Teresa”

“Mother decided to drive it right home from the store,” Jane recalled in August 1928 when Daysie Hall bought the the boxy Six -Cylinder Special. They named the Studebaker “Teresa,” but before Dickie had even seen it, they had an accident on the less-than-perfect roads. Autos still had no turn signals or rearview mirrors, road tests were not even required for a driver’s license and danger could appear from any direction. Jane had been with Daysie as they headed down Washington Boulevard in Manhattan Beach towards their house. Suddenly another car smacked them “on the front wheel end” until the fender “didn’t look like part of the car.” Insurance covered the cost of repairs. Still, for several days afterwards, Daysie’s side was very sore.

Although her philosophy was to always ”take it on the chin,” the accident was the least of her worries. At some point in 1928, Daysie Hall began to fight for her life. In correspondence with her older sister Rose, she never used the medical name for the mysterious scourge that filled the hearts of patients and doctors with dread.* Instead, they both referred to the malignant tumor in her right breast as “Cappy.” Daysie’s interest in Christian Science, her love for her children and her sad memories of how doctors had failed to save her late husband, made her delay aggressive treatment until March of 1929 when she entered the hospital in Redondo Beach. By April she had been transferred to the California (Lutheran) Hospital on South Hope Street in Los Angeles. Finally, in May, after radium treatments, Daysie could report that “Cappy has noticeably decreased although he looks very formidable.”

That year Dick took the second semester off from Redondo Union High School. Exhausted from his own struggle with mild cerebral palsy that primarily affected his speech and gait, he slept a lot, smoked too much, played chess, probably studied with a tutor and was indispensable as the family chauffeur. Now that they had Teresa, he could bring their gram, Rosa Sutton, back and forth from Los Angeles to the South Bay or drive the auto to the hospital where he kept up his mother’s spirits by pushing her wheelchair up to the roof.

By the early summer, Daysie was home again – supported by codeine until the doctor ordered her to stop taking it. Still in considerable pain, she listened to the radio and tried to walk a few steps every day: “I have regained the reflexes in my knees so I am gradually getting better and better e’en tho at times the slowness of the procedure overcomes me and I almost explode – the last remnant of the tempestuous ego which broadcasts through this frail human body,” she confided to Rose, who had covered all her medical bills and now paid for a nurse named Maggie and a housekeeper. Admitting how ashamed she was to be so dependent, Daysie prayed that her land in Salome would someday be valuable enough to repay her sister. And while forty-nine-year-old Rose recovered from a  second bout with pneumonia, she sent encouraging letters to California from another Manhattan – for some, the more glamorous, sophisticated one.

In September 1929, Dick, Jr. returned to school for his senior year where he was inducted into the Scholarship Society. But what about Jane? She was clearly on an emotional roller coaster, exhilarated by success with her writing and devastated by her mother’s illness. Rose asked her niece what she needed. “What do I crave? For Mother to get well – and stay well. I want that more than anything else in the world,” she answered. But  just “so you can get a ‘line’ on my frivolous nature, these are my minor and comparatively unimportant cravings: a bestseller when I’m in my teens; ice-skating; a water wave every week; Switzerland; a checkerboard bathing suit, and a horse like Silver King. Don’t want much do I?”

1927 Lobby Card Fred Thomson and Silver King

Rose had never heard of “Silver King” and was likely not a fan of the late silent movie star Fred Thomson or his clever pale grey hunter. But Jane was in love with the movies and with horses and dogs. Whenever possible she escaped into daring adventures with “Silver King” and a fearless German shepherd Rin Tin Tin. Her aunt was more inclined to encourage her feminine side and sent Jane dresses– one in dark blue silk with bands of yellow and red, and a second with a matching jacket in flowered orange chiffon.

Rose** had seen much more of the world than Daysie. She was by their mother’s side in Washington and Annapolis in 1909 during the high profile second investigation into their brother Jim’s untimely death. Once an aspiring writer herself, Rose studied, traveled and wrote short stories for close to three years while she was in Europe during the Great War. By then she and her husband, Lieut. Hugh A. Parker, had separated by mutual consent and in 1919 she married attorney R. Randolph Hicks, a childless widower with strong roots in Virginia and a practice on Wall Street.  The Hickses lived in a world in which privileged young ladies not much older than Jane went to the Metropolitan Opera or to dances at the Waldorf Astoria in capes and evening gowns. And now their future was uncertain as Rose realized how much support her niece and nephew might require. For on May 2 she had agreed to be the guardian of Daysie’s children if necessary.

It was the end of a prosperous decade;  no one could foresee the economic upheaval that would put millions out of work and demolish the savings and brokerage accounts of the most fortunate Americans. Rose and Randolph Hicks were building their dream house on his family farm in Virginia. And when she began her sophomore year, at least for Jane, there was still hope that a miracle could save her mother.

*See James T. Patterson, The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987) on Cancerphobia and shifting attitudes towards doctors and cancer in the early twentieth century.

** Jane’s Aunt Rose was a sensation as “Mrs. Parker” in Annapolis in 1909; known for her mesmerizing black eyes she had done some detective work on her own to help prove her brother had been murdered. See A Soul on Trial for her life as a young woman as well.

 

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“Writer’s Career Shines Bright”

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Redondo Union High School 1928
  • They seemed an unlikely pair as they climbed the wide steps to Redondo Union High School at the beginning of September 1928.  Dick Wick Hall, Jr., a thin, lanky 16-year-old with dark brown curly hair towered over his sturdy younger sister.  “Little Jane” was both eager and apprehensive as they passed through the Ionic columns that guarded the main entrance to the auditorium like silent sentinels. The Beaux-Arts building overlooked the Pacific Ocean; its “stately beauty” reinforced the values that Principal Aileen Hammond and her faculty hoped to instill in their students. Jane had poured over the 1928 yearbook when her brother brought it home in June. This Pilot’s  dedication honored alumnus Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, and Miss Hammond applauded his “severe discipline, modesty, courtesy, and unselfishness,” the same qualities Jane encouraged her readers to cultivate in her stories and essays.

Just a year earlier, on their mother Daysie’s birthday, May 20, Lindbergh had left Long Island for Paris on the single-engine “Spirit of St. Louis.” (The Halls may have seen the Fox Movietone News newsreel of his plane as it took off on the solo transatlantic flight—it was the first news film with sound.) Their uncle, Don Sutton, had been an aviator for the army and, when Jane let her imagination roam, she too longed for the opportunity to soar through the clouds in a small plane. Within the next few years she would.

For now she was one of 429 ninth grade “scrubs” (first semester freshmen) in a navy blue wool pleated skirt topped by a white cotton midi with blue collar and cuffs and black sailor tie – a uniform designed to keep the girls from noticing each other’s taste in fashion or lack of it. She signed up for at least four of the “solid” subjects required each year, choosing Spanish as her Foreign Language (later she wished she had taken French.) Then, as now, the school excelled in journalism and, by the end of October 1928, Jane had already become a Literary Assistant on the weekly student paper High Tide.

In the coming months and well into 1929, Jane not only did well in school and kept up her cooking column, she submitted other work that came out in local and Los Angeles papers. It did not take long for the editor of The Redondo Daily Breeze to notice her talent. Passersby saw a sign nailed to the front door of  the Halls’ home at 1148 Manhattan Avenue that identified Jane as ”Manager” of the Manhattan Beach Office of The Breeze. She covered society news, City Hall, Service Club Meetings and other events of interest in the town while demonstrating unusual literary versatility and breadth. Once her homework was done, she wrote poems, stories, editorials, a historical article about opium smuggling in Manhattan Beach, and human interest tales. James Globbins was a gentle, talkative elderly man she had visited in Redondo Hermosa Hospital. He confided to her in Spanish how much he wanted to go to church but he could not leave the hospital – alcoholism had destroyed his health. Jane’s profile was as much a cautionary tale for those who might become “slaves to alcohol” as it was the story of “Jimmy’s” lonely death in June of 1929.  But her splashiest article for The Breeze was a front page feature on Friday, June 14 about the Redondo Union High School graduation.

“Writer’s Career Shines Bright in Future of Young Beach Girl” wrote Jim McGinnis in The Breeze on September 10, 1929.  After noting Dick Wick Hall’s success in The Saturday Evening Post, McGinnis published a poem that had already brought Jane a silver medal in from the prestigious St. Nicholas League and, according to her scrapbook, also came out in The Manhattan News Progress and Hermosa Review.

“Midnight Seen Through an Open Window.”

Deserted streets
And darkened windows.
Roads littered with the shrouds
Of yesterday’s merriment.
Far off, the sound of a brush –
Ceaseless, monotonous as time.
He comes in sight at last –
And old, bent man.
Sweeping up the remains
Of someone’s pleasure.
Banana peels – and empty wrappers.
Wind whips through his tattered coat.
His hands are gnarled, his thin face
Creased with care.
For him, life has been
an empty wrapper . . . .
Fate is cruel.

Jane’s “fourteen-year-old eyes evidently see a part of the burning beauty and piercing truth of the world that is denied to most of its rather blind inhabitants,” Mr. McGinnis observed. “She is quite certain that someday she will be an author. She will.”

 

Many thanks to Therese Martinez and the Archive staff at Redondo Union High School for their help in locating information about Jane Hall and her brother Dick Wick Hall, Jr.

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“Do Your Best” – Calamity as Inspiration

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When we last left Jane Hall in Manhattan Beach in the summer of 1928 she had just graduated from the eighth grade and remained focused on her career goals; she defined herself as a writer and the work provided a defense against the unbearable loss of a father who was also her mentor. Her stories and fairy tales about animals or other children often had a moral; her poems spoke of nature, the ocean, an orange tree or the desert where sunbeams hide between the rocks and “a soft, bright, glow, halos the mountainside.” And occasionally she wrote about forgiveness, flirtation, romance and love.

Jane’s prize-winning editorial in the Los Angeles (Junior) Times, “Do Your Best,” emphasized a recurrent theme – be responsible! Everyone has special talents and 13-year-old Jane encouraged young readers to “develop your talents, no matter how insignificant they may seem, or how many obstacles block your progress.” Once in a while when she needed a break from her typewriter, she stuffed down her favorite snack, “jelly doughnuts,” and rode the surf in the nearby Pacific.

Then one day she picked up her pen — or possibly even Dick Wick Hall’s Waterman fountain pen — and wrote in a slender brown composition book about the impact of his death. Even when recording her most private thoughts, she edited her prose in a search for the perfect word.

There is something very contradictory about death. It brings friends so much closer and widens the gap between acquaintances. Since Daddy died mother and Dick and I are bound together by the surest tie there is – the knowledge of what each means to the other. Before, we were just a family – husband, wife two children. Now we are The Three. I think we could get along without ever seeing another person. Just being by ourselves and going to the movies occasionally. I love the movies. When you stop to think about it, which Dick and I do too seldom, it’s really remarkable the way mother has given up her own existence for Dick and me since Daddy died. She doesn’t even go to bridge parties in the afternoon anymore just so she’ll be waiting for us when we get home from school.

Of course we have fun together – we go on picnics and swimming and that sort of thing, but it can’t be as much fun for mother as it is for Dick and me because after all he and I are two of a kind, and while she is our mother and closer than we are to each other, something – I suppose it’s a matter of years – sets her apart. I wonder why we are the way we are? Other men died, and their wives are widows, and lonely and all that, but it doesn’t bring them as close to their children as mother is to Dick and me. I know. I can’t even imagine what it would be like not to have her waiting for us. As a matter of fact, I can but it’s awful. Like looking down a well when you are really dizzy. Ever since Daddy died – it’s been two years now – I’ve had that terrible doubtful feeling in my stomach – when will it be mother? And no matter how secure things seem today, I know it’s got to be sometime. I hope when the time comes we will all three be killed together in an automobile accident or something.

Amid these sobering and prescient thoughts, Jane’s mission to make her father proud kept her going. She had no way of knowing what a devastating struggle the next two years would bring to The Three of them.  And that summer good news came from The Los Angeles Times. Each week for more than a year between August 26, 1928 and the end of 1929, aspiring new chefs read “Jane’s Cooking Corner, Written and Illustrated by Jane E. Hall, Manhattan Beach,” usually with a cartoon-like self portrait at the top. The column would be filled with dozens of recipes and cheerful advice about how her readers could help their mothers in the kitchen.

At about this time, Jane began pasting her published work and articles about her in a scrapbook with linen pages. The dark green front cover is missing and the clippings have turned a mellow beige, but they show the pride she took in her work. And she was fortunate too – in the 1920s newspapers and magazines actively sought submissions by children under 15 who made up almost a third of America’s population. By the time she entered Redondo Union High School in September 1928, Jane already had built up quite a reputation in Manhattan Beach. Before long she would gain some notoriety in Redondo Beach as well.

Click on the images for a close up view and enjoy Jane’s poem about romance and her jingles on how to be thrifty. Try baking the pumpkin pie. Please use the contact tab for any comments or questions.

 

“The Safest Beach in America”

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Manhattan Beach Promotional Flyer 1927 MBHS and Jan Dennis

 When Daysie Hall and her children reached Manhattan Beach in 1927, the area had just begun to come into its own as a popular resort. Much of the shoreline with its massive coastal sand dunes was still undeveloped and flyers eagerly promoted “the safest beach in America.” The 928 foot long pier had been a big attraction ever since its completion in 1920; a large neon sign that spelled out “Manhattan Beach”  welcomed visitors after dark. As many as 360 people at a time could rent bathing suits and change in the large bathhouse available on the land end of the pier. Out on the ocean end they bought tackle and fished or enjoyed the restaurant in the lighted stucco octagonal pavilion. When the weather cooperated, men, women and children in modest bathing wear or fully dressed set up tents or umbrellas and shared picnics on the sand. And there were still rules of decorum. A sign proclaimed that no bathers were allowed on the streets without a robe.*

It must have been hard for tourists to imagine how recently there had been no roads, few boardwalks and no electricity in the area. Mules still had to clear sand and level out the beachfront. But Daysie was not a newcomer. The Sutton Family had lived in Los Angeles between 1890 and 1897 while her father, James Sutton, was General Manager of the

Dick Wick Hall on Venice Beach

Redondo Beach Road. She and her family would come to the area on weekends and she remembered the days when there was much less activity along the South Bay. Every summer California’s beaches had provided the Halls with relief from the desert heat. Daysie would often stay in California with the children for several months while Dick remained in Arizona.

In 1927 Daysie’s first goal was to find an affordable home with access to good schools for Dickie and Jane. A shingled, three-bedroom rental at 1148 Manhattan Avenue on the corner of 12th Street had great appeal.

Manhattan Beach in 1929 with Hall House. MBHS and Jan Dennis.

With their windows open, her family could hear the waves churning up sand. The house sat on a narrow lot at the top of an incline just a short walk from the beach and several shops including a drugstore, bank, market, a bakery and two small restaurants. And perhaps most important, a bus could take Dickie the four miles to and from Redondo Union High School. They settled in before his sophomore year began in September.

Jane continued on track as a frequent author and prizewinner for the Los Angeles Times young writers’ pages while she tackled the responsibilities of eighth grade. By the following summer her skill as a wordsmith had attracted local notice; in July, 1928, the Manhattan Beach Progress editor, Harry Wilson, noted at the top of one of his columns: “There are few who have not heard of the late Dick Wick Hall, the writer, who made Salome, Arizona famous. . .” And with that, he introduced a polished editorial by Jane on her first impressions of Manhattan Beach.**

Proclaiming that Manhattan Grammar School was the best school she  ever attended, Jane gave the town high marks for being “one of the cleanest, neatest, most ‘jazz free’ little communities on the Pacific coast.” It is filled with “real, whole- souled” American citizens who take an interest in everything around them, she wrote. Recalling her father’s skill in marketing Salome’s “Laughing Gas Station” with warmth and humor, she noticed that some shopkeepers in Manhattan Beach were a bit lackadaisical –their wares “are displayed in a rather haphazard fashion.” And, she warned, they needed to be more friendly to the tourists or they would take their business other places such as Hermosa, Redondo or Los Angeles.

Jane’s honesty, spunk and unusual talents soon made her the Manhattan Beach Correspondent for the Redondo Daily Breeze. (More to come in 1/21 post.) She exuded self-confidence in the daytime and yet, when the seagulls were silent and the streets fairly deserted, when only the moon and stars could be seen outside her window, she had trouble sleeping alone in her room. As soon as the house was quiet, Jane confessed in a diary she kept for a few months in 1928, “I go scuffling in to mother.” She was mad at herself for being so “babyish” at thirteen even though both her mother and her beloved gram, Rosa Sutton, could certainly relate to her curiosity and uneasiness about ghosts.

“I would like to see Daddy’s ghost but if it should ever appear when I’m by myself I know I would have a stroke. In the daytime I have myself half believing that such things can’t be and that ghosts don’t exist but in my heart I know they do, because once I saw one out in the corner of my eye. It was on the desert, at night, and it flew around the corner of the house, about a foot off the ground. It was very white and luminous, and I have never in my life been so scared before or since. I would like to know whose ghost it was tho.”

Perhaps that is why, when I was a child, she liked to tell ghost stories and to dare me and my cousins to walk outside in the dark alone at night … But that may be material for another post down the road. Next week we will follow Jane to high school and watch her literary career take off.

Today as Manhattan Beach  celebrates its centennial, it is one of the most beautiful and expensive places to live in the United States. Home values often far exceed $1,000,000. And many residents value the community’s rich heritage as much or more than its real estate. Through its meetings, lectures, publications and its museum in the cottage at Polliwog Park, volunteers at the Manhattan Beach Historical Society keep this history alive.

View of the ocean from near 1148 Manhattan Avenue today

1148 Manhattan Avenue is now Talia’s Italian Restaurant but some of the old structure of the home where Jane lived still remains.

 

 

 

*Both images of Manhattan Beach in the 1920s are at the Manhattan Beach Historical Society. They were also published in Jan Dennis, Manhattan Beach California (Images of America Series). San Francisco, CA: Arcadia Publishing, 2001. Many thanks to Steve Meisenholder, President of the MBHS, for his help with several details as well as information about the original house the Halls rented at 1148 Manhattan Avenue.

**Above the clipping in Jane’s scrapbook, she wrote the date July 11.

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