“Writer’s Career Shines Bright”

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Robin

: 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

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Robin

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”

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Robin

: 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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Dick Wick Hall’s Family and His Legacy

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Robin

Daysie Hall with Her Children circa 1917

She has addressed the short note to “My Pearls” and her bold scrawl covers the entire page. For the newly widowed Daysie Mae Sutton Hall her children are her life. “Light the fire & be careful it do not pop on the floor. Will be home in due course – all my love to my treasures Mammy.” At the bottom of the page, there is a postscript for her son – she called him “Handsome” just as he often called her “Fairest.”

Few papers survive in Daysie’s handwriting, perhaps because grammar, punctuation and spelling were not her forte. (That may be one reason why she spelled her name phonetically though no one else in her family would use this unusual spelling of “Daisy.”) But Daysie had no trouble at all with the spoken word and had won a gold medal for elocution. An aspiring opera singer, she met Dick in Los Angeles in 1909 while performing at a stage show. Her tall, slender frame lent itself well to the Gibson girl look but when Daysie piled her thick auburn hair on top of her head she often covered it with a large ornate hat. That she was “a woman of remarkable intellect and rare personal charm,” was clear to a Los Angeles Times reporter who spoke with Daysie on May 22, 1910 about her mother Rosa’s unprecedented battle with the United States Navy . (See the home page.) And yet in all the articles in books, magazines and newspapers about Dick Wick Hall, his beloved Daysie – the subject of his numerous love poems – is rarely present.

She was born in 1882 and raised in Portland and Los Angeles. Although she much preferred the climate on California’s coast, Daysie remained in Salome for a year after Dick died. It was her family’s hometown and the only place where they owned property. Daysie and her children could feel Dick’s presence there. Perhaps it’s not surprising, given her own mother’s apparent ability to hear from departed family members, that Daysie also thought she saw Dick’s ghost. For of all Rosa Sutton’s children, Daysie was the most receptive to paranormal experiences.

But she could not take much comfort from her late husband’s modest estate. For years the Halls had lived on a financial roller coaster and Dick’s unexpected death, just as his literary career had taken off, only made Daysie worry more. His primary legacy was clearly his literary output – his wry humor and down-home philosophy would often be compared to that of his contemporary, Will Rogers. But Daysie had always been more reserved and practical than her husband and she knew her limitations. Early in May 1926 she turned to the one person she trusted, Dick’s editor and mentor, Thomas Masson. Two of his long, thoughtful typed letters to her survive (May 28, 1926 and February 15, 1927). Masson urged her to be cautious around manipulative men who might take advantage of her situation. It would now be up to Daysie to carry on Dick’s work and Masson hoped she would not feel responsible for any of the debts Dick had incurred as an overly optimistic entrepreneur. The letters also reveal Masson’s spiritual side – for him Dick was still:

“much more alive than ever, for his real, immortal self is here, and released from the material bondage. This is what you must see. There is nothing ghostly about it. It is just a fact. Before [he died], he was unable to express himself, because he was earthbound. He was so intensely earthbound that he couldn’t stand it – here. That frequently happens, especially with intense natures. They cannot drop off the material, there is a point from which they cannot go – here. The material structure thus breaks and frees them to express themselves.”

This seems to be a surprising comment for Masson to make because he was so supportive of the way Dick expressed himself in his writing. And yet, in his letters to Daysie, he implied that Dick’s death was in a sense foreordained. And once his spirit was in God’s hands he became truly free.

As for Jane and Dick Jr. they continued to interest Masson “vastly;” he hoped Daysie would “let them alone largely . . . They will come through big, and above all, don’t let them think they are any sort of geniuses.” They were unusual to be sure. Daysie’s tall plucky 14-year-old son with curly dark brown hair, handicapped by cerebral palsy since birth, was gifted in science and math and an expert at chess despite his awkward gait and slow speech . Eleven-year-old Jane idolized her father and was more determined than ever to follow in his footsteps as a writer, and to help her mother by selling her own poems and stories .

By the summer of 1927, ” Dickie” as Jane called him, had benefited greatly from a tutor and was ready for sophomore year. Daysie knew she must find good schools for the children and so the Halls headed for Los Angeles where Rosa Sutton eagerly waited for her family . But Rosa’s large personality and small living quarters motivated Daysie to start house hunting quickly. She focused on finding affordable rental housing in Manhattan Beach, near the Pacific Ocean and only a short bus ride from Redondo Union High School. It would be from this new location that little Jane Hall’s career began to flourish as she thought often of her daddy and of the impact of his death on her family .

We will join the Halls in Manhattan Beach in the January posts and returned to Arizona occasionally. For in her heart, Jane never totally left the desert and Salome; when she reached Hollywood she noticed that many of her colleagues remembered her father too. Jane would hold up a mirror to those who were caught up in the pretensions of high society just as her father had done in his stories and columns, She even took on his habit of capitalizing nouns unexpectedly – editors did not seem to object .

Part Two: How Do We Know What We Know?

As a historian and as the granddaughter of Dick and the daughter of Jane Hall , I’m writing these posts with both a personal and professional perspective. Although I never met Rosa Sutton or Dick Wick and Daysie Hall, I have come to know them through what they wrote and what was written about them, as well as by visiting the places where they lived. My mother rarely spoke about her early life, but she left an archive that provides an intriguing window into her private thoughts, her published observations and into the life of an American girl in the first three decades of the 20th century . When she died, Jane had not been well for many years and it was easier, at first, to immerse myself in her father’s papers. I have made several trips to Salome, often with one or both of my daughters. Twice we had the great privilege of being in the “Dick Wick Hall Days” parade. Dick’s most visible legacy today lies in Salome and in the other towns of the McMullen Valley among people who find creative ways to preserve memories of the past.

And there are those throughout Arizona who still appreciate Dick’s philosophy and shrewd marketing skills– his writings put Salome on statewide and national maps. Today Fry’s Electronics store in Tempe (2300 West Baseline Road) is celebrating Arizona’s Golf History with a series of murals. Two large murals are already up near the software and service departments that feature Dick’s Greasewood Golf Course and Dick with his Salome Frog and the famous stick figure image of Salome in a desert setting. Perhaps this is a perfect example of Masson’s claim that, after he died, Dick was much more alive than ever.

There are many articles about Dick Wick Hall in books, pamphlets, newspapers and in magazines such as Arizona Highways. Two well-documented ones appeared in the Journal of Arizona History (Winter, 1970 and Spring, 1984). Hall’s business papers can be found at various locations such as the Arizona Historical Society (Tucson and Yuma Branches), and the Arizona State Library (Archives and Public Records) in Phoenix. Several letters from Jane, written when she was about seven to nine years old, are among the Hall papers in Tucson (MS 321). An internet search of “Dick Wick Hall” brings up several resources (including images) some of which are more reliable than others.

Dick’s pen, his aneroid barometer* in the shape of a gold pocket watch, a stamp with his signature, a glass office sign with “D.W. Hall” in gold letters against a black background, some stationary, photo albums, his personal papers including many letters and love poems to Daysie that have never been made public stayed with his daughter Jane. She always wanted to write about her father and to publish a collection of his writings. But “real life” in the form of other obligations intervened. Although Jane objected because she hoped to do it herself, we owe a lot to the late Frances D. Nutt who did just that in 1990 with An Arizona Alibi: The Desert Humor of Dick Wick Hall, Sr. — Arizona’s First Famous Humorist. The forward by Barry Goldwater (1909-1998) reveals that he was a big Dick Wick Hall fan. Like the Halls, Senator Goldwater’s family made the trip from Arizona to California every summer when he was a child “to get away from the heat of Phoenix and the desert.” He remembered stopping in Salome. ”There will never be another Dick Wick Hall unless another community finds a need for one, ” he wrote, “and then they are going to have to invent him.”

*It was identified with the help of Laraine Daly Jones, Museums Collections Manager at the Arizona Historical Society, Southern Division (Tucson) who found the link (above) and explained that “an aneroid barometer measures air pressure without the use of liquid mercury.” For additional information about Hall’s papers at the Arizona Historical Society contact archivist Christine Seliga (Tucson), or AHSref AT azhs.gov or Carol Brooks (Yuma).

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Christmas in Salome, Arizona 1925

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Robin

Happy Holidays to all!

This illustration of ”Our Christmas Tree“ appeared in The Salome Sun in 1925. No one imagined it would be Dick Wick Hall’s last Christmas (see prior post). Dick added the following thoughts using the sporadic upper case letters that became his signature and some deliberately questionable grammar: ”Christmas comes pretty near getting by here without noticing us much Much and Vice Versa and Nobody remembered it was Christmas Day until December 25, which happened to be Christmas day – even if we didn’t think of it . . .Archie Bald Doveface reminded us of it.… He also said Folks out here ought to Respect Christmas because Christ come from the desert – but Scar Face Scroggs says if he did he sure had Sense Enough to Leave it; all of which I don’t pretend to Argue About. . . . You can’t very well have a Tree out here where there ain’t nothing much but greasewood and sagebrush, so we compromised by using the Big Cactus near our Office and everybody had a Good Time excepting Happy Jack Aagaard, who volunteered to act as Santa Claus and had to climb up to Light the Candles and Get the Presents while the Reptyle Kid played A Hot Time on the Harmonica . . . The Frog got more Presents than anybody, including a Canteen of Water and a Bath Tub.”

If Dick Wick Hall were alive today you can be sure he would have fun writing posts about ways to improve life in what is now La Paz County (and used to be Yuma County), about the challenges of Golf in the Desert, the adventures of his Frog, the trouble with Easterners and promoting his latest business venture; many posts would poke fun at Society Ladies. And, as Dick was buried near this very same Saguaro, we will end the year on December 31 with a few observations about his ghost and his legacy–with some more insights from Tom Masson who thought Dick never really died. And he has a point about that.

Next month we will follow the Hall family to Los Angeles and Manhattan Beach, California where Jane kept on writing and made quite a success of it . So let’s give Dick the last word and see what he had to say about California: “Folks who have Never Been to California, or those who have Been There Once and can’t get back again, they all Dream of it – a good deal like Women who have Never Had any Pink Silk Undies, or those who Have Had Them and can’t get any more. California, in many ways, Is a good deal like Pink Silk Undies. It Takes Money to live in or Explore the Wonders and Beauties of California –and that is what a Lot of us are Working for –the Money to get either into California or Pink Silk Undies – and Dreaming of the Good Times we will have When We Get There.”*

*From The Salome Sun

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“A Genius Passed Away”

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Robin

Encouraged by her father’s success with his now syndicated Salome Sun and his stories in the The Saturday Evening Post, “little Jane” kept on scribbling. During the fall and winter of 1925 – 1926, more of her poems were published and her biography of a little colt– told from his point of view– came out in the Los Angeles Times on December 3, 1925. Jane had high standards for herself and those around her. In a new red leather diary for 1926, she gave herself marching orders for the year.

1. Don’t be so saucy to Daddy.

2. Be more conciderate. [sic]

3. Don’t primp so much.

4. Help mother more.

Within a few months, Jane’s efforts attracted notice outside Salome. On a fortuitous Friday in late March—the 26th to be exact– the Yuma Morning Sun proclaimed in a small headline on its front page: “ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD SALOME GIRL IS WRITER OF FAIRYTALE WITH MOST IMPRESSIVE MORAL; SHOWS GENIUS.” “Up in Salome—made famous by Dick Wick Hall–,” the editorial comment began, “where the desert is just a little bit more desert than anywhere else in Arizona, there seems to be something in the air that produces a peculiar type of genius.” Jane’s composition followed. “How My Wish Was Granted” is a first-person tale of a melancholy little girl who has gone swimming in a small cove. Suddenly, the voice of a mermaid barely three inches high interrupts her thoughts. The mermaid grants her one wish and a mere twelve seconds to decide what it will be. The girl does not ask for anything extravagant but for a wreath of coral just like the one the mermaid has in her “dark lustrous hair.” The mermaid is so pleased at this modest request that she adds the gift of perfect happiness to the wreath. The little girl reveals, ” . . .the heavy sense of depression that I had for the last few days left me, suddenly, and I felt perfectly happy.”

But the mood in the Hall household had changed at the beginning of April. Dick Wick Hall had gone to Los Angeles for some tooth extractions and run up against severe complications. On April 13 he typed a note to his wife from the Hotel Hayward. He was desperately homesick; his eyes brimmed with tears when he found a rose that Daysie had left in his bag and a sweet note from Jane in his typewriter. The next day, Dick’s doctors discovered that he had acute kidney disease. Jane, her mother, her thirteen-year-old brother, Dickie, as well as her uncle, Ernie,* were at his bedside at the small Angeles Hospital when Dick Wick Hall died on Wednesday, April 28 at about one in the afternoon.

There was no question about where Dick would be buried. On Sunday, May 2, eight leather-skinned pallbearers carried his casket to a modest garden next to the office in Salome where Dick and his daughter had worked so diligently for much of her childhood. And there he would lie for generations to come next to a tall Saguaro. In the coming months, friends erected a small obelisk out of quartz and other local stone for a man whose quirky characters, sage advice and wry humor had given them a reason to smile. The town of Salome still celebrates “Dick Wick Hall Days” every autumn. And Jane Hall – whose journey had just begun – paid homage to the most important man in her life in the way she knew best.

To Daddy

When the blossom graced the cactus

And the fields were sweet with hay,

When the birds were singing in the trees,

A genius passed away.

In the joyous month of April

Just two days from merry May,

A man who made the whole world laugh

My father, passed away.

Of all the mortals in this world,

Our Lord has picked the best,

For on the 28th of April

My Daddy went to Rest.

*Ernest Hall, Dick’s younger brother, was Arizona’s third Secretary of State and occasional acting governor between 1921 and 1923.

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How Did Salome Become Famous?

Posted on December 11, 2011 by Robin

Thomas Lansing Masson (1866-1934) Mentor to the Hall Family

In this age of social networking and instant access to information, it’s hard to imagine life 90 years ago when it took a lot of patience and more than a little luck to put a tiny town like Salome, Arizona on the national map. That’s what happened when “The Salome Sun” came across the desk of editor, author and humorist Tom Masson. Born in Connecticut, he lived in New Jersey and worked in New York for most of his life. That didn’t discourage him from helping out a maverick in Arizona who poked fun of Easterners and Wall Street types in his desert news sheet. His enthusiasm gave everyone in Dick Wick Hall’s family hope – including little Jane – at a time when their chips were down. And what nobody knew until now – I certainly didn’t until I found some letters he wrote to Dick’s wife Daysie – was that Tom Masson became a spiritual mentor to the Halls even after Dick was no longer on this Earth in the material sense (as Masson would put it).

Dick’s lucky break came at some point in 1922 when a literary-minded traveler stopped in Salome and picked up some copies of the mimeographed “Sun.” He mentioned Dick Wick Hall to Masson who had just taken over as Editor of the “Short Turns and Encores” humor pages in The Saturday Evening Post. Masson came to The Post after twenty-nine years as Literary Editor and then Managing Editor of Life –the general interest magazine that Charles Dana Gibson took over when Masson went to The Post– not the photo journalism magazine Henry Luce launched in 1936. By then Masson had written several stories, articles and books; he was something of a sage. In Tom Masson’s Book of Wit and Humor (1927) he recounts how he “got the Salome Sun man” for his column.

Karl Harriman, Editor of The Red Book, told Masson about his recent trip to Arizona one night over dinner in New York City. He said, “There’s a fellow out there who has a frog that has never had a drink, although he seven years old.’” (Actually, the frog had never had a swim and could not have survived in Salome without a drink.) Masson was intrigued. Harriman told him all about Dick Wick Hall and his quirky little hamlet. He could hardly believe Harriman’s tale but wrote to Dick who before too long (and after more than one request according to Dick) sent him a pile of his work.

“As soon as his humor was featured in the Short Turns page,” Masson wrote, “he was approached by a lot of magazines and is now – well, almost a national character.” Dick’s first contribution to the “Short Turns” page came out on August 12, 1922. That fall excerpts of varying length from “The Salome Sun” appeared every week but, because Dick was preoccupied with his mines, only two appeared in 1923. Fourteen excerpts turned up in 1924 and three in 1925. Dick often signed these nuggets of desert humor and philosophy “Dick Wick Hall, Editor and Garage Owner.” According to Dick, The Post paid him $.25 a word “to copy and run” the segments from “The Salome Sun.”

Pretty soon Dick’s luck got even better. In the Twenties readers everywhere clamored for good fiction and for a mere five cents they could have a lot of it — on slick coated high-quality pages. By 1925, under long time editor George H. Lorimer, The Saturday Evening Post was one of the top mass-circulation magazines in the United States with more than two and three-quarter million readers. The welcome publicity for Salome increased once The Post also accepted Dick’s short stories. The first of these, “Salome – Where the Green Grass Grew,” came out on January 3, 1925. He was paid well and in good company with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ring Lardner, and William Faulkner to name a few. (Who knew that one day his daughter Jane would write in the office next to Fitzgerald at Metro.)

Masson also gave himself credit for energizing Dick’s and Daysie’s marriage: “One of the funniest things he [Dick] ever wrote was a private letter to me in which he said that his wife somehow never seemed to have much respect for him, but the day his stuff came out in The Post [sic] she said that after all she guessed he did have brains. I know that Dick won’t mind my telling this, because I happen to know that they’re both crazy about each other.”

More to come on Masson and the Halls. But first we’ll take another look soon on Jane’s progress and the loss of her father.

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It All Started in Salome in 1925

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Robin

On summer days Salome, Arizona was so hot, dry and shade free in the midday sun that its sand hills seemed to be populated only by greasewood and saguaro. The would-be town, which had a population of less than two dozen people, still sits in a valley framed on its northern edge by the Harcuvar and Harquahala mountains. Devoid of much vegetation, their orange, violet and grey contours changed by the hour as the sun moved across a cloudless sky. Clear air, inspiring vistas and above all precious minerals drew miners to the southwest end of the Harcuvar Range. Salome was near a railroad track but its residents waited expectantly for a paved road from Phoenix to Los Angeles. Dick Wick Hall fought hard for this road and he was sure that someday the town would be “Some Place.” His daughter, Jane, was far more convinced than her mother, Daysie, that it would be for she was captivated by the desert and by her father’s imagination.

Dick’s rustic office was a one-room adobe building with a mission-style desk and a Smith Premier typewriter that had “lost a Lot of Its Teeth.” There, when he was not writing to potential investors or urging Yuma County to improve the roads, he created unforgettable characters out of local personalities and creatures: horned lizards, Gila monsters, coyotes, jack rabbits, snakes, scorpions, and centipedes. A seven-year-old bull frog who could not swim and wore a canteen on his back would become the town’s mascot. (Even today the high school football team is “The Salome Frogs.”) When he had time, Dick used these characters in a compilation of local “news,” humor and philosophy spread out over two sides of a legal-sized mimeographed sheet and decorated with his rough sketches. He did this at first for his own amusement and certainly that of his children. His “Salome Sun” is full of anecdotes that poked fun at Eastern tourists, bankers, Wall Street, high society folks, Democrats, and even the town and its environs.

“Salomey Jane,” as he called her, often came into her father’s office to draw and write poems and stories of her own. She was delighted when her father brought her ink so she didn’t have to do all her work with a pencil. Soon he would teach her to use a typewriter and how to send out work that appealed to the editors of magazines and newspapers.

Outside in the sprawling desert landscape of the Arizona Outback barely a handful of buildings made up the town. One of these was a modest one-story wood house with a garden and porch on one side and a postage-size patch of green in the front. This was home to Jane and her small family. Behind the house, stretching twenty-three miles up into the mountains was her father’s one-of-a-kind “Greasewood Golf Lynx” that took 46 days to play with caddies on horseback—if you were lucky. For Jane this make-believe course was primarily a place to ride “Sunny Boy,” aka “The Killer,” a Cayuse pony that belonged to Mrs. Lillian (“Mike”) Thomas who was her “best friend” in the desert. When she was not in the saddle, Jane played a fierce game of cards, excelled at miniature golf and loved to roast spuds and marshmallows. A fearless little girl, at least fifty percent tomboy, she took great pride in a brown leather pencil case embossed with the words “Outlaw Jane Salome Arizona.”

In 1925 her father’s work had become popular– excerpts from his small town news sheet and his stories were now featured in The Saturday Evening Post, one of the most successful magazines in America. But “Little Jane” was not about to be outdone by the father she adored. She’s joined the Junior Club of The Los Angeles Times which brought out work by young writers every Sunday on “Aunt Dolly’s Page.”

That summer she sent in her first story,”Bill’s Greatest Victory.” The protagonist is an eleven-year-old boy who learns to control his temper. But Jane was impatient. As she tells it: “Picture a little girl who was always scribbling away on a piece of paper, trying to write a story; but hardly ever succeeding, then imagine her sending a story to ‘Aunt Dolly’ and waiting, and waiting” for months with no word. Then suddenly the “most thrilling moment” of her short life occurred. The train from Los Angeles brought her a letter from The Times with a money order for $2.50. Her story came out on November 8; for ten-year-old Jane, the possibilities seemed endless.

See the Gallery for images of Dick’s Frog and The Salome Sun. The town is in the McMullen Valley in what is now La Paz County.

From Tomboy to Glamour Girl

Featured

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Robin

: Jane Hall and Kate as pictured in “Beauties” by Bradshaw Crandell. Cosmopolitan Magazine, October 1939 (Copr. Hearst Publications)

WATCH FOR “NANCY GOES TO RIO” ON TCM . The film is a remake of ”It’s A Date” which Jane worked on in 1939. She kept her story and screen credit.

Here’s a bit of background for the posts and images in the Salome to Hollywood Blog and Gallery. (Posts began on 11/16/2011.) So who was Jane Hall and why is her journey of interest today?

“I was a candle on the President’s birthday cake!” On January 30, 1934 Jane Hall was exuberant as she whirled around the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria at a pageant in honor of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fifty-second birthday. For nineteen-year-old Jane, this Depression Era ball and other glamorous evenings like it were not just fun – they were research. Jane’s roots in Arizona and California had not prepared her for this world of eastern glitter. Just four years earlier she had been an orphan who knew what it meant to be heartbroken and hard up. But once she arrived in the nation’s cultural capital to live with her aunt and uncle, her life was transformed.

Like an undercover agent, she brought keen eyes and ears from the wide-open West into what appeared to be (but of course was not) a dream world. In his definitive history of Depression Era culture, Morris Dickstein refers to the “split personality” of the era as Americans confronted disaster and sought to “create art and entertainment to distract people from their trouble. . .”* Jane Hall did just that in her stories, essays and screenplays as she came to terms with the tragedies in her life.

Named a “literary prodigy” by at least two papers by the time she was fifteen, Jane’s work frequently appeared in print between 1925 and 1942. Her sharp wit and superb ear for authentic dialogue soon caught the notice of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In October 1937 Metro offered her a contract as a scenarist and over the next five years she worked on several films. In August 1939, “These Glamour Girls,” which also became a book length novel for Cosmopolitan, opened in New York City – it was “the best social comedy of the year” according to the New York Times. And the film gave Lana Turner her first starring role. That same month Hall’s feature-length article about her visit to the set of “The Wizard of Oz,” received high praise from the editor and staff of Good Housekeeping . It seemed she was on her way.

Jane’s journey from a desert hamlet in Arizona to Manhattan’s Café Society and then to Hollywood is a story of resilience that is often exhilarating and always captivating. Her father, Dick Wick Hall, Arizona’s best-loved humorist in the mid 1920s, was the dominant influence on her until an unexpected illness cut his life short in April 1926. By then “Little Jane” had already decided she must become a writer; her work first appeared in the Los Angeles Times when she was ten.

As she reached twenty, literary magazines such as Good Housekeeping, The Saturday Evening Post and especially Cosmopolitan began buying her stories on a regular basis. In the middle of the Depression, Jane wrote fiction with a twist of satire about the romantic predicaments of her socialite contemporaries. As editors soon learned, she was as much fun as the characters in her stories. But she had agonizing choices to make and kept a unique record of her professional and emotional journey. Through her diaries, sketches, photographs, telegrams and hundreds of letters, we will travel across America with this articulate young woman as her small-town values were tested and she made decisions that would affect her for the rest of her life.

: Return Address– A Letter from MGM

A critical turning point for Jane came between 1938 and 1940 when she “belonged only to Louis B Mayer.” She worked long hours, often six days a week, in the Writers Building at Metro – for much of the time in an office next to F Scott Fitzgerald’s – (see Gallery) and still managed to dance with the stars at night. Her voice from Culver City is candid, refreshing and at times disturbing as she describes her adventures and the creative process at MGM during its Golden Age. (She also did some contract work for Universal Pictures and RKO. )

In weekly posts (that began on November 16, 2011) we will follow this self-conscious, sturdy tomboy as she matured into a sophisticated, glamorous young woman and, in October 1939*, became one of Cosmopolitan’s iconic cover girls. Her complexion is flawless, the features perfect, but the expression in Jane’s green eyes is wistful. Always unsure of her looks as a young girl, by 1939 her sense of who she should be had been redefined by Hollywood and by cover artist Bradshaw Crandell. The image is symbolic; the world of glamour was seductive but it came at a cost. Her aunt and uncle — her guardians–had been hard-hit by the Depression and felt enormous relief when Jane became engaged to Robert Frye Cutler, a handsome theatrical producer who was thirteen years her senior and could provide some assurance of financial security. Though unforeseen complications that followed her marriage distracted her from writing, she left a priceless record of the years between 1925 and 1942 when she helped create –and assess– the vibrant culture of a tumultuous era.

The images in the Salome to Hollywood Gallery also tell a story – click on the image for a larger view and additional information. We own the original of this Bradshaw Crandell cover pastel of Jane and Kate; it is currently on loan to Poplar Springs (now an Inn and Spa) where Jane spent much of her life after 1930. Cosmopolitan is published by Hearst Publications but it is no longer a literary magazine.

This post is Number 1 in a series. For an easy way to follow the story go the Blog Tab at the top of the home page, click “Salome to Hollywood” and you will have all the posts on this topic, starting with the most recent.

PLEASE USE THE CONTACT TAB AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE FOR ANY QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS.

Author Q & A: Why Does Rosa Sutton’s Crusade to Save Her Son’s Soul Still Matter?

Posted on January 8, 2009 by Robin

For all the details about this case see the website home page, and the tabs for A Soul on Trial. www.robinrcutler.com

Was Rosa Sutton the first mother to challenge the military over the death of her son in a courtroom?

Probably; scholars and reviewers have all said this is a unique story. (See Press tab.) But many military court documents still lay buried in the National Archives waiting to be discovered. So unless you know of a case, the answer may be unknown. My History News Network essay discusses this case and its relevance today. http://hnn.us/articles/41493.html Click here or cut and paste to your browser.

And here are a few other questions I have been asked in interviews with some answers :

How did you come across this story and what convinced you to write a book about it?

After my mother died in 1987 I found a mysterious locket in a drawer with a photograph of a midshipmen and a lock of his hair. Years later, while going through other papers, I discovered the young officer was her uncle, James Sutton, and his death had caused a national sensation. (The locket had been worn by his sister Rose (then Mrs. Parker)* at the 1909 Annapolis inquiry into Sutton’s death.) It took several months for the wonderful staff at the National Archives to find the court transcripts of both inquiries into the fate of Lieutenant Sutton. The 1907 transcript is full of inconsistencies and the lengthy report of the second inquiry that captivated Americans throughout 1909 is a fascinating window into military justice before World War I.

I also began searching for articles about the case in papers from Maryland and Washington, D.C. and soon realized what a big story this was and how reporters helped shape its outcome. The 1909 “trial” as the press called it was the trial of the decade to many contemporaries . In fact, headlines about Rosa’s crusade appeared all across the United States. An unusual set of circumstances made Rosa Sutton’s quest for justice and redemption for her son unprecedented .

What did you learn about Rosa’s personality? What was she like ?

Rosa was a feisty, funny, devout and irreverent woman devoted to her 5 children, especially her oldest son . She was horrified by the thought he might have committed suicide–to her that was a mortal sin and much of her mission was shaped by her Catholicism. Her outspoken temperament was formed in the Pacific Northwest where her parents were pioneers. Rosa’s apparent psychic abilities created quite a stir one hundred years ago when she came up against the United States government in a military forum. Her later years as a grandmother and her role in her two grandchildren’s lives is part of the Salome to Hollywood Blog on this on this website.

Naval officials accused her of being cold and calculating as well as unstable – do you agree ?

Rosa’s mission and her goals changed over the course of her three-year crusade to find out what happened to Jimmie. After judge advocate Harry Leonard and Arthur Birney, the attorney for the young Marine Corps lieutenants, gave her a hard time and accused her of hallucinating, her views hardened ; at times she may have wanted revenge. But she never gave up her belief that her son had been murdered. Rosa had many supporters; she was not unstable. On the contrary, she was very sharp as Dr. James Hyslop proved in his exhaustive study of her premonitions and psychic experiences.

Why did this story matter so much a century ago and what makes it timeless ?

I think it mattered then for the same reasons it matters now. It’s an appealing story of a mother desperate to find out the facts about what happened to her son. Rosa was a private citizen taking on big government and speaking truth to power. As I became immersed in the documents I became caught up in how complex it was to decipher the truth in the face of conflicting testimony. Also a century ago there was a great deal of interest in the paranormal which seems to be true today as well.

Even now (in 2012) many television programs are based on the paranormal; in fact Pilgrim Studios has just produced an episode of “Ghost Hunters” about a search for the ghost of Jimmie Sutton in Annapolis (“A Ghost of a Marine.” 4/18/2012 ) It’s quite a yarn–with several inaccurate bits.( Such as Sutton’s brother was Don not Dan, his mother was Rosa not Rose.) The hunt is popular entertaining fantasy transformed into a reality show. And almost all the still images in the program are identical to those in my book and the Soul on Trial gallery on this website so that may take a bit of detective work. (No one asked my publisher or me about using those images.) What is really surprising is that the ghost of Jimmie Sutton is apparently still around Annapolis and especially Beach Hall, the home of the Naval Institute where the Naval Academy hospital used to be located

Did Jimmie Sutton commit suicide or was he murdered?

Well that turned out to be a far more intriguing and complicated question than I realized when I started looking into this case . And for the answer you should read the book. It’s a detective story – and I hope readers will have fun following all the threads that I found; each reader will be a historian for a time and make up his or her own mind about what really happened in the early morning of October 13th (Annapolis time), 1907.

*A decade later Rose would become Mrs. Randolph Hicks. Her critical role in the life of her niece and nephew, Jane Hall and Dick Wick Hall, Jr. comes out in the Salome to Hollywood Blog on this site.