 Okay, so good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. My name is Angela Scott and I am the library assistant here at the Billy Jean King Main Library's Miller Special Collections Room. On behalf of our Senior Librarian of Collection Services, Jake Wheeler, our Special Collections Librarian, Jeff Whelan, and all the staff here at the Long Beach Public Library, I'd like to welcome you to the Miller Room's Local History Lecture Series. Today we're pleased to present a dynamic program with our special guest, Maureen Nealy, who is a local historian and librarian with the Long Beach Public Library. This is one of a series of lecture programs that will be presented periodically in the Miller Room throughout the year. In addition to our Art of Nature lecture series, our musical performance programs, Miller Room Book Club and short story reading group and much more. Please keep an eye on our LBPL calendar and website for upcoming events and we hope you'll join us again for more of these special programs as they become available. Now while we have you all here, we'd also like to mention our next big program happening here in the Miller Room, part of our Poetry and Fiction Writing Series. On Saturday, November 14th from 2 to 4 p.m., please join us for an engaging workshop with local author Stephen Diebel, who will lead a live soon event on writing the short story that will be sure to get your creative juices flowing. Now this program will provide an overview of what constitutes a short story today, including flash fiction. Workshop attendees will be able to draft very short pieces to share with our presenter and then he'll work with participants to revise their work and receive helpful tips for marketing stories to publishers and agents. There are only a limited number of people who can participate in this free workshop and registration is required to attend. So for more information about this event, please visit our website at LBPL.org or call the main library for more information. We'll also have a variety of other programs rolling out in the next few months, so please keep an eye on the LBPL website and calendar for more details. Now getting back to our program for today, it's our pleasure to once again welcome and introduce our featured speaker this afternoon, Maureen Neely. Born and raised in San Francisco, Maureen is a fourth generation Californian. After receiving her BA in history from Gonzaga University, she went on to earn her master's in library and information studies from UC Berkeley. She's currently working as a librarian here with the Long Beach Public Library, but she's also worked as a research librarian in other library systems as a medical library supervisor and as a fundraising consultant. She served on the board of trustees for many organizations throughout California, including the McHenry Museum, the Stanislaus Connections Editorial Board, and the Monterey Historical Society. She also offers workshops, tours, and programs about local history and on how to research the history of a home. As owner of a research consulting business called House Stories, Maureen has researched over 400 properties, residential, commercial, and multifamily throughout Long Beach since 2004. She also writes freelance for various publications about neighborhood histories, local lore, and architecture. Maureen is a longtime active member of Long Beach Heritage and president of the Belmont Heights Community Association. She's past recipient of the preservationist of the Year Award, and she serves on the advisory board for the Historical Society and for Walk Long Beach. She is on the executive board for the Long Beach Navy Heritage Memorial Trust as well. Now at the end of today's program, please stay for Q&A that will be moderating through our chat. And if you have any questions, please also type them into the chat bar, and you'll see a chat button at the bottom of your screen, and you can type and submit your questions there. And Maureen and I will moderate these questions at the end. The program will officially end at 4 p.m. if you need to leave, but you're welcome to stay and continue asking questions via chat until about 4.15. We'll also be sending out an email next week with a link to the archived video recording of this program, so you can watch it later at your leisure. So thank you again for joining us today. And without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, the Miller Room and Long Beach Public Library is very pleased to present our very special guest, Maureen Neely. Hey, thank you, Angela. That was a great intro. Well, I'm not that old. It makes me so old. Anyway, thanks a million to Long Beach staff, Long Beach Public Library staff, and of course, Director Glenda Williams, and Angela Scott, who you just heard from as the library assistant for the Miller Room. It's been a wonderful working with them to get this set up. I'd also like to thank the Arts Council of Long Beach. They provided a grant for me to pursue this research, so it's been an awesome opportunity for me to really get a handle on some of the things you're going to be seeing today and for me to uncover some unusual art and stories. I'd also like to thank the support of Long Beach Heritage and the Historical Society of Long Beach. This has been a project that we've all been involved with for a number of years, and in particular, if you're out there, Dr. Kay Bregel and Karen Clements and Ruth Ann Lair, they reactivated the interest in WPA art and architecture and New Deal programs back in the 1980s when we were in danger of losing a lot of these buildings and pieces of art. So again, that interest and preservation of these pieces continues today, but we wouldn't have these pieces without their advocacy back in the 1980s. So I'm just going to dive right in. We're going to talk a little bit about in context what WPA art in our architecture is in Long Beach and how an earthquake and the Great Depression, in my opinion, shape the style and sensibility in the city. You think I could do this? Let's try that. There we go. Okay, so here's just a little calendar. I pulled off the internet. It's called a little graphic design about the Great Depression, and you can see what was happening in Long Beach. I've inserted some of those things. So we have an oil strike in 1921, and between 1920 and 23, we annexed Zafariah area and North Long Beach. And then in 1933, we had a big earthquake. And the reason I put this out here is because we don't operate in a vacuum here in Long Beach. So things were happening in the rest of the world that affected us, but also we were growing by leaps and bounds. Between 1910 and 1920, our population increased over 200% from 17,800 people to over 55,000 people. And then again from 1920 to 1930, we increased from 55,000 to 142,000. So we were an area that people wanted to live. We were living in an area that was growing. And that's important when we think about the amount of people that were coming here, and it was putting Long Beach on the map. I also want to talk a little bit about the fact that we struck oil in 1921 up in Signal Hill, though we had been looking for oil and taking oil out of the ground for years before that. But it really brought people to the city during that time, so the early 20s and then into the 30s. Okay. So the 1930s, the Depression starts around 1929 for the rest of the country. But people were losing their livelihoods. This is a Hooverville in the Sacramento River area. And I bring this up because Hoovervilles were named for Hubert Hoover, who was the president at the time. He was there, our president from 1928 to 1932. And my uncle used to live in Sacramento. My parents were raised there, not born there, but raised there. And he used to go down and hang out with a boat he called the Hobos in the Hooverville. So this is a picture of what he would have done in 1930s. And today is my dad's birthday. He was born in 1912. He was raised, his early adulthood was fashioned by the Great Depression. So it's a story that's near and dear to my heart. So here's a timeline of what we're going to be talking about today. We had the stock market crash. Hubert Hoover tried to quell the panic with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation or the RFC. But he lost the election and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected. And things started to heat up. People were hungry. People were out of jobs. The stock market had crashed. It was a trickle down effect for the common people and for some of the very wealthy. So as Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to put people back to work and try to figure out ways to jumpstart the economy, you know, always construction comes to mind and those types of projects. But then there were these other types of people. They were artists and they weren't necessarily good on the line. They weren't good schlepping stones. So, you know, what would we to do with our artists? And I love the fact that Harry Hopkins, who was the gentleman that Franklin Roosevelt put in charge of the New Deal programs, he decided that, you know, artists, hell, they've got to eat just like other people. And so that's why we have programs that focused on putting artists to work as well. And that's what we're going to talk a little bit more about today. Here's our Franklin and he implemented the New Deal within the first 100 years of his office. Didn't really affect Long Beach still in those first few years because, or the first few days of that, because, you know, we had oil, we had growth, we had, we were, we were represented in Congress as this very wealthy town in Southern California that was growing that didn't need much help. In fact, when I looked at congressional records, I was hearing our Congress people argue for the fact that, you know, Long Beach needed some help. And they said, why? Your streets are paved with oil. Why would you need any help? We don't need to fund you. Well, fortunately for or unfortunately, as some people might say, we had an earthquake on March 10. And that made it very clear that Long Beach was going to need some help. We had a 6.25 or 6.5 earthquake on a Friday evening, March 10, 1933. And here's a picture of Franklin. It was Franklin Junior High at the time. Now it's called Franklin Middle School. And what happened to that school? It just completely crunched in on itself. So the state authorities rushed in and they said, you know, we can't be having our schools, you know, fall down. What if this had happened during the school day? We would have lost so many children. So one of the obvious, some of the obvious decisions that they made was that schools were better off if they were a single story if possible, that they should not place chandeliers and canopies over entrances, and that this construction, the actual style of construction should be of better quality. So that instituted what was called the Field Act. And the Field Act made it so that no schools since that time have been demolished or greatly hurt by an earthquake ever since the 1933 quake. So it really put into the code very tight constraints on what schools could build and how they could build. So what happened in Long Beach after the earthquake is we got a lot of money from the federal government and we built a ton of schools between 1933 and 1935. So I have a little printout here of the number of schools that were rebuilt after the earthquake with federal funds. You can see the year that they were built and where they were located. And there's actually a second page on this. So let's drill down to a few schools. This was Lowell Elementary School prior to the earthquake. This was its 1926 design. And in 1935, Edward Mayberry was hired to design the new James Russell Lowell Elementary School. One note about all the architects I'm going to be mentioning, they were all local Long Beach architects. And that's also important to the new deal that the WPA and the plan that Roosevelt have was to put local people to work as much as possible. So now you see it's a single story. It has a little art deco look to it. It's got medallions and linear piers and a symmetry. It's very clean looking. So one of the things that besides just building the school with local architects, we also were able to request our mostly the principals had a big hand in this request that art also be included in the rebuild. And in this case, Douglas Newcomb was the president of I'm sorry, the principal of Lowell Elementary School. And he decided that he wanted to commission a piece of art for the school. So he went to the school board and asked that if they would grant permission to make an application to the federal arts program to have a bust of James Russell Lowell. And they said yes. So here's a picture of James Russell Lowell and it was designed by Louie Zach, Z-A-C-K. It says he was the architect, but he was not. He was the artist, the sculptor. Sorry about that. And this is a picture that is actually held at the Smithsonian, the art and artist files at the Smithsonian. And it's made out of Minnesota Carnillion Marvel, a granite, sorry, Minnesota Carnillion Marvel. So now it's all polished up. This is what it looks like. It's in place in Lowell, in the office or outside the office. But who was Louie Zach? Here's a picture of him. He's doing a lovely sculpture called Florence Nightingale. Some of you, if you go up to Los Angeles, you might see that. It's in Lincoln Park in LA. Louie Zach was born in Russia in 1901. And he just died in 1981. He did work for the Federal Art Project while living in Los Angeles during the 1930s and 40s. And then he went on to work for the Red Cross. But he continued to do sculpture all of his life. And I love the fact that he is one of our local artists. And we can still see a few pieces of his work. So we talked a little bit about the architecture of Art Deco or Art Modern. I'm not going to cover that much about the architecture. Hopefully some of you were able to participate in Architecture Week last month and caught John Thomas' tour of Art Deco buildings in Long Beach. And he's well versed in that topic. So if you don't have his book, I would recommend you get it, Art Deco in Long Beach. Otherwise, I'm just going to briefly talk a little bit about why Art Deco became a big deal in Long Beach as we started to transition and rebuild these schools. Clearly before when they were built, they were not built in the Art Deco style because the Art Deco style didn't come into being until kind of the late 20s. There was a movement in France that migrated from that very brick and bozart look, a little more ornate to a very clean and streamlined look. And there was two reasons for that. One, in the late 1920s, early 30s, there was a great interest in speed. Flights were taking off the aeronautic industry, the trains, ocean liners, and automobiles. And people loved that type of feel that were progress, lots of progress. And then the second reason is because we were experiencing a depression all over the world, the Art Deco schools were less ornamentation, a little easier on the pocketbook. So let's take a closer look at the Lindbergh Junior High School. It was built in, this iteration was built in 1935. And over the front door there is a map of Lindbergh's transatlantic flight that took place in 1927. Of course, that's who the school is named after. So the question is, the architect was Easton Harald. Did he direct the design of this since it's on the exterior? Did he want to see some kind of ball relief or sculpture as a tribute to Lindbergh? We don't know that, we're still figuring that out. We do know that on the inside, the principal asked that the library have a wraparound mural license, it's wraparound, it's three walls. It's a massive five foot by 132 foot history of aviation. And the story takes place beginning with, you know, humans just dreaming about flying to all the way through the end where there's actually a beautiful panel on what the future of flight would look like. And it's basically a picture of people just flying by themselves. Very fun. Some of the artists that worked on this were Jean Goodwin, Arthur Ames, and Dore Bothwell. Well, Jean Goodwin and Arthur Ames were the actual designers, the drawers of what they called, before a mural was put up of the cartoons. So a cartoon is like an outline of what the mural is going to look like, all the figures, the placements, the scenes, things like that. And then often those designers would turn over the actual painting to other artists. And that's what happened in this case. So the drawings were turned over to, her name was originally Doris Bothwell. She was an artist. She was born in 1902 in San Francisco. She changed her name to Dor because she realized fairly early on as a young artist that being a female artist wouldn't get her maybe the jobs that she wanted. There was preconceived notions about female artists. And so she changed it to Dor. So it's kind of male or female, nobody really knew. Kind of what a lot of authors also do when they assume a different name. So she married she entered the art business. She did marry in 1931, but they divorced four years later. And she moved to Los Angeles, where she worked for the pottery manufacturer, Gladiant McBean, and joined a post surrealist group that centered around Lorzer Feidelsen and Helen Lundberg. Now, if you're an artist, you know some of those names. And Dor Bothwell was a very good friend to both Feidelsen and Lundberg. So she worked on this mural and I suspect that Helen Lundberg had something to do with it as well, that she's not credited. And what Dor Bothwell said in an interview was when when Jean Goodwin and Arthur Ames gave her the cartoons, they were so small that she had to like basically take a magnifying glass to enlarge them and figure out what they really had wanted. So really this this mural is a lot of Dor Bothwell because she had to interpret Goodwin and Ames' design and I think she did a very good job. You know, Bothwell went on to design dioramas for the Long Beach, the LA County Museum, which used to be the LA Museum of Natural History as well. So she's very dexterous artist, if you will. All right, let's get to that next slide. Oh, here's a nice little inset. And there's Dor right there. She did a self-portrait in 1942. You can see she had a various, there's just a realism to her as well. So that inset you see of the of the flight is deadless and Icarus dreaming of flight. Another style of this style of art with the art modern was reflected in a couple of our junior high schools. They now call them middle schools. Jefferson built in 1934 and then Washington Junior High. So well, let's look at Washington. Let's take a closer look at Washington. It was designed by W. Horace Austin who's often called the Dean of Long Beach Architects. Very high, high regard. And I think that might be why, since he was the architect on this on this building, why this school got an amazing amount of art. Wait till you see. So first of all, there's these medallions that that that face you when you when you enter the school. So there's kind of that federalist look with the eagle. And then there's the medallion of George Washington over the doorway. These were pretty common in federalist art, like post offices and things like that. But we don't have a lot of that here. The only other building that had similar medallions like this with that nationalist or federalist style was the Veterans Memorial Building. As some of you of a certain age might remember that building, it was in our part of our Civic Center for a long time. It had a relief federalist designed by Meryl Gage, the very famous sculptor. But that building was destroyed in 1978. So let's take another look at some of the other work at Washington. Doorways. These are doorway reveals. They're very deep and they have a bob, what's called a bob relief on them. These are allegorical representations of technical or social arts done in like a classical style. So one question is, did Austin request that these, you know, panels be done this way? Or did he just say, I want art, do what you will? How much were the artists guided? Here's another door. You can see how beautiful these are. This is music and sculpture. But not to be outdone on the other, that was the cedar side of the cedar entrance of Washington. On the back side, if you will, the Pacific Avenue entrance, there are two shops that have two doors that go into shops, the metal shop and the wood shop. Here is this incredible kind of almost forgotten doorway with this beautiful bobber leaf sculpture over the top. And then you can see the very very fanciful art deco braiding over the doors and actually the lighting as well. And here's the wood shop. People making things out of wood. But let's go inside. And here we have the foyer. It's a black and white photo, but it does show very clearly the beautiful marquetry of the ceiling, that beautiful sconce, the chandelier, the hanging light fixture. It's really, it's just remarkable. And then you will see these tiles on the staircase. And those are actually a brilliant green. So you can see there's two staircases that lead from the foyer, the lobby up into the hallway where the offices are, et cetera. I understand that the offices also have some of the same ceiling fixture or ceiling design as well. But again, Washington also had another mural. And it's been lost. It was either painted over or damaged and destroyed. And I had a heck of a time trying to figure out what that was. I kept reading that there was a lost mural. It was supposedly by an artist by the name of Pasquale G Napolitano. And he was Irish. No, I'm not kidding. And he painted a mural depicting the sciences. And nobody had really seen it. I actually sat with a graduate of Washington Junior High from the 50s. And she said, I don't remember seeing a mural. I don't know. But I was, you know, what it was, a 13 or whatever. You know, her mind was not on the science mural, apparently. But it was, it was painted on the science building stairwell as you entered that building. And I ended up finding his archives and was able to procure this, basically this sketch of what that mural looked like. And there's a little inset of Pasquale right down there on the bottom. He went on to become a leading artist for Merle Armitage. I don't know if you've heard that name. But Merle Armitage did an awful lot of publications, books and things like that. And he used, you know, local artists to sketch out and, and do some of his illustrations. So Napolitano traveled in good circles that way. This photograph of him was by Brett Weston. And that was his good friend and colleague as well, Edward Weston's son. I do think I've calculated out, I think this mural was painted over in probably the night in the early 1970s. Napolitano also painted the Hollywood Turf Club bar backdrop. We're all for that as well. So Polly is another school that has a wealth of art and even just the architecture itself is a piece of art. It was a major had a major rebuild in 1935. Of course, it is our oldest, our first high school in the city. And I remember too that our high schools, even, even before the, the New Deal, but certainly after the New Deal, art and inspiration was, was printed or designed, ingrained into the buildings to inspire and, and just encourage students to be better people. So over the entrance is a saying that says enter, go forth and serve, go forth to serve. And then in the courtyard, there is a saying that says we live in deeds, not in years, in thoughts, not in breaths, in feelings, not in figures on a dial. And that is from the poem Festus from 1839. So very high ideals our schools have. The clock was added later as a gift from one of the graduating class. So that was just, you know, just lettering and pieces that are part of the school architecture itself. But now we have doorways. So there are doors, it's a two-story building. There's entrances all throughout several of the buildings. And they are flanked by these cast concrete relief panels. They have figures and faces of various inspirational people who are these people. It's funny, about 2011, there was a plea that went out from Sean Ashley, who was the principal at the time. He was like, hi. Who are all these people? We think we've identified him. He was kind of doing a scavenger hunt with the kids and invited the public to help him out. But if he had only called the Long Beach Public Library, he would have found that we had a clippings file here at the library that listed out all of the people on the panels one by one by one. And when the panels were erected, so we know that they are the actual people. So I was able to trace who some of these were. And now you now know. So if you see the one on the left here, we have Oliver Hoitzer, who was, I think he was a writer. I'm so bad. Euclid, of course, the mathematician, and Michelangelo. But it was interesting. The panels didn't just reflect the greats of the past. David Bircham was the principal of Polly for a number of years until 1941. And people called him Daddy Bircham. And he graduated, you know, thousands of men and women from Polly over the years. And when he became principal in, oh, I don't know when he started, but there were 347 students. And the enrollment grew to over 3,000, making it the largest high school in the state at that time. He retired after 34 years of service to the city in 1941. So it's nice that he was, he was, let's say, commemorated here. And then Jane Harnett is another person that some of you might recognize. She was a historian. She worked as the, she was the head of the history department in Long Beach High School of Polly, which is now Polly. And she developed the first student body commission in California. So she's commemorated on these panels as well. And I also love this picture because I didn't realize it. And now we all have to realize it that some of the panels were used twice. So you see Euclid on the one on the left. You also see Euclid in the, in the doorway on the one on the right. So David, just smart. You might as well use a few of them. There's about 70 panels. There's a few more there too. So we have Plato, Abraham Lincoln, Sir Isaac Newton. You can see there's panels up above and panels below as well. The panels aren't signed. Who, who made these? That's another one of my, my conundrums, the reason that I'm doing some of this research. I really would like to get to the bottom of some of this. So if anybody knows, let me know. So I'm looking at what other sculptors did and looking at their work and seeing if some of it might be aligned. Deje, Deje Elje was a sculptor who worked around this time period for the WPA and he worked in Los Angeles. He worked in Castoraza and in Wood. It's a similar style. Is it possible that he was the sculptor for the Pauley panels? Pauley also has a mural and this mural is important for a number of reasons. It's in the stairwell of Building 100. And the graduates, two graduates of Pauley High School actually designed and painted this mural. It was Jean Swiggett and Ivan Bartlett. And at the scenes are of industrial activities in Long Beach. Again, trying as kids would pass by this on their way to classes, they're seeing all of the opportunities available in Long Beach. You could work in the port. You could work in construction. You could apparently go fishing with fish and all kinds of great things. But very fun and you could hopefully be inspired. Swiggett and Bartlett became artists in their own right and they referenced in many catalogs and books for their art. And here's a few pieces. Jean Donald Swiggett. This is some of the work that he ended up doing over the years. And then Ivan Bartlett. Sorry, Jean was a female. Sorry about that. And you can see, and I love the fact that Ivan Bartlett, he ended up really specializing in textiles. So the cherries, raspberries, linen, handkerchief is one of his pieces. And you can find other pieces of his work. Very, very fifties, very fifties, kitschy stuff. So that's what happened. And then one more piece at Pauly was an easel, framed easel piece by Eugene Brooks. He was also another Pauly graduate and he lived on gun tree and he studied what Ivan and Jean were doing and tried to copy their style and he did a pretty good job of that. And this is supposedly still in the administration building hanging on the wall at Pauly. I have to go over and take a look and make sure it's still there. We're losing some of our architecture. The photo on the left shows the Theodore Roosevelt School in 1935 by George Kars. It was demolished in 2013 and we now have the new Roosevelt School in 1913. Other styles of architecture was not all streamlined modern and not all art decos. We had Spanish. Here's a Lincoln Elementary School designed by Kurtman Cutter. Some of you know some of these other schools that also have that Spanish style. Other art though that we covered is some murals. I don't know if anybody would remember this building being inside. This was the Carnegie Library down here at Lincoln Park in Long Beach. In 1937, Suzanne Miller was commissioned to paint scenes from English literature and it was installed throughout the circulation room. She painted all these and there's like 15 different scenes of literature. Then when the middle library, the one that was just demolished in Civic Center here, had to take down the old panels and then they put them in frames and then they posted them in the library that was here until just a few years ago. Then they were carefully removed again and cleaned and now they are posted in the Billie Jean King Main Library up on the wall. You can come and there's actually a sheet that you could look at that explains what each panel is and what scene from literature it is. They're all pieces of literature that I wish we read more but we really don't. Pilgrims Progress, Canterbury Tales, The Lady of Shallots by Tennyson. What a difference. Please come down to the main library, Billie Jean King Library and take a look at some of these beautiful panels that are all clean and available for the public. Suzanne Miller, her name is going to come up again a couple more times but I'm going to leave her for a moment and we're going to go to some of the other types of architecture. You can see the Willem Cohen Bryant School it's up on I want to say Terminal and 15th or so. Check out the little books that are just set on either side of the doorway. Those are just little books because Bryant of course was a poet and a writer and then the Grant School is very almost very classic looking and McKinley School as well and then there's the Jane Adams Elementary School and we're going to talk about that one a little bit. Edwell Baum was the Architects. There's a lot of unattributed architectural detail at the Jane Adams School and I also want to mention that Jane Adams was you know we had a few women that we named our schools after. I'm going to have to I'm going to have to move along a little bit but she was very important because she had died in 1935 and she was the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Some people may know her as the Settlement House Founder of Holhouse and very very progressive women in terms of social services and things like that. So you know we had a lot of women in Long Beach that were very strong and they had a voice and of course we were big voters here in the city and in some of the 1930s and numerous new schools and sorry 1920s numerous new schools were erected and named after women of history and then of course when they were rebuilt after the earthquake they kept those names. So here's another piece of architectural details of broken pediments above the auditorium door. Again was this the art the architects desire or towards a special artist brought in and I just love this too. That's the entering the library but what is it? It's an open book. Just sweet. Now once you get into the library you see another mural. This is a mural again by Suzanne Miller and it was painted in 1938. It's called A Visit to the Jungle and it's a fanciful illustration of three children visiting with an array of animals in a jungle setting. Suzanne Miller actually wrote a children's book to correlate to this mural and it is supposed to be in the Adams library. I would like to get a copy of that myself. She did the cartooning like I said she did the design but then they were trying to figure out how to best adhere this paint to this wall because it's a library. You have to hush right? So and there's a lot of children so you have to figure out how to do something so that you don't kill the acoustics and her technicians really helped her with that. This is a close-up of a panel. So who were her technicians? Because they did something to this that they were able to apply oil paints to the plaster without destroying the acoustical capability and that is credited to her young assistants Wilbur Broderick and Jesse Marsh. Broderick went on to be mostly a teacher, art teacher but Jesse Marsh was a very quiet man and he stayed in the world of cartooning. He ended up working for Disney for quite a while and then for the Edgar Rice Burroughs Corporation if you will and he has a reputation as one of his most prolific artists for the Tarzan comic books and they're quite collectible and he died in Monrovia actually not that long ago. So I just love the fact that you know our artists who worked here in Long Beach went on to do these another other amazing things in the world and they got their start here for the most part. Here's a Franklin classical middle school or at the time it was Franklin Junior High built in 1934. Again a lot of Bob Relief details we're going to see with this. George Riddle was a design builder, an architect here in town. He also owned the Monarch Construction Company. So some of the little details that are found and the outside of Franklin is the gymnasium. There's two entrances to the gymnasiums and one is obviously it was supposed to be the entrance for the girls and what girls focus on but health and beauty and the boys would focus on sportsmanship apparently. It was interesting when I first started this research oh gosh 15 years ago there was an actual delineation of boys you know girls under this one and the word boys under this one but those were read these were chiseled out and removed sometime in the last 15 years. So who did this? I still don't know but working on it. So this is the Santa Barbara Post Office. They have about 12 Bob Relief sculptures lining the interior of the post office in Santa Barbara and this artist's name was William O Atkinson. So he was nearby in Santa Barbara. Franklin was built a year, year and a half earlier. It's conceivable that he he could have done work for us here in Long Beach prior to his work with Santa Barbara. So I'm in contact with a gentleman who has been collecting his work and work about him and so we're trying to figure out if there's a way to find out if he worked here in Long Beach. One other piece in Franklin is the sewer and reaper. It's really hard to see this. Right now there's fencing up all over the school so you really can't see it. This is over the auditorium, the backside of the auditorium. Really modern piece of work. Probably the most modern I've seen of the New Deal sculpture work and again it's to refer to instructional in styles. You reap what you sow, you know children. So you know take a lesson. Inside the foyer of Franklin it was left blank. It was always a plan to put a mural in there but either the school ran out of money or desire or maybe there was a change in leadership but it never got painted. However, I found an article that mentioned that in 1945 the principal and the parents group decided that they wanted to raise the money to get that mural painted that was supposed to be there and so they did and they hired Suzanne Miller yet again and she did this kind of very Japanese feeling. You know these beautiful kind of washed out colors of mountain and lake scene. So I just love the fact that you know clearly the colors that that she wanted were already laid out in terms of that linoleum that's on the floor right. So this mural had been painted over probably in the 70s again and about in 2001 there was a call to try to uncover the mural because some of the teachers were kind of picking away at the paint and they found this mural underneath and in 2015 the school district did manage to have it restored so you can go in today and see a much nicer look and for some reason my screen has stalled so let me see what I can do here. Let me see if I can get some technical help. I'm going to go on mute for just a second. All right we are having technical built up difficulties but we're almost to the point where I only had a couple more schools to cover. I'll keep looking. It's one of these things where my I've got a spinner spinning and that means that my program has shut down for some reason. So I was going to talk a little bit about Rogers middle school and then of course the recreation and long beach that beautiful mosaic mural that's downtown at the end of third and the promenade. So the reason I am doing this research is I feel like you know our society grows every time we have big problems in this country right. I mean we just we just come together we figure solutions out and we see a leap in in civilization and we see a leap in the American culture. So I feel like the the the New Deal era was one of those leaps and it certainly pertains to today as well. You know we had the great recession in 2008 and then we've got you know COVID-19, COVID-2020, possibly COVID-2021. You know how are we going to address this and what can we what what from the past can we use to help us inform today. So that's why I'm working on this and I I think as Angela requested if there's stories that you have or if there's any questions that you have I'd be happy to answer them. We're going to start the some some Q&A fairly soon. So we're going to open up if you have something you want to share or some questions you want to ask please do so. I think you just put it in the chat is that right Angela? Yeah just write it in the chat and we'll we'll pull it up and I'll try to answer it. I'm sorry you missed the last two sections of the last two projects that I was going to talk to but I there's also a lot of other things I didn't get a chance to discuss. Obviously the airport if you haven't been up to the Long Beach Airport that is the best free museum you will ever have. I encourage you to to go up there and they have a wonderful brochure on the art that is there and the airport has done a wonderful job of uncovering it and protecting it. So very happy to see see that as well. So that's my my actual presentation and I'd be happy to answer any questions if you have any. Okay so can everybody hear me I hope you can. We have a few questions that we're going to start with and if any members of our audience have other questions that you'd like to ask again you'll see the chat button at the bottom of your screen and you can type and submit them in the chat to us and Maureen if you want to exit your screen share and try going back in again that might help you with your buffering issue there. Okay so Maureen the first question is where did you find your research information for this program? Oh that's a great question thank you. You know as a librarian I just have such a the reason I went into this field is because I absolutely love research and I appreciate the fact that there are people out there that hold archives that that have you know kind of private projects that they've been working on and my you know being a librarian gives me access to so much of that you know when I started this oh you know years ago of course the first place I went was Google and you know you just keep saying the same stuff over and over again and some of it's not even right so you know at Google and searching online sometimes just perpetuates you know bad information so really I I tend to talk to people I look at who's written on the subject and then I will contact them. The Long Beach Public Library history collection is amazing and has a lot of obscure information for researchers the historical society as well and then of course interviewing people who were here and then following up with them but yes I really love digging around and it takes a while and it's an organizational nightmare sometimes to keep it all straight but I'm doing my best and and I'm I'm really plugging away at it so thanks for that question. Okay so our next question is are any of our local Long Beach artworks or buildings protected as landmarks? The airport has protection um the big WPA mosaic mural at third and promenade it used to be on the municipal auditorium is a landmark but for the most part all the pieces that I showed today do not have any protection in terms of you know formal protection. Okay great so we also have a question about do you have any comments on the 1932 Olympics in Long Beach like Marine Stadium? Of course and others. Yeah so that's an area I didn't even touch on because I was working more with talking more about the artists but we had a number of buildings and facilities that the New Deal or the WPA the PWPA actually funneled money into and you know one of the things I didn't explain is how did the money work so say for instance uh let's see you talked about the Olympics the Marine Stadium Rec Park um the let's say the the bowling the the lawn bowling green in Rec Park um the city would apply to uh the the WPA program and say we want to build the golf course so we want to build the the the lawn bowling course um they the city the sponsoring agency would pay for the permits and the materials and then the uh WPA would pay for the labor and so that's how most of our buildings were underwritten by the federal government so yeah that's uh so the the gentleman asked about the 1932 Olympics in Long Beach we used them we had that Marine stadium built you know they they expanded color or lagoon and the arm from Alameda's Bay into that shape and then put in stands their stands are not there now but their other stands at the time and so that there could be trials for the 1932 Olympics that took place in Los Angeles and it was a really great boon for Long Beach brought people here um and they could see our beautiful um our beautiful city yeah okay wonderful we have another question about Washington Junior High is it still intact in a federalist style so Washington is it is an art modern style but the federalist aspect where those medallions yes it has the eagle and then washington's medallion over the entrance everything you that I showed you at washington is still there except for that science building mural which hasn't been seen since about 1971 okay we have another question um so interesting that so many of the WPA murals are at LVUSD schools where else can they be found if any place so the live at the Long Beach uh airport for sure um of course here at the library at the Long Beach public library the main library the village in King library has the those murals but they've been transported the mosaic mural that used to be on the municipal auditorium and is now at third and the promenade um those are the major ones that are not in schools that I can think of offhand but our schools got the majority again it was because we had the earthquake and we lost so many of those schools so they were great canvases for the artists to come down and and utilize what about the port administration building the artwork that was on the outside of that the old one before yeah that that mural was done in the 50s I believe so it was not part of the WPA project and that was taken down it's been carefully uh saved and it is awaiting a spot to be relocated so if the person who asked that question has a nice long area that they could put a mural in let Long Beach Heritage know because Long Beach Heritage is the group that worked very hard to save that port mural okay we have another question are school yearbooks a good source of old photos and artist information they can be that's a really good question um I have um so when I started this project back in 19 at 2001 to 2004 um we uh we conscripted a bunch of volunteers and if you're one of the people listening to this thank you for that and we contacted each of the schools and we said we're going to have a volunteer come out we're just going to look for art that we were told was either there or we believe is there or there might be some art that hasn't even been discovered yet and one of the things our volunteers are going to want to do is look through the old yearbooks and and that is because they would often have in the background pieces of the art I do know when the Franklin mural was getting restored and they were trying to figure out what it actually looked like they the the restoration study group did look through old murals and they transcribed or took photographs of the photographs from the yearbooks that showed students standing in front of the like I think it was the lost and found which was in the foyer and where you could clearly see the mural and what that also helped them to do was date when the mural disappeared because pretty soon the same students or students later still standing in front of the lost and found and there's no mural behind them so um that's how that's how it's really not an exact science you have to do a lot of extrapolation okay so um if anyone has wpa stories you know family members that were involved in that process please leave a note in the chat with your email contact information and Maureen can follow up with you more later and then I also want to mention that if people have more questions or interest in wpa art architecture and artists in Long Beach history there's as Maureen has mentioned there's a lot of information in our library collection and special collections that the public has access to whether through checking out materials or submitting research requests to us here in the Miller special collections room at Billie Jean King being so you can send research requests through the ask a librarian link on the special collections and archives web page on our website and we're just at about four o'clock right now um so if anyone needs to leave right away we want to thank you again for joining us and for anyone who has additional questions that you'd like to ask Maureen in the chat after the program you can do so for another 10 to 15 minutes until 415 and then we'll have to end the meeting and if you have a question but you don't have time to stay please feel free to submit your question with your email address and we can get them to Maureen so she can reply to you maybe at a later time um so at that uh you know I'd like to thank uh all of you guys for joining us again today and thank Maureen for today's wonderful local history lecture series program on the wpa art artist and architecture of Long Beach and for her gracious support of our educational enrichment of the Long Beach public library community and I'd also like to thank our library administration staff the friends of the library the lbpl foundation and many other of our local contacts for helping to promote our event and Maureen as well because I know you helped get the word out um our sincere thanks and appreciation to all of you have a wonderful afternoon everyone we'll see you again at the library soon hopefully um sometime after beginning of the year but in the meantime we have lbpl to go and you can check out materials so please make sure to check our website if that's new to you and you haven't heard about it it's a wonderful opportunity for you to keep checking out materials with us but in the meantime if anybody has any extra questions please stick around feel free to mention it in the chat and we will stick around for a few more minutes to help you so thanks again everybody thank you take care stay safe and have a wonderful afternoon we'll see you again soon thank you okay Maureen so um if anybody has any questions you could just unmute can they unmute themselves you could just talk as well okay sure um we can try to unmute everybody we'll get jade is going to work on that for us but in the meantime we will ask questions on the chat until she gets that going um there was a question from k briggle she wondered where you got that photo of grant elementary school she knows darn well where i got that it's from her and she's in that picture too you have many many people thanking you for all of your help with program and all of your research no yeah no it's not something you can do in a vacuum um and i i am always super appreciative of uh you know people sharing stuff with me and i and uh i try to you know represent that as best i can okay all right well thank you you still have many thanks rolling in um and someone asks is it possible to tape the rest of your presentation slides to be included with the recorded tape um what we can try to do um we'll work that out and see what we can do if marine can make some of that information available to us we'll work that out and see what we can do or you know i'm wondering if if they're you know i didn't even get to the airport i didn't get to a couple other you know like the bowling screen and the a lot of the areas that um are not quite art specific we might be able to do a part two you know maybe next year sometime and you're welcome marine again if you want to try reopening that presentation maybe it'll work for you now if you have just a minute you know we have a few minutes um let's see if we have any other questions nope it's not going to work okay so you do have a question about um do you remember the home s and l on lake wood boulevard in Carson street and do you know what happened to it it was the home s and l on lake wood boulevard in Carson standard alone that must be yeah home savings home savings so um that is the uh the bank that i believe farmers and merchants has um has taken over so there was a mural on the interior and a mural on the fountain um outside and i believe the um museum at cal state long beach um has made an effort to remove at least the exterior mural the mosaic mural and reinstall it on the campus or near or in the museum and i'm not sure if they're going to be able to do the same with the interior painted mural um i don't believe there's any plans to do anything with the fountain it's a sculpt bronze sculpture um but if anybody knows for sure feel free to pipe in um but that is what i understand and kudos to the museum for uh taking that on and recognizing that it's a miller cheats designed mural and very different from uh miller cheats's normal style so i'm really happy to see that mosaic uh be get a second life and it will take funding so if anybody wants to donate to that please contact the museum at cal state long beach um absolutely okay here if you wanted to cruise through a few things here i can do that for you oh okay yeah i think we're good okay yeah we can do this and i mean if we do a part two i'll cover the rest of uh roll and then the mosaic okay any other questions while we're here okay i think that looks like it's about it um that's it okay guys well thank you so much again for joining us we can get a hold of me and or even through the library if you've got anybody in your family that worked for the wpa i'm collecting stories um you know historical society has some but we can always use more and of course photographs and things like that too so keep that in mind that this is ongoing research and really appreciate you dialing in and any anything you can send to me in the future would be much appreciated thanks okay thanks again everybody thanks again take care