“it was a beautiful big studio”, a story and a half high, and “he was a kind human being” who offered much help and criticism in artistic questions.
The next member of the colony at first walked (eight miles each way). Then skated to, and finally came to live on the artist’s street in Alhambra. By 1937 Marjorie Reed had arranged to take lessons from Mr. Smith, and walk from her Glendale home down to the east end of Alhambra was rather arduous, and so Marjorie tried skating to her lessons, until this mode of travel had nearly disastrous results. She was skating down Fair Oaks Avenue in South Pasadena, canvases and materials “tucked under my arms, really making good time” when a car backed out or a driveway in front of her, sending her canvases flying, while she grabbed the handle of a door and rode with the car into the street. She escaped injury but was “in a state of nervous exhaustion” when she arrived at Champion Place. The Smiths, whom she always called Uncle Jack and Aunt Emma, sensed her upset condition, questioned her, and learned of the mishap. It was decided that Marjorie would take up quarters in “the dog house”, a tiny room in back of the garage. Mrs. Smith converted it into “a very livable studio.” “They paid me $2.50 per week” Marjorie recalls, to help Mrs. Smith with the dishes, and other chores such as cleaning Uncle Jack’s brushes, and with this money she was able to buy art materials.
Today Jack Wilkinson Smith’s protégé, Marjorie Reed Creese, paints and lives the life of the West in her “Old Adobe” in Tombstone, Arizona, still creating her epic series of paintings of the mid-19th century Butterfield Overland Stage route. In the 1930’s this petite, blonde young lady was the child of Champion Place, and today she is the only heir to the painting tradition of the street. Besides her father, she credits two other men for setting the course of her career, Captain William Banning, son of Phinneas Banning, and Jack Wilkinson Smith.
Mr. Reed was a commercial artist and engraver, and in the 1930’s Marjorie worked with him at Mission Engraving Company in Los Angeles, and during their lunch hour they would go to the Biltmore Salon and view and study the exhibits. Here she first encountered Jack Wilkinson Smith and his work, and she became determined that some day she would study with him.
Jack Smith encouraged all of his students to sketch and paint from nature, and they went to all of the local canyons with “their colorful sycamores and oaks”, Marjorie recalls. In her travels in the region she met Captain William Banning, whose father, Phinneas, had been the local staging and transportation pioneer. With notebooks and pencils in her skirt pocket, Marjorie rode and studied the stagecoaches with Captain Banning, gathering information about “what the driver’s job entailed”, holding the reins, “getting the feel of riding on top”, and sketching for the first time the details of “the beautiful Concord Coaches.” Captain banning told her about the Butterfield Trail, “and was very influential in launching my quest for the old Trail.”
Marjorie Started traveling the countryside in her Model-A (which the artist William Krehm had taught her to drive) with her Alaskan Husky dog, “Boy” as a companion, tracing the route of what Harris Newmark had called “the longest continuous stage line ever established, the entire length being about two thousand, eight hundred and eighty miles.”
In a beautifully conceived, solidly composed series of paintings, sometimes reminiscent of Nicolai Fechin and Jack Smith in color and style, William Wendt in composition, and Frederic Remington in design and action, she captures the cities, the missions, trading posts, ranches and relief stations, passes, valleys, and river crossings. “The Broken Wheel” and “On To the Yuma Crossing” are exemplary works of Marjorie Reed’s artistic and historical achievement. After three decades she’s still seeking “the old Trail”, and says that “I hope to complete it—God willing, of course, -- clear to the Eastern Terminus at Tipton, Missouri, before I pass over the Bid Divide.”
Champion Place still flourished despite the fact that the Stock Market crash, the Depression, and then World War II, hurt the market for art sales. Productivity didn’t slow down, and Smith, Forsythe, Johnson, and others went on frequent sketch expeditions, into the desert or up to the Sierras, It was noted on these trips, that while most artists drew or painted directly from nature, Frank Tenney Johnson, would take photos, then lay back and sleep while the others worked. He preferred to do the work in the studio.
The colony remained a magnet to other artists, “the Smith house was full all the time”, Marjorie Reed recollects, and there she met Jimmy Swinnerton, Kathryn Leighton, William Wendt, Hanson Puthuff, Will Foster, and Ed Borein. And, also, the eighth member of the group Tex Wheeler.
New Years Day, 1939, a pall came over Champion Place with news that Frank Tenney Johnson had died. On December 19, 1938, the Johnsons had gone to the wrestling matches at Olympic Auditorium with some old friends, and through a social greeting, a kiss, Frank contacted a fatal disease, spinal meningitis. The following week he worked on his last painting a dramatic nocturne, his last, cowboys and oxen pulling a prairie schooner through an adobe Mexican village, on a moonlit march. His last completed and signed work; the 46 by 60 “Santa Fe Traders” was finished Christmas Eve 1938. A week later, at the height of his career, he was dead.
Hughlette “Tex” Wheeler, a sculptor who specialized in horses and cowboys, had come frequently to the street, as a friend of both Johnson and Forsythe. He often brought another mutual friend, J.R. Williams, creator of the comic “Out Our Way,” another cowhand and rodeo man turned artist. Little is known about “Tex”, and his work is scarce, but he did create his moist famous work, Sea biscuit, on Champion Place, in the studio of Frank Tenney Johnson.
During most of 1940, using Johnson’s studio after his death, Wheeler worked on the model for the bronze still seen by thousands daily at Santa Anita Racetrack since its unveiling, February, 6, 1941. The statue is life size, down to the hundredth of an inch. The one aesthetic problem the artist was confronted with was the actual nick in Sea biscuit’s ear. If “Tex” had included it, it would appear to have been a defect in the statue, so he decided to delete this one imperfection from the scion of Man-O’-War.
“Tex” Wheeler, who died at age 55 in 1955, also created a fine statue of his friend J.R. Williams, on his horse “Lizard.” He also did a model of Will Rogers and his horse Soapsuds.
All of the artists understood the vagaries of artistic success. Although some reached the outer galaxies of stardom, all were successful artists, whose works are in demand today. They all derived their greatest satisfaction from their ability to pursue their choice of a life’s work.
Sam Hyde Harris summed up the feelings, and cited the accomplishments of not only the Alhambra group, but of the larger community of which Champion Place was a microcosm: “In those early years, 1900 to 1950 or so, a group of serious painters, men and women,… discovered the painting potentials of this locale, practically untouched, long, long ago before over-population, bulldozers, sub dividers and smog…each of them portrayed our magnificent scenery…they were great men, great painters. In coming years posterity can know and appreciate what Southern California was like in those early years. These artists were pioneers.”
Marjorie Reed Circa 1939