Source: Dun’s Review, April 1967
Time for a short break in the COAL series. When we left our protagonist, he had completed his first coast-to-coast trip in his trusty ’66 Caliente convertible. Figures just-unearthed show that the journey consumed eleven tanks of gasoline (totaling $59.55), five motel nights ($57.83 in all), $9.67 for food (!), and another $5.76 in stamps, postcards, and other sundries, for a grand total of $132.81, a frugal trip even then. Now, on the hunt for a place to live in southern California, he was armed with a typed list of approved boarding houses supplied by Art Center College of Design, as there were no on-campus accommodations.
Remember, this was the fall of 1971. The internet was barely a gleam in Al Gore’s eye at the time, and maps were still manually unfolded, not accessed with one tap on a cellphone app. I’d already invested in a laminated Los Angeles map, and holding it at a suitable reading distance with one hand, I steered with the other hand, driving to the first address indicated.
This would become home for the next few years.
Norton Avenue was one of many quiet residential streets in West Los Angeles, close to the intersection of Western and Melrose Avenues, near what is now the Koreatown area. 411 South Norton, the address in Art Center’s listing, was an unassuming two-story with a partial attic. At some point in the past, it had been converted from an expansive single-family home to a boarding house.
The first and last stop on my L.A. house-hunting list.
The lower floor was occupied by two elderly single women, as well as Mrs. Ray, the not-quite-elderly woman who owned and ran the place. Student tenants lived on the second floor, while the home’s partial attic functioned as a common studio area. Room and board amounted to $120/month, including breakfast (usually alternating between eggs and hot cereal) and whatever was on the menu for dinner. The fare, while hardly of gourmet variety, was at least enough to keep one nourished. Meals were staggered so that the lady residents dined separately from the student boarders.
As the beginning of my first Art Center term was fast approaching, I quickly agreed to Mrs. Ray’s terms and settled into my first Los Angeles digs. One of the next orders of business was to stock up on the basic art supplies that I’d need for the next few years. I quickly learned that one of the “go-to” art supply emporiums was H. G. Daniels, not too far away from Mrs. Ray’s and even closer to Art Center. Over the years, I must have spent thousands on art supplies there. Here’s my first such shopping list, from September 1971:
Look at those late-1971 prices.
Suitably equipped with art materials and having paid the first semester’s $800 tuition, I was ready to begin my higher education in earnest. Back then, Art Center’s program included a single, nine-to-five class each weekday. This was intended to duplicate as closely as possible the real-world working conditions we would presumably face upon graduation. Various design exercises aimed to elevate our sensitivity to line and form, ranging from a lettering class to a life drawing session (the latter of which was my first exposure, no pun intended, to a nude model).
A typical second-semester program for Art Center students majoring in Transportation Design would include Product Design I (model construction and surface development), Model Construction II (design project in-shop build), Transportation I (intro to transportation design), Design II (principles and practice), and Theory of Structure (introduction to structural systems). My second-semester Saturday-morning academic adds were Political History of the U.S. and Physical Science, all of which made for a full schedule.
Most of my Art Center classmates were somewhat older than I, typically having already completed their academic requirements for a Bachelor’s degree. Some were military veterans as well, a subject best avoided in those days at the height of the Vietnam War. (Sidebar: I vividly remember being nervously glued to my small black-and-white portable TV on February 2nd, 1972, as the draft lottery for those born in 1953 was being conducted. My number was 152, ironically the same as our house number back in Morristown, so I was not obliged to consider the implications of another life-changing circumstance, though my poor vision may have rendered me unfit for service anyway.)
Life-changing futures being drawn from a bin.
The Saturday-morning academic classes referred to above were compulsory for those few attending Art Center directly from high school. Although these were largely cursory at best, and their course load was not overwhelming, they did require additional homework over and above the regular assignments related to my Transportation Design major. My most absorbing academic class was in English, taught by a veteran Los Angeles Times wordsmith, Fred Holley. Looking back, I rank Mr. Holley alongside Strother MacMinn and Harry Bradley, as my most influential and fondly remembered instructors. (Photo of partial LA Times front page)
And what of the Comet? Near the end of another manic cross-country trip during a three-week semester break over the Christmas holidays, its Cruise-o-Matic decided to pack it in. A replacement modulator and hose, new seals and pan gasket, and eight quarts of transmission fluid cured that issue. The local Lincoln-Mercury service shop also replaced an idler arm to firm up the power steering, and a cracked driveshaft (!) was also replaced, for a grand total of $177.20, including labor and tax.
Just a bit scruffy after the first cross-country trip.
After its transmission was fixed, I began to question the Comet’s long-term reliability, especially since I couldn’t afford more expensive repairs cramping my already-spendthrift student lifestyle. In fact, now that I had a better understanding of the greater-LA apartment market, I was actively looking for new (and cheaper) accommodations. But the Mercury would make one more trip back to New Jersey before it was replaced…
When did the ID world switch from watercolors and colored pencils to markers? I’m surprised there were no French curves on your list. In fact, when I started my design engineering career in 1977, I was surprised to see that the compass was rarely used; plastic circle and radius templates were ubiquitous. I still have mine from that era, along with heavily yellowed French curves. And my drafting set. No slide rule though 😀
When I was studying industrial design in the mid 80s markers were ubiquitous and I still have two dozen Chartpak markers in the garage along with my Staedtler Mars technical pen and compass sets. Computer graphics were in their infancy but the engineering students had AutoCAD and plotters and graphic design was starting to use digital stuff. I also have both French curves and a flexible curve form those days, along with a manual lettering guide.
All ACCD transportation and product design students had the first semester shop class priveledge of building our own “SWEEPS” from master patterns originally supplied by Toyota, IIRC. No doubt Strother Mac Minn had a big hand in that happening. I never expected I would end up using those plastic sweeps on virtually everything I designed before I finally switched to CAID software on a compute in the mid 1990s!
Markers, Prisma color pencils and even chalk were the tools to create renderings on either Vellum or layout bond. Those were the two favored papers by then. Of course, there was the special Ted Youngkin paper for his first semester class using only warm and cool gray chalks on that “paper” (it had MAXIMUM “tooth” to ensure a GOOD bite on the chalks.), that was used for eyeball drawing of 3D objects out in the California sun…..chasing shadows!! :):)
The initial trek to H.G. Daniels was a shock to the po’ ACCD student wallet, but one did get equipped with everything needed….to start! Back then there were certain spray colors in aerosol cans that could be used for various purposes. The EPA banned them, curiously I still have several cans all these decades later. 🙂
My daily driver to ACCD was my beloved 1956 Chevy, at the time the second oldest car in the small student lot behind the “annex” building. Both of us helped pay for the “new” ACCD campus on a hillside over looking the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Tuition jump$ were “huge” every semester. 🙁 DFO
My older brother graduated from Art Center (Transportation), 1969. Good planning as I graduated from high school same year and moved to Miami to start my architecture studies. Funny now that we both moved as far away from our parents who had retired to North Carolina. I only remember you had to be very talented to be admitted to Art Center. Not sure why but brother could not take his Austin Healy Sprite to LA and Dad bought him a 50s low mileage Cadillac which I am sure brother was not thrilled. But after he arrived managed to get a Mustang. I was lucky to start college with my 1963 T-Bird. Looking back we were both fortunate our parents supported us in our creative career choices as well as those expensive out-of-state expenses. I still have my old colored pencils, water color brushes, and French-curves stashed somewhere in the back of a dark closet. Hated markers and dumped them decades ago.
An old-fashioned boarding house. I don’t remember those in Iowa City (University of Iowa) at the time; just lots of old houses with rooms rented individually ($50/month) and use of the common kitchen, which of course meant that the chance of theft from the fridge was quite high.
I’m surprised you didn’t rent a room in Pasadena, there used to be plenty of boarding houses there .
Good story well told .
-Nate
Thanks for the overview of an Art Center student – the Art Center is someplace I’ve heard much about, but never heard a first-hand account. The 9-to-5 class seems to make a lot of sense.
Regarding roominghouses, last year I looked my current address up in the 1950 Census (Censuses are confidential for 72 years, after which time they’re available for the public to research). Our house was a boarding house back then – the owner had been recently widowed, and I suppose she rented rooms to make ends meet. There were two single people living downstairs, and then a family of four living on the 2nd floor. Very different from today.
I like the photo of the comet sitting in California, with New Jersey tags. Definitely looks like it had been through a long journey. Seems like that car served your rather well – looking forward to see what its replacement was.
This is fascinating! I can’t wait for the next installment.
@-Nate – Art Center didn’t move to Pasadena till 1976. Prior to that, they were in Hancock Park and downtown. The Koreatown location would have been a good location, depending on the crime rate
Very evocative of a time and place. Nice work, sir.
Great story, and a concise reminder of how 1971 seems like a whole other world from a 2024 perspective. I wonder what 1971 will seem like in 2077 when someone stumbles over this thread. Not to mention what they’ll think about 2024.
“Cracked driveshaft. ! indeed. I’m assuming that it cracked at one of the universal joint yokes? Still, that seems like a pretty odd failure on a car. Did you ever have anyone guess at what was the root of that issue?
I well remember that first draft lottery in 1969. I had an evening class that evening, but when I got out of class, I heard from a friend that one of the wire services had the list of numbers. I found a phone booth which was off a lounge in one of the dorms. A bunch of other students were studying in the lounge. I called the wire service, I told the guy my birthday, and he went off the line for a minute. He came back and said, “I think you’ll be pleased—it’s 358.” He was right! I came out of the phone booth into the lounge and said, “358!” and everyone knew exactly what I was referring to.
I toyed with the idea of getting a sweatshirt made with 358 on it in the font you’d see on a football jersey. I ran the idea past a friend, and he said that would smack too much of gloating. I decided that he had a point.
The boyfriend (later husband) of a cousin of mine got a number in the low 2 digits. As my cousin said, what rotten, shitty luck. But he somehow managed to avoid being drafted.
My uncle Terry Henline got his design education at Art Center, having won a scholarship in the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild competition wherein teens built and submitted scale models for “dream cars” of their own design.
After school, GM hired him for a position at Chevrolet styling, where I gather he was largely responsible for the design of the first Monte Carlo under the supervision of their chief stylist, David Holls. Apparently some dispute arose over changes in the production design, leading to a referral over to Pontiac design where his design sensibilities were felt to be a better fit.
Eventually he rose to chief of design for one of Pontiac’s two exterior studios, primarily responsible for their midsize and large car styling (their other studio handled compact and sporty models), then a stint at GM’s Advanced Design studio in California, then back to Pontiac, then finally tasked with developing styling of the production Hummer H2 before his retirement.