TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE: A PERSONAL INTRODUCTION BY GRAY BRECHIN
PART I :: THE MAKING OF A SUMMER PLA CE
CHAPTER 1: The Berkeley Hills Before the 1923 Fire
CHAPTER 2: From Town to Country
CHAPTER 3: From William Morris to Lewis Mumford
CHAPTER 4: The Arts and Crafts Paradox
CHAPTER 5: Building in Nature
CHAPTER 6: Berkeley and Inverness in Conversation
CHAPTER 7: A University’s
8:
PART 2 :: PORTRAITS OF PE OPLE AND STRUCTURES
CHAPTER 1: The Early Berkeleyans
The Morgans
The Dornins
The Johnst one/Leales
CHAPTER 2: The Preservationists
The Colby s (co-written with Daniella Thompson)
Willis Linn J epson
CHAPTER 3: The Architects
Julia M organ
Ernest Coxhead
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I don’t know what novel our Maybeck house could be compared to, but it would contain darkness and radiant light; its beauty would arise from honest, bold, inventive construction, from geniality and generosity of spirit and mind, and would also have elements of fantasy and strangeness.
Writing this, I wonder if much of my understanding of what a novel ought to be was taught to me, ultimately, by living in that house; and so, if all my life I have been rebuilding it around me out of words.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, Living in a Work of Art
Preface
The village of Inverness on Northern California’s Point Reyes Peninsula has brown-shingle houses like those in the hills north of the UC Berkeley campus. When I initially set out to explore this similarity, I feared I had chosen a subject so narrow as to be forever in search of an audience. But you do not choose a subject, it turns out, any more than you choose an audience. You discover both in the same way and at the same time, which is to say through the creative process. 1 Sure enough, as I researched and wrote, my subject began to change from the similarities in houses between two places to the shaping force of one place upon the other.
During California’s Arts and Crafts period, Berkeley was home to the house designs and planning ideas of architect Bernard Maybeck and the Hillside Club. Maybeck’s brown-shingle houses joined home and garden into a single, unified living space—one that capitalized on the region’s local materials, natural beauty, and temperateness. Berkeley’s Hillside Club offered suggestions for designing houses in unity with one another and with the surrounding environment. From Maybeck’s generation came a brown-shingle culture in which three spheres—house, garden, and neighborhood—came together with an inspiration from a fourth: nature. Berkeley families brought this brown-shingle culture to Inverness. There, they put these ideals to work in the design of their summer houses, in the plan for the village, and in the defense of the village’s surrounding natural spaces.
This shift in my subject came about after making two key connections: one between place and identity, and the other between generations. In her essay, “Living in a Work of Art,”
1 Flannery O’Connor, “On Her Own Work,” in Mystery and Manners (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1969), 106.
Ursula K. Le Guin described how her childhood experience of a beautiful and natural place—a Maybeck-designed house in Berkeley—helped form her identity. The generational connection came from reading essays by Francis Violich and T.J. “Jack” Kent, two founders of UC Berkeley’s Department of City and Regional Planning. Inspired by Maybeck’s generation, they and their cohort of fellow planners and environmentalists envisioned the preservation of vast open spaces accessible to people from the Bay Area’s urban centers—a kind of regional greenbelt. Inverness was where they went to collaborate and realize that vision. It was also where they observed a growing tension between preservation and affordability.
My expanded subject needed wrangling. It seemed to be moving in several directions at once and lacked a signature concept t o capture it. Then I read a short essay by environmental writer John Hart in which he described the coalition of people who helped preserve the Point Reyes Peninsula. He referred to this alignment as “the Berkeley–Inverness axis.” 2 That was it—or that was nearly it. In my story of Berkeley and Inverness, it was not an axis so much as a diaspora in the sense of a culture formed in Berkeley that spread to Inverness. My revised subject, I now realized, moved from the Berkeley Hills to Inverness, from the parents of summer families to their children, and from the design of houses, gardens, and neighborhoods to the protection of wild landscapes beyond. Unconsciously at first, but later consciously, I wrote about Inverness in t erms of plac e, identity, and continuity. I took note of the built environment, trying to understand the mindset of those who made it and later preserved it. I also observed the Inverness people. They were concerned about the environment in which they lived. They argued over that environment—over the fate of ranchers and oyster farmers on Point Reyes and the confinement of tule elk near Tomales Point. I asked myself what inspired this spirit ed engagement with one another and the surroundings. The answers kept leading me back to Berkeley’s brown-shingle culture, which carried forward in Berkeley and in Inverness long after Berkeley’s Arts and Crafts heyday had ended.
2 John Hart, Legacy: Portraits of 50 Bay Area Environmental Elders, photo. Nancy Kittle (Sierra Club Books, 2006), 83.
The story focuses on the generations of Berkeley families that left their mark in Inverness from the 1890s to the 1970s. The 1970s provided a good stopping point. By that time, the Berkeley–Inverness diaspora had secured the last in a series of environmental wins that proved essential to preserving the village’s natural surroundings. The decade was also when Inverness became more of a year-round place, its culture gradually bec oming less traceable to the influence of Berkeley summer families of old.
I have tried in the telling of the story to stay out of the way of it. By that I mean the story needed to be assembled, perhaps even synthesized in places, but not created. The people at the center of the story were the thought leaders of their time and place and were influenced by even bigger thinkers, including William Morris and Lewis Mumford. My protagonists committed their thoughts to writing or reminisced in interviews available through UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, the Berkeley Historical Society and Museum, and the Jack Mason Museum of West Marin History. I see my job as one of getting their st ory across to an audience who may not know it, or perhaps may only vaguely know of some affinity between Berkeley and Inverness. It is the story of how Berkeley made a summer place—a natural place—that matters to a good many people today.
COURTNEY LINN Sacramento and Inverness, California
A town that aspires to being a work of art must be as finite as a painting, a book, or a piece of music. Innocent as we are of this sort of planned parenthood in the field of urbanistics, we exhaust ourselves in architectural proliferation. Our towns, with their air of futility, grow unchecked—an architectural eczema that defies all treatment. Ignorant as we are of the duties and privileges of people who live in older civilizations, acquiesce as we do in accepting chaos and ugliness as our foreordained fate, we neutralize any and all misgivings about the inroads of architecture on our lives with lame protests directed at nobody in particular.
—Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects
A Personal Introduction
BY GRAY BRECHIN ::
“I don’t belong in a place like this,” I thought to myself as a school bus full of prospective enrollees rolled up to the west gate of Berkeley’s University of California campus. I was a callow kid up for a visit from a once-lovely Santa Clara Valley that had morphed into another valley dubbed “Silicon.” After two initial years at the University of Washington, I transferred in 1967 because Cal was then tuition-free. As a Californian, it was a birthright I mistakenly took for granted.
That is when I first saw the white shaft of the Campanile in its parklike setting and the majestic structures around it. Years later, as I studied architectural history inspired partly by their example, I learned they were the legacy of the Phoebe Apperson Hearst International Competition of 1897–1899. Mrs. Hearst ambitiously sought to give the young university the world’s most beautiful campus, arranged around a grand axis aimed straight for the Golden Gate. Though I didn’t know it at the time, those meticulously crafted and detailed buildings were also my birthright.
I soon discovered a much different Berkeley in the hills north of campus, a neighborhood of largely shingled houses of seemingly infinite variety, nestled randomly on winding streets in an idyllic forest. It was a place in which one could happily get lost, as in the byways of Venice. Many of the houses were designed or inspired by architect Bernard Maybeck, who was also responsible for the Hearst competition and San Francisco’s haunting Palace of Fine Arts, built for the 1915 world’s fair. Living on the flats as an undergraduate, I wanted to live in those hills. And then I did.
Unable to reach escape velocity after getting my B.A., I found a rental room on Shasta Road. Through my landlady, a retired
anthropologist, I found myself invited to dinner parties and conversations in those very houses I had admired from the outside. Later, I shared a quirky redwood duplex on Tamalpais Road with my friend Dimitri Shipounoff. He was then writing the introduction to a reprint of Charles Keeler’s 1904 manifesto Th e Simple Home , a how-to manual that both explained and created the Arcadia in which we lived. I came to know eminent professors and their families as neighbors and friends on that rustic street. Many were planners and environmentalists, as I was myself becoming. As the first director of the Mono Lake Committee, I worked with biologists to save a desert lake east of Yosemite from the thirst of Los Angeles, whose long aqueduct was sucking its feeder streams dry. We succeeded, and today it may be the only terminal lake in the world returning from near-death as a vital stop for birds on the Pacific Flyway.
As a personal aide to architect William Wurster, who suffered from late-stage Parkinson’s disease, I had the opportunity to live in an elegant redwood house on Greenwood Terrace designed by John Galen Howard, Wurster’s teacher and the supervising architect of the Hearst plan. I befriended his long-time housekeeper, Thelma Redd, and I heard from her how Wurster and public housing advocate Catherine Bauer had, after their marriage in 1940, hosted students, faculty, and celebrities such as Alvar Aalto and Lewis Mumford, the latter with whom Bauer had earlier been a lover. The building housing the university’s College of Environmental Design is jointly named after Catherine Bauer and William Wurster. In Wurster’s library, I found Mumford’s 1970 book The Pentagon of Power . It was foundational for my own critical thinking about technology and cities, a volcano of unconventional ideas to which I often return.
I realized there was no contradiction between the formal BeauxArts grandeur of Howard’s campus and the rustic idyll above it; they were both products of intentional design built within a uniquely promising landscape, climate, and time. In the hills, redwood-framed casement windows opened out onto vistas of San Francisco Bay and the cities around it, suggesting the expansive possibilities of the early 20th century. I, like Forrest Gump, had fortuitously fallen into and become part of it all, receiving an incomparable education beyond the classroom.
In the 1970s, I enrolled in the university’s art history graduate program. Professor Herschel Chipp invited students to his house in Inverness, and I discovered that other town on the Point Reyes Peninsula. I wanted to live there as much as I had on the slopes above Berkeley, and I did so 20 years later, when I rented a studio in which to finish a late-in-life dissertation. Once again, I came to know the town’s denizens, especially my nonagenarian neighbor Maidee Moore. Through her, I met other remarkable elders, such as Kay Holbrook and Ginny Rothwell. I realized that village though it is, Inverness punched well above its tiny weight. It not only looked like the Berkeley Hills, but it had been umbilically attached to Berkeley for over a century.
Reflecting after a stroll across campus in his graduate years at UC Berkeley during the Depression, distinguished economist John Kenneth Galbraith admitted that despite his Scotch-Canadian reserve, “I was suddenly overwhelmed by the thought that I loved this place—the paths, trees, flowers, buildings, even the new ones. I was deeply embarrassed.” I feel no such embarrassment, but only gratitude for the twin towns that have shaped my life.
Courtney Linn has masterfully excavated and explained a connection that goes beyond the visual resemblance of the two towns and the residents they shared. Through Lewis Mumford, William Wurster, planner Jack Kent, and others, he explains that Inverness, no less than Berkeley, is an intentional community whose appeal largely runs counter to California’s long ballyhoo of metasta tic growth. Maybeck, Keeler, Mumford, and their acolytes represent an environmental sensitivity and positive conservatism passed down from John Ruskin and William Morris that shaped both towns into what they are today: conjoined communities more the products of deliberation than speculation. Like Venice, they are, at their best, fragile places of refuge from what insensate growth and innovation have wrought, to the world’s growing peril.
During World War I, Annie Maybeck was active on the editorial team of the Mobilized Women’s Organization of Berkeley. Bernard Maybeck designed this cover for a book of recipes the organization published to help raise money for the war effort. The recipe book encouraged the use of ingredients other than meat, wheat, and dairy products.
collection.
Ruskin and Morris’s writings likely reinforced Bernard Maybeck’s well-developed understanding of the medieval world. It was an understanding he gained as an architecture student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 1880s. Interviewed late in life, he recalled history lessons from Henry Lemonnier—one of the Immortals in the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Lemonnier invited craftsmen and tradespeople to speak about their centuries-old methods, leaving Maybeck with the feeling of having experienc ed the past. He also learned of the fellowship that existed between the gentry and the common people in medieval times. Even the gentry, Maybeck commented, pulled on the ropes tha t drew the stones to the church building site. 29 He believed medieval people embodied a spirit of cooperation similar to what he observed after the 1906 San Francisco Fire, when rich and poor worked side by side to aid those in need.
29 Bernard Maybeck, “Men and Issues: Bernard Maybeck–Programs I, II, III,” interview by Robert Schultz, Berkeley Historical Society, February 16–17, 1953, https://californiarevealed.org/do/97b048d5-0a28-496a-b6db-5c93718c07e7.
Private
Maybeck developed a belief that beautiful structures enriched the lives of those who occupied them. He spoke about what he saw and heard inside Le Puy Cathedral in south-central France and Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris. He described the people whose lives were inextricably tied to these old and sacred places—the lacemakers whose routines he observed in Le Puy and the nuns he could hear singing but could not see as he passed through the transept of Église Saint-Germain-desPrés. Walking a short distance from École des Beaux-Arts to a favorite cafe, he regularly passed through the church, pausing to sit in hopes of hearing the nuns singing again. “While I was sitting, I gradually had the feeling something was there,” he said. Maybeck sometimes used the word “intuition” to describe what he felt in these moments: an immediate knowledge of a truth that came from a clear, concentrated vision. 30
Maybeck’s time in France and at the École des Beaux-Arts influenced his approach to architectural design. Meeting with clients at the start of a project, he wanted to know details about
30
Bernard Maybeck in formal attire standing in front of the Mobilized Women of Berkeley (Moby) headquarters building at 1001 University Avenue. Maybeck designed the building, which was later destroyed by fire.
Private collection.
Maybeck, “Intuition versus Functionalism,” 4. Later in life Maybeck would go every Friday afternoon to the Unitarian Church at Bancroft Way and Dana Street in Berkeley to listen to the Vespers music. Jacomena Maybeck, Maybeck: The Family View (1980, reprinted 1991), 4–5.
Watercolor by Charles Hovey Pepper (n.d.) depicting Bernard Maybeck and his friend and neighbor, carpenter-builder Frank Pennell. In the painting, the two men are walking toward the construction site of the Pennell house on Buena Vista Way, which Maybeck helped design. Pepper was a New Englander, an old friend of Maybeck’s from their days together in Paris, and the father of UC Berkeley professor Stephen Pepper.
how they lived. Clients expecting to discuss the particulars of a house design were instead greeted with questions about favorite foods, poems, and garments. After assessing his clients, Maybeck ascribed an architectural period to them and then designed a house fit t ed to their personalities. He was in some ways the antithesis of Frank Lloyd Wright, who complained that people did not know how to live in his houses. 31 In contrast, Maybeck said that a house should be an expression of the life and spirit that is to be lived within it. 32
The Berkeley brown-shingle houses powerfully affected those who experienced them. Writer Ursula K. Le Guin used the word “utopia” to describe her family’s 1907 Maybeck-designed house on Arch Street in the Berkeley Hills. “I grew up in a utopia—in one respect: the house I lived in. No metaphor, liter -
31 Kenneth Harvey Cardwell, interview by Paul Grunland, 2004, Berkeley Historical Society and Museum, 2011, 89.
32 Charles Keeler, “Bernard Maybeck: A Gothic man in the 20th century,” unpublished memoir, Internet Archives Wayback Machine (accessed January 4, 2025), https://web. archive.org/web/20140512221707/http://www.oregoncoast.net/maybeckgothicman.html.
Courtesy of Allison Pennell.
ally, physically, bodily, the house.” 33 Architect and UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design Dean William Wurster used the term “magic” when referring to the interior of a house designed by Maybeck’s contemporary and fellow architect Ernest Coxhead in 1 904. 34 Wurster visited the house as an undergraduate student in 1913. He later searched for words to describe the in t erior, saying the space transcended aesthetics and embodied
33 Barry Bergman, “Houses in the Hills: Berkeley’s Early Bohemian Architecture,” Cal Alumni Association, June 12, 2018, https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/summer2018-our-town/houses-in-hills/.
34 William W. Wurster, “A Personal View,” in Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region, exh. cat. (San Francisco Museum of Art, Civic Center, September 16, 1949 to October 30, 1949). Wurster did not identify the architect of the house in the 1949 essay but did in a subsequent interview for the Bancroft Library. William W. Wurster, William W. Wurster: College of Environmental Design, University of California, Campus Planning, and Architectural Practice, interview by Suzanne Riess, 1963, University of California Oral History Center, 1964, 49.
Watercolor by Ursula K. Le Guin of her family’s house, the Schneider-Kroeber House, on Arch Street (n.d.). The house was designed by Bernard Maybeck in 1907.
Courtesy of the Ursula K Le Guin Foundation.
a way of living. “It took great skill to bring about this room,” Wurster wrote. “It meant giving up the idea of windows as holes in the wall, of competing with the view with the triviality of fabric, color or pattern.” The house and garden were integrated, as Le Guin remembered of her family’s Maybeck house: “Sit ting on the pa tio, one could see right through the house— through the French doors of the dining room and the French doors of the west balcony clear to the Golden Gate.” 35
THE 1923 BERKELEY FIRE AND ITS AFTERMATH
The houses and the way of life they framed were destroyed in 1923. In the late morning of September 17th, a wildfire raced up Wildcat Canyon, crossed over the ridge, and descended in a southwesterly direction through the Berkeley Hills. A witness recalled that the smell of burning eucalyptus announced the fire’s approach before it could be seen crossing the ridge. 36 The blaze consumed one wood-clad structure after another until the wind shifted and the fire stopped near the northern edge of the campus. With the fire still raging, Hillside Club leader Charles Keeler fled south on foot to the safety of College Avenue and Bancroft Way, shouting to passersby that Berkeley was lost. 37 “The Berkeley that he loved so much was going,” architect Walter Steilberg remembered. 38 Keeler’s reaction conveyed a sense of loss not just for the wood-shingled houses, but for a way of life. 39
By day’s end, almost 600 houses had been destroyed, an estimated 90 percent of them clad in wood shingles. 40 Few
35 Ursula K. Le Guin, “Living in a Work of Art,” Paradoxa No. 21 (2008), 130.
36 Hildegarde Flanner, “Wildfire: Berkeley, 1923,” New Yorker, September 23, 1974, 38.
37 George Hodges, Edward Hussey, Norman Jensen, Julia Morgan, Walter Steilberg, Robert Ratcliff, Evelyn Paine Ratcliffe, and Jack Wagstaff, Julia Morgan History Volume I: The Work of Walter Steilberg and Julia Morgan, interview by Suzanne Riess, 1974 and 1975, University of California Oral History Center, 1976, 56.
38 George Hodges, Edward Hussey, Norman Jensen, Julia Morgan, Walter Steilberg, Robert Ratcliff, Evelyn Paine Ratcliffe, and Jack Wagstaff, Julia Morgan History Volume I: The Work of Walter Steilberg and Julia Morgan, interview by Suzanne Riess, 1974 and 1975, University of California Oral History Center, 1976, 56.
39 William W. Wurster, William W. Wurster: College of Environmental Design, University of California, Campus Planning, and Architectural Practice, interview by Suzanne Riess, 1963, University of California Oral History Center, 1964, 42, https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/record/217150?ln=en&v=pdf (“It burned up much more than those shingle houses; it burned up a whole way of life”).
40 Susan D. Stern Cerny, Northside (Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, 1990), 1.
brown-shingle houses survived, and of those, many were later removed. 41 Berkeley’s population continued to grow after the fire, and the campus grew, too, filling in the natural areas with buildings and pushing outward at its edges into hillside neighborhoods. Pressured to accommodate increasing numbers of students, university administrators resisted calls by Wurster to concentrate buildings in the core campus area and leave the rest as greenbelts and open spaces. 42 “As now constituted, even the greatest universities—and the University of California a t Berkeley is one of the great ones—exhibit the current metropolitan vice of over-growth and congestion,” wrote Lewis Mumford. 43
The surviving brown-shingle houses are regional if not national treasures. “They are to Berkeley what brownstones are to
41 Of five houses that Maybeck designed near Highland Place and Ridge Road, three were removed in the mid-20th century to make way for apartment buildings.
42 Peter Albert Allen, A Space for Living: Region and Nature in the San Francisco Bay Area 1939-1969 (PhD diss., University of California Berkeley, 2009), 263.
43
Mumford, The City in History, 56.
Private collection.
Three early Maybeck-designed houses at the intersection of Ridge Road and Highland Place. All survived the 1923 Fire, but only the Charles Keeler House (center) escaped demolition in the mid-20th century.
University of California, Berkeley.
Courtesy of the Bancroft Library,
Photograph taken in the immediate aftermath of the 1923 Berkeley Fire.
Boston and Brooklyn,” remarked historian Gray Brechin. But the unity of the whole is gone, and it is the whole that Hillside Club leaders had sought to create. In the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, architects and their clients began migrating away from the naturalism of the brown-shingle form. That migration accelerated after the Panama-Pacific In t ernational Exposition held in San Francisco in 1915, when Bay Area residents observed up close architectural styles inspired by historical precedents, including Maybeck’s Grec o-Roman Palace of Fine Arts. The 1923 Fire brought the brown-shingle era of construction to a close in Berkeley—at least until a second brown-shingle tradition, inspired by the first, gained traction years later.
In the fire’s immediate aftermath, Bay Area residents embraced period-revival styles, especially the Spanish Colonial. In California, “a handful of dilapidated Spanish missions provided an unconvincing historical justification,” Osbert Lancaster later wrote. 44 But however thin its historical precedents, the Spanish Colonial house had the virtue of featuring fire-resistant materials like stucco and tiles. 45 In handicrafts such as pottery, designs also changed from the matte-glazed pots and tiles in muted colors that complemented the regionalism and naturalism of the brown-shingle era to the bright, shiny pots and tiles suit ed to the new historicism. 46 In the rebuilding, many apartment buildings took the place of architect-designed houses. “With trees destroyed as well as structures, there was small incentive to attempt the same venture again,” Wurster lamented. 47
44 Osbert Lancaster, Here of All Places (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1958), 150.
45 Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream (Oxford University Press, 1973), 410, Kindle, (“The Panama-California Exposition turned popular support in favor of historicism as represented by the Spanish Colonial”).
46 Kirby William Brown, California Faience: Ceramics for Cottages and Castles (Norfolk Press, 2015), 73.
47 William W. Wurster, “A Personal View,” in Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region, exh. cat. (San Francisco Museum of Art, September 16, 1949, to October 30, 1949).
Maps by Ben Pease.
beaches. Point Reyes is vast, with some 71,000 acres lying within the boundaries of the national seashore, and that is before c oun ting more than 50,000 acres of nearby ranch lands preserved through easements held by the Marin Agricultural Land Trust. Adjoining these open spaces to the south are the 82,000 acres of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
In or near most urban centers in California, nature does not survive except in landscaped parks. But departing from San Francisco, you can walk across the Golden Gate Bridge and step directly into the recreation area—with its 19 distinct ecosystems and 2,000 plant and animal species—and continue north into the national seashore. More than 40 straight-line miles after leaving San Francisco, and without ever leaving nature, you reach the tip of Tomales Point—a distance comparable to traveling from San Francisco to San Jose or from Boston t o Providence. Along the way, you pass cliffs above Drakes Bay that so resemble those in southwest England that Francis Drake named the region “Nova Albion” when he and the crew of the Golden Hind took refuge there for a few weeks in 1579. 51
Inverness began to build out in the early decades of the 20th century when the Berkeley brown-shingle era of residential
51 The term Nova Albion translates literally to “New White,” or “New England.” Albion was a term used by cartographers in Drake’s time to designate England.
Courtesy of iStock.
The Seven Sisters, East Sussex, England.
nizing for East Bay teachers and San Francisco dock workers during the Depression years, and resisting the imposition of the UC Regents’ McCarthy-era loyalty oath. 69 J. Robert Oppenheimer had few close friends outside the physics department during his time at Berkeley in the 1930s and early 1940s, bu t some of his closest were Inverness summer people—the Tolmans and the Tatlock-Whitneys, to name two. 70 Jack Kent, a student at UC Berkeley in the 1930s, described the political mood of those years by joking that he would have joined the Communist Party if anyone had asked him. 71
69 James Schevill, Years of Becoming, vol. 12, Contemporary Authors Autobiographical Series, ed. Joyce Nakamura (Gale Research, 1990), 267–268.
70 At the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission hearing that resulted in the revocation of his security clearance, Oppenheimer identified the Tolmans as within his circle of friends in the period from 1940 to 1942. John S. P. Tatlock was the father of Jean Tatlock and one of Oppenheimer’s closest friends. Dr. Elizabeth Whitney was a friend of the Tatlocks who was briefly married to John S. P. Tatlock in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
71 Author interview with James and Betty Whitney, Nick Whitney, Kathleen Whitney, and Elizabeth Whitney, August 3, 2024.
Private collection.
Postcard image of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on the Outer Cape.
Courtesy of iStock images.
Over the course of summers, faculty relationships deepened. “I got to know other faculty members because of Inverness,” Jack Kent said. 72 Belonging to a sort of Brahmin class, the university people were certain of their high social and intellectual standing and were wary of Inverness summer visitors from ou tside their circle. As Mary Tolman Kent explained of her childhood summers: “the grownups from Berkeley and San Francisco were really very provincial, each group suspicious of the other, each group feeling superior to the other, and they simply didn’t mix.” 73 The distinction between being a thinker (Berkeley) and a doer (San Francisco) set social boundaries in Inverness. 74
At summer’s end, the families returned to their hillside neighborhoods north of the UC Berkeley campus, where they would ga ther at one or another’s house for an Inverness party to cap off the season. Tamalpais Road above Codornices Park was home to many university families. There, 41 of the 55 houses
72 T. J. Kent, “T. J. Kent: Professor and Political Activist: A Career in City and Regional Planning in the San Francisco Bay Area,” interview by Malca Chall, 1981 and 1982, University of California Oral History Center, 1983, 14; Kent, The Closing Circle, 58.
73 Kent, The Closing Circle, 34.
74 Mildred S. Barish, Tamalpais Tales: A Berkeley Neighborhood Remembers (Buckeye Books, 2004), 30. (Peggy Linforth recalled that her mother deemed one of her childhood friends unsuitable because her father was a commercial artist in San Francisco; “the significance of that epithet for their university-centered parents offered all the explanation possible”).
Photograph of the S.S. Point Reyes at Inverness, on Tomales Bay.
was being espoused by the increasingly visible and influential arts and crafts movement in 1890s America.” 161
In its primitiveness, the Welch cabin in Steep Ravine was just a baby step removed from tent camping. Nonetheless, its canyon siting and integration with its natural surroundings, and the story of the Welches’ back-to-nature life there, likely influenced the aesthetic of summer cabins in coastal villages north of San Francisco. In Inverness, early cabins were generally scaled-back imitations of houses built primarily in the Berkeley brown-shingle tradition and fitted into a landscape not unlike a t Steep Ravine. Temperate and rural coastal life provided the fullest opportunity to integrate the house and garden
161 Alfred C. Harrison, Jr., Pastoral California: The Art of Thaddeus and Ludmilla Welch (North Point Gallery, 2007), 22.
Courtesy of the Bolinas Museum.
“Cabin in Steep Ravine” by Ludmilla Pilat Welch, (n.d.)
to the surroundings. Keeler wrote that the opportunities of the garden were greater in the village than in the city. In the village, he wrote, “the limit is reached in the lodge amid the wilderness where the overpowering presence of nature makes the intrusion of an artificial garden an impertinence.” 162
“Marin County Homestead” by Jack Wisby, (n.d.). Wisby lived for many years in Inverness and Bolinas. This painting likely depicts a West Marin cottage circa 1910. Alfred Harrison wrote of Wisby: “Inspired by Thaddeus and Ludmilla Welch’s paintings of their rustic cabin at Steep Ravine, Wisby sought similar dwellings surrounded by wilderness as a way of drawing attention to the virtue of living far from the noise and bustle of urban life in an unspoiled natural environment.”
162 Keeler, The Simple Home, 7.
Courtesy of Krusi Collection.
In Maine’s Northeast Harbor, one exception to the social aloofness of Harvard families was Harvard President Charles W. Eliot. In an 1899 biography of a Maine yeoman named John Gilley, 197 Eliot wrote with intimacy and admiration about Gilley’s frugal, self-sufficient, upright, and enterprising life on the island. New England intellectuals of the late 19th century were nostalgic about the ideal of the self-sufficient farmer or woodsman, and Gilley’s life appealed to Eliot and at least some of his c on temporaries, in part because it was the story of their own origins. Many of their ancestors had come from similar New England rural places and backgrounds. Eliot’s own ancestors arrived in New England around 1670. In Northeast Harbor, to the frustration of junior faculty wishing to spend more time
Photograph by Alexander Vertikoff.
Living area of the Vierra House in Inverness’s Second Valley.
197 Charles W. Eliot, John Gilley: Maine Farmer and Fisherman (Century Magazine, 1899; repr., The University Press, 1904).
Courtesy of Jody Short.
with him, Eliot was as interested in the views of the farmers and fisherman as he was in those of Harvard professors. 198
Nothing remotely like the biography of Gilley was written by Berkeley summer families about Inverness’s year-round working residents. The children of these summer families—James Schevill, Mary Tolman Kent, and Edward Lewis—each wrote about their childhoods in Berkeley and summers in Inverness, but they touched only lightly on the people who operated the ranches and staffed the stores, laundries, piers, and wharfs. Ironically, these Berkeleyans’ origin stories were more closely aligned with the New England farmer and fisherman than with the working families of Inverness. The Schevill, Tolman, and Lewis families had roots in New England, and they were not seeking new friendships in Inverness with year-round people; they were seeking to recreate a summer experience they remembered from their youths in New England.
Colorized photograph of a 1915 brown-shingle house built for Anne Winter of Oakland, California. The house looks out across Inverness’s Second Valley to the Inverness Ridge. In 1960, the house became the summer home of the Short family from Berkeley.
198 Jaylene B. Roths, “Charles W. Eliot and John Gilley: Good Hope for Our Island,” The History Journal (1998): 4, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/610d5055699fb835cba4d997/t/61bc60d37ab8b763b96effec/1639735522386/Charles-Eliot-and-John-Gilley.pdf.
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER AND INVERNESS
After her first husband, Dr. James Whitney, passed away in 1935, Elizabeth married Professor John S.P. Tatlock in 1939. Tatlock had come to Berkeley from Stanford, and before that, Harvard. He was a noted medievalist, focusing on the works of Chaucer. He was also “one of the few faculty members outside of the physics department with whom Robert Oppenheimer had more than a casual acquaintance.” 233 Tatlock’s daughter, Jean, was romantically involved with Oppenheimer from 1936 to 1940, a relationship that nurtured the leftist activities for which Oppenheimer would later be questioned at his security clearance hearing in 1954. Others in Oppenheimer’s orbit included Edward Tolman and Rudolph Schevill. 234 Edward was Jean Tatlock’s psychology professor and, according to Haakon Chevalier, Tolman, and Oppenheimer were part of a group that met regularly to discuss psychoanalysis. While most faculty members in the 1930s refused to be part of unionizing activities, Tolman joined Oppenheimer in donating time to Local 349 of the East Bay Teachers’ Union. Schevill, Tatlock, and Oppenheimer were all part of a committee that raised funds for the R epublican side in the Spanish Civil War. Oppenheimer made his way out to Stinson Beach to visit Haakon and Barbara Chevalier at their Willow Camp estate, and was likely a guest of the Whitneys, Tolmans, or Schevills. In Inverness, he would have sailed on Tomales Bay, a body of water not too dissimilar to the Great South Bay separating Long Island from Fire Island in New York, where he learned to sail as a boy. 235
Professor Gordon Griffiths was a longtime Inverness summer resident who for a while was also part of Oppenheimer’s political circle. Griffiths a ttended UC Berkeley in the 1930s and returned to complete his graduate work in 1940. He stayed on
233 Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2005; repr., Vintage Books, 2006), 111, Kindle.
234 Schevill was on a committee with Oppenheimer dedicated to raising money for the Loyalist side. Bird and Sherwin: American Prometheus, 618, Kindle. Tolman was a friend who was part of a study group that included Oppenheimer and met monthly to discuss psychoanalysis. Tolman was also involved with Oppenheimer in East Bay teachers’ union activities. Bird and Sherwin: American Prometheus, 124–25, Kindle; see also Haakon Chevalier, Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship (George Braziller, 1965), 13.
235 The Point Reyes Light, September 4, 1958 (noting that Dr. Oppenheimer’s Bird boat had arrived on Tomales Bay for the Drakes–Tomales cruise).
to teach, and from 1940 to 1942, he served as a liaison between the Communist Party and the handful of Communists on the faculty. Griffiths wrote in an unpublished political autobiography that out of the hundreds of faculty members in that era, he believed only three were communists: Arthur Brodeur, Haakon Chevalier, and Robert Oppenheimer. This small faculty group met regularly, usually at Chevalier or Oppenheimer’s house. “I cannot testify that Oppenheimer was a member, but I can say, without any qualification, that all three considered themselves to be Communists,” he wrote. 236
236 Gordon Griffiths, Venturing Outside the Ivory Tower: The Political Autobiography of a College Professor, 1999, UC Berkeley Libraries, 26. The page that identifies Oppenheimer as a communist is a photocopy laid into the manuscript. A handwritten note indicates the photocopied page was removed from a later version of the manuscript. Courtesy of David Griffiths.
Professor Gilbert Newton Lewis in his laboratory at UC Berkeley. Lewis was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry at least 34 times by 20 different nominators, but never received the award. Prize recipient Glenn Seaborg wrote: “And, somehow, the Nobel Foundation made one of their rare mistakes by not awarding him the Nobel Prize in chemistry.”
Courtesy of Alamy.
Edgemont patio. Photograph by Alexander Vertikoff.
Edgemont living area. Photograph by Alexander Vertikoff.
Julia Morgan Papers, Special Collections and Archives, Robert E. Kennedy Library, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.
A hand-drawn Christmas card that Bernard and Annie Maybeck sent to Julia Morgan. The card depicts the “Maybeck Cottage” on Nut Hill. The handwritten note—“Architecture?— Not!”—was likely an inside joke between the Maybecks and Julia Morgan. The Cottage was formerly a real estate field office that the Maybecks purchased and had trucked up to Nut Hill.
PART 2 :: CHAPTER 3 :: JULIA MORGAN
