Strange Angel (5 page)

Mount Lowe and Mount Wilson both hunched over the city to the north. Those who climbed to their pine-clad peaks and cast their gaze back down below would have been charmed by the prospect. Pasadena looked like a sea of green trees through which numerous white church spires protruded. Giant hotels could be seen resting amidst the orange groves, enticing wealthy tourists from the East and Midwest to lengthen their visits and become citizens of Pasadena.

“It is the land of the afternoon,” wrote resident Charles Frederick Holder. “People live out of doors and have an inherent love of flowers.” While the rest of the country froze, Pasadena gloated over its natural abundance at the New Year's Day Festival, better known as the Tournament of the Roses. Since 1890 the city had honored its floral glut in a truly Arcadian communal boast. Foot races were run, games were played, and chariots were raced. There was even a jousting match in which horsemen with lances tried to spear three rings hanging at thirty-foot distances. But the day's centerpiece was the parade of flower-bedecked carriages that wove through the city's streets, ridden by Pasadena's beaming beauties who threw flowers as they went.

The city was swiftly becoming a Mecca for visiting architects as new and uniquely Californian designs were constructed in the city. Henry and Charles Greene almost single-handedly created the Craftsman style with the large wooden bungalows they built for their Pasadena clients. Calling upon Swiss and Japanese influences and using materials gathered from the surrounding wilderness, they designed houses that were poems of wood, texture, and light, featuring open beams, skylights, stained glass windows, and low slung eaves, fit for the fancy of any American who sought to establish a gilded frontier lifestyle.

But while residents basked in the languor of their pioneer daydreams, the city still retained something of the intellectual energy and progressive spirit of its midwestern Protestant origins. When the opera or symphony played in Los Angeles, the Pacific Electric Railway ran special cars to and from Pasadena. New schools and centers of learning were constantly being built, and groups such as the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle and the Social Purity Club were swift to make their presence felt with lectures and dances. Astronomers began studying the heavens from the Mount Wilson Observatory, built by the astronomer George Ellery Hale; and the local technical college, Throop, was slowly undergoing its transformation into the California Institute of Technology. It was not long before Pasadena became known as a “western clearing house for Eastern Genius.”

By the turn of the century, Pasadena had already been visited by two presidents, and residents such as Jason and Owen Brown, the sons of the famed abolitionist John Brown, attested to the city's moral seriousness and political leanings. When a third president, Theodore Roosevelt, visited in 1903, Pasadena's importance was assured. The editor of the
Pasadena Daily News
spoke of the city in 1907 as embodying all that is “beautiful, clean, cultured, moral and aesthetic.” Such traits were not gained by accident. While the flood of immigrants saw Los Angeles sprawl, Pasadena was adamant about rebuffing the less appealing by-products of urban growth. The Pasadena Board of Trade, run by many of the wealthiest residents, consistently voted against encroachments of factories or large-scale business enterprises. “We do not bid for factories,” said a contemptuous president of the board, D. W. Coolidge, “but lay special stress on our superior location, climate, civic improvement, churches and schools as making the most desirable place of abode.” In 1906 only an estimated 10 percent of the population were classed as “laborers and artisans.” By 1920 Pasadena had the highest per capita income of any city of its size in the country; and by 1930 the city, whose population was now over 76,000, could still claim domestic servants as its largest labor force.

In comparison to the conservative, antiunion governance that held sway ten miles away in Los Angeles, Pasadena harbored pockets of left-wing thought. While the oligarchs of Los Angeles were fighting pitched battles against labor in order to attract businesses to the West Coast, Pasadena—which had no want, or need, for businesses—paradoxically set itself up as one of the friendliest municipalities to the unions. Open shop bands were often thrown out of the Tournament of Roses parade, and the American Civil Liberties Union was permitted to speak in Pasadena in spite of fervent opposition from the strictly conservative American Legion and Better America Federation. Indeed, Pasadena would gain its full Socialist credentials when Upton Sinclair, author of such jeremiads against big business as
The Jungle
and
Oil!
moved to the town (even though his uncommon interest in the working man saw him shunned by the city's uppermost echelons). Pasadena was enlightened, moral, aesthetic, and rich. If people traveled to Los Angeles to achieve their dreams, they moved to Pasadena when they had attained them. It was the VIP enclosure of Paradise.

If Pasadena was the jewel of Southern California, then the jewel of Pasadena was Orange Grove Avenue. Unlike the grid system that shaped the rest of the city, Orange Grove had been laid out at a three-degree angle from true north to preserve some of the area's native oaks, which now stood obstinately in the middle of the road. By the time Parsons' family moved to Pasadena in 1916, some fifty-two millionaires populated the one-and-a-half-mile-long avenue. They included Lamon Vanderburg Harkness of New York City, one of the richest men in the world because of his Standard Oil Company, which had been recently dissolved by Supreme Court decree. Arthur Fleming, the Canadian-born logging magnate and philanthropist, lived in the first Craftsman-style house to be built in Pasadena. Chicago chewing gum millionaire William J. Wrigley lived in an Italianate mansion at the top of the avenue, while Dr. Adalbert Feynes, a famed entomologist, resided in an Algerian-style palace not far away. The St. Louis beer millionaire, Adolphus Busch, had created a giant stone mansion overlooking his wondrous gardens, and the black-clad widow of assassinated president James A. Garfield also lived on Orange Grove. Behind ivy-clad walls, manicured hedgerows, and twelve-foot-high pillared gates were vast estates with swimming pools and tennis courts, driveways encircled with roses and flowering vines of perpetual summer. Footmen and even carriages were sometimes seen on the road. And where did these great and good meet? At the northernmost end of the avenue, where the Valley Hunt Club acted as the exclusive preserve of Pasadena's high society.

If any one street was responsible for the civilizing of California in the minds of the New England Brahmins, then Orange Grove Avenue was it, for it would have taken a stubbornness even greater than that displayed in the Episcopalian East not to have been impressed by the sheer mellifluous quality of Orange Grove. Languor and energy, rusticity and sophistication, American nature and European art mingled sweetly throughout. The avenue made even the palm trees look dignified. The year that the Parsons arrived on Orange Grove was the year the
Los Angeles Times
named it “the most beautiful residence street in the world.”

Not one to shy away from ostentation, Walter Whiteside purchased a giant Italian-style villa at 537 Orange Grove Avenue so that his small, multi-generational family could rival any of the more conventional dynasties of Pasadena. Set back from the road amidst an acre and a half of cosseted foliage, the house met the visitor with a facade of pristine stucco, shaded windows, and sculpted arches. Within the cool walls the family of four shared some twenty rooms with their two English servants. What's more, this mansion sat right next door to the Valley Hunt Club.

Jack Parsons spent almost all of his childhood surrounded by this prodigious wealth. His earliest memories would have been of an exotic palace that seemed his alone, with attentive servants compliant to his every need. As the sole child in the house, he was given strict lessons in manners and treated as the heir apparent to the Whiteside family by his doting grandfather. As for Ruth, blue-blooded Pasadena suited her much better than downtown Los Angeles, and she swiftly entered into the social whirl that occupied Pasadena's elite—chamber concerts with the Pasadena Music and Art Association, lectures at the Twilight Club, theater at the Pasadena Playhouse, golf and tennis tournaments at the Valley Hunt Club, and maybe the odd trip to the polo fields a few miles away. On one occasion the world renowned Austrian opera singer, Madame Schumann-Heink—better known in the popular press as “The Heink”—sang a private recital for the family, with young Jack sitting on her ample knee.

Parsons' neighborhood was no less fantastical than his home. Crenelated French chateaux with faux-arrow slits stood side by side with the domes and crescent moons of Moorish palaces, while the vast Craftsman-style bungalows conjured up pictures of the Orient with their sloping beams and precise lines. To the south of Parsons' house lay the Busch Gardens, consisting of thirty acres of manicured lawns and exquisite floral pageantry. Plants from all over the world bordered the rolling lawns, and over fourteen miles of walkways wound their way through the gardens, serving thousands of tourists a year (not to mention numerous Hollywood film companies). The miniature buildings and statues scattered throughout the grounds, especially designed to delight the younger visitors, added a touch of magic. Under a darkening bower could be found a small cottage plucked straight from “Hansel and Gretel,” while closer inspection of a fountain revealed a horde of tiny terra-cotta fairies. In such an idyllic setting a young child could easily lose himself in imagining that such tales were true and that such creatures existed, if not here, then where?

And if the pampered and irrigated environs of the Busch gardens felt too genteel, a real wilderness could be found backing up to it. The Arroyo Seco (dry stream) cut deep into the landscape along Pasadena's western edge. Here facets of the old frontier still survived. Chaparral covered slopes, and steep rocky sides formed a natural playground for young and old alike. The valley floor was thick with sycamores and tangled thickets of wild grapes. Rabbit and deer could be hunted among the spruce, oak, and bay, and the town's children made camps, fired BB guns and let off firecrackers. A touch of surrealism was added by the ostrich farm positioned at the valley's southernmost end. Part Huckleberry Finn playground, part never-never land, Pasadena provided the perfect landscape for the imaginative child, with Orange Grove its most blissfully secluded centerpiece. It was little surprise that Parsons grew up unconstrained by reality. Throughout his entire life he would never feel more at home, or more at ease, than when living on this fanciful street.

Mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever.

 

—from the obelisk of the Russian space pioneer
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

 

As a boy, Parsons suffered from two of the hazards of being a single child: He was spoilt, and he was solitary. He had few friends, a fact which he would later see as a great boon in developing what he called “the necessary background of literature and scholarship.” Without television and with Pasadena shunning the movie halls that inundated Los Angeles, Parsons read voraciously. His taste tended towards classical tales of romance and fantasy, and he devoured the Arthurian legends, the
Arabian Nights,
the legends of Greek and Norse mythology, and stories of ancient battles. “When he was a youngster he used to read about King Arthur,” a friend from later in his life recalled. “It was a dream of his as a child to belong to a group of men who were doing something noble and wonderful. And he also wanted to go to the moon.”

This last dream was provided for him by Jules Verne's classic fantasy of 1865,
De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon).
Verne tells the story of a group of demobilized American soldiers, members of an old artillery company known as the “Gun Club,” who, in seeking an outlet for their frustrated aggression and some use for their ballistic talents, design a plan to literally blast themselves into outer space. By inventing a new explosive powder and constructing a nine-hundred-foot long cannon, they shoot themselves free of the earth's atmosphere and enter into orbit above the moon. What is most striking about the book is its scientific realism. No scientist of the era would have said space flight was possible, but Verne described it in great detail, using only the technical knowledge available at the time. His talk of velocities and materials, the minutiae of technical method, gave the fantasy that most enticing ingredient—plausibility. To the young Parsons space travel must have seemed only steps away.

Verne's story sent Parsons to the pages of pulp magazines for other tales featuring space travel or scientific themes. The pulps—so named because of the inexpensive paper on which they were printed—had been part of a magazine publishing revolution in the 1880s. Magazines had once had relatively small circulations and had been aimed at the upper middle classes, but a universal rise in literacy had created a craze for enjoyable and affordable reads. With gaudy covers and sensational stories, the pulps were the television of their day. The
Argosy,
a 192-page weekly which featured adventure fiction by such writers as Edgar Rice Burroughs, the inventor of Tarzan, had a readership by the turn of the century of some 700,000. Along with its numerous competitors, the
Argosy
delivered a weekly diet of shoot-outs, monsters, and murders, and while the majority of stories might not have been very technically competent, the fans' enthusiasm for them was unmistakable.

By the time Parsons could read, the pulps had diversified into hundreds of specific genres.
Black Mask,
founded by the literary polymath H. L. Mencken, specialized in crime stories and would later feature the writings of hard-boiled noir writers Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett.
Ace-High Western Stories
was dedicated to cowboy yarns and gunfights, and
Weird Tales,
which included the macabre fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, spun sword and sorcery and horror yarns. There was as yet no publication devoted to stories like Verne's scientific romances, so Parsons would have had to content himself with the occasional tales of the future and new technologies that would appear in the other pulps.