a garden in deep freeze where there’s a...

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

SPRING/SUMMER 2016

HAMMERSLEY’S COMPUTER DRAWINGS

A GARDEN IN DEEP FREEZE

WHERE THERE’S A WILL

SENIOR STAFF OF THE HUNTINGTON

LAURA SKANDERA TROMBLEY President

CATHERINE ALLGOR Nadine and Robert A. Skotheim Director of Education

JAMES P. FOLSOM Marge and Sherm Telleen/Marion and Earle Jorgensen

Director of the Botanical Gardens

STEVE HINDLE W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research

MARGARET IRWIN Chief of Staff

MITCHELL MORRIS Chief Information Officer

COREEN A. RODGERS Anne and Jim Rothenberg Vice President for Financial Affairs

KEVIN SALATINO Hannah and Russel Kully Director of the Art Collections

RANDY SHULMAN Vice President for Advancement

SUSAN TURNER-LOWE Vice President for Communications and Marketing

DAVID S. ZEIDBERG Avery Director of the Library

MAGAZINE STAFF

EDITOR Kevin Durkin

DESIGNER Lori Ann Achzet

Huntington Frontiers is published semiannually by the Office of Communications and Marketing. It strives to connect

readers with the rich intellectual life of The Huntington, capturing in news and features the work of researchers,

educators, curators, and others across a range of disciplines.

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© 2016 The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. All rights reserved. Reproduction or use of the contents, in whole or in part, without permission of the

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FROM THE EDITORCABINET OF WONDERS

Sometimes it seems as though the The Huntington is a kind of wunder-kammer, or cabinet of curiosities, gathering together in one beloved place many delightful wonders and significant items from the worlds of art, science, and the humanities. This issue of Huntington Frontiers

underscores that notion. In our cover story, James Glisson, the Bradford and Christine Mishler Assistant Curator of American Art at The Huntington, delves into the work of the artist Frederick Hammersley (1919–2009), whose explorations of geometric form and innovative computer drawings reveal a man who was committed to both order and play (see pg. 18). Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Usha Lee McFarling introduces Raquel Folgado, a plant physiologist at The Huntington who is developing methods to freeze and preserve the germplasm of endangered plants. Through her cryopreservation techniques, Folgado, who hails from the province of Zamora in Spain, has helped invent techniques that allow plant material to survive temperatures that normally cause instantaneous death. Serious business, but one that she pursues with a sense of fun and adventure (see pg. 12). In the year that marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Stephen Tabor, curator of early printed books at The Huntington, relates how Henry E. Huntington built one of the world’s great collections of the Bard’s works (see pg. 8). And historians Norris Hundley Jr. and Donald C. Jackson remind us of the 1928 collapse of the St. Francis Dam, the tragedy that brought the curtain down on the legendary career of William Mulholland, who at the peak of his powers had designed and supervised the building of the Los Angeles Aqueduct (see pg. 26). Don’t miss our vibrant Social Scene (see pg. 6), a roundup of images and news items from The Huntington’s social media sites, and Back Page, which features a 19th-century spelling slip from the Library’s Jay T. Last Collection of Graphic Arts and Social History (see pg. 36). The Huntington continues to delight and instruct, move knowledge forward, and bring the past to life—it is a cabinet of wonders whose dimensions are bounded only by the limits of the imagination.

Kevin Durkin

Kevin Durkin is editor of Huntington Frontiers and managing editor in The Huntington’s Office of Communications and Marketing.

On the cover: Detail from Frederick Hammersley’s JELLY CENTERS, 1969. Computer-generated drawing. Gift of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Image © Frederick Hammersley Foundation.

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Contents SPRING/SUMMER 2016

FEATURES

A GARDEN IN DEEP FREEZE 12 The Huntington’s cryopreservation program strives to conserve endangered plants By Usha Lee McFarling

FREDERICK HAMMERSLEY’S ART AGAINST THE MACHINE 18 The painter’s computer-generated drawings were groundbreaking and playful By James Glisson

DEPARTMENTS SOCIAL SCENE 6 CURATOR’S INSIGHT 8 Where There’s a WillBy Stephen Tabor LESSONS LEARNED 26 Mulholland’s Fatal DamBy Norris Hundley, Jr. and Donald C. Jackson IN PRINT 34 Recommended Reading BACK PAGE 36 All Mixed UpBy Kate Lain

volume 11, issue 2

12

18

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Top: Raquel Folgado, a plant physiologist at The Huntington, dissects a magnolia shoot tip before conducting a cryopreservation experiment. Center: Frederick Hammersley’s Seedling, 1967. Silkscreen. Gift of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Image © Frederick Hammersley Foundation. Bottom: Detail from the title-page portrait of the author in Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies, London, 1623. This volume is one of The Huntington’s four copies of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s collected plays.

South Coast Plaza, The New Nixon Library and renowned arts institutions celebrate President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China, and a new era of friendship and cultural enrichment.

This must-see exhibition highlights the far-reaching impact that President Richard Nixon’s visit had on the arts, education and music.

The exhibit is an unprecedented collaboration between South Coast Plaza, the Richard Nixon Foundation and an impressive group of the world’s leading arts institutions. Visitors to South Coast Plaza will have a special opportunity

to enjoy this multimedia exhibit that includes never-before-seen images and footage.

J U N E 24 - A U G U S T 1 8S O U T H C OAST P LAZA | A LL C EN T ER H O U RS

changed the worldT h e W e e k T h at

San Diego FWY (405) at Bristol St., Costa Mesa, CA southcoastplaza.com 800.782.8888

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6 huntington.org huntington.org 7

We’re also on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more! Links at huntington.org

SOCIAL SCENE

1The Octavia E. Butler papers are center stage in a yearlong project by L.A. arts organization Clockshophuntingtonblogs.org/2016/01/celebrating-octavia-butler/

“Looking at familiar things in a new way is often illuminating, revealing, thought-provoking.” Curator Catherine Hess weighs in on the Alex Israel intervention in the Huntington Art Gallery.huntingtonblogs.org/2015/12/alex-israel-in-the-house/

It’s not every day that a lithograph from The Huntington’s collections is used to publicize a major archaeological discovery.huntingtonblogs.org/2016/02/a-whale-of-a-discovery/

Ted Matson was a freelance writer who grew up on the prairie of North Dakota. He now oversees the bonsai collections at The Huntington. Wait, what?huntingtonblogs.org/2015/09/a-prairie-boys-passion-for-bonsai/

3 The Huntington has many plants tucked away in greenhouses behind the scenes—one of these gets its close-up in a short video in the LOOK>> series.huntingtonblogs.org/topics/watch_listen/video/look/

5

A PEEK AT WHAT WE’RE UP TO ONLINE

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ON iTUNES U…These lectures are only a tiny fraction of The Huntington’s audio available for free on iTunes U.

Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist by Amina Hassan

Thomas Cromwell and the Gifts of the Tudor Courtby Felicity Heal

Conference: “My Self in a Transitional State”: Isherwood in California

Conference: The Business of Fun: The Role of Theme Parks in Shaping Los Angeles

William Smith: The Man, His Map, and the Democratization of Geology

by Simon Winchester

Conference: Portraiture as Interaction

Looking at Lincoln by Shirley R. Samuels

A Neglected Document (Really!) of the Salem Witch Trials

by Clive Holmes

4

2

Photographs from the following visitors (left to right, top to bottom row): @sara_tuscher, @sleepywaldo, @smiley_syrus; @1011alcorn, @karenthetortuga, @the_dangster; @hannaheunjoo, @Iamrachelchristine, @jasperwatts; @mlochner, @nickyt31, @kotawade; @akelacooper, @tknosxmnky, @polinaneshpor.

ON INSTAGRAM…#AtTheH visitor-snapped photos.

Follow @thehuntingtonlibrary

8 huntington.org

When Henry Huntington turned 60 in 1910, he announced his retire-ment, saying, “I believe I am en-titled to some rest and playtime.

Why shouldn’t I take it?” For one of America’s richest men, this meant a new commitment to book collecting, in which he had been dabbling with increasing sophistication during his working years. Recognizing that he had to limit his scope, he set a goal of building the best private library dedicated primarily to English and American lit-erature and history—with a few incidental jewels like a Gutenberg Bible. At the turn of the 20th century, reverence for William Shakespeare’s works was perhaps the most powerful engine driving the passions of gentlemen collectors. This stimulated interest in all early English drama and in original editions of any works that had a flavor of Olde England. Coincidentally, the 1894 imposition of estate taxes in Great Britain was starting to force the dissolution of many old family libraries. Auction houses and antiquarian book firms were flush with rarities that had never before been exposed to an international market. Into the resulting feeding frenzy dropped Henry Hun-tington, ready to play, his sights set on Shakespeare.

His method was not to hang around bookshops; he preferred to bag whole collections at once, using high-end dealers like George D. Smith and A.S.W. Rosenbach as stalking horses. His fast-growing library therefore incorporated the knowledge and taste of numerous discerning buyers who had pre-ceded him. His first notable en bloc purchase was the library of Elihu Dwight Church in 1911. In addition to a choice collection of the most impor-tant works on American discovery and exploration, this netted Huntington more than 50 early copies of Shakespeare’s plays and poems and placed him immediately among the collectors in the field to be reckoned with. Of the Huntington’s 30 Shakespeare folios, 10 come from Church. Huntington’s next big trawl of Shakespeare came in 1914 from the Duke of Devonshire. At its core was a collection of English drama started by John Philip Kemble, a London actor and theater manager at the turn of the 19th century. Kemble collected not just early printings of Shakespeare, but also later editions, including the now notorious Restoration adaptations, some of which were still being staged in Kemble’s time. The star of this collection is one of the two surviving copies of the first edition of Hamlet (1603)—and the only one with the title page. (The British Library copy lacks the title but has the final leaf of text, which the Devonshire copy lacks.) This is the so-called bad quarto, containing a corrupt text differing widely from the one we are familiar with today. (For example, in the bad quarto, the first line of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy doesn’t

Where There’s a WillREVERENCE FOR THE BARD PERMEATES THE HUNTINGTON

By Stephen Tabor

curator’s insight

Marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Stephen Tabor, The Huntington’s curator of early printed books, relates how the institution’s founder built one of the world’s great collections of the playwright’s works.

Below left: Actors from Shakespeare’s Globe in London performed a touring production of Much Ado About Nothing in The Huntington’s Rothenberg Hall on Nov. 9 and 10, 2015. Photograph by Jamie Pham. Below right: On April 17, 2015, students from the East Los Angeles Performing Arts Academy at Esteban E. Torres High School performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the South Terrace of the Huntington Art Gallery. Fairy Queen Titania, played by Mariah Gonzalez, was sung to sleep by her fairy attendants (left to right): Skyla de la Torre, Wendy Lopez, Jacey Caceres, Jasmine Tucker, and Alexa Mendoza. Photograph by Martha Benedict.

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exactly soar from the second comma onward: “To be, or not to be, I there’s the point.”) While we would normally place both Kemble and Devonshire at the top of the pantheon of book collectors, both men compromised their achievements by the pernicious habit of cutting up their best books (including the 1603 Hamlet) and mounting the leaves individually in paper frames in misguided acts of piety. By making further bulk purchases—including the fabulous Bridgewater library in 1917, which sits at the heart of the institution’s early English hold-ings—and cherry-picking other famous collections, Huntington expanded his Shakespeare holdings while building on his other strengths. The most coveted items were the early quartos, the printings of single plays up to the rather arbitrary date of 1640. These survive today in an average of only 10 copies per edition, and the first printings are much rarer than that. Those published before Shakespeare’s death in 1616 carry the most potent magic—the possibility that the author himself could have turned their pages (though there is no evidence that Shake-speare took the slightest interest in his own plays once they were printed). Henry Huntington set himself a goal to beat the British Library’s holdings of early quartos, and while he fell a little short at 73 copies, his collection was thought at the time to be the second-best in the world. (Meanwhile, the single-minded Henry Clay Folger was secretly assembling a collection as large as the other two combined.) This figure ignores a shelf-full of works once thought to be by Shakespeare and earlier treatments by unknown authors of familiar plots like King Leir (as opposed to Shakespeare’s King Lear) and The Taming of a Shrew (a different version

of The Taming of the Shrew). It also leaves out the poems, among which is a tiny volume in its original limp vellum binding containing the 1599 editions of both Venus and Adonis and The Passionate Pilgrime. Then there are the folios—the hefty collections of the plays published in four editions between 1623 and 1685. Huntington bought four, ten, seven, and nine copies of the respective editions. The First Folio, published seven years after Shakespeare’s death, contains 36 plays, 18 of them printed for the first time. This “authorized version,” prepared by his friends and colleagues from “true originall copies,” is the prime source of our knowledge of Shake-speare’s texts. Another standout among The Huntington’s folios is the Devonshire copy of the Second Folio (1632), with extensive revisions in a “contemporary” hand that turned out to be forg-eries by the 19th-century Shakespeare scholar John Payne Collier. Though discredited, the notes remain an object of fascination for authorship conspiracy theorists and students of bibliographical rascality. The death of Henry Huntington in 1927 marked the end of the library’s purchases of early Shake-speare editions. Even if the institution he founded had been adequately endowed to compete in the marketplace, the supply was drying up. If any first-edition quartos from Shakespeare’s lifetime remain in private hands today, potentially available for sale, only a few tight-lipped individuals know about them, and their appearance at auction will make headlines. These early editions are now little-studied for their texts: we already know what they say. Instead, and increasingly, scholars want to find out where the individual copies have been: who bought them, how they used them, what they thought of them, and what books kept them company on the shelves of early readers. As with an archaeological dig, the goal is not to use the artifacts as they were intended but to study the evidence that clings to them and what it can tell us about the culture that produced them. Early Shakespeare editions at The Huntington remain in high demand by scholars conducting such research, though their circulation is tightly restricted because of conservation concerns. Scholars return to the original copies with different questions in each new generation. What would the Bard make of it?

Stephen Tabor is curator of early printed books at The Huntington.

Stephen Tabor (far left), curator of early printed books at The Huntington, shows a Third Folio, 1663, of Shakespeare’s collected plays to teachers attending the Shakespeare at The Huntington institute program in July 2015. The annual program brings theater professionals together with teachers, who learn innovative techniques for teaching Shakespeare through performance. Photograph by Lisa Blackburn.

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A Garden in Deep FreezeTHE HUNTINGTON’S CRYOPRESERVATION PROGRAM STRIVES TO CONSERVE ENDANGERED PLANTS

By Usha Lee McFarling

The caretakers of the tender succulents in the Desert Garden may cringe at news of a prolonged cold snap, but Raquel Folgado, a plant physiologist at The Huntington, thinks nothing of plunging aloe plants into temperatures 321 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.

In her lab near the Rose Hills Foundation Conservatory for Botanical Science, Folgado opens a flask of liquid nitrogen. As the ultracold liquid billows out clouds of vapor, she drops in tinybits of sterile aloe. Folgado will later pull out the frozen bits of tissue, thaw them, and gently place them in petri dishes. She will then line the dishes up under a series of grow lamps. Through the lens of a Nikon camera mounted on her microscope, she’ll watch over the next few weeks as the thawed dabs of plant tissue, like tiny green miracles, grow into rows of healthy new aloe plants.

Folgado is one of a small fraternity of researchers attempting to save plants by freezing them. Called plant cryopreservation, the young field uses still-developing and sometimes trial-and-error techniques to allow plant material to survive temperatures that normally would cause instantaneous death. The plant tissue can then be thawed and regrown when and where new plants are needed most.

Preserving plant genetic material, or germ-plasm, is a critical part of safeguarding the world’sfood supply, creating new varieties of plants, and being able to bring back plants that have been destroyed by disease, pests, and manmade or nat-ural disasters. The backbone of this effort consists of large seed banks, kept in massive freezers or, in the case of Svalbard’s “Doomsday Vault,” in the belly of a frozen Arctic mountain. But seed bank-ing doesn’t work for plants that produce few or no seeds, plants that don’t grow true from seed, or plants with seeds that can’t be frozen. In these cases, cryopreservation of specialized plant tissue is necessary. But because the work is difficult, time-consuming, and exacting, it has mainly taken place in large government or internationally funded labs, and rarely at smaller institutions.

Huntington botanists have plunged into this emerging field because such work is considered urgent. Many conservationists believe that tradi-tional methods of saving plants, like protecting habitats or growing rare plants in preserves, are no longer enough. “We’re living in such an incredible age of extinction that we have to take extraordinary measures if we want to take care of our plants,” says Peter Raven, president emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden and chair of the board of trustees of the Center for Plant Conservation. “The work The Huntington is doing is visionary.”

While the project is futuristic, the inspiration for it is nearly 100 years old. It’s a set of thick black binders overflowing with yellowing pages that sits stacked outside the office of Jim Folsom,

the Marge and Sherm Telleen/Marion and Earle Jorgensen Director of the Botanical Gardens at The Huntington. These carefully typed records document every plant that has ever graced the gardens. But when Folsom flips through the long lists of plants, he sees one word stamped in red capital letters next to most of the entries: “DEAD. DEAD. DEAD.”

This loss is common for botanical gardens—plants don’t live forever—and it sadly mirrors the decimation of plants worldwide. One in five plant species—and one in three cactus species—are

Left: Raquel Folgado pours liquid nitrogen into a Styrofoam container before freezing plant material. Below (top): Aloe fievetii is grown in sterile conditions before being dissected by Raquel Folgado for use in her cryopreser-vation protocol. Below (bottom): A page from a set of binders that records every plant that has ever been grown in The Huntington’s gardens. Photographs by Kate Lain.


A Garden in Deep FreezeTHE HUNTINGTON’S CRYOPRESERVATION PROGRAM STRIVES TO CONSERVE ENDANGERED PLANTS

By Usha Lee McFarling

The caretakers of the tender succulents in the Desert Garden may cringe at news of a prolonged cold snap, but Raquel Folgado, a plant physiologist at The Huntington,thinks nothing of plunging aloe plants into temperatures 321 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.

In her lab near the Rose Hills Foundation Conservatory for Botanical Science, Folgado opens a flask of liquid nitrogen. As the ultracold liquid billows out clouds of vapor, she drops in tiny bits of sterile aloe. Folgado will later pull out the frozen bits of tissue, thaw them, and gently place them in petri dishes. She will then line the dishes up under a series of grow lamps. Through the lens of a Nikon camera mounted on her microscope, she’ll watch over the next few weeks as the thawed dabs of plant tissue, like tiny green miracles, grow into rows of healthy new aloe plants. Folgado is one of a small fraternity of researchers attempting to save plants by freezing them. Called plant cryopreservation, the young field uses still-developing and sometimes trial-and-error techniques to allow plant material to survive temperatures that normally would cause instantaneous death. The plant tissue can then be thawed and regrown when and where new plants are needed most. Preserving plant genetic material, or germ-plasm, is a critical part of safeguarding the world’s food supply, creating new varieties of plants, and being able to bring back plants that have been destroyed by disease, pests, and manmade or nat-ural disasters. The backbone of this effort consists of large seed banks, kept in massive freezers or, in the case of Svalbard’s “Doomsday Vault,” in the belly of a frozen Arctic mountain. But seed bank-ing doesn’t work for plants that produce few or no seeds, plants that don’t grow true from seed, or plants with seeds that can’t be frozen. In these cases, cryopreservation of specialized plant tissue is necessary. But because the work is difficult, time-consuming, and exacting, it has mainly taken place in large government or internationally funded labs, and rarely at smaller institutions. Huntington botanists have plunged into this emerging field because such work is considered urgent. Many conservationists believe that tradi-tional methods of saving plants, like protecting habitats or growing rare plants in preserves, are no longer enough. “We’re living in such an incredible age of extinction that we have to take extraordinary measures if we want to take care of our plants,” says Peter Raven, president emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden and chair of the board of trustees of the Center for Plant Conservation. “The work The Huntington is doing is visionary.” While the project is futuristic, the inspiration for it is nearly 100 years old. It’s a set of thick black binders overflowing with yellowing pages that sits stacked outside the office of Jim Folsom,

the Marge and Sherm Telleen/Marion and Earle Jorgensen Director of the Botanical Gardens at The Huntington. These carefully typed records document every plant that has ever graced the gardens. But when Folsom flips through the long lists of plants, he sees one word stamped in red capital letters next to most of the entries: “DEAD. DEAD. DEAD.” This loss is common for botanical gardens—plants don’t live forever—and it sadly mirrors the decimation of plants worldwide. One in five plant species—and one in three cactus species—are

Left: Raquel Folgado dissects a magnolia shoot tip before conducting a cryopreservation experiment. Below (top): Aloe fievetii is grown in sterile conditions before being dissected by Raquel Folgado for use in her cryopreser-vation protocol. Below (bottom): A page from a set of binders that records every plant that has ever been grown in The Huntington’s gardens. Photographs by Kate Lain.


currently at risk for extinction, according to recent estimates. “We’re losing so much so fast,” says Folsom. “I thought, if I could do one thing now to stop this disaster, what would it be?” The answer came in 2013 when The Hunting-ton’s plant conservation specialist, Sean Lahmeyer, visited the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Na-tional Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colo. The Fort Knox–like facility warehouses some 600,000 unique specimens of U.S. agricultural plants in vast freezers, an underground vault, and hundreds of vats of liquid nitrogen the size of Jacuzzis. While Lahmeyer knew The Huntington’s staff couldn’t work on the same scale, he thought they could aid the global effort by cryopreserving their own plants. The start-up costs did not seem that high. “With our collection, we could work on so many things,” he says. “We thought, why can’t we do this? They said, ‘There’s no reason you can’t.’”Lahmeyer was encouraged by Christina Walters, who leads the USDA’s plant germplasm research unit at Fort Collins. Walters is anxious to get as many plants as she can cryopreserved and stored before they disappear completely. “There’s always something coming up and you were wishing you could buy more time,” says Walters, who works in collaboration with botanical gardens to cryopreserve plant material they ship to her. But she’s even happier to see The Huntington start its own program. “There are precious few researchers doing this,” says Walters. “We can’t do all the things necessary unless we play together.” Lahmeyer had a good start because the garden had a tissue culture lab, built in 2000, for propagating large numbers of plants. The lab included the sterile workplace that was needed; it was not difficult to add in liquid nitrogen and freezers. But the lab was missing one critical thing: a cryopreservationist. Through a global call, Lahmeyer found Folgado.

to rest her eyes. Yet she must move quickly so that the plant tissue doesn’t dry out. Then she must remove as much water as pos-sible without killing the plant tissue. To do this, Folgado tinkers with solutions—elixirs of vitamins, sugars, antioxidants, and antifreezes (such as glycerol)—that replace water in plant cells with fluids less likely to form ice. It’s a delicate dance: the best antifreeze agents are usually toxic to plants. Not leaving tissue in solution long enough may mean it won’t freeze well. But leaving it in too long could kill it. Once the sample has had much of its water replaced, Folgado must cool it as quickly as pos-sible so ice does not have time to form. Folgado uses a technique called droplet vitrification. She places the plant tissue in a micro-droplet of solu-tion on a small rectangle of aluminum foil. The technique freezes the sample at an ultrafast rate of more than 260 degrees Fahrenheit per second. Working very carefully—“otherwise your fin-gers will be cryopreserved,” she notes—she then places the aluminum into liquid nitrogen. “This is the dangerous part,” she says. “Ice will break the cells.” If it works, the sample will cool so quickly that ice crystals do not form. Instead, the fluid will vitrify, or turn into a non-crystalline glass. The tissue should then remain viable, perhaps indefinitely, until it is thawed and revived. The field of plant cryopreservation has come a long way since its birth in the mid-1950s. For decades, scientists had to start from scratch and create a detailed freezing procedure for each plant—work that could take years. The techniques Folgado has learned are robust enough to work fairly well on a wide variety of plants—but the process must still be fine-tuned for new plants; this process can take months of experimenting. (Folgado’s experi-ments at The Huntington have already yielded some successful new freezing protocols.) Even after the protocols are developed, though, systematically

storing large numbers of plants can take years, Panis notes. “My dream is to develop a kind of Svalbard Number Two for cryopreserved material,” says Panis, who now works for Bioversity International, a global group dedicated to preserving agricultural and tree biodiversity. “Of course, this means that people overseeing individual collections have to do a lot of work.” Folgado was finishing her doctoral work on potatoes when she learned that The Huntington wanted to cryopreserve a number of plants with no established protocols. It was a huge scientific challenge—to tease out the secrets of diverse and threatened plants. Though still at the start of her career, Folgado hopes to make contributions in her field by using experiments and knowledge of plant physiology to create simple and robust freezing protocols that can be widely used. “The reason I came was the project,” Folgado says. “I’m really in love with this work. I believe it can make a difference.” Folgado arrived at The Huntington in August 2014. Her first cryopreservation success came within a year with Aloe fievetii, an orange and red firecracker of a plant that was already being grown in the lab. She was able to freeze and then successfully regrow new plants from 70 percent of samples—a high success rate. Aloes were chosen as a starting point because they are a conservation priority and a core collection at The Huntington. Of the more than 500 species of aloes known worldwide, The Huntington has housed 325 of them. The protocol Folgado devel-oped for A. fievetii seems to work handily on other aloes, which should speed future aloe conservation projects. She is also working on cryopreserving aloe seeds for projects in which growing plants from seeds is a better strategy. One plant in dire need of help is Aloe bowiea, which grows hidden among grasses and has been

Top (left to right): Raquel Folgado sits at a microscope, under sterile conditions, and extracts tissue located in what is known as the shoot apical meristem of an Aloe fievetii(photograph by Kate Lain); extracted A. fievetii tissue viewed under the microscope’s lens (photograph by Raquel Folgado); Folgado places the plant tissue in a micro-droplet of solution on a small rectangle of aluminum foil (photograph by Kate Lain); Folgado lowers the tissue on the foil into liquid nitrogen (photograph by Kate Lain); the frozen bits of tissue thaw in a warming solution (photograph by Kate Lain); A. fievetii growing successfully three weeks after thawing (photograph by Raquel Folgado); A. fievetii thriving six months after thawing (photograph by Raquel Folgado).

Folgado, a 35-year-old native of Spain, is ener-getic, down to earth, and fiercely devoted to her field, which she calls “cryo.” The ninth of 12 chil-dren, Folgado’s first botany lessons came from her parents, who grew apples, pears, potatoes, and wheat on a small farm in the mountains of Zamora, a Spanish province near Portugal known for deep-red Toro wines. Folgado excelled in biology and attended the University of Oviedo. She encountered cryo-preservation during a summer course, volunteered to join a lab, and quickly took to the painstaking work on hop plants even as fellow students quit in frustration. “It’s not so easy,” she admits. “You have to love it.” She does. Folgado thrives on laboratory bench work; she routinely puts in long days and calls it “playing.” She’s adored by colleagues, who say they love that she’s so self-effacing and doesn’t take herself too seriously. When asked what she likes about working with plants, she simply answers: “They never complain.” One reason for Folgado’s success here is her training. She did her graduate work in Belgium at the University of Leuven with Bart Panis, a legend in the world of cryopreservation for work on sim-plifying critical techniques and using them to store hundreds of species of banana. Cryopreservation of plants is very tricky: it requires freezing plant tissue, which is full of water, without letting destructive ice crystals form. To start a freezing protocol, Folgado must sit at a microscope, under sterile conditions, and deftly tease out the tiniest bit of plant: a one-millimeter- by-one-millimeter segment barely visible to the naked eye. The tissue, located in what is known as the shoot apical meristem, is hidden between tiny leaves and contains special cells, akin to stem cells, that can regenerate an entire new plant. The work takes patience, good hands, and very good eyesight. A single experiment may require more than 60 samples. Folgado often has to stop

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displaced in its South African habitat by the spread of shantytowns. Lah-meyer and Folgado are seeking part-ners in South Africa who can learn the aloe cryopreservation techniques Folgado has developed and use them to save and reintroduce the succulents. They hope to create similar partner-ships with Mexican botanists to help preserve agaves—plants that flower so rarely that being able to create new plants from frozen tissue is critical. This “exporting” of knowledge, Lahmeyer says, is a way of giving back to the foreign countries and wild landscapes where the early stewards of The Huntington once did so much collecting. Folgado has also succeeded in cryopreserving the seed from a number of species of cactus—the garden’s renowned desert collection holds samples of two-thirds of the world’s 1,500 known cactus species—and preserving this germplasm would be a large contribution to the conservation of this threatened plant family. Fol-gado is very curious about why cac-tus seeds tolerate liquid nitrogen so well and thinks they may hold some physiological secrets, perhaps related to their drought tolerance, that could be key to improving freezing success rates in less hardy plants. Another conservation target centers on magnolia trees: of 230

known species, 200 are endangered. But the project has been a challenge since many wild magnolias, rarely studied, do not have protocols for being grown in sterile lab conditions. “At the beginning, we killed a lot of material,” Folgado confesses. She is working with Panis on the magnolias; after a few rounds of experiments, they have successfully grown a number of species in the lab and hope the work will lead to a way to speed cryopreservation of other wilder and little-studied species. The fact that some plants prove more trouble-some in the lab comes as no surprise to Valerie Pence. An expert on mosses and ferns, Pence has spent nearly three decades leading an innovative plant cryopreservation program at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden. (Along with Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium, the Cincinnati

Zoo is one of a few smaller institutions with cryo-genic programs. Zoos have been leaders because liquid nitrogen has long been used for in-vitro fertilization programs.) Pence fears that plants that are more time-consuming to work with—including many of Folgado’s targets—could easily be left out of conservation efforts. “If it costs so much to deal with them and you could bank 10–20 other species at the same cost, will they get preserved?” Pence asks. “There’s so much to be done, and the resources are limited.” Another plant that’s proven difficult is the avo-cado tree. Avocados are a priority because The Huntington was home to one of California’s first commercial avocado groves (in what is now the visitor parking lot). Many avocado cuttings from the garden have not been growing well in tissue culture, perhaps because of fungi and pest burdens. But Folgado is not giving up. Such challenges seem to drive her even more. To speed her efforts, Folgado has been working long distance with a team in Queensland, Australia, where avocado is also a commodity and where the plants grow better in lab conditions. She helps with experiments there via Skype. In addition to these conservation efforts and international collaborations, the cryopreservation project has one very long-term goal: to preserve The Huntington’s collection for the future in dewars, or double-walled flasks, of liquid nitrogen. This frozen garden could offer a way to propagate critical plants not only into new locations and habitats, but also into the future as well. “If I could have saved seeds or tissue from every plant of importance we ever got,” Folsom muses, patting the cover of one of his thick black binders, “this would not be a book of memories. This would be a library, and I could say, ‘Next year, let’s bring this plant out.’ In 100 years, it would be very sad if someone has not done this.” Folgado shares Folsom’s dream of a parallel frozen garden. And she loves being able to stroll out of her office to observe plants and choose new species to work with. Her problem is that there are so many plants and so little time. The urgency keeps pushing her forward—one plant at a time. There are cycads, too, of course. And rare orchids. “The camellias,” she adds, “are also waiting for us.”

Usha Lee McFarling is a Pulitzer Prize–winning freelance writer based in South Pasadena, Calif.

Aloe fievetii in bloom. Photograph by John Trager.

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huntington.org 19

Frederick Hammersley’s Art against the Machine THE PAINTER’S COMPUTER-GENERATED DRAWINGS WERE GROUNDBREAKING AND PLAYFUL

By James Glisson

Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Frederick Hammersley (1919–2009) studied at Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) and taught at Southern California institutions from 1948 to 1968, when he moved to New Mexico. A focused Huntington exhibition curated by James Glisson, Frederick Hammersley: To Paint without Thinking (Oct. 2017 to Jan. 2018), will look at Hammersley’s lifelong preoccupation with creating art from sets of instructions and rules, and, in particular, his encounter with computer-generated art during the late 1960s.

Frederick Hammersley first came into prominence as one of the four artists in Jules Langsner’s land-mark exhibition Four Abstract Classicists (1959), which began in San Francisco and then traveled to Los Angeles, Belfast, and London. Along with John McLaughlin, Karl Benjamin, and Lorser Feitelson, Hammersley offered an alternative to the lush, gesturally expressive art of the Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. With their machine-like precision and titles that rely on wordplay, Hammersley’s geometric paintings are not about physical or emotional intensity, like the works of Abstract Expressionists; nor are they austere, like the paintings of John McLaughlin. While The Huntington in the past had generally not collected post-war American art, the gift of Andy Warhol’s Small Crushed Campbell’s Soup Can (Beef Noodle) (1962) from the estate of Robert Shapazian in 2010 and subsequent gifts from an anonymous donor in honor of Shapazian have significantly enlarged this area of the collection. Hammersley’s See saw was one of those gifts. When I was consulting the artist’s papers at the Getty Research Institute, it became apparent that a

Left: Frederick Hammersley, sure, 1980. Ink on paper. Gift of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Image © Frederick Hammersley Foundation. Right: Frederick Hammersley, See saw, 1966. Oil on linen. Anonymous gift in memory of Robert Shapazian. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Image © Frederick Hammersley Foundation.


squares in the corners jump forward. With only two colors and two sets of four congruent squares set at 45-degree angles to one another, See saw has the laconic austerity of a Euclidean geometric construction, yet the toggling of the sets of squares makes it into a kinetic illusion, which the work’s title references. The inability of geometry, with its timeless axioms about right angles and circles, to accommodate everyday human perception—the squares are obviously not really moving—speaks to the problem of order and disorder, about systems and when they break down. No system, no set of rules, no protocol can work in every instance in the real world: machines break, unpredictable situations arise, rules turn out to be unworkable, and humans get fed up and revolt. In the late 1960s, Hammersley left Los Angeles to take a teaching position at the University of New Mexico, where the artist Katherine Nash and computer scientist Richard Williams collaborated to make ART 1, among the first programs anywhere designed to be used by visual artists. When I inter-viewed Williams, he recalled teaching art students and Hammersley how to punch cards to create shapes, which required following an exacting set of instructions. A misplaced punch could cause an error. The punch cards were then run through an IBM 360/40 mainframe, and the output was printed on a high-speed IBM 1403 printer. Like a typewriter, the 1403 could print only letters, numbers, punc-tuation, and a limited range of symbols, including #, &, and *. The matrix for the image was 50 rows x 105 columns. Additionally, ART 1 could double print characters to make them bold or cause dif-ferent characters to be printed on top of each other, say A over B. ART 1 could form these characters

into a small range of shapes: rectangles, triangles, ellipses, circles, and curves generated by a loga-rithmic function. Within this constricted set of options, Hammer-sley made a surprising range of shapes and patterns, as the Computer Drawings at The Huntington demonstrate. While many mimic his paintings, they lack solid color blocks; rather, the drawings are diaphanous—light gray veils layered across the page. Hammersley’s calling them “drawings” is significant—the easy explanation is that he followed the lead of Nash and Williams, who in a 1970 essay also called the printed output of ART 1 “drawings.” However, I think Hammersley is signaling their experimental nature. After all, he could have called them “prints,” since they were made on a printer. As with an engraving or woodcut, mul-tiple identical copies could be made easily: just feed the punch card through the IBM 360/40 and out pops another batch. A print—whether a cheap poster, an engraving, or a photograph—is assumed not to be unique. More to the point, drawing is the medium par excellence for artistic experimentation. Pencil and paper in hand, an artist sketches, erases, turns the page clockwise, flips the page over, and starts again. He also pushes against the mechanical nature of the computer drawings. Even if they lack the stray marks and wavering lines left by an errant human hand, they are still fashioned by an artist. As if to remind us that he made these drawings, Hammersley signed each of the 75 prints in The Huntington’s series. Logic, the ability to follow instructions to the letter, and the willingness to learn through trial and error were needed to produce the Computer Drawings. This is not exactly the skill set required

complex set of rules and procedures were used to generate See saw’s deceptively simple composition. To understand Hammersley’s art fully, one needs to know something about his system, and The Huntington’s exhibition Frederick Hammersley: To Paint without Thinking (Oct. 2017–Jan. 2018) will pair finished works in various mediums with archival materials to elucidate his procedures for generating compositions. Early in my research for the exhibition and accompanying book-length catalogue, it became clear to me that Hammersley’s Computer Drawings, created in 1968 and 1969 when he taught at the University of New Mexico, were not outliers but central to unraveling his art’s complexity. After 20 years as an artist who had experimented with rules, Hammersley happened upon a purely rule-based medium, computer art. (After all, a computer program is nothing more than a set of instructions for a computer.) Their indispensable role as windows onto his arcane working process and their impor-tance for the exhibition surely factored into the Frederick Hammersley Foundation’s decision to give The Huntington 75 computer drawings, as well as 30 additional drawings and a rare sculpture—a total of 106 objects. As a result of this extraordi-nary generosity, The Huntington now has broad and representative coverage of Hammersley’s work. Even though Hammersley used rules and pro-cedures to create his art, neither See Saw nor JELLY CENTERS have the tone of schematic engineering diagrams, much less paint-by-number demonstra-tions. They are zany. They follow rules and break them. See saw, for example, visually flips back and forth. First the black diamonds in the center assert themselves, and then they recede as the

Opposite (left): Frederick Hammersley, JELLY CENTERS, 1969. Computer-generated drawing. Gift of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Image © Frederick Hammersley Foundation. Opposite (center): Frederick Hammersley, . ROTISSERIE ., 1969. Computer-generated drawing. Gift of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Image © Frederick Hammersley Foundation. Opposite (right): Frederick Hammersely, TEA TALK, 1969. Computer-generated drawing. Gift of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Image © Frederick Hammersley Foundation. Below (top): Frederick Hammersley, SLEEPING PILL IT’S NOT, 1969. Computer-generated drawing. Gift of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Image © Frederick Hammersley Foundation. Below (bottom): Frederick Hammersley, ENOUGH IS PLENTY, 1969. Computer-generated drawing. Gift of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Image © Frederick Hammersley Foundation.

22 huntington.org

to be a draftsman. However, throughout his life—to keep his eye sharp and his hand dexterous—Hammersley drew figures and portraits, and the Frederick Hammersley Foundation’s gift includes a broad selection of accomplished drawings. There is a red-and-black-chalk anatomical study, an exquisitely simple sketch of what might be a geranium leaf, and a delicately rendered boy’s head, a copy from an Old Master painting. One consistent subject over the years was the artist himself, and The Huntington owns a handful of self-portraits that range from an emphatic line study to a demented ink sketch to a ballpoint pen drawing in which his features emerge from a fog of scribble. In all of them, however deliberately infantile or fuzzy, Hammersley’s long face and broad forehead stand out. The titles of works—such as See saw, SLEEPING PILL IT’S NOT (1969), ENOUGH IS PLENTY (1969), and JELLY CENTERS (1969)—play with words and, as you may have noticed, the rules of capitalization. The paintings’ titles have only the first word capitalized, as if each title were a sentence or a phrase. The Computer Drawings’ titles are all capitals, consistent with the limitations of the IBM printer. The eccentric capital-ization is a friendly reminder of the importance of the titles and the care Hammersley took in selecting them. In some instances, the titles match the image. JELLY CENTERS contains squishy lozenge shapes that could be jellybeans or jelly-filled doughnuts. In other instances, the title refers to its own subject. The two periods on either side of the title . ROTISSERIE . (1969) are like the ends of a spit driven through the word. Imagine the word as a piece of meat rotating. Other titles, however, have no obvious descriptive meaning. SLEEPING PILL is definitely not any kind of pill, sleeping or otherwise. Another series is titled TEA TALK, which seems like a mismatch of “tea time” and “coffee talk.” Its graduated blocks of gray, like a bar chart, have no relationship to talk or tea or their combination. ENOUGH IS PLENTY vaguely resembles a stylized face with two owlish eyes staring out, and the phrase, on reflection, melts into a puddle of nonsense. Enough is enough, but plenty is usually more than enough, right? Or not? Hammersley is pulling our legs and chipping away at the conventional understanding of a title as explicating an artwork’s subject matter or meaning.

Top (left): Frederick Hammersley, untitled, 1941. Ink, conte, and graphite on paper.Gift of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Image © Frederick Hammersley Foundation. Top (right): Frederick Hammersley, untitled, 1974. Graphite on paper. Gift of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Image © Frederick Hammersley Foundation. Bottom: Frederick Hammersley, copy, 1974. Pencil on paper. Gift of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Image © Frederick Hammersley Foundation.

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By calling them drawings, signing them, and adding witty titles, Ham-mersley humanizes machine-made computer printouts. During the 1960s, the possibilities for computer technology were seen as literally endless and only decades away. While some of this was utopian—take The Jetsons (original broadcast 1962–63) or Star Trek (original broadcast 1966–69) with their labor-saving gadgets—other visions of a computerized future were horrific. Perhaps most famously, HAL 9000, the homicidal sociopath computer in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), murders some of the crew before the protagonist, Dr. David Bowman, shuts it down by removing the CPU boards from their cooling tank. One of the film’s motifs is that HAL, as the computer is called, is infallible, unlike the astronauts. Albeit in radically different ways, 2001, an epic about misplaced human trust in the efficacy of technology, and the Computer Drawings, with their wry sensibility, both address an awkward fit between computer systems and flesh-and-blood, error-prone human beings. Despite the user-friendly graphic interfaces of today’s computers, we know the computer is the boss, and we adjust to its constraints. (Try making it do something it isn’t programmed to do, and you discover who’s in charge.) When Hammersley worked with ART 1 to make the drawings now at The Huntington, he could operate only within the program’s protocols. Yet the artist, who turned the rules of geometry into something playful in his paintings, impishly subverted the computer’s rigidity in his Computer Drawings. An IBM main-frame may have produced the drawings, but only a human could appreciate their lace-like patterns and humorous titles.

James Glisson is the Bradford and Christine Mishler Assistant Curator of American Art at The Huntington.

Top: Frederick Hammersley, untitled, 1974–80(?). Ballpoint pen on computer paper. Gift of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Image © Frederick Hammersley Foundation. Bottom (right): Frederick Hammersley, light switch, 1988. Lithograph. Gift of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Image © Frederick Hammersley Foundation. Bottom (left): Frederick Hammersley, like it, 1978. Ink on paper. Gift of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Image © Frederick Hammersley Foundation.

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Mulholland’s Fatal DamTWO HISTORIANS ASSESS MULHOLLAND’S RESPONSIBILITY FOR ONE OF THE NATION’S WORST CIVIL ENGINEERING DISASTERS

By Norris Hundley, Jr. and Donald C. Jackson

lessons learned

Top: William Mulholland, not long after the completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, as he appeared in the Complete Report on Construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, 1916. Bottom: St. Francis Dam, around 1927. From Donald C. Jackson’s collection of historic dam images.

In the critically acclaimed book Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster, historians Norris Hundley, Jr. and Donald C. Jackson provide a detailed account and analysis of the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, which was located 45 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles near the present-day city of Santa Clarita. In the early hours of March 13, 1928, a massive wall of water flooded the Santa Clara Valley, leaving roughly 400 people dead in its wake before reaching the Pacific Ocean at dawn. Considered the worst civil engineering failure in the history of California and the state’s second-worst disaster, in terms of lives lost, the collapse of the dam ended the storied career of Mulholland, the man who earlier had masterminded construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. To contextualize Mulhol-land’s responsibility for the dam’s failure, the authors relied extensively on items in The Huntington’s collections, including the only known copy of the transcript of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s In-quest into the disaster. In addition, roughly a third of the book’s more than 150 illustrations are drawn from The Huntington’s holdings. By focusing on the design of the dam and its relation to dam engineering practice in the 1920s, the authors build a convincing case that Mulholland himself ultimately was responsible for the dam’s collapse. Describing the dam’s construction and disintegration in precise detail, as well as the devastating impact

of the flood on Santa Clara Valley residents, they also explore such issues as the political dimensions of water-control technology and dam safety legislation in 20th-century California. Most importantly, they probe Mul-holland’s background, training, and the professional and political context of his work as Los Angeles’ most prominent hydraulic engineer. The following passage is from the book’s prologue.

“A Misty Haze over Everything”

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retired for the night in their modest frame bungalow. It was one of a group of houses built for married employees of the Bureau of Power and Light, tucked in a small ravine off the main San Fran-cisquito Canyon. They lay close by the city’s recently built St. Francis Dam. Other city employees and transient workers lived in bungalows adjoining the city’s San Francisquito Power House No. 1, about five miles above the dam, or clustered near San Francisquito Power House No. 2, located a mile and a half downstream from the reservoir. The married employees’ com-pound where the Curtises lived lay but a short walk west from Power House No. 2. Also residing in the married employees’ compound were Ray Rising, his wife, Julia, and their three young daughters, Delores, Eleanor, and Adaline. Rising had worked for the city for nine months; Lillian’s husband had been on the job a few months more. Neither family had been living in San Francisquito Canyon when the St. Francis Dam was completed in May 1926, but the Curtises were in residence when the reservoir, with a capacity of more than 12 billion gallons, came close to filling in May 1927. And—not quite a year later, in early March 1928—both families called the canyon home when water first filled the reservoir and rose within three inches of the dam’s spillway crest. “Everything seemed per-fectly safe,” recalled Lillian Curtis. Seconds after midnight on March 13, Lillian was startled by a strange apparition in the night sky. “I sat up in bed and looked out the windows toward the dam, which was northeast of us, and I seemed to see a misty haze over everything.” Nearby, Ray Rising was jolted awake by a roaring sound that reminded him of torna-does he had experienced as a youth in Minnesota. He grew fearful about what might be occurring at the dam. Lillian Curtis was now also “hearing a strange noise,” and she grabbed her husband and screamed, “The dam has broken!” A 125-foot wall of water, moving at about 18 miles per hour, soon engulfed Power House No. 2, demolishing the plant and killing the on-duty crew. Floodwaters surged up the ravine where the Curtis and Rising families lived. Lillian, several months pregnant, grabbed her three-and-a-half-year-old son, Daniel. In turn, they were picked up by her husband who, after pushing them through a window with orders to “run up the hill,” went back for Daniel’s two sisters, Mazie and Marjorie. Lillian never saw Lyman or her daughters alive again. For the moment, she concentrated on getting to higher ground, a punishing task amid the brush, silt, and debris filling the rising water. “Mommy,” her son called out, “don’t let the water get us.” With the boy in her arms, she persevered, telling herself, “I must get him out.” Breaking free from the tempest near the crest of the hill, she heard a voice. Convinced it was her husband, she crawled over the knoll to safety. The voice she heard was not her husband’s, but Ray Rising’s. Rising later recalled that his wife had shouted, “What’s that—a wind?” Soon “the sound grew louder and louder, then we heard trees snapping. We went to the door and looked out. Water was coming. We hurried back to get the children. When we got back to

Top (left to right): Lyman and Lillian Curtis, soon after their wedding in Bakersfield in 1921. Lyman worked for the municipally owned Bureau of Power and Light, and he and his family resided near San Francisquito Power House No. 2. Lillian survived the flood, but Lyman perished along with their two young daughters. Photograph credit: SCVHistory.com. Bottom (left to right): Mazie, Daniel, and Marjorie Curtis in happier times, before the St. Francis Dam disaster. The two Curtis daughters drowned in the flood but Daniel was miraculously saved by his mother. Both mother and son attended the ceremonies in 1978 marking the 50th anniversary of the disaster. Photograph credit: SCVHistory.com.

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Cole Porter NightMICHAEL FEINSTEIN, conductorCATHERINE RUSSELL, soloist NICK ZIOBRO, soloist

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the door and tried to open it we could do nothing, as the force of the water held it shut.” Then he felt himself “thrown into the air with a force like from an explosion,” the water knocking him aside and crushing the timber bungalow. Fighting for air in the blackness and entangled in electrical wires and an uprooted tree, Rising somehow found ref-uge atop a floating roof. Holding tight until the impromptu raft backed into a canyon wall, he jumped to safety, all the while shouting for his wife and children. But they were gone, joined in death by 23 of his fellow city workers and 42 of their family members who, for at least a few months, had created and shared the community at Power House No. 2. The settlement’s only survivors were Lillian Curtis, her son, Daniel, and Ray Rising.

Top left: A low-lying section of Santa Paula, Calif., after the inundation. From Donald C. Jackson’s collection of historic dam images. Center left: Drawing of the downstream side of the dam, showing the placement of surviving blocks within the original structure. Not all remnants could be identified, but because the dimensions of the stepped downstream face varied depending on the elevation in the original structure, it was possible to link many of the surviving pieces to a precise location. Failure of the dam started along the lower east abutment, near block 35. From Western Construction News, June 1928. Bottom left: Detail view of block 5, with broken mica schist deposited on top of the block. Richard Courtney Collection, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Bottom right: Block 5 is visible in the lower-left foreground. Toppled to the right is block 2. This large remnant, along with blocks 3 and 4 (not pictured), sheared off from the surviving center section (block 1) late in the flood. Richard Courtney Collection, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

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The torrent sowed death and destruction throughout the night. Not until daybreak did it finally wash into the Pacific Ocean south of Ventura, leaving in its wake millions of dollars in property damage and some 400 lost lives. By then, William Mulholland—the man responsible for building the dam—had been roused from his bed in Los Angeles and driven 45 miles to the site of the now empty reservoir. Acclaimed as a master engineer for his success in creating the modern city’s expansive water supply system, the 72-year-old Mulholland had long reigned supreme in the world of Southern California water. But now, as Lillian Curtis and Ray Rising—along with hundreds of law enforcement and civic officials, citizen volunteers, and family members with ties to the Santa Clara Valley—set out in search of survivors, it would be left to Mul-holland to explain how his once great dam had turned to rubble.

Norris Hundley, Jr. (1935–2013) was a professor of American history at UCLA and longtime editor of Pacific Historical Quarterly. He also was the author of Dividing the Waters: A Century of Controversy between the United States and Mexico (1966), Water and the West: The Colorado River Compact and the Politics of Water in the American West (1975), and The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 1770s–1990s (1992).

Donald C. Jackson is the Cornelia F. Hugel Professor of History at Lafayette College and was a 2012 Trent R. Dames Fellow in Civil Engineering History at The Huntington. His books include Great Ameri-can Bridges and Dams (1988), Building the Ultimate Dam: John S. Eastwood and the Control of Water in the West (1995), Big Dams of the New Deal Era: A Confluence of Engineering and Politics (2006), coauthored with David Billington, and Pastoral and Monumental: Dams, Postcards, and the American Landscape (2013).

Left: In the company of his chauffeur George Vejar, a weary Mulholland walked away from the St. Francis site in March 1928. The disaster weighed heavily on him—the Los Angeles Herald noted that he appeared to have aged some 10 years in the traumatic days after the collapse. Mulholland lived on for another seven years, but after the flood he was no longer a dominant force in Los Angeles or in the world of hydraulic engineering. Peirson Hall Papers, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Right: A reviewer for the Wall Street Journal has written that Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster “does something unexpected. It opens a new perspective onto William Mulholland… [bringing him] to life in all his sharp-elbowed, stubborn glory, saddened and perplexed by the St. Francis Dam debacle yet prideful until the end.” The book, copublished by The Huntington and University of California Press in 2015, is available online at theHuntingtonStore.org.

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BRITISH AND EUROPEAN HISTORY FROM THE 16TH TO THE 18TH CENTURY

In Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Mark G. Hanna, associate professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, explores the often overt support of sea marauders in maritime communities from the inception of England’s burgeoning empire to its administrative consolidation. Although traditionally depicted as swashbuckling adventurers on the high seas, pirates played a crucial role on land, according to Hanna, contributing to commercial development and the economic infrastructure of port towns.

David Cressy, research professor in arts and humanities at Claremont Graduate University, tells the story of the reign of Charles I through the lives of his ordinary subjects in Charles I and the People of England (Oxford University Press, 2015). The first major attempt to connect the political, constitutional, and religious history of the period with the experience and aspirations of the rest of the population, this book mines a broad range of archival and printed sources, including court proceedings, ballads, sermons, speeches, letters, diaries, petitions, and proclamations.

In Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Vera Keller, assistant professor of history at Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, follows the shared development of modern science and modern political and economic thought by tracing one key political stratagem for linking human desires to the advancement of knowledge: the collaborative wish list. Focusing on such authors as Jakob Bornitz and Francis Bacon, Keller shows how the early modern pursuit of desiderata fostered an ideal of sustained collaborative research.

AMERICAN HISTORY FROM THE 18TH TO THE 20TH CENTURY

David L. Preston, historian of early America and Westvaco Professor of National Security Studies at The Citadel, gives the fullest account of French and Indian perspectives on General Edward Braddock’s campaign through the wilderness in Braddock’s Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2015). Preston, who grew up in western Pennsylvania, where the battle took place in 1755, includes extensive fieldwork on the campaign’s geography and terrain, and offers new manuscript evidence regarding Braddock’s fateful expedition.

In George Washington’s Journey: The President Forges a New Nation (Simon & Schuster, 2016), T.H. Breen, a James Marsh Professor at-large at the University of Vermont and author of 11 books on U.S. history, re-creates a series of tours that Washington organized during his first years in office, visiting scores of communities from New Hampshire to Georgia. The book explores, among other topics, the goals of the trip, the parades and festivals organized in Washington’s honor, and the role of women in politics out-of-doors.

Lori Flores’s Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale University Press, 2016) chronicles how Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in California’s Salinas Valley organized for their rights in the decades leading up to the strikes led by Cesar Chavez. An assistant pro-fessor of history at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, Flores concentrates on how different groups of Mexicans—U.S. born, guest worker, and undocumented immigrant—confronted and interacted with one another during this period.

A SAMPLING OF BOOKS BASED ON RESEARCH IN THE COLLECTIONS

In Print

Keller

Many studies relate modern science to modern political and economic thought. Using one shift in order to explain the other, however, has begged the question of modernity’s origins. New scientific and political reasoning emerged simultaneously as controversial forms of probabilistic reasoning. Neither could ground the other. They both rejected logical systems in favor of shifting, incomplete, and human-oriented forms of knowledge which did not meet accepted standards of speculative science. This study follows their shared development by tracing one key political stratagem for linking human desires to the advancement of knowledge: the collaborative wish list. Highly controversial at the beginning of the seventeenth century, charismatic desiderata lists spread across Europe, often deployed against traditional sciences. They did not enter the academy for a century but eventually so shaped the deep structures of research that today this once controversial genre appears to be a musty and even pedantic term of art.

V E R A K E L L E R (PhD Princeton) is an Assistant Professor of History at the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including most recently the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography and the Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

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Cover image: Johann Matthias Faber, Parthenis novus orbis noviter detectus, Ms 863, Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Printed in the United States of America

Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725Vera Keller

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All Mixed UpGRAB THE SCISSORS AND RE-CREATE A 19TH-CENTURY PARLOR GAME

By Kate Lain

back page

Among the extensive holdings of the Huntington Library is a curious collection of beautifully printed 19th-century games, puzzles, and toys—fascinating artifacts that speak to diverse areas of study, including histories of color lithography, consumerism, child development, and educational play. Included in that collection is a box of Criss Cross Spelling Slips, produced by McLoughlin Brothers of New York; in 1885, it sold for 50 cents. Under the wood-and-paper box top are six sets of eight narrow cardboard slips, each one printed with two letters and a portion of an illustration, and each set depicting a different wild animal when assembled correctly. As depicted on the box top shown above, the strips also could be used to build structures. It was a puzzle, spelling game, and construction set—all in one! We have reproduced one of the sets of slips for you to cut out and rearrange. Time to play and spell!

Kate Lain is the new media developer at The Huntington.

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