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THE CALIFORNIA RANCH HOUSE

Cliff May

Interviewed by Marlene L. Laskey

Completed under the auspices

of the

Oral History Program

University of California

Los Angeles

This manuscript is hereby made available for research
purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript,
including the right to publication, are reserved to the
University Library of the University of California,
Los Angeles. No part of the manuscript may be quoted
for publication without the written permission of the
University Librarian of the University of California,
Los Angeles.

CONTENTS

Introduction vii

Interview History xii

TAPE NUMBER: I, Side One (April 14, 1982) 1

Genealogy of May's maternal ancestors, the
Estudillo family — The Estudillo house and the
functional quality of early California adobe
ranch architecture--Memories of his aunt Jane
Magee and Las Flores Ranch--The process of
proving land ownership after California's
annexation--May ' s extended family in
Calif ornia--Las Flores Ranch--Funct ional
quality of ranch and barn architecture--
Ramona's marriage place.

TAPE NUMBER: I, Side Two (May 12, 1982) 36

May's paternal grandfather, Charles E. May —
May's father, John Clifford May--May's boyhood
neighborhood in San Diego--Irving Gill houses
in San Diego--Basement and layout of May's
childhood home--Never being able to please his
father — His brother, Henry C. May, wants to
make money--Prominent citizens of San Diego —
May's musical interests as a youth.

TAPE NUMBER: II, Side One (May 12, 1982) 73

Learns to play the piano--Enters college — The
stock market crash of 1929--Begins designing
and building furniture — Designs and builds his
first house.

[Second Part] (June 9, 1982) 86

The modern California ranch house--Importance
of a designer to an architect--Few regulations
and low costs when May first started building--
Building styles which May considers poor
architecture--His low opinion of Le Corbusier
and the International style--May's first use of
the pullman lavatory--His use of cement floors.

TAPE NUMBER: II, Side Two (June 9, 1982) 115

Importance of rock cushion in cement floors--
The problem of working with clients who do not
want to take the designer's advice — Builds a
house for John A. Smith and Smith offers to put
up money for May to build houses in Los Angeles —
May builds a house for his own family — Various
houses May built in San Diego — His association
with John A. Smith — Difficulties with the Board
of Architectural Examiners — Feuds between
architects and builders — Riviera Ranch
development — Decision to build good houses
rather than cheap houses.

TAPE NUMBER: III, Side One (June 9, 1982) / 154

Becomes acquainted with Paul Frankl's
furniture — Building houses for Frederic M.
Blow — Building for John Galvin.

[Second Part] (July 21, 1982) 163

Early California ranch architecture — The
Monterey box-style house — Maximizing space on
building lots by building up to the property
line — Different ways of disposing of garbage —
Need to adapt each house to the client — Need
for architect to examine the site before
building — The designing of Balboa Park by the
Olmstead brothers and Bertram Goodhue — Other
builders of ranch houses.

TAPE NUMBER: IV, Side One (September 15, 1982) .... 190

The spreading of the ranch house idea —
Innovations in May's houses — Costs of ranch
house construction — Puts out the book Western
Ranch Houses with Sunset magazine — May's
"Pacesetter House" featured in House Beautiful —
Other architects begin copying May's houses —
The need for larger living rooms — Mandalay (CM
No. 5) originally seemed too big, now does not
seem big enough — House and Garden features
Mandalay--May 's development of one-room houses
with movable partitions.

TAPE NUMBER: IV, Side Two (September 15, 1982) .... 230

Advantages of the open plan which is not
divided up into a number of rooms--The Skylight
House--May's designs plagiar ized--Building
prefabricated houses in the fifties.

[Second Part] (September 30, 1982) . . . 240

Copyright laws and architecture--Development of
the nail-on sash--Lawsuits May has initiated
against builders who copied his plans — Lawsuit
against Fletcher Jones.

TAPE NUMBER: V, Side One (September 30, 1982) 269

May's assistance for architects with legal
problems--General Motors' and DeVilbliss's
unauthorized use of May houses in advertisements.

[Second Part] (January 13, 1983) .... 278

May's opinion that famous people make good
clients--Des igning an apartment building for
Shirley MacLaine and her husband--May ' s
involvement with low-cost housing across the
country — Low-cost housing and the problems with
building regulat ions--Af ter designing low-cost
housing. May returns to designing more
expensive single-family homes--Designs the
Mondavi Winery--Mandalay .

TAPE NUMBER: V, Side Two (January 13, 1983) 308

Houses with movable part it ions--Problems in
making skylights too big — Need for space in
houses--Need to observe a few basic design
rules--Walk-in ref r igerators--Indoor swimming
pools--Means of heating homes--May's music
room — May's book collecting — Antique
f urniture--Flying — Tendency for artists' work
to improve as artists get older — The house for
Joe W. Brown that was never built.

Index 352

INTRODUCTION

"I just built one kind of house ... I just had one
style," says Cliff May, the foremost exponent of the
California ranch house style. In terms of sheer numbers
of buildings credited to him alone, he ranks as one of
the most prolific figures in architecture to have emerged
in California in the twentieth century. He has
personally designed and/or built over 1,000 homes and
commercial properties. His work can be found all over
the United States, in Latin America, the Caribbean,
Europe, Australia, and in the Philippines. Beyond that
his designs for low-cost ranch homes were used in the
construction of at least 18,000 houses built by licensed
contractors after the end of World War II. May's work is
noted for its high artistic quality and individuality.
He is generally considered to be the "author" of the
California ranch house style, the designer who first
enunciated its basic principles and then developed the
ideas over the years. The popularity of the contemporary
ranch house and its rapid spread out of California as one
of the basic styles used in suburban residential design
largely derive from the pioneering work of Cliff May.

Clifford M. May was born in San Diego, California,

vi i

on August 29, 1908. He is a sixth-generation
Californian; on his mother's side, he is descended from
Spanish settlers who came to California at the end of the
eighteenth century. Much of his childhood was spent on
the Santa Margarita y Las Flores ranch in northern San
Diego County, operated by his aunt Jane Magee. There he
grew up with the traditional adobe ranch house
architecture of his ancestors which he constantly drew
upon for inspiration in his own designs. May has had no
formal architectural training, nor is he a licensed
architect. He is a building designer and contractor who
learned his trade through practice. He planned at first
for a musical career and was the leader of a popular jazz
orchestra in the 1920s. Because of the jazz group's
regular radio broadcasts. May is now a member of Pioneer
Pacific Broadcasters. He attended San Diego State
College from 1929 to 1931 and primarily took business
courses. He withdrew from college without taking a
degree and began designing furniture.

After meeting real estate developer R. C. Lichty,
May gained the opportunity to design and build a home in
the Talmadge Park section of San Diego in 1932. He then
designed and built over fifty homes in San Diego for
Lichty, O. U. Miracle, and George Marston. In 1937,
oilman John A. Smith invited May to move to Los Angeles

VI 1 1

and establish a joint partnership to construct homes
there. In addition to numerous homes for individual
clients, May developed, designed, and built the Riviera
Ranch and Sullivan Canyon Ranch projects in West Los
Angeles, and Woodacres in Santa Monica.

His ranch house designs have won awards from the
National Association of Home Builders in 1947, 1952,
1953. In 1948, one of his homes was featured as a
"Pacesetter House" in House Beautiful, and in 1950 Better
Homes and Gardens selected another of his ranch houses

for the magazine's exhibit on the Avenue of American
Homes at the Chicago Lake Front Fair. May received the
Award of Merit for Residential Design and Construction
from House and Home in 1956, the "Hallmark House" award
from House and Garden in 1958, and the Builder of the
Year Award from the Congress of Building Contractors
Association of California in 1963. He was staff
consultant for construction to House Beautiful from 1946
to 1952, president of the Los Angeles division of the
Building Contractors Association from 1945 to 1946,
director of the division from 1940 to 1950, and member of
the Board of Directors of the University of Southern
California Architectural Guild from 1974 to 1976. May is
the author of two books. Sunset Western Ranch Houses
(1946) and Western Ranch Houses By Cliff May (1958).

Among May's better known buildings are the Mondavi
Winery and offices in Napa County, California (the
design, a reworking and modernizing of California Mission
motifs, is featured on the label of Mondavi wines), the
Sunset Magazine and Book buildings in Menlo Park,
California, the Saga office complex also in Menlo Park,
and Hotel Cabo San Lucas in Baja California. Some of the
more famous private homes designed by May are the
Frederic Blow house in Los Angeles, the John A. Smith
ranch in La Habra, California, the K. S. "Boots" Adams
home in Bartlesvi 1 le , Oklahoma, additions to Rancho
Tajiguas in Goleta, California, and his own home,
Mandalay, in Los Angeles.

May's influence has been felt not so much in
particular buildings as in the development of an idiom.
His buildings illustrate a rejection of the box-style
approach found in traditional American and Northern
European architecture in favor of an integration between
outdoors and indoors that draws on the Mediterranean
heritage of Spanish and Mexican California. He favors
single-floor dwellings, the use of natural materials, the
arrangement of rooms and openings to tie together indoor
room space with patios, courtyards, and gardens to form a
single aesthetic and living whole. As May states in this
interview, "the floor plans are the way you live in

California." (p. 157) Cross-ventilation, skylights,
sliding-glass doors, and the use of wings all serve his
oft-stated goal of "bringing outdoor living indoors."

Cliff May has also been an innovator. He has
developed new flooring, heating, cooling, lighting, and
wall systems. He is the first home builder to use the
pullman lavatory. He and his partner Chris Choate
designed the nail-on sash. May and Choate were among the
first after the Second World War to experiment with
modular and prefabricated construction.

Despite May's many accomplishments and achievements,
his work has not always been treated seriously by the
architectural profession. Similarly, May, a self-made
man, in this oral history interview, freely discusses his
low opinion of the work and theories of several
internationally renowned architects. For May, the
purpose of building design and construction remains
always ease and comfort of living. He eschews principles
of formal symmetry for a flowing design that is arranged
around the needs of the men, women, and children who make
their home in a Cliff May house.

INTERVIEW HISTORY

INTERVIEWER:

Marlene L. Laskey, Interviewer, UCLA Oral History
Program. B.A. , Political Science; has researched,
organized, and led architectural tours of Los Angeles.

TIME AND SETTING OF INTERVIEWS:

Place : May's office in Los Angeles, California.

Dates; Preliminary discussions were held by telephone
during March and April of 1982. The recorded interview
sessions took place on April 14, May 12, June 9, July 21,
September 15, 30, 1982, and January 13, 1983.

Time of day, length of sessions, and total number of
recording hours; All sessions were held in the
afternoon. The duration of the individual sessions ranged
from between thirty minutes to one hour twenty-five
minutes. A total of six and a half hours of conversation
was recorded.

Persons present during the interview: May and Laskey.

CONDUCT OF THE INTERVIEW;

The interview was designed to follow a generally
chronological format, moving from May's childhood to his
present activities. This chronological order is
frequently interrupted by May's own associations, which
move from subject to subject as one remembrance triggers
another.

Due to May's busy schedule, several weeks or even months
elapsed between sessions. Since it seemed that future
appointments would be even more difficult to arrange,
Laskey decided to conclude the series in one extensive
session which could tie up many loose ends. As a result,
the last session covers a wide range of topics and no
longer follows the chronological format which
characterized the preceding interview sessions.

EDITING:

Transcribing and editing of this interview were

Xll

complicated by the poor sound quality of the original tape
recordings. Staff of the UCLA Oral History program
checked a verbatim transcript of the tapes against the
original recordings and edited for punctuation,
paragraphing, spelling, and verification of proper
nouns. Words and phrases inserted by the editors have
been bracketed. The final manuscript remains in the same
order as the taped material.

In June 1983 the edited transcript, along with a list of
queries and names requiring identification, was given to
May. He made a number of changes and additions, which are
indicated in the manuscript. He returned the approved
transcript in December 1983.

Richard Candida Smith, principal editor, reviewed the
transcript and wrote the introduction. Other front matter
and the index were prepared by Teresa Barnett, editorial
assistant.

SUPPORTING DOCUMENTS:

The original tapes and edited transcript of the interview
are in the University Archives and are available under the
regulations governing the use of permanent, noncurrent
records of the university. Interview records and research
materials are on file in the office of the Oral History
Program.

XI 1 1

TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE
APRIL 14, 1982

LASKEY: Mr. May, it seems reasonable that, since you're a
sixth-generation Californian, we start the interview with
some detailed information about your rather remarkable
family history.

MAY: I was first aware that my family had a California
history by my mother, Beatrice Magee May, who was very
proud of her family. She was the daughter of Victoria de
Pedrorena, and Victoria de Pedrorena goes back through her
mother, Maria Antonia Estudillo, three generations to Jose
Antonio Estudillo, who was born in Monterey in 1805. He
built Ramona • s marriage place as his own home. It's said
that he built it in about 1820. I think that's been
debated, and it has never been pinned exactly. [tape
recorder turned off]

I'll talk in a little more detail about the Estudillo
house later, but I'd like to finish off the family tree.
Jose Antonio Estudillo was born in October 1805. He died
in July 1855, in San Diego. His father was Captain Jose
Maria Estudillo, who came from Spain and was commandante in
charge of the San Diego Presidio and Chapel in 1803. Prior
to that, he had been the same at the presidio at Monterey.
LASKEY: Did he come from Spain?
MAY: He came from Spain.

LASKEY: With the army or the navy, do you think?
MAY: No, no. To the best of my recollection, he married
Maria Horcasitas, who would have been my great-great-
grandmother. Then they begat Maria Victoria Dominguez, who
was married to Jose Antonio Estudillo. One of their
descendants was Maria Antonia Estudillo, who married Miguel
Telisfero de Pedrorena, who came from Spain. I do remember
my mother telling me that my great-grandfather came from an
illustrious family in Spain, and she gave me quite a few
papers on the background. I do know that she was very
proud of the fact that he had attended Oxford University in
England.

LASKEY: This was your great-great-grandfather?
MAY: No, my great-grandfather, Miguel de Pedrorena. Their
daughter, [of] Miguel de Pedrorena and Maria Estudillo, was

Victoria de Pedrorena, who was born in July 1842, in San

Diego, and who died in August 1886.

She married Henry Magee, who was at that time a
lieutenant with the New York First Volunteers, who volun-
teered to go out to California just before the gold strike,
the gold rush in 1849. He met Victoria de Pedrorena, my
mother's mother, and they were married.

They lived on the ranch, my mother's family property.
The family tree says that it was in the North County, which
meant the Palomar and Temecula and Las Flores Ranches. The

Las Floras Ranch I'll also talk about later. It's one of
the great ranches in California and extended into three
counties which later became a part of the state of Califor-
nia. It's the biggest parcel of the famous Santa Margarita
Ranch. The full title of the Santa Margarita is the Santa
Margarita y Las Flores. My generation, the whole family
was raised on the ranch, including me, of which more later.

Back for a moment to the Estudillo house. It was one
of the first houses, substantial houses, built in San
Diego. It was of adobe walls; they were all three- and
four-feet thick. They were made out of native material,
like adobe, of course. The tile roofs were made of mud and
were baked and burned in the ovens. The construction was
what we call shed roofs. It was hard in those days to make
what we call valleys, where two sloping roofs intersect on
an inside corner. And [it was built in] the U-shape
[around a patio]. As a result of the primitive way of shed
roofs, shed roofs made the general architectural scheme of
the building. The patios were paved with handmade brick,
which were burned also. [tape recorder turned off]

In spite of the newly-come-to-the-scene architects
that say functional architecture and native building
materials are the only way to go, the real truth of the
matter is that all of the old California architecture was
built that way--f unctional . The only building material

they had was what they dug out of the ground. The only
thing they had to determine the width of the buildings was
the length of the poles they could cut out of the trees in
the nearby Cuyamaca mountains or in any other area that a
building of that time was built. The building materials
were what we would call native materials in the entire
house, even to the point where, except for glass, which was
imported, the rafters and the windows were hewn out of pine
from the Cuyamaca mountains. The building fit the contours
beautifully. There was no grading done. They merely
sloped the building, stepped the building, as the ground
fell away. The drainage took care of itself this way.

One of the interesting things is that the first
sanitation law that pre-Calif ornia had was that every
building had to be whitewashed once a year. That's why you
get lime white adobe buildings. The real true adobe
buildings, all the old ranch buildings, you'll find have
coat after coat of whitewash, almost to the point where it
becomes like a quarter-inch thick plaster that breaks off.
LASKEY: Why was that?

MAY: Well, the lime in whitewash is a disinfectant, and
they used it to disinfect the buildings. They had animals
that would wet against the buildings, and the men would,
and the splash and the plain dirt of the community — It
would be like we would paint our buildings; now we hose

them off. But if you hose an adobe building off — they
didn't have hoses in the first place--the adobes wouldn't
take the wet. That's why they had the big overhangs to
take the water away from the foundations and away from the
adobe wall itself. But, anyhow, the whitewash was a part
of old California. When you see the newcomers come to
California and make an adobe house and leave it natural
brown brick, you know that they don't know what they're
doing. [laughter] To be really functional and fit the
environment, the old way was the right way.

Several other houses were built in San Diego at the
same time. But the one that I think lasted and set the
pace for many of the ranches to come was the Estudillo
house, although many of these houses were building at the
same time. Yet there is a unity to them all. There was no
architect who designed them. They were built just for the
function of housing the people. They were made U-shaped in
most cases or around a courtyard completely for protection.
It is said of the Estudillo house that they could even open
the patio and drive the animals into the courtyard if they
had to in case of attack. Many other ranches were built
completely that way. The Santa Margarita was. [It stood]
on a big hilltop overlooking the whole valley before it,
just like an old feudal castle, an old fort. It had a
completely enclosed patio on four sides. It was built on

this knoll with a big river that came down behind it and
the river going around the building, which was on this
great giant knoll. You could see people coming for miles
and miles.

I'm digressing now, but I can remember as a child
going horseback from the Las Flores Ranch where my aunt
lived to over on the coast about ten miles north of the
present Oceanside. We'd go by horse and buggy, and riders
would lead and follow. It would be an all-day trip with
the surrey with two horses and three or four people. Two
kids in the back and two up front, maybe three, and a
horseman or two. We'd take a lunch and stop along the way.
It was a full-day's trip. There were no automobiles that I
remember. The first automobile that I remember that came
to the Las Flores ranch was an old Overland car which had a
top that went up and down like a convertible. It had old
isinglass things that you put up in the rain. It had
isinglass screens; no windshield wipers; no modern day self-
starters — you cranked the car.

My aunt Jane Magee , who was my mother's sister, was
the oldest of ten children of Victoria de Pedrorena and
Lieutenant Henry Magee. They both died, as the records
show, very young. This left my Aunt Jane, who was around
thirty-two, to raise the whole young family of mine. And
with her, oh, I guess you would call it pioneer

perseverance and her ability, she had made a life time
arrangement with Richard and Jerome O'Neil of the Santa
Margarita to farm the land, the Las Flores Ranch. She
raised "all the children" to womanhood and young manhood,
and they all became very successful.

Aunt Jane never married. Her favorite song was "Thank
God I'm Free, No Wedding Bells for Me." Poor soul, she had
to spend her life raising the children and then the next
generation of nieces and nephews. But she loved them very
much. Dear Aunt Jane, of course, then she became the hero
of all the nephews; there must have been twelve nephews and
nieces. Every summer we would go up to the ranch, and she
would take care of us. We would wreak all kinds of damage
on the place. From stealing the apple pies from the help,
to breaking into the storeroom to eat the food, and gener-
ally making trouble of ourselves as young people did in
those days.

Everybody had his own riding horse on the ranch. In
that day they had no Caterpillar tractors to run the
machinery and to do the farming. Las Flores was a lima
bean ranch. For power they used horses that pulled big
wagons. The wagons would go around picking up the stacked
dried beans and haul them to the threshing machines. Other
horses would drive wheels which would crush — or thresh — the
beans out of the bean pods. Very, very primitive. I have

pictures of the old ranch with nothing but horses. That
required, of course, stables, and, of course, having
stables you had mangers, and mangers had hay. In the hay,
you had the chickens, and you had to pick up the eggs. It
was just a real country life that all of us went through.
I say all of us; I'm speaking of my generation now.

I was born in 1908 in San Diego. Born in the house
that my dad built for Mother. I have no recollection of my
first trip to Los Flores, but I have pictures that tend to
make me recollect going to the ranch on the train. The
train was about an hour-and-a-half ride from San Diego.

The trains in those days would stop any place that you
had told the engineer to stop; so he would stop either at
the Don station or the Las Flores station. You would get
off, and then you would be picked up by horse and buggy and
taken down to the big ranch house at Las Flores. Those
were grand days that we will never have again. Never! If
you go out to Australia they still have electricity from
generators, and airplanes. But those days we had nothing
but the train. Later we had a Greyhound bus that went from
San Diego to Los Angeles, and they would stop wherever you
wanted to stop. There were no halfway houses, no restau-
rants on the highway. In 1912, there were no highways!
The highways were just two-lanes paved. The two-lane
highway went through Las Flores Ranch and is still there.

It is used for the bike riders now, my son Michael tells
me. So they use the old highway to get to many places
without going on the freeway. I know that they get through
the whole Santa Margarita Ranch on this old two-way drive
from San Juan Capistrano to Oceanside.

The ranch was a great experience. The Santa Margarita
was the biggest of the [ranches]. It was a whole ranch,
and it went into three counties. The Santa Margarita y Las
Flores was in Orange County, Riverside County, and San
Diego County. It was primarily a beef-raising ranch, and
that came back from the days of Pio Pico, when the main
trade industry in California was rawhide exports from the
beef that they had raised. There was no cannery or no ice,
so the beef had to be consumed. The hide was the only
export that they had at that time. All the ranches raised
beef and hides. There's lots of history on that. At Dana
Point, they used to dump the hides over the cliffs. That's
all history; most people know about that.

All the old families, because of their early arriving
upon the scene far before the Americans, had their own
ranches. There is a great history [with] the Indians being
chased out by the Spaniards, and then the white people
tried to chase the Spaniards out. But upon the signing of
the declaration of California independence, California
through the new federal government set up a land

reclamation for all settlers. I think [this] is all
history, but I will pass on it briefly. The land council
was formed — the Land Commission. Then you had to prove the
use of your land. You gave proof by the house that you
lived in; how long you had been there; by witnesses who
said they knew how long you had been there; where you were
born. Where-you-were-born records were involved. And
many, many other items, such as boundaries, if you could
identify boundaries, such and such a boundary. The bound-
aries used to be a mountain top or a tree with a big crack
in it. So many times there wasn't anything to prove.

Many families got dispossessed. Many families were
able to prove up, and I recall my mother saying how her
mother, Victoria de Pedrorena, who had married Lieutenant
Magee, had her own separate property, which, I guess, the
property laws came back from old Spain and the wife —
LASKEY: Excuse me, Mr. May. Victoria had her property
separate from Henry?

MAY: Separate from Henry. It must have come from the old
land because it was granted to her; so, as I say, it was
her separate property. I have papers that were given to me
by friends or Mother, I can't tell which. But most people
knew that I was the oldest son of the May family, so I did
get more of this kind of paper to take care of. I've taken
the responsibility of passing it on to the others. But the

papers I had on the land showed Mother's holdings which
were proved up — I guess that would be word — by the Land
Commission and given her grant and recorded at the San
Diego county recorder were the El Cajon Rancho, which is
the biggest [and] is all of the land east of San Diego, one
of the great ranches. My dad told me one time how he had
looked it up on the books of the county assessor's office —
county recorder's office. It was there. I've never seen
it although I do have copies from the documents.

Later I was reading an historical book. Mother always
told me how they couldn't afford to keep the land although
they owned it in fee. The land was so inexpensive that
some people would sell their ranches for a dollar an acre.
Sometimes it would be more than that. Sometimes they would
just lose them. But I didn't realize how they could lose
them really until I was reading one of the history books,
and it said something that happened to me all my life. The
reason [was] that the Magee family, and that would be
Mother's — Mrs. Magee, she came from the de Pedrorena, you
recall, she was a Magee — that they couldn't afford the
lawyers' fees that they charged to do the proving up, so
the lawyers got it. Then the lawyers sold it for fees to
the rich people who were coming in. I've had so many
experiences with lawyers, so I know how some can take over.
LASKEY: That's coming up.

MAY: But it even happened back in the 1800s.

LASKEY: But going back, before we get too far from the

Estudillo house, how did it get to be called the Ramona

marriage house? Because Ramona, as I understand, was not a

real person.

MAY: She was a fictitious person. But she was real in

that the thing happened to many people like Ramona, so I

think they gave her that name. I think maybe there was a

real Ramona, but I think the name was different. Mother

speaks of her, that she was raised on the de Lugo ranch,

who was another one of the cousins. In fact you will find

that in our family that we have cousins all over Southern

California. Leo Carrillo to the de Lugos to the

Dominguezes — which would be Fritz Burns 's wife — and we go

on and on. I could make a two-week speech on just the

cousins we have. And that goes for all of the old

families.

LASKEY: Were you directly related back to the Dominguezes?

MAY: Yes, yes.

LASKEY: Right, your great —

MAY: In fact, I remember visiting one of the Dominguez

aunts, I can't remember her name, [Mrs. Carson]. She used

to come down every year to Del Mar, take a month's vacation

there, and I used to go out to see her at Mother's

insistence, because she believed that we should always keep
our family relatives in touch with each other.

The last thing I was talking about was the Las Flores
Ranch, and the children, I thought, was the big point
there. One thing that did happen in the old days — it
doesn't happen like it used to — everybody took care of
their own. There were no handouts or people in line for
free food. Each family took care of its own.

And when Dad and Mother — and now I'm going to talk
about their house very quickly — lived in San Diego, in the
house I was born in, it was — Architecturally, it was a
what we would call a Greene and Greene house, but I don't
think the people that built it had anything to do with
[Charles S. ] Greene and [Henry M. ] Greene or even knew
about them. This was built in 1908. I understand Greene
and Greene were starting a little later than that, but [our
house] was just a typical California bungalow. Where the
plans came from, I don't know, but Dad, I know, had it
built. Including the land, I think it [cost] $3,500. It
was built, of course, before they even thought much about
automobiles. There was no garage, of course, and I have a
picture that shows where the garage was cut in under the
house and then walls built to hold the lawn from falling
in, because they had to excavate under the house to get the
garage in. And when Dad got his first car, which was, I

guess, about 1910, I believe it was an old Saxon. You very
seldom hear of them.

But going back to the families taking care of each
other and my father's house in San Diego, when it came time
for us to go, summertime, when we were big enough to go,
we'd get on the train, go out to Aunt Jane's, and when Aunt
Jane would come to San Diego, she'd stay with us. We
didn't use hotels. And when I'd go to Riverside, I'd stay
with my cousin[s] Estudillo. They [were] Miguel and Rex
Estudillo, who descended directly from the same Miguel I
did, but [they] kept the name, because, see, there were
boys all the way. Cousin Rex became one of the top city
attorneys for the city of Riverside. When we'd go to
Riverside, we'd stay with the Estudillos. Aunt Jane had
four sisters and five brothers, making ten all together.
And when we'd go to the northern part of San Diego County,
we'd stay at Uncle Bill's. He was the major domo for the
north end of the Santa Margarita Ranch. And I had another
aunt. Aunt Anita, who lived near Idyllwild, at a place
called Keen Camp, Keen Camp Post Office. It had a lovely
resort there called Tahquitz Lodge. So I lived at Tahquitz
Lodge for the summer. My cousins Alice and Louise, Anita's
children, would come down to San Diego to go to summer
school or to visit. And we'd just change the nephews and

nieces all around the different houses. Everybody who had
an uncle or an aunt had a place to go.

And then when the time came for education — I was in
grammar school--the older cousins came down to live with my
mother and father, and they went to the state normal
school. There was no such a thing as exchange of dollars
if you stayed, say, five weeks too long. You know the old
Spanish saying, "Mi casa es su casa," my house is your
house. With ten relatives, and Aunt Jane's, with all the
accommodations she had, we had ten places to go. We were
just on the move all the time.

As I say, I never knew what poverty was. I never saw
[it]. We had hoboes, who lived by — My Aunt Jane used to
say, "Don't go near the railroad track or the hoboes '11 get
you." [laughter] They were men that used to ride the
rails, and we used to be enchanted with these hoboes that
we'd see. At the Don station sometimes we'd see them.
They'd be camped out there, cooking along the railroad
track. I know during World War I they had a very big scare
because the IWWs came to the West Coast. The nickname was
I Won't Work — but it was the International [Industrial]
Workers of the World. And Aunt Jane had them in the same
category as gypsies, [laughter] and we didn't want to get
caught by the IWW because they'd take us off. We did see
gypsies come down the northern road near Las Flores once in

a while, and we were always wanting to keep far away from

them because they'd grab us and [our family] 'd never see us

again.

LASKEY: These are real gypsies?

MAY: They're real gypsies, yes. But that was the only

poverty I ever knew. There was the poor part of town, or I

should say the not-so-rich part of town, because in San

Diego there was no — The only thing I can remember about

being poor in San Diego, they had the Detention Hospital —

No, the Isolation Hospital, that was it. It later became

the University Hospital. It was run for people who had

tuberculosis and communicable diseases and wanted to get

put in one place, and I think they had free doctoring

there. But I think that was contributed. There were no

taxes for it, I believe. I think the people just paid

their way for their relatives that were in there.

LASKEY: Wasn't that how a lot of people came to California

and settled, because they were sick and the weather out

here?

MAY: Yes, I think, yes. I think a lot of people did.

That's why they had places like Soboba Hot Springs.

Another aunt owned Soboba Hot Springs. That was Antonia,

and she had three daughters: Inez, Nonie (which was

Antonia--nickname ) , and Josephine. So Josephine came down

to live with us, Inez came down to live with us, and Nonie

came down to live with us. They all became teachers.
Inez, I remember, became actually one of the top teachers
in the state of California for delinquent children. She
was sought after by the all the schools, and she finally
wound up in the San Francisco Bay Area. But all she took
were children who were hard to teach, stuttered, and
couldn't get through school. That's all she taught. But
each one of those three sisters became teachers having gone
through school [while living] at my mother's house, having
gone through the normal school. The normal school later
became San Diego State College, and that's where I first
went to school, the first college I went to after I gradu-
ated from San Diego High. It later moved to its present
location further out up the Mission Valley.

Uncle Bill was one of our [really] great uncles. He
was a real cowboy. When he was a young man, they say, he
could ride horseback full speed, lean over and grab a
chicken's head off that had been buried. That was an old
California sport —
LASKEY: [grimace] Yes, I know--

MAY: And they did it, and I guess in those days they ate
the chickens. So what difference whether you cut it off or
grabbed it off? He was very great at that. He was nomi-
nated by Ed Ainsworth for the Cowboy Hall of Fame. I think
he made it. I think he had passed on by that time. But,

in fact, he was a nominee. He was one of the great cowboys
of all time. Western, he was a real western man. He was
as great a western man as Aunt Jane was a western woman.
He was a great friend of Ed Ainsworth, who was a L.A. Times
columnist who wrote several books on him. He had Bill
Magee's [Western] Barbecue Cookbook, and Ed Ainsworth
ghosted it, and my uncle gave all the information. It was
a best-seller.

Then Ed Ainsworth probed into the family history
through Uncle Bill, my mother, and the rest of the rela-
tives. Well, he cased the family's history and came up
with lots of information. Then he wrote the book called
Eagles Fly West, the story of young Henry Magee having
heard about California and the chance to join the New York
Volunteers. The story starts out him joining up on ship
and coming to California and then meeting my great-
grandmother. Then the book goes on about the beautiful old
days in California. At that time the family had — which I
neglected to say — they had holdings all over. But the
holdings that they had at this time that I'm referring to
was called Condor's Nest, meaning eagle. It was a big side
of a mountain just north of the Palomar observatory — the
Palomar mountain — and it was a place that all the family
went to. And as I say, they had ranch to ranch to go to,
and Uncle Henry had another big ranch up by Sage, which is
south of Hemet.

LASKEY: Now is this still some of Victoria's holdings?
MAY: Yes-- No, no! Victoria's holdings were specifically
in the El Cajon. The Sage was purchased by my uncle Henry.
Uncle Bill was in the northern part of the Santa Margarita,
and Aunt Jane was on the Las Flores.

LASKEY: Now, the original Henry was your grandfather.
MAY: Great-grandfather. And the Henry I just spoke of
that bought the ranch in Sage was the son of Lieutenant
Henry Magee and Victoria de Pedrorena Magee , my mother's
brother. One of Jane Magee ' s brothers. And there was a
Victor Magee who farmed on the Santa Margarita. He ran
cattle and raised grain on a big ranch called "Wild Cat," a
big holding located between the Santa Margarita ranch house
and the Las Flores ranch house and on the main road between
these two ranches.

The old days on the Las Flores Ranch when I was a boy
and when I was growing up and all my cousins were growing
up, [that was] an experience we had that our generations
now will never know. Like there was no refrigeration. So
on the ranch they had the water tank house, a square house
on top of which was the tank. The tank had to be high
enough to get enough height for pressure to go down to run
the water piping systems. And this tank house was built
[for] rural plumbing. All the toilets were outdoor chic
sale toilets. And they were very nice and discreetly

located behind planting. They had a three-holer, which
would be one for the mother to take her two children in.
There would be one with seats halfway down and one all the
way down for different heights for different children.
There was etiquette about it. It was just a normal way of
life. We didn't know what toilets were in the country.
Luckily, we in San Diego had the first toilets [with] the
big tank high on the wall and the chain to make the toilet
go.

But back now to the primi tiveness of it. No refrigera-
tion, so the water tank on top of the ice — Not the ice
house, there wasn't any ice then. In Southern California,
we didn't know what ice was in those days. The ice, I
meant the cold water, dripped from the leaks, and it was on
purpose. It had leaks, so the building was always wet, and
it dripped down on the cement floor in which there was a
drain. And the drip just constantly kept it cool, by
evaporation. So the meat was bought once a week.

Aunt Jane — going back to the harvesters, and there was
no equipment except horses and laborers — had to feed
fifteen, twenty, thirty men at high harvest time. At
planting there 'd be fifteen men, and it would go down to
six or seven men between seasons. So the meat came out in
big quantities. The fun used to be to get at the end of

the buckboard and hitch up a horse to the 4-wheel buggy
(buckboard), and we'd go off to get the meat.

Well, the supplies would be sent up from San Diego on
the train. The trains ran on schedule, so at 10:30, the
10:30 train would come through. You'd take an hour to get
to the station. You'd get there and play around until you
heard the train coming. When it came, it whistled a couple
of times to let them know that they were going to slow up.
They'd slow up, and without stopping they would dump big,
big chunks off, sewed in burlap, that would go bouncing
around down the railroad track, on the side of the track.
We'd go pick them up and get them in the buggy and bring
them home.

Aunt Jane had a Chinese cook and [his] wife that were
there their whole lifetime. He was there when I became
conscious of what a cook would be. Maybe [I was] three or
four years old. He and his wife, Kim and See, lived there
their whole adult lifetimes on Aunt Jane's ranch until they
retired many years later. Their son. Toy, his nickname,
his name was Harry [Young], he became a very prominent
merchandiser of fresh produce at the Los Angeles public
market, which has made him a fortune. I, incidentally,
built a home for him. But we grew up as kids and have been
friends ever since.

The Chinaman would — I shouldn't call him that, but he
was a Chinaman. He had a Chinese wife, but he would call
dinner. The first bell of the evening would be one bell, a
warning bell, one long bell. That meant for all the
workers to get washed up, that dinner would be served in
ten or fifteen minutes. We wouldn't pay any attention to
that bell. Then the long bell would ring and ring and
ring. He'd pull the big ranch bell on the outside with the
rawhide rope that came through a hole in the wall; the
board in the kitchen was only one board thick. He'd pull
it from the inside. And then all the workmen would come
into a long mess hall, just one table wide and maybe fifty
feet long. They would troop in and they would be fed on
benches built to the table. The table had benches on both
sides. And he would serve them as fast as he could. He
did a good job of it.
LASKEY: And what was his name?
MAY: His name was Kim.
LASKEY: Kim.

MAY: And his wife's name [was] See. Kim and See. And the
last name was Young. That's where we get Harry Young. And
it's Kim Young and See Young.

At the time of the first bell — We didn't work, so the
workmen came first, not the family. The workmen first
because we depended on them. So as soon as he could get

them all fed, then he would ring a warning bell, two
bells — bing, bing — and that meant that we had about two
minutes to get to the dining room. By the time we got
there, Kim was serving.

I'll never forget one time he had been there for many,
many, many years, and I was at the ranch this one time. It
seemed that I lived at the ranch most of my life, which I
will tell you again about the architecture. But this day
he rang the first bell for the workmen. And all [of a]
sudden the second bell for the family who were waiting.
And only one ring was heard. He usually rang two for the
family notice. All of a sudden the door to the patio flew
open, and Kim came running down the corridor. He had a
piece of the rawhide rope in his hand. And he said,
"Missy, Missy, Missy Jane! Ring bell! Ring bell! Pull,
pull! Bell no holler!" Anyhow we got through that meal,
[tape recorder turned off]

Well, back to the ranch. The construction and the
architecture of the ranch was built, I think, in 1840.
[That's] the Las Flores Ranch, and it was built like all
ranches — functional. Adobe, and "U" shaped, with a second
story, with balconies like Monterey, [with] a tile roof at
one time because there used to be old tile stacked up when
they changed the roof to a shake shingle roof later.

But the most important thing on the ranch was, of
course, the kitchen. There were no bathrooms, except the
outhouses. The great big important room was put on the
main court right next to Aunt Jane's room, where it could
be watched. It was the provision room; the storeroom, they
called it. In the storeroom were sacks of beans and sacks
of rice and sacks of flour. All the things like a great
store. And Aunt Jane had the key to it. Nobody got in
except when Kim came, and then he was given the key. And
he opened it for what he wanted; then he locked it up. And
it was filled with prunes and dried apples, for apple pie
was a piece de f aire for the workmen. Every night apple
pie or prune pie. The meat was kept in the meat house, and
that was kept locked. The provision [room] and the kitchen
were the main important rooms, and Aunt Jane's room down
the open corridor was right next to them on the ground
porch level.

Then there was a big two-story section, with a living
room downstairs and a two-story fireplace. All rooms were
heated by fireplaces. Every room had a fireplace. They
had a man who was just a groundsman. All he did was keep
wood in the fireplaces, and he kept the leaves raked up on
the patios, kept them clean. And he also raised a small
garden.

Everybody had a job to do. They had the foreman who
ran all the men. And they had the manager, my uncle Louis,
who never married. He later came to live at Aunt Jane's,
and he ran the ranch for her. He also became her business
manager. It came to the point where she had to — Uncle
Percy Johnson, her original manager, who was my aunt
Antonia's husband, was quite a prominent man. He ran and
won as assemblyman for the state of California early in the
old days. And when Aunt Jane got to the point where she
was getting older and needed more help, then Uncle Louis
came down and ran the ranch for her. Then Percy died. And
[there was] a big family funeral I'll never forget. We as
family have always stuck together like families seldom do
now.

Then Uncle Louis gave up what he was doing and came to
manage the ranch for Aunt Jane. And he managed the ranch
for her, planting, harvesting, stable management, black-
smithing, commissary, maintenance. There was lots of
management to do — payrolls, fights, people not showing up,
workmen getting drunk, selling the beans at a profit,
knowing when to sell the beans [or] hold the beans stored
in the warehouse. They had a tremendous big warehouse at
Don station, where they would sack and store the beans.
And then how to select out and store the seeder beans for
the next year. They had the best beans. They got better

beans by rotating the crop. There's a tremendous science
to running a big ranch. Aunt Jane had all that at her
fingertips, and she was able to direct her brothers how to
do it. Taught them how.

LASKEY: How many square miles was that?

MAY: That was big. The Las Flores went from the — I can't
say, I would only be guessing, but it went from, oh gee,
ten miles north of Oceanside where the Las Flores ranch
began and about five to eight miles north. Then the
Barnard ranch began; Fred Barnard was another lessee. Aunt
Jane was a lifetime lessee of the Las Flores Ranch — a
lessee on a handshake, no more than that. Barnard had two
brothers. One was north of Aunt Jane and one was south.
The Barnard north went broke eventually, and Aunt Jane took
over his lands. So it made more land. But she was known
at the time, at her time, as the biggest — by the biggest I
mean the greatest — number of lima beans ever raised on any
one ranch. She was called the "lima bean queen" of Califor-
nia. She had these big sacks. We used to get paid —

Oh! That is another thing I think is important. We
all learned how to work very young. As soon as we were
able to work, why, we had jobs. I remember one of the jobs
that I had was to go out in the fields and pick up beans
that had — Where they stacked the beans to dry from green
cutting, they cut them green and put them in stacks, and

then they'd come and pick them up with the wagons and throw
them in the wagons. The wagons would be lined with rope
nettings, so that when they went up to the thresher they
would pull up the rope netting and all the beans would come
up and drop into the hopper. But there would be tons of
beans left behind that dried and popped from the pods
before they picked them up. When they stuck the pitchfork
in to put them into the wagon, the beans would drop. So we
kids would get the job of going out and picking up beans in
a sack, and we would get paid so much a sack. We'd just
pick beans all day long and loved it. We learned to enjoy
work, and then we got paid for it, which is even better.

Dear Aunt Jane — I was saying about the number of
sacks she put out. These great big stacks of sacks,
originally, they had no name on them. So she got this
brass stencil that they had that said, "Jane Magee Lima-
beans, Las Flores Ranch." Fifty pound [sacks], one hundred
pounds. And then we'd take a big old black brush with
black paint; we'd scrub through the thing and paint the
sacks and stack sacks for her. We worked in the warehouse
helping to sew sacks. And we worked with the threshing
machine helping shove the beans in, and we'd work with the
threshing machine, catching the beans in the sacks and then
shoving them on to another man to do the sewing. When we
were younger and couldn't work, we'd ride with the wagons

picking up the beans. We were always out in the fields,
always working with the land. Then coming home exhausted
and tired for a good night's sleep.

In those days, no drinking. Nobody drank. When I
said drinking , a workman would once in a while get some
booze or something. It wasn't serious. The family men
seldom drank. Women never drank. Women never smoked. It
was just a happy kind of pastoral life that you just can't
imagine.

Then the friends would come. The holidays, all the
family would come to Las Flores. We'd go to Easter and
Christmas masses at San Luis Rey or San Juan Capistrano
Mission. By this time that I'm talking about, the auto-
mobiles had come, and everybody at the ranch was always
equipped with the best of equipment, their automobiles, and
my dad finally had a better car. And we'd go to Easter one
year at San Luis Rey mission, and the next year at Easter
we'd be up at San Juan Capistrano. [tape recorder turned
off]

Those same churches, missions — We were all raised in
the missions. We knew all the fathers. The fathers would
come to visit Aunt Jane. With the thick walls and the deep
sanctuaries and the tile floors and the tile roofs, [the
missions] were all just a part of our boyhood and child-
hood. And girlhood as the girls grew up. My mother and

father were married in the San Luis Rey mission, and I was
married in the old San Diego mission in 1932.

I mean, to me, ranch living was just the only way to
go. It was spread out. You had cross-ventilation in every
room and a fireplace in every room. Every room had pri-
vacy. The walls were thick. You couldn't hear people.
You couldn't hear noise. You had shutters you could close
up and make it dark if you wanted to sleep. And if you
wanted privacy at night, you close up. You close up
because you knew there was no — We didn't have burglars
like we do now, but we had the gypsies, of course, and we
kept locked up for that reason.

But, the ranch house was a functional building with
its outbuildings. The blacksmith's shop was in the right
place where the machinery could pull up without disturbing
the occupants of the ranch. The barns with the odors and
the manure smells and molding hay that would get wet and
have to be thrown out would not disturb the ranch living.
The ranch was in the path of the ocean breezes. It was a
functional ranch.

I had a friend point out once — and he's right and I
know it's right and I've often said it — the reason you
never see an ugly barn is that a barn is built for horses.
For functional use. You see all kinds of ugly houses,
because they're built for people without function. They

don't care; they just make them look funny. The barn is
made to spend not a nickel more than you need to house the
horse or the cow and feed. And the most beautiful architec-
ture, I think, are the cow barns and the horse barns of
California. You never see a bad barn! You never see a bad
barn. So think of that with some architects that go out
and spend all their time making "boxes for living" look
good-- All facade. No plan. No function. No out-of-door
living.

Again to the ranches, we started in with the Estudillo
house. I'll digress back to it and your question about
Ramona. Ramona was a real person, that I'm sure. Mother
used to tell me about her. She knew she was really not
married in the Estudillo house. Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson
picked the Estudillo house, because she visited there when
she came out and she was a guest and decided it was such a
beautiful place. And Father Caspar, I think, was the name
in the book. I think he's a — Mother spoke of him. I
digress very much but I'll get back to it.

One of the books on San Diego, [William E. ] Smythe —
This shows you how history is written. At the time Smythe
was the greatest historian of San Diego. He has two
volumes of the history of San Diego, volumes one and two,
red books. Mother gave me her copies of them, Beatrice A.
May in her handwriting in the front when they were given to

me. And in the books, it tells about part of her family,
and it tells about one relative who had two daughters. And
Mother scratched it out and said, "Smythe is wrong; there
were three daughters. Victoria [was left out]."
[laughter] And in another place she corrected Smythe. So
the point is that history picked up Smythe and went on, so
Victoria was lost forever because this writer didn't know
his history. I came across that in the book [The History
of San Diego, six volumes] put out just recently by [Rich-
ard] Pourade, editor-emeritus of the San Diego Union,
published by the San Diego publishing company of San Diego
Union-Tribune. What is it?
LASKEY: Copley?

MAY: Copley Press. And in that book, I picked it up and
they listed the same person, with two daughters, and at a
later date, why, they had three daughters. Even they were
in conflict, but it was three daughters according to
Mother. Because she knew, of course.

LASKEY: It's interesting that it got corrected because
usually when the mistakes are —

MAY: It wasn't corrected. In the book, it's wrong one
place and correct in the other.

LASKEY: I thought it was the newer edition that had the
three?

MAY: No, no. In the only edition they have, they have the
name and then they say he had two daughters and then the
next, way down the line, it said he had three daughters.
So the proofreader had forgotten and missed it.
LASKEY: Oh, I see.

MAY: But, the three daughters was correct. Nobody knows
that except when I get the history down. The three daugh-
ters were Antonia, Maria, Victoria.

It became just known by hearsay that this was Ramona ' s
marriage place, whether it was or not.

But, the Estudillo house was in great disrepair. Jose
Antonio Estudillo left the house in his later years, and he
was a very young man at the time. I think he died in 1852
[and] left it to a Mexican to take care of. The Mexican
promptly let everybody take anything they wanted. They
just desecrated it. So, by 1900, it was a mess. Just
walls, and the roof had caved in, and it was in real bad
shape.

The Spreckels Company had great interests in San
Diego. One of them was the streetcar line. The streetcar,
I remember very clearly, the only way I could get around
San Diego when I was a young boy, I used the streetcar.
The streetcar went out to Old Town, and then it went out to
Loma Portal and Ocean Beach and ended. Then it went out to
South San Diego to National City, where, I think, it ended.

Then [it] went up to Normal Heights where the old normal
school was and ended right there at the ostrich farm. I
think Spreckels built the ostrich farm so that at the end
of every railroad there'd be something to get off and then
see, and so they'd get another fare going back or have a
place to go, otherwise you wouldn't get the fare. So,
anyhow, that was the idea.

So, they [the Spreckels Company], took Ramona ' s
marriage place and said they'd rehabilitate it and make it
a museum. They did, and they hired this wonderful Mrs.
[Waterman]. She measured the old foundations, took all the
major dimensions of the house, took the grades. The walls
were caved in. She'd talk to the people. She found out
that one person had said it had a balcony where the band
used to play. And that was from my cousin by marriage.
Cave Couts. And then, I think, it turned out to be later
that they didn't have the balcony; it had been added later.
But they still put one up. There were few photographs for
the old building, of course, but there were old drawings
that are shown in the volume by Pourade, The Golden Dons.
So, she made the only architectural drawings that were ever
made.

And her name is Hazel Waterman, Mrs. Waldo Waterman.
It is said her son was the first to fly a power-driven
airplane lighter than air. He beat the Wright brothers,

but he didn't have any publicity on it. He flew out at
Otay Mesa. I guess that's pretty well established in
history now, that he was the first one. Anyhow, he was one
of the pioneers for sure. But I think the Wright brothers
got off and got more publicity on the thing. Prior to that
time, according to several sources, he was said to have
flown on the Otay Mesa. With the big, strong winds out
there, he got up and did fine.

The building was then re-created by Mrs. Waterman and
brought back. I have many different types of pictures from
it. Mother gave me a wonderful book of the old [house],
when it was first refinished in 1909. I believe it was
published in 1909. So between 1900 and 1909 it was built.

Many years later, Mrs. Waterman gave me a call and
said that she knew of my relationship to the house, and she
would like very much to have me have the original drawings.
So she gave them to me. When a friend of mine knew that I
had them, architect Sam Hamill from San Diego, who is very
active in the San Diego Historical Society, he called me
and said he thought it'd be a great idea if I would give
them to the San Diego Historical Society because they had a
museum, the Serra [Historical] Museum, which was built by
Mr. George Marston in the Presidio Hill park overlooking
Old San Diego and the Estudillo house. So, I gave them to
the Historical Society, and I kept an original set of

tracings for [myself]. No, I gave them the originals, and
I kept the tracings. In fact, I originally gave them the
tracings, but they said they wanted the originals. So I
switched and I have the tracings.
LASKEY: Oh! [laughter]

MAY: And it's best to be there. It shouldn't be in my
collection. More people can see them. More students and
historians can read it there.

TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO
MAY 12, 1982

LASKEY : Let's spend some time now, Mr. May, talking about
your father's family and your father.

MAY: All right. I've never traced the family very far
back other than the information that was given to me by
Dad. He did say jokingly at times that we were related to
Pocahontas, whether that was a joke or not — I think it
probably was.

But, the first trace of my grandfather, who was
Charles E. May, was that he was born on January 7, 1839,
[at] Indianapolis, Indiana. He was one of a family of six
children. Then, his family moved to Burlington, Iowa when
he was a young boy.

Dad has told me many tales about his father. In fact,
he used to entertain all the young boys in the neighbor-
hood, sitting on our front porch on long summer nights, he
would tell the stories of crossing the plains that his
father had told him. The dates that Dad gave me was that
his father was about twenty years old when he left Iowa to
come to California or to come West. And that would make it
about 1859 or 1860 that he came across the plains. I
remember there were two routes to the covered wagon, the
northern route and the southern route, as I've seen on some
of the old maps. According to Dad's information he gave

me, he came to Salt Lake City on the way, which means he
probably took the northern trail or the central. I think
there was another trail which crossed up into the Washing-
ton-Oregon country. But he apparently took the central
trail or whatever trail that took him to Utah, then to San
Francisco, and then he came on to Los Angeles. One of the
notes that Dad gave me was that when he arrived land that
is now downtown was selling for twenty-five cents an acre,
if you can believe that.

In 1868, he came to San Diego from San Francisco on
the steamer Orazabo, which I've seen written up a number of
times in some of the old historical [journals], one of the
coastal boats. He came down with a man named [William]
Jeff Gatewoods, who. Dad said, later founded the San Diego
Union, which was the major paper in San Diego.

My grandfather, Charles E. May, went into the harness
and saddlery business. Dad had an advertisement that he
had gotten from one of the first issues in the Union that
Grandpa May had put in about his saddlery and harness shop,
and it said,

"Always on hand and for sale."
He had saddles and bridles and harness and lines, collars,
whips, spurs, and so forth.

"Repairing done with neatness and dispatch, shop on
West Side San Diego Avenue near courthouse. Old Town
San Diego, October 10, 1868.

Something I was very proud of from when I was a little
boy was a great big full-sized wooden horse that was on the
saddlery company downtown. When I was a boy, there were
still lots of horses around and used for hauling the
grocery [and] vegetable carts that came out to the house,
which was a novelty I've never seen since. We also had the
ice wagons pulled by horses, and nearly all the trucking
when I was a small boy [was] done with horses. So I guess
horse repair and saddle business was pretty good, harness
especially. There was this great big, wooden horse. It
was life-sized, and it had a regular tail, a regular
horse's tail fastened on and a horse's mane. It was
painted to look like quite a horse. And that was put on
four wheels and a platform, and it was pulled out everyday
and put on the sidewalk in front of the saddlery shop.
This was not my grandfather's shop, but it was his horse.
It had been for his shop. And when he passed on, whoever
bought the saddlery business kept it, and it was still
there. I was always proud of the fact that my grandfather
had had a big wooden horse.

There's not too much about Grandfather except that he
did buy a number of properties. He owned quite a few
houses that he rented. I remember later, as I became more

aware of what was going on — My grandfather died I think
before I was born, but my German grandmother, she inherited
the houses that Grandfather and she had bought and had
rented. She lived in one, but I was given the job of
"maintenance man." I got a little bit of early carpentry,
putting in the screens that would be knocked out and fixing
doorknobs that wouldn't work. And I remember going down a
number of times and redoing the screens. They seemed to go
out the fastest. I made pocket money taking care of
Grandma's houses. The houses were in a part of town that
later became the east end of town, which wasn't the great
area that the north [became].

Incidentally, in all cities, the west is where the
great improvement-- Nearly all the cities in the United
States grow to the west. Like West Brooklyn is more
valuable than East Brooklyn. I've never been there, but
that is what they would tell me. And West Los Angeles is
more valuable than East Los Angeles, obviously. In Santa
Monica, the ocean property is more valuable than Santa
Monica inland and east. But anyhow, the houses Grandma May
owned were in the east part of San Diego. [They] never
amounted to very much.

Dad went to work. He worked for the San Diego gas and
electric company all of his life. He started as a clerk
and wound up being one of the vice-presidents. As a young

man, he was quite a ladies' boy, or a woman's man, whatever
you call it. Ladies' man. He said that he was one of the
fast typists of San Diego and used the touch system then.
He had a pretty girl's picture under every key. [laughter]
You couldn't see the letters, but you could see their
faces. I have a few pictures of him that are rather nice,
on the beach, with his violin, and he had real curly hair.
He was a handsome, young fellow. He met Mother, I think,
quite young in life. They were both born in San Diego.

For many years, I had a big play chest that was very
German and had carvings all over it, with flags and
emblems, lions and tigers and — Not tigers but dragons,
with long gold tongues sticking out and red eyes. Anyhow,
I was later told that was the bench on which my dad had
proposed to my mother. And it was owned by a-- In those
days, there was only one doctor that I became aware of, it
was Dr. Valle. But it was in the doctor's home, and they
met there. And so he [Dr. Valle] gave Mother the chest.
Then the chest became mine, for my toys, which I had all
kinds of, being a lucky youngster with lots of relatives to
donate things from time to time.

Very early in their life, they built their house.
Dad, I guess, had good judgment, picking out things, atti-
tude— that's not the word — but he had the ability to decide
where the best place to live would be. And so instead of

going west at that time, [which] would be miles over to
Point Loma , which would have been great but it was just too
far, because I think in those days when they built, the
streetcar determined where you lived. So, the streetcar to
what would be, when I say, the west, the best part, was
really down along the fringes along the bay and all the way
to Old Town, and it wasn't the best part of town. Old Town
had gone into decline by 1900. Dad was there earlier than
that. But, he went north, and then he went west. By going
west he got onto what was known as Bankers' Hill, I think
so called because two or three bankers lived out there and
had some big, beautiful homes.

Dad picked out a little side street called Albatross.
It was on what we now call a cul-de-sac or dead-end street.
It was unpaved for many years, which was great because it
gave us a chance to play ball in the dirt street, and we
had a turnaround at the end. There were just four houses
on the street. There was one family who became my best
friends, Styris. This is going to come in later because
Mr. Styris, Sr., was one of the great master craftsmen of
San Diego. There was one house in between us, the
Babcocks. Then there was the house of the Strawns just
north of our house, and then one on the corner, people
called the Marshalls. The Marshalls were the richest

people on the block. The rest of the people were all
working people.

The Marshalls had the first automobile. I'll never
forget it. It was an electric [car], and in the cab was a
place to put rosebuds on the side of the window, and a bar
steered it. There was no such thing as garages when these
houses were built, so Mr. [John] Marshall built a garage.
A big box of a place to run his car in. We used to marvel
how he drove down the street with his big electric car. It
looked like a showcase on four wheels.
LASKEY: What year was that?

MAY: That would be about my first remembrance, and you see
I was not born until 1908. So it would be 1912 or '13. I
was three and four years old I remember.
LASKEY: Well, how large was San Diego at this time?
MAY: Oh, less than 100,000. Maybe 80,000. I'm just
guessing.

The automobile is another — I'll come back to auto-
mobiles.

But that lot ended our street. Across the street was
a big canyon. [The] slope started from right across the
street. Dad had a great view. He looked out across the
cul-de-sac out into the canyon. The Styrises lived
furthest down south on the side of the canyon. They had a
cow and a shed for the cow and chickens. They did not have

a car either. No one had a car except the Marshalls; the
others came later.

We had great experiences though, because there were
two brothers, Eli and Herbert, and then a sister in
between. No, the baby was Linia. They were very strict
Swedish people whose father demanded obedience, and they
each had their jobs to do. They all had to work. Mr.
Styris was really, as I say, a master builder and also sort
of a genius. He had a roof that he built that had gutters
around it, especially kept clean. The boys had to get upon
the roof twice a year to clean them. All the water went
into a cistern, a big cistern he had dug under the house on
the side of the hill. It had an old-fashioned pump that
you pumped up and down. Later, progressive as he was, he
got a chain pump that you could crank, that would pump the
water out. I remember as a child going down to the cis-
tern, which was open to the Mays because we were great
friends, and pumping two pitchers of water, which we always
drank, fresh cistern water, because water systems weren't
as great as they are now. They didn't have the dams and
piping that they now have.

The Styrises raised their own vegetables. They had
their own fruit trees. They had loquats, loganberry, and
sapotas, which is a Mexican plant, a great big tree, big
enough for us kids to climb in and eat them, more sapotas

than you could eat. [They had] all their vegetables in
neat little rows. They furnished vegetables to the commu-
nity. They had their own lawn and a very comfortable three-
story hillside house on approximately two acres. [They
had] a hammock out in back; the hammock overlooked the
canyon and the big trees they had planted there. They had
a beautiful view. It was a wonderful house.

I remember Mr. Styris was very thrifty, so he would
draw his tub of water and he would bathe in it and leave it
all day to let it settle. Then he would drain it out
rather than fill it with warm water and bathe again,
[laughter] That was all the water they got. I think all
the water they got was from the rainwater until they got
their water system in.

Mrs. Styris was a wonderful person. She was a great
cook, and she always had food for the kids. And I was one
of the family, as were they of our family.

The Strawns had one boy named Spencer, who was a part
of the gang.

Across the street up to the north were the Fleets.
They were an old family. They had a young son named
Arnold, who was my good friend, and his older sister about
my age named Gertrude. Gertrude was the most athletic of
all of us. She was the only one of us who knocked the
baseball through her father's screened porch across the

street on a home run. Many years later, I designed a home
for her husband and her in Santa Anita Oaks. We had great
times. There was no theft in the neighborhoods. There
were no thoughts of mugging or anything like that. Every-
body left their doors open. There was no such thing as
robbery. There was no such thing as worrying at night.
We'd sleep with the windows open and the doors open. I'd
go down to the Styrises, and I'd walk in and yell for my
friends. They wouldn't be home, so I'd go home and figure
they hadn't got home yet and Mrs. Styris wasn't there. I
was welcome to come in anytime. It worked the same with
all the houses in this small neighborhood.

One interesting thing, I'm jumping again, but the
neighborhood Dad picked — The opposite side of the street,
I said it went over the hill. There was no place to build
a house. But just before, opposite the second house down,
we were the third, so Dad could look on out to the view.

During the [Panama-California International] Exposi-
tion, Mr. [Irving] Gill, who was one of our great archi-
tects from San Diego, was commissioned by the exposition
committee to build four demonstration homes, which he built
as part of the exposition of 1914. [loud noise] It was
opened, one of the two, and then it was — it was '16 — I
think the building got started in '14 to get them finished
for the exposition.

Incidentally, Gill had been hired to be part of that
team with Bertram Goodhue. Nobody seems to know what
happened. I have read in Mr. [George] Marston's book that
he was originally on the design team with Goodhue. Appar-
ently he designed the Balboa bridge because it certainly
has his complete mark with the Gill arches. But somehow
Mr. Gill didn't get in on the rest of the exposition.
Goodhue took over, and Mr. Gill did not do it. But these
houses were done in the true Gill manner. So, here we had
four wonderful Irving Gill houses.

I knew Mr. Gill, as a child would know an older man.
He had a daughter, as I mentioned earlier. Bonnie was her
name. I admired her from a distance for many years. I
don't think she ever knew I existed. We visited the Gill
house quite often because they and the Styrises were very
friendly. The reason they were very friendly was this, I
spoke of Mr. Styris as being a very fine cabinetmaker and
master craftsman, a master builder. In those days, archi-
tects needed master builders to execute their drawings,
because their drawings were not as complete as they are
nowadays. They would do a set of stairs, and then the
master builder worked out the stairs on the job. Without
Mr. Gill, Mr. Styris would not have the job. Without Mr.
Styris, Mr. Gill would not have the house finished. It was
a mutual operation. And to my knowledge, every job Mr.

Gill did, Mr. Styris was on the job as the master craftsman
and carpenter.

As a result, Mr. Styris had built a wonderful big
basement under the whole house that was filled with carpen-
ter benches and all kinds of tools that we, as children,
had the right to use. He had his tools which we couldn't
touch, but he had tools for the boys. He had vises and
drills and hammers and saws and wood mallets and chisels
and coping saws and everything an expert would need. He
had tools for his sons and his sons' friends, if they
treated them properly. The two boys had the two bedrooms
down off the shop, downstairs, that would be on the Alba-
tross Street level. At the lowest level was the storeroom
for the feed for the cow and the sheep and the pigs and the
chickens and all the animals they had. They would feed
them in the stable in the canyon. Anyhow, we learned a lot
of carpentry from Mr. Styris and from [his] boys, who were
very proficient.

Back to the time with Gill, Mr. Gill building those
houses, we played in those houses as children. You know,
an empty house [under construction], you'd jump out the
window and be up on the roof and in the attic. I just had
an awareness of Gill's feeling of arches, and yet when I
look back, they were typical houses. They weren't houses
like my people did. When I speak of my people, [I mean]

the old California. They were not adobe. They were not on
one floor. They did not have patios. They were true
boxes, two-story boxes.

One of my best friends lived in one up from my house.
Robert Churchill lived in the house, which would be across
from the Marshall house. I knew that house backwards. We
played in it while it was being finished, and I practically
lived there with Bob as his best friend after it was
finished. [He was] one of my best friends. The house was
distinctive. You knew that it had been done by an archi-
tect.

It had forced air — No, it didn't have forced air in
those days. It just had what they call gravity heat. In
those days they did it with wood. You built a wood fire in
the furnace, and it had ducts going up to the rooms. It's
gravity; the rising heat would take it up to the rooms and
heat them. Later on we had gas, but not in those days.
Originally it was all wood.

We had a one-car garage. In those days nobody ever
aspired to having two cars, and everybody just built one-
car garages.

LASKEY: When was this now?

MAY: This was before '15, about '15. These were built in
'14. Dad's house was built in 1906 because I was born in
1908. There was no garage provided for.

One day, we got the big news. Dad was coming home
with a big surprise. Mother had me waiting for the big
surprise. Dad came driving home; I think it was in a Saxon
car. Never heard of now, but it was a flimsy old car. All
of them were flimsy in those days. [laughter] It wasn't a
Ford though, but we had to park, it in the street.

So immediately Dad said we were going to build a
garage. He had to excavate the whole lawn in front of the
house and expose all the foundations, which didn't go down
deep enough. They had to cut back and underscore the
foundation. They cut one opening into the foundation and
formed it so they could dig out underneath the house. Then
they put foundation walls all around inside, retaining
walls, so they could drive the car in. Then the doors,
they didn't have garage doors pivot like they do now. So
the doors were hinged, and you had a regular front-door
lock on it with a key, a door knob. You'd open two doors,
and then hope they wouldn't blow shut on you. Then you
drove in, and then you locked the doors.

Under the house at that time, we had a door going up,
an excavated space where we later put in a furnace. In the
meantime, the only heat in the house was a fireplace, as I
remember, and, maybe, some little electric heaters. And
then, one day, we got floor furnaces, when the gas came.
And by having this access under the house and the door, we

had a nice place to store Christmas tree ornaments on dirt
under the house. It was dry, and we could put [in] wood
platforms. Mother had all kinds of things stored there.
It was always fun to play in the basement. There was
always something to find down there.

LASKEY: Basements were unusual, weren't they, in Southern
California?

MAY: Yes, they were. But in this case, we dug a basement
for the automobile. And then the rest was just the under-
pinning. The part you dug out to get to open the door
because you couldn't open the door in because you'd hit the
car .

LASKEY: So it was just an added benefit from having a
garage.

MAY: You're right. There were few basements. There were
just crawl spaces, they'd call them. Except on hillsides.
On hillsides sometimes people dug in and made a basement,
or like the Styrises, they had a third of the third floor
below as a lower terrace for their cow. And halfway up was
the real basement, which was where the two boys slept, with
windows because it was not under the ground. Only half was
underground. The carpenter shop was on that same floor,
and then the top floor was where the owner lived. He had a
master bedroom, a dining room, a kitchen, and a service
porch. Outside, where the well was, was kind of a little

patio. And then they had a living room. So they had just
one bathroom upstairs, and doors all the way through so you
could make a complete circle. Our house was built the same
way. You could go from the living room through the bedroom
through the bathroom through the bedroom through the living
room. The typical plan of those days. The Gill plans were
a little more superior to that, they were more expensive
houses.

Dad's house cost $3,500 when he built it, and I think
the lot was $1,000. And when my stepmother died, why I
think, we sold it for about $50,000. It was ten times, but
it was mainly because of the land, the location. But the

house served well. I get the feeling of We always had

mission furniture, and that was the big fashion at that
time.

Mother had these wonderful Indian rugs made by the
Navajos. They were bright reds, greens, and whites, and
blacks. Each one a different design. And Dad was always
so proud of the fact that they were so imperfect, which
proved that they were made by real Indians. They would
start out a Z, and the Z would wind up an X [laughter]
someplace else. They were just filled with errors, and
that was his great pride. Many years later I found out
that that was just the opposite; the poor Indians that
didn't have any education and were sort of dumb or were not

all there — who didn't have all their marbles — were the ones
that wove the ones that were so funny. [laughter] So, the
really valuable [rugs] were the perfect ones.
LASKEY: And wrecked his theory.

MAY: Nowadays the collectors are always going for the
perfect rug. But in architecture we try to make our
architecture not perfect. I mean, we like to have it
asymmetrical, and, if we have a little wave or bump in the
eave line, we like it better, and if the plaster is put on
carelessly and randomly so it doesn't look machine made.
You take a Navajo rug that looks like it's been made by a
machine, why, it doesn't have handcrafted value. To me, I
would value the handmade so much more than I would machine
made.

But, anyhow, we had mission furniture.

Then the world progressed, and inventions came,
airplanes came, and the telephone came. We didn't have a
telephone when we first moved in. I remember that coming.
A big deal! Stretching the wires.
LASKEY: When was this?

MAY: It would to be when I was big enough [to remember].
That must have been maybe 1912 or '13. I think the lights
were on. The lights were on. I remember when my cousins
from the country would come to visit us, the big thrill was

that they got permission to turn the lights off and on,
because they were all used to using lamps, coal oil lamps.

There were other improvements that did come along, of
course. One day, the first GE refrigerator came. I don't
know what date that was, but it was such a big, wonderful
thing. It had a big coil up on the top. Guaranteed
forever. And then the washing machine came, and we had
laundry tubs installed on the back porch. Then they got
the electric washing machine. Refrigeration was here now,
and then later models came. Then the stoves, the old gas
stove, then you got later models of gas stoves with better
ovens. Dad constantly upgraded the house, so it was always
comfortable.

LASKEY: How long did you live there?

MAY: I lived [there] until I was married. I went through
San Diego State [College] there. I had my orchestra
practice there. A little, tiny living room, we'd get five
guys in there. Dad would get his violin and make us tune
up. I always wanted to get rid of him. I don't know why
he was always trying — [laughter]

I think back now how much good he did for us.
[laughter] But one good thing about Dad, he made me toe
the mark, and I could never please him. He never — Any-
thing I did wasn't good enough. It always could be done
better.

Later on, on the radio, I had my own band, and we were
one of the early, early orchestras that had a sponsor. We
played, and our sponsor was the Hercules Gasoline Company.
We had two nights a week over KFSD, which was the major
broadcasting station; the second one was KGB. My high
school and college friend Art Linkletter worked on KGB as
an announcer, but we played our band out of KFSD, which was
on the roof of the U. S. Grant Hotel. We were one of the
first dance bands (1925) to have a theme song, "Thanks for
the Buggy Ride." We would play a program. I would come
home. And Dad would have tuned in the crystal set lis-
tening to us. And he'd say, "You played too loud. You
played too much jazz. You should stick to melody more.
Keep the tunes, so the people listening to you hear the
tunes, so they'll know what you're playing. You mustn't
just go all crazy like you're doing."

So, I never did things well enough. But I look back
now, and it's the thing that made me keep on wanting to
go — "What makes Sammy run." These parents who say, "Oh,
you're so wonderful," you know, and the kid slows up. I'm
just sure of that. And those who endow them with lots of
money and say, "Look, son, you've earned it." But I've
never seen very many of them ever amount to much. But
anyhow, I'm glad Dad was the way he was.

Mother was the same way — No, she was understanding.
Dad was always the ogre in the family. Mother was sweet
and lovely, but she had one thing wrong with her which was
tough on everybody. When I was a bad boy, instead of
taking care of it right then, why, she'd say, "Wait till
your father comes home. He's going to punish you."

I went up to the streetcar to meet my dad every night,
whether I was good or bad. But, one day I ran up to meet
him — Many spankings later this occurred, maybe a couple of
years of spanking. He had a razor strap that he would get
out, and, boy, I got it. But anyhow, Dad left the street-
car, and we walked home together. He came home real happy,
until he found out he had to do his terrible duty, to give
me a spanking. Which I thought was really bad for raising
children, but I didn't realize this until afterwards. It
didn't hurt me any, didn't hurt me any, but I said to him
as he got his strap, I said, "Tonight you can hit me as
hard as you want, but you can't make me cry."

So he said, "Well, that's enough. I won't hit you
anymore. "

So he quit.

I don't know why I bring that up, but it was just
interesting because it didn't hurt me, at least as far as I
was concerned. My brother never got spanked, and he made

more money than I did. But I think. I've done more for
people than he did.

LASKEY: Now, your brother was older?

MAY: Younger. My brother was born ten years later than I
was. He's ten years younger. His name is Henry May, Henry
C. May. He has been very successful. He ran an advertis-
ing business just after the war. [I have] a good story
about my brother [to show what] he was always like — Dad
always wanted to buy things at discount because he was the
purchasing agent for the gas company, and so everything he
bought was at discount in big quantities. So Dad got in
the habit of being a bargainer. He always got a bargain.
And Hank became that way, and I guess I tried to. But
being in the building business, you learn to pay a fair
price and get a good product. Not necessarily is the good
bargain the right one. But Hank would always make a fast
buck; so one day, this was quite a bit later, I was build-
ing a house for a retired commander in the navy. Commander
E. Knauss, and it was in one of the main streets overlook-
ing the country club in Coronado. Hank was working for me
as a flunkie, he would sweep the house out and do odd jobs.
He was going to school. I was out of school by this time,
and I was building houses.

So, anyhow. Commander Knauss said, "Young fellow like
you, what do you do with your nighttime?"

And Hank said, "Nothing."

He said, "Well, you ought to do something with your
nighttime, too." He said, "Why don't you join the naval
reserve?" He said, "They pay you money to go and march.
You don't do anything but march."

And so Hank thought that was terrific, and he joined
up and became a naval reservist and went every three
nights. Before we knew it, we were in World War II. Hank
gets a telegram, and it says, "Please report for duty.
Lieutenant H. C. May." He went in as lieutenant.

No, no. He threw it away. He said that it didn't
apply to him. So he ignored it.

And one day, the FBI came out and said, "Young man,
Where's your father?" or something. So I called Commander
Knauss, and he, knowing the right people, kept him from
going to the brig, I guess. So Hank reported the next day.
[laughter] He knew it was serious. Anyway, he went out to
defend his country and became, I think, a full lieutenant
in charge of a minesweeper out in the Pacific. It swept
mines. He had some wonderful experiences, but that's
enough of Hank.

Oh, Hank — Henry came back from the war and had the
idea to go into business for himself, so he opened up an
advertising [firm]. May Advertising. Knowing what he did
from his previous employer, the Pacific Outdoor

[Advertising], why, he made it a fine business and built it
on up and sold out very young and retired to Fallbrook
where he has a big ranch now and raises avocados.
LASKEY: Oh, how nice. Any sisters?
MAY: No sisters.

Then, my grandmother was quite a woman. Whenever she
used to come, she would bring me something, very generous,
and she'd bring a box of candy, or a box of this or a
sweater or a toy. She'd come out once a week and take the
streetcar and let us know. We always knew what streetcar.
It'd be the ten o'clock streetcar or the eleven o'clock
one. I'd usually rush up to meet her. So, anyhow, I guess
she told my folks that every time she'd get off the street-
car I said, "What did you bring me? What'd you bring me?"
[laughter]

So anyhow it turned out to be that finally my folks
said that you must never do that again. Dad said no more
"what did your grandmother bring you." Absolutely not.
The next time she came off the streetcar I said, "Dear
Grandma, I hope you didn't bring me anything." [laughter]
Working both sides of the family, I guess.

Anyhow, from there we go back to where we lived. The
house was a great house, for those days, a great neighbor-
hood. We grew up with a lot of fine people. Dad, being an
old-timer, knew all the other old-timers. There were just

a bunch of them down there. It was a small town, and

mostly everybody knew each other. And there were three or

four, I think, five or six people who ran San Diego in

those days, besides Mr. [John D. ] Spreckels. Spreckels ran

it because he owned everything. He owned the streetcars.

He owned the Hotel [del] Coronado. He owned the Spreckels

Theatre. He owned everything.

LASKEY: He owned the Coronado? the del Coronado?

MAY: The Hotel del Coronado. Yes, they owned that. It

was called the Spreckels Corporation, and, of course, they

had the sugar income. So they were very wealthy.

Besides that, there were some other very wonderful
men. Mr. George W. Marston was the head of the big depart-
ment store there — George W. Marston, one of the finest men.
He was the one who was most responsible for the San Diego
Balboa Park. I think he was a founder of the zoo, although
the Wegerforths were also working with the other families
I've mentioned.

Mr. Marston was responsible so much for the community
of San Diego. He was on every committee. And he owned
this great store. He befriended me, when I first got into
business. He knew my family. Miss Mary Marston, his
sister, was never married. Mary Marston was most active in
civic duties and everything important to San Diego. And
then he had a son, Arthur Marston, who inherited his

business and who was also very well known in San Diego.
Mr. George Marston did many, many things to help me get
started.

Then, another important citizen was Mr. Ed Fletcher.
Mr. Fletcher had five sons and one daughter. One of the
older boys was one of my good friends, Stephen Fletcher,
and the younger brother was one of my brother's best
friends. The Fletcher boys were of all ages; I mean they
went right from [grown-up] men right down to little boys;
there was a long spread between them. [laughter] So we
fitted in with two of them.

Then, Mr. Roscoe Hazard was one of the great persons
of San Diego. He was one of the big contractors. He was a
great friend of mine, as was Mr. Fletcher. I have in my
scrapbook a letter from Mr. Fletcher writing a recommenda-
tion for me to build a house for somebody: He was a fine
person for helping young men to get started. But it's
amazing in those days how the older men befriended younger
people and helped them. I try to do that with my people.
I help people all I can, young fellows that come in to my
office. Youngsters ask questions and seek advice, and I
try to help. I go out of my way to write letters to people
and anything I can to help them along if I can.

One of the other families that was very influential in
San Diego there was Mr. 0. W. Cotton. He was one of the

important real estate men and one of the old-timers. A lot
of the people came in and went, like the Mills' came in and
made a lot of money and moved out. But Cotton was raised
there and generations of his boys, two boys. Bill Cotton
and John Cotton. Bill was my best friend of the Cottons,
and Bill was younger. But John was the talent in their
family, and he inherited all the business. Bill was the
kind that went along and became a great guy. I think if
you looked back you'd say that maybe that the younger took
to the business better than the older. Mr. Cotton used to
write articles in the newspaper, and he wrote a number of
articles about me. In fact, he wrote a book and included me
in the book. The Good Old Days was the name of the book.
I'm included in one chapter, about the work I did in
getting started in San Diego. He helped me very much, as
did Mr. Fletcher and as did Marston.

Mr. Marston went so far as to give me a lot in his
subdivision. He called me in one day and said that he
admired my houses and he had some land up in Presidio Park,
which was the best subdivision of its time, up overlooking
Old Town, where later the Marston museum, the one with the
San Diego Historical Society, is located.

"Pick out any lot you want, and it's yours, provided
you build a house on it. I don't expect you to pay for

it," he said, "but, I'd rather have them say 'there she
goes' than 'there she lays.' We need activity."

So I built my third house for sale, and it brought a
lot of activity. In the meantime, the man who bought the
lot decided that he'd like to get into business with me, so
he bought five lots from Mr. Marston. We built five houses
beside that house. Then when the banks were closed in '32,
the man who was sent out from Washington to open the bank--
Our big bank shut down. The man who came out was Mr. Alex
Highland. Nobody knew who he was, but he just came out and
went to work at the bank. And then they, the government,
opened the bank; he was sitting up there running it. And
he picked out the best lot in Presidio Hills, right on the
corner as you enter, and I built a beautiful one- and two-
story house for them. It was the catch of the season for
the builder and architect, because Mr. Highland later
became quite important in San Diego. The building cost
$101,500 in 1932-33.

LASKEY: Now, this was to come later?

MAY: Yes this was-- I jumped from Mr. Marston when I was a
kid growing up to what he did for me after I started to
build houses.

LASKEY: I want to see if I have this straight. This was
the father of one of your friends?

MAY: Mr. Marston had [a son] Arthur Marston, but Arthur

Marston was much older than I was.

LASKEY: I see.

MAY: And Arthur Marston 's son had [his own son] Arthur

Marston [Jr.]. We were friendly, but we weren't buddies.

They lived in the high-rise and I lived in the middle-rise

district. We just had different circles. I think Arthur

went to a school in the East, and I went to San Diego

State. But we did lots of things. But the Cottons, we

went to school with the Cottons, and we were fraternity

brothers.

LASKEY: It was the Cottons that I got mixed up —

MAY: Then the Fletchers, we were very close because they

were neighbors of ours. I would walk by their house to get

to school, and so we were very friendly with them.

Then, Roscoe Hazard, I knew young Hazard. He was one
of my good friends. In fact I gave Roscoe Hazard, Jr., his
first job as a contractor, for which his father thanked me
every time I saw him. Well, I am jumping again up to my
building era. This is all my childhood era.

And then there was Mr. Frank Forward, who was presi-
dent of the — No, Mr. John Forward, yes, it was John
Forward, and Mr. Frank Forward was his brother. John
Forward was the founder of the San Diego Title Company.
The San Diego Title Company was one of the biggest

institutions because it insured titles of all the houses in
San Diego, and there was only one title company. And John
Forward's house backed into our house, so I could jump from
our roof onto their roof. They used to have wonderful
places to hide, up on their roof. [tape recorder turned
off]

I think of an episode with Mr. Forward. He had a
daughter, who was not attractive, but a lively girl. Her
name was Flora, Flora Forward. We were the same age. One
day Mr. Forward sent word to me , I don't remember how. But
he asked me to come down and see him in his office. So I
went downtown. Flora, in the meantime, was going to the
Bishop's School, the private school across a couple of
canyons from where we both lived. I went down to Mr.
Forward's office and was ushered into this big office. I
must have been in my early teens, or maybe twelve, maybe
eleven. Mr. Forward had me sit down. It was the first
time I'd been in an office that big. He told me what a nice
girl Flora was, and I said I knew she was. He said that he
liked very much the way we played together and that Flora
didn't know how to play tennis, and that they had a beauti-
ful private tennis court at the Bishop's School and that if
I would teach her how to play — I played tennis well — if I
would teach her how to play tennis, he would be very happy

to buy me a brand-new tennis racket. So I said that that
would be fine. I'd love to help Flora.

I don't think I ever got the tennis racket, but I'll
tell you why. Anyhow, I had an old tennis racket.

So we went to play the first game. We got over there,
and they opened the gate for us for the afternoon, the
Bishop's School, and we could use their tennis court.
There was another girl there that I knew, and so she came
in to watch. So I gave Flora her lesson, and we batted the
ball a few times. And the other girl said she'd like to
play. So I said I'll give you lessons, and I got the other
girl to play. We played and we played and we played.
Pretty soon. Flora wanted to go home, so I took her home.
Anyway, the next day, why, Mr. Forward sent word he was not
buying me a tennis racket because Flora didn't like the way
I taught her how to play tennis. But, actually, it was the
fact that I played with the other girl and hadn't spent my
time with Flora. So I learned early that you can't be a
gigolo and get away with it. [laughter]
LASKEY: You mentioned the Bishop's School. That's an
Irving Gill building, isn't it?

MAY: The Bishop's School you're thinking of came much
later in La Jolla. This was the Bishop's School either
when it was first starting or it had not arrived at La
Jolla. This was back in 1916 or '17.

LASKEY: Oh, I see.

MAY: Incidentally, Gill did do the Bishop's School, and
Mr. Styris also did the work on it. Then he did the E. W.
Scripps Building, [named after] Ellen Scripps. She donated
the school. I think the Scripps Building came first.
LASKEY: Did your association with Mr. Styris and Mr.
Gill-- It almost sounds like that is where your future
profession came from.

MAY: Not really, I never really thought of it. I think
things brushed off on me, and I was just aware of certain
things. But a lot of things I wasn't aware of until I
looked back. I look back on the Gill house that we used to
play in, the Churchill house, I look back on that as just
being rather conventional. It was not a breakthrough like
a Frank Lloyd Wright would have been at that time.
LASKEY: I was thinking more specifically of Mr. Styris.
MAY: No. He gave the boys their instructions. He was
very gruff, very. No words at all. And he didn't speak to
me hardly ever. I was scared to death of him. All I got
was through the boys. I used tools — Dad always got me
tools — but I never ever thought of ever building houses.
Never. Even when I was in college it never occurred to me.
LASKEY: Really?

MAY: No. No need to. Jumping again from where we were to
in college, I went to school in 1929, Oh! I had an

orchestra, and as I told you earlier, I played on the
radio, which incidentally made me eligible for joining a
wonderful club I belong to now called the PPB. It's called
the Pioneer Pacific Broadcasters. You can become a member
only if you were in old radio and can prove it. Its
members are announcers and all the old-time radio perform-
ers: Gene Autry, the Mills Brothers, Art Linkletter, Bing
Crosby, etc.

LASKEY: It sounds wonderful.

MAY: Yes, it's wonderful. I go every six weeks. They
have meetings, and I go and have a wonderful afternoon.
LASKEY: Well, when did your music career start?
MAY: It started when I was just a little boy. The first
money my aunt gave me was five dollars, and I bought a
bugle with it. That's all I could buy for five dollars was
a bugle. So I was a bugle boy for the Boy Scouts, but I
couldn't play it. [laughter] I did learn to play it. Dad
had me take lessons, because Dad used to play the violin.
He had me go to one of his friends, a Mr. Shaw. So I
learned; Mr. Shaw taught me bugle calls.

Anyhow, they had a big parade in San Diego before I
learned to play the bugle, and so I marched with my bugle
out at the side of all the other fellows. They were all in
the squad, but I was out marching right behind them and to
the side of the scout leader. They marched up Broadway,

and I was right next to the crowd. Every time I'd go by,
they'd say, "Blow the horn, bugler! Blow the horn!" And I
couldn't blow, and I'd march on. [laughter]

But, then I wanted to get a saxophone. I went back
and took lessons with the same man. But Mr. Shaw would
call my dad and said, "C.C." — Dad's name was C.C. for
Charles Clifford — "C.C, I can't keep taking him. Clifford
won't practice."

But I eventually did practice and got to where I could
play the saxophone. Dad kept after me. That's one of the
things I thank him for. He always said, "I wish you would
play the piano, son. If you carry a violin you have to
tune it. If you carry a saxophone you got a big case and
have to carry it. You feel sorry for the poor bass man, but
the piano player he walks around with his hands empty and
helps the other fellows. And there's always a piano
wherever you go." He said, "A lot of times you will be out
and you won't have an instrument to play." So Dad always
had good advice for me.

Anyway, I played the saxophone for many years. I
worked up to where we played for the Hotel del Coronado.
We had remote broadcasts from there, and we had remote
broadcasts from where I played the El Cortez Hotel. We
followed Harry Owens, who was a great [performer] from
Hawaii. Remember "Sweet Lailani"? [That was] one of the

songs he wrote. We followed him into the El Cortez. He is
a great friend of mine. We are personal friends. We
played piano together and did a lot of things. We had a
lot of mutual friends.

LASKEY: You did learn to play the piano?

MAY: Eventually. How I learned to play the piano was, I
went up pretty fast with the music. And all during the
Depression — '29 — they didn't have enough money to eat.
They didn't have enough money to do anything. But they
could buy home-brew, and they could dance. Dance orches-
tras were in demand. We played every Friday and Saturday
night for dances. I was at the point there of making as
much money as my dad was. I would save up my money. I
bought a car, a big car on time. Later, I'll tell you
about it.

I was called by the hotel three or four nights a week,
on special nights. I played for [Charles] Lindberg when he
returned. I didn't know who he was. The master of ceremo-
nies was Will Rogers, and I didn't know who he was. So we
all went down in the basement and shot pool while they had
the ceremonies. We played "Lucky Lindy" from up in the
balcony, we united with the concert orchestra and with
Martin Day's orchestra, a big band. So anyhow, we got
called back for the program to play "Lucky Lindy" again as
he left. [This was] in the grand ballroom of the Hotel del

Coronado, but when you're young you don't know what's going
on sometimes. I learned more about him later on, about
Lindberg and what he had done.

All I wanted to do was go to school and play music. I
wrote with one of my fraternity brothers [Paul C.
Johnston], Epsilon Eta, a local which later became [part
of] Sigma Alpha Epsilon, a national [fraternity]. We wrote
two of the school's extravanganzas . Follies, we called
them Aztec Follies. I wrote the music on the second show,
and Paul Johnston wrote the words. And on the first show I
wrote a couple of tunes and a couple lyrics, but I didn't
do all the music. On the second I did all.

I was one of two bands being considered to go to the
Coconut Grove in Los Angeles for a sub for Jimmy Grier when
he — No, Jimmy Grier played with Gus Arnheim, [who] was
going to go on a two-week tour with his band, and they
needed a pick-up band, a band they could get hold of. My
Coronado band, we were considered as a possibility of going
in there, which would have been the capstone for me, but we
didn't get the job. Somebody else got it. Dad used that to
build up on me to see how uncertain this music [business]
is. You can't count on it.

And then we had a chance to go around the world,
playing on a ship. Not around the world. They played from
here to Japan, all the stops on the ship. We would be the

ship's orchestra. They would pay a very small stipend,
like fifty dollars for the trip, but everything was free
and you'd get to see the world. You'd be off all day;
you'd just play the evening. It went up to the point where
I bought sheet music for "Roses of Picardy." We would ' ve
played all this concert music during dinner and then
dancing. I didn't know anything about concert music, so we
were practicing it.

Then one day a promoter came along who knew we played
at the Coronado Country Club some of the time. One day he
came, and he said that we had a chance to go on the
Pantages vandeville circuit. It would be a hundred a week
for each one of us. Maybe it wasn't that much, but it was
a lot, though. We had a five-piece band.

We started rehearsing like crazy. We were all set to
go. We had to play a tryout to show what we could do.
This man was the manager of the Coronado Country Club, and
he was a former actor from New York. So we rehearsed,
rehearsed, and finally we went on the stage. Mr. Pantages
— Alexander Pantages — was sitting out front with two or
three fellows. So they rang the curtain up and away we
went. We played our act, and they said, "Thank you very
much." That was the last we heard from them. [laughter]

In the meantime, I'd canceled going on the ship at the
last minute, which was terrible to have done. They had to

get another orchestra at the last minute. But I was so
sure that we were going from this promoter. I learned
early that you can't work both sides of the street and you
can't pull out on people like that. It was very bad.
LASKEY: So you lost your trip to the Orient?
MAY: Lost my trip to the Orient.

So, Dad kept building on this. "See, son, the Coconut
Grove, the Orient trip, and now this. Music will be like
that the rest of your life. Now," he says, "you're going
back to school."

I'd already missed registration [for college], and I
think registration had closed.

TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE
MAY 12, 1982

MAY: [We were talking about] my break with music. Dad
convinced me I had to go back to school. But the semester
had started, and they said it was too late to get in and do
any good. So he sent me up to my aunt's mountain resort
called Tahquitz Lodge. It is no longer in existence, but
it was up in a little area called Keen Camp. It was up
near Idyllwild. They were competitors at that time.
Idyllwild has since gone way past them, and they are out of
business. But it was a lovely spot. And I had never seen
snow before, and I went through one winter of snow, which
was just wonderful.

I worked up there. I would get tips from — Not that I
needed them or wanted them. But I laid fires in some of
the little cabins, and they'd give me a dollar. It was,
you know, fun to be useful and be wanted. I had never done
any work like that for anybody, like waiting on people,
ever, so this was my first experience. Anyhow I did that,
and then I had a horse to ride in the hills. And I had
nothing to do, just nothing. Wonderful food. People would
come there. It was like a resort. They had an old woman
that played the piano there on Saturday nights, and they
danced in this big ballroom they had. They had great big
fireplaces. It was a wonderful spot. And like I told you

earlier, all the relatives took in all the relatives, and I
was just taken [in] like one of the family. [tape recorder
turned off]

While getting ready to return to school and finding
out I was too late for that semester, I had a short course
[of] piano lessons. I took ten lessons, and that was over
a period of, I think I took one twice a week. I think it
was over a period of five or six weeks. I took this
shortcut [method]; it was called the Waterman method of
piano-playing. It was swing-base rhythm playing and what
is now called stride-base and fixed chords. It was a chord
system which worked very fast and very good.

Anyhow, I had this behind me, and I had my music book
and these ten lessons. So when I got up to the mountains,
I had all this time, and there was an old piano sitting out
there in the middle of the dance floor. So I started
practicing on that, and I started to enjoy playing it. You
go very fast with the Waterman system. I had no teacher
from then on. I just had the chords and the memory of this
wonderful fellow that had hands so big he could hit four-
teenth almost, but he could hit tenths with his hands
almost closed. I couldn't do that; my hands are smaller.
But anyhow I kept working away on the swing base, and I got
so I could go through all the chords and all the progres-
sions and could play quite a little bit. I knew about ten

pieces that I could play pretty well, ten pieces by the
time I went back to San Diego, going back to school.

I agreed with my dad that I should give up music and
go back to school because, as he pointed out, show me a
musician that's even happy, which I couldn't. I knew a
lot of musician friends. And he knew. He'd been a musi-
cian, and he got out. In fact he led the orchestra at the
Isis Theatre in San Diego, which was the first opera house
in San Diego.

LASKEY: Your father led the orchestra?

MAY: Yes, as a young man. Not for long, I don't remember
the Isis [Opera House] staying open very long. It was
before my time, I guess.

The idea was that I was seriously going back to
school. I wanted to get going, doing something. I regis-
tered in [San Diego] State College as a freshman, and I got
the curriculum. I decided I didn't want to study all the
requirements that they had for basic things. How I did it,.
I don't know--good talking or luck or something. I was
able to talk them into [letting me enroll in] courses in
money and in banking and economics, all junior/senior
subjects [that] looked really interesting in my freshman
and sophomore years. So the first year I took all these
business courses, and the basic business courses were all
the tough ones. I was in with a lot of older folks because

I was also, you see, a year behind. A lot of my friends
were up there.

Incidentally, in school the first opening day in
Money, Banking and Investments, the teacher said, "I'm
going to give you your first assignment. The first assign-
ment, I'm going to give you all $1,000." (Multiply that
times twenty, that would be $20,000.) "That's going to be
your stake to start out with. I want you to invest in the
stock market. "

Everybody was in the stock market. He was. Every-
body. We used to ditch college to go down and watch the
stock market returns.
LASKEY: What year was this?
MAY: This was 1929. I registered in September.

Anyhow, I still had the orchestra of mine. Oh, I
didn't give up music, but I gave it up professionally. We
played Saturday nights. When I got back from the moun-
tains, I had a whole summer before school, and I got the
band back together and we started playing for dances.
LASKEY: How large was your band?

MAY: Well, it would depend on how much money you had. If
you were playing for a big school and you wanted a five- or
six-piece band, we had one. We played as much as eight.
We got a little combo going out to a La Jolla home party

one day; we had three of us. And we played in the house
for a small dance.
LASKEY: That's nice.

MAY: But we normally had never less than five, sometimes
six. I would give a flat price. Then I would get my
musicians as cheap as I could, and then I would keep what
was left over. That taught me a lot of things, how to
handle people. The boys would get together and say,
"You're getting all the money, you're keeping all the
money." It was good experience for me, because in the
building contracting business they figure if the contractor
is making too much money they should charge more. So I was
able to placate and to be fair and not take more than my
share. But take your share. Plus your interest on your
investment. Plus interest on your gasoline for driving
them, and interest on getting the job, which would be the
booking fee. You're entitled to all those, and then split
what's left. But don't work for the same price they do and
then do all the work.

So you learned all those things, like "What makes
Sammy run" again. In my book, he was out working while the
other kids were going to school and then playing. And when
they finished school, well, they all went to work for him.
LASKEY: Did any of these things come from your father,
too?

MAY: Oh yes, he helped me. And some of this stuff you're
just kind of born with. I wasn't born with enough of it.
I mean I've been a "good guy" too long. I've come in last
lots of times. [laughter]

But, anyhow, back to school. The class was supposed
to make their investments. I didn't make my investments
for two months, and, in October, the market crashed. In
the first crash — It really crashed twice, you know.
LASKEY: No.

MAY: Oh, it crashed twice. And that's where everybody got
wiped out. The first crash not everybody was taken. The
big financiers of the country, not the Rothschilds, they
were in Europe, but the Rockefellers and — I can't remem-
ber the names of all of them. I can recognize them, but
all the big investment houses now, those names, were the
men who got together and said, "We've got to stop this."
They all jumped into the market and bought. And when they
bought heavily, then the market started back up again.
They said, "You see, there was just nothing to it."

And then everybody jumped in on the rise. My [future]
father-in-law took everything he had and mortgaged it — real
estate, loans. Everybody put loans on everything they
owned. They took savings out of their bank. They just
went crazy, and they bought. They all bought on margin.
Ten percent down. And then wham! she started — And you

couldn't stop it. The banks called their loans, and they
took their houses. And took their businesses. There were
people in New York jumping out the windows. That's true.

And yet in our family we were lucky that Dad had a
fine job with the San Diego gas and electric company, and
salaries didn't go down. Prices started falling, and they
kept falling, but Dad's salary stayed the same. And, then
with a yearly increase, he was doing real well. And I was
doing real well; I was playing all for cash. And there was
no income taxes in those days; one didn't even know about
it.

So anyhow, I made my investment after the crash. And,
of course, the teacher said that was not fair. "I didn't
know it was going to crash," [he said].

And I said, "Well, I admit it, but you said invest it,
and so I invested it when I thought was the proper time. I
got more than the rest of the class did."

"Well, you are not going to get an A, that's for
sure. " [laughter ]
LASKEY: That's not fair.

MAY: So, anyhow that was my money and banking [class] I
took. Two years later, I got to the point where I couldn't
go on anyhow, because I had elected junior and senior
subjects and not enough basic credits. By that time I was
anxious to get out on my own.

The Depression was on, and the best job you could get
as a college graduate out of San Diego State was to become
a salesman dispensing gasoline, a gas attendant for $100 a
month. That's what Standard Oil paid in 1930-31. Many
graduates aspired to that, and everything from that was
down to-- Carpenters were getting fifty cents an hour, and
they worked nine hours and got paid for eight. So you got
$4 for nine hours. In those days, we never knew there was
such a thing as not working Saturdays. We worked six days.
And that was the highest pay the best carpenters could
earn. That was high pay.
LASKEY: Were you doing carpentry work?
MAY: No, I was getting ready to. But that's what was
going at that time. By '32 it got down to that. I'm
talking about 1930-31.
LASKEY: Yes.

MAY: But in the meantime, I was starting to go into the
dance band business again. I had gone to college in '29
and '30, and had played in the band for school dances. And
then '31, I was out of school. I finished because after
two years I was through and didn't want to go back and take
all the freshman subjects to graduate.

LASKEY: Had you decided at this point what you wanted to
do?
MAY : No . No .

LASKEY: You hadn't.

MAY: With my band's popularity increasing, I had quite an
income. I had a good income. I could keep on playing
professionally, you know, and still say I'm not a profes-
sional.

But I got the desire to build furniture. I don't know
why, but I had this talent of carpentry that I'd learned
through my Styris friends. I drew it up myself. I hope I
can find the drawings someday; I've got drawings of the
furniture I made. But it was made out of wood four-by-
four's and one-by-four's. It was like the Monterey
furniture with the rope seats and just drop the upholstery
in them and iron bars bent at angles to hold up the wings
of the arms. And I made quite a bit of furniture with no
place to store it. Then, I put it in a house of a friend,
a realtor, who had a lot of houses for sale. He couldn't
sell them, because of the great '29 crash and depression.
So I put the furniture in a house to store it. Painted it,.
did my own painting, and had someone help me decorate it
and then antiqued it.

Then the house sold. So he said, "That's all right;
I'll let you put it in another house." We moved it to
another house, and pretty soon that house sold. So he
said, "Well, why don't you go and build a house yourself?"

I said, "That'll be great."

So he introduced me to R. C. Lichty, who had a lot of
lots he couldn't sell. Again because of the Depression.
Now this was '30 and '31. So Lichty said, "Great, I'll put
up the land. I'll put up the money. You build the house,
pay me for the land, and we'll split fifty-fifty." And he
had his money for the lot. And that was fine. My labor
for use of his money.

So anyhow, we agreed and built my first house in east
San Diego. It was a good house, I landscaped the property
and moved my furniture in, and the furniture helped. When
I look back at pictures of it, it was a good house. It got
good publicity, but very few people would go through it
because it was during the Depression. One day somebody
would come through, and for three days nobody would be
there. Again one day somebody would go through. Fairly
soon somebody came through, and they said they were just in
from Manila. He was a colonel. Colonel Arthur J. O'Leary,
and his wife. They fell in love with it and they said,
"Come over and see us tonight to discuss buying the house
and furniture. "

And when they left, I didn't know what to do, and I
panicked. I went to a friend who was a realtor, and he
said, "You take this form right here and you fill out the
name here and you do this — [laughter] You put down the
price and put down 'all cash' and then you have them sign

here and you sign here. Then I'll tell you what to do
next. And get a check!"

So I went to see them that night. They said they
loved the house very much and they'd like to buy every-
thing, furniture and the whole works. So I sold it for all
cash, in the middle of the Depression for $9,500, house and
furniture.

LASKEY: And that was it?

MAY: It was outside money. They came from the Philippines
from the army, with their savings that they had brought
with them.

My partner, his name was, how do you say, unbeliev-
able. His name was 0. U. Miracle, just like it sounds,
Oliver Ulysses Miracle.
LASKEY: That was his real name?

MAY: Yes. I just took a picture of his name the other day
on the sidewalk. He built all the sidewalks and streets in
the subdivision that we built in. That's why he owned all
the land. He was a wonderful man. He gave me lots of
wonderful business experience, like "keep all the money and
then pay it out as they dun you for it." And "don't
overpay; if somebody overpays you, let them find it. Don't
you do their books for them." That was his theory. I
don't believe quite in that, but [he said] "if it costs you
$100 to find a mistake they made, then deduct the $100

and then give the balance back to them. But don't spend
your money what's already been earned." You can take that
any way you want, but that was his credo. I've changed
that a lot. A lot of things you change after you get into
business.

LASKEY: Yes. Well, times have changed considerably too.
MAY: That's right. But right now I have had a series of
secretaries, and each one of the three of them, I think,
sent out more checks than they should have to the same
place. The checks were returned from the computer people.
[And] big companies are so eager to have a credit on your
books, like the gas company says you have credit on your
books and the power company says you have credit on the
books. Some of the doctors mailed them back, but I wonder
how many didn't get back. We have no way of knowing, but a
lot of them came back. Too many — They were just writing
checks; every time a secretary came in, they'd write the
check, and, when the invoice came in, why, they'd pay the
invoice again. But that is way off the subject, except
character building. I mean, you know, you learn from other
people.

But Mr. Miracle was real tight with money, and that's
why he survived and was able to build houses and finance
them when everyone else was going broke.
LASKEY: What did the house look like?

MAY: Well, it was pretty handsome. It had a cornice
molding all around the eaves, a hand-tiled roof and hand-
tiled floors all the way through, and Mexican fireplaces.
It's been pretty well publicized. I'll show it to you
someday. And for a first house, I think it has stood up
well architecturally. It was much copied. I built the
house, and you go back now in that one neighborhood and I
counted — I took photographs of fifteen houses that were
copied from it later after I'd moved to Los Angeles in
1936.

I started building the first house in '31 and finished
in '32. Then [numbers] two and three. The third house I
told you about. And then we started — We did an awful lot
of houses in San Diego; it's hard to believe. Dr. David
Gebhard [from] the University of California at Santa
Barbara is interested in me and the work historically and
architecturally. He's been collecting, cataloging my
houses. I am collecting all of the old photographs for him
to examine. Now, why I started this I don't remember why —
LASKEY: I asked you about the style of the house.
MAY: Yes. So he wanted me to list all the houses we had
built and asked, "How many did you build?" And I tried to
guess and decided to make a list, which is now in process,
[tape recorder turned off]

SECOND PART
JUNE 9, 1982
LASKEY: Mr. May, almost from the beginning your houses
were unique, and they were the early California style. How
did you develop your style?

MAY: It's sort of difficult to say how I developed the
style, because I was unconscious of anything in those days.
And you said one of the first — But actually the first
house was unique. I built it sort of as rebelling against
the kind of houses in the community and against the box
house, which I said some of the [Irving] Gill houses were.
They had that great detail and the arches that said "Gill,"
but the living was still living in a box. To me, when we
lived on the ranch, with cross-ventilation and rooms spread
out and around courtyards, basic old California plan, it
seemed to be a much better way to build and live.

I think it can be easily said that the floor plan
determines the look of a building. If you build it square,
absolutely square, why, you're going to get a square
building. And if you build a rectangle, you'll have a
rectangular building. If you build an L, you'll have an L-
shaped building and more chance to work with it. If you've
got a U, you'll have a little more chance, because you've
got three facades to tie together. Every time you build a
wing you are starting to enclose space, after you build the

second wing. The second wing, third wing, fourth wing
enclose space, if they are properly placed around the
courtyard. And that, of course, is the basis for the
thesis [that] the whole California way of living is for
protection and for trapping the sun and for having privacy.
All the things that we think about in fine housing today
are what the early Californians did, and what I originally
did and still do.

People coming from back East are usually so steeped in
the ways of the East Coast [that] they come out and look at
something like this, and they'll think it over and then
they'll go buy the house that they are used to. It gets
back to the same thing that I've said over and over again,
that people can't judge any better than they know. If they
only know buildings the way they were raised up as chil-
dren, why, they're looking to find something [like that];
it's like going home. And a house being the single biggest
investment that the usual family makes in a whole lifetime,,
why, they want to be pretty careful and be sure that what
they're doing is the right thing.

The strange thing in my first houses [was] all the
people I sold to were all people who had traveled around
the world. Like the first house I built for Mr. Miracle on
Norma Drive was bought by Colonel and Mrs. O'Leary. He had
been in the army, and they had traveled all over the world.

They were world travelers, and when they saw this, they
said that's the way they wanted to live. And I think that
people that have the advantage of travel are more educated
about living, having seen people from Eskimo houses to skin
houses of the Africans and the wonderful Mediterranean
houses and the houses up in Oslo and Norway, Cape Cod and
Colonial, and you name it.

Remember how the first settlers brought their ideas
over from the old country. On the Mayflower , they weren't
from Spain. They were from England someplace, and they
brought their idea of living [from England]. Of course,
they had to adapt it to the climate. So the climate really
dictates; you can see that all over the world. I mean, the
warm climates with their courtyards and patios, and only in
the last, oh, the last couple of generations have we been
even able to think about putting a courtyard type of house
in the East. Now they are becoming very common. Mainly it
is because of the insulation development and then being
able to move heat great distances. Where in the old days
you had to use a fireplace, now we have forced air, and
even better yet we've hot water for steam radiators or for
radiant heating, that would be a coil fan unit where they
put hot water through a coil and a fan blows air over it.
So there's three phases of hot water heating that can be
used with this type of living. And then with double-

glazing and insulation, the houses are more adaptable to
cold climates. Modern mechanics and modern building
materials have made it easier to adapt this type of house
for sites in the Northwest and the East. And we've done
many, many houses across the country.

But, going back to the style, I remember Mr. Wright--
Frank Lloyd Wright — told me, he said that you "find that
designers are born; they are not made. We can't teach
anybody how to be a designer, try though we may."

I often relate my building to an orchestra. You have
one man in the band who's a good arranger, and he can
arrange the tunes. So he's the arranger; he arranges and
makes them sound better than anybody else can. He knows
how to voice the instruments. He knows how to take a lead,
how to back up, how to play obligates or countermelodies ,
counterthemes. And how the strings on top of a low-voiced
alto saxophone and a lower-voiced tenor sax would work. In
fact, he knows that if the band went to three saxophones
and added a soprano sax that it will take the lead note
over everything else. He knows that. He's [the] designer
of the music for the band, the arranger. There's usually
only one in every band. Not everybody can do it. Often
several people can, but there's always one best one, and
he's the arranger. And he's the one that makes the band
great. Benny Goodman was a great band leader, but if you

took the arranger — And that was a wonderful musician
called Fletcher Henderson. Fletcher Henderson did all of
Benny Goodman's arranging. Without Fletcher Henderson you
may never have heard of Benny Goodman.

And so it goes the same way [with] architecture.
There's one man who knows, and that's the designer. The
architect has got his name out front, and the architect
takes all the credit. But in his office someplace — unless
he's the designer himself — he'll have a designer just like
the orchestra leader has an arranger. So, getting back to
your question, I just built the house the way I thought it
ought to be built. Design came naturally.
LASKEY: I was just wondering, where did you get the
experience to build a house? We've talked a lot about your
background, but specifically how did you know how to design
a house when you first had this opportunity.
MAY: Well, it was real simple; there wasn't too much to
it. I'll tell you two or three reasons why it was simple.
The first house, I think I told you, I built largely myself
with Mr. William F. Hale, who was my mentor in construc-
tion. He taught me all the things he knew. We built the
whole house from foundations, all the way through. We did
everything. I worked in every trade with him coaching me.
We got experts only in one or two trades when we needed
them, such as a plumber and an electrician.

LASKEY: So you were essentially apprenticed to Mr. Hale?
MAY: Apprenticed, yes, on this first house.

But prior to that I had drawn the plan for it. And I
had drawn the plan by just drawing naturally, not well,
just enough to get my ideas on paper. Just last weekend I
went through some old drawings and found one of our first
houses. And it helps me to answer your question, because
in those days when we built a house it would be a $10,000
house, which now would be a $200,000 house, and I had two
sheets of paper. One was a foundation plan outlined over
the floor plan, so those two plans were one plan. And one
was a little plot plan and one elevation, or maybe one or
two principal elevations of the house.

We went out to get the bulding permit, and I remember
Oscar Knecht was the chief building inspector of San Diego.
I came in with my drawing, not the first one, but one of
the later ones, and there were only two pages to look over.
There wasn't big building in San Diego in the thirties. He
looked it over, and he said, "This looks pretty good. Do
you know how to build it?"

I said, "I can build it."

And he said, "OK."

And stamp, stamp, and it was all done.

But, nowadays it's another world. You can't get
started, a man can't prepare the raw lot for less than nine

months to a year, to get the lot ready to build on. Fees
and commissions, soils engineers, geologists, calculations,
test, reports, etc., etc., you've got every kind of engi-
neer working on that land before we can get the building
permit. We have to have special soils reports, and geology
the same

With that all approved by several departments, then we
start planning. Then you take topog [ raphical ] maps and
measure all the trees, and already you've spent four times
more than finished houses used to cost and you spend that
much on services. That's not all. Then you go down to the
building department, and they'll take the plan — Los
Angeles County is strict and they'll take your plan and
keep it maybe for five weeks. If they don't like you, why,
maybe six, seven weeks.
LASKEY: Really?

MAY: If you have a friend, they'll take it a lot faster.
I guess that's the normal practice. I'm not complaining
about that, that's life. They check for everything. I
mean, their engineer will sign the drawings that the
structure is sound, and they'll check all these drawings
and ask for more drawings to make it clear certain things
are there. And it's their job to make sure it's well
built. But the point is now some of these houses are
being overbuilt that you can't believe it. Way back in the

old days we used to say that a two-by-four vertical stud
would carry ten times any weight you could put on it, and,
recently, just three or four years ago, they have cut the
studs down now from three-and-three-quarter inches by an
inch-and-three-quarters down to an inch-and-a-half by three-
and-a-half. Because they figured that they were shipping
all this extra wood they didn't need in studs and they were
wasting lumber.

Anyhow, in building a house we have many things now
that make it cost more. You didn't ask me that question,
but you asked me how —

LASKEY: But, I do want to know about that. Yes.
MAY: The main thing is this: that we just have too many
people to do the job. In the old days, I was the appren-
tice. I drew my own plan and built it. I was the contrac-
tor, and I was the so-called building designer or the
architect.

But I wasn't an architect. At that time they allowed
me to practice architecture if I notified the client in
writing that I was not an architect. Then, I had all the
rights of an architect. That's the way I operated for many
years before the building designer license law was enacted.
Because, then, I went in under the grandfather clause.

But the number of people we have [now]-- [tape inter-
rupted] three or four engineers, which would include the

soils engineer, and then we have the subcontractors. The
subcontractor many times now is a big company who owns a
firm, and they'll have a superintendent who'll run all of
their jobs. The superintendent will have a foreman on each
of his jobs, each one drawing money or a percentage. And
then they'll have the men who will do the actual construc-
tion work.

Our big problem right now is communication. We were
building a fine big home in Rancho Santa Fe this last year.
And the contractor brought up all his subcontractors to see
the work they were going to have to do, to see my house
because they hadn't done that kind of a house. But who
came? The mason who was going to build it didn't come.
The boss, or owner of the subcontracting business, came for
the ride to Los Angeles. So, I found I was talking to the
heads of all these small companies. So, they said, "Oh,
yes. We can do it. Sure, sure. Don't worry, our men can
do i t . "

And so I got down there, and everything was being done
wrong. I said to the general contractor, "What happened?"

And he said, "Well, they're doing like you said."

"But these aren't the men I talked to. They are not
doing it at all right."

So I got out with the trowel, as I usually do, and I
started to show how to do it.

Then the workman says, "So that's what you want.
Well, they never told me that."

This happened with most of the subs. So it was lack
of communication, and pride in their work.

We furnish a detailed set of specifications. In the
old days it would be written on the plan, two or three
sheets, four sheets, five sheets. As times got a little
better and houses larger, we'd furnish more drawings. Also
you must realize that I had the advantage of being the
builder, so I didn't have to write down all the things that
I would have to write for another builder. I would just
give the subs instructions directly. So I was able to have
them do it my way easily.

The way I would work with a client [was] they probably
would have seen a house already built, and they'd say, "I'd
like to build one like it, or bigger or similar or
cheaper." I didn't usually do anything cheaper per square
foot, because prices kept rising. From '32, they slowly
rose from $2.50 per square foot to now over $100. So every
time you built a house it was going to cost a little more
than the one you just finished. We had no problem of being
built any cheaper until the "Low Cost House" by Chris
Choate and me, which is another story.

The house was shown. The client said he liked it, so
I would make a real rough floor plan for him. If he had a

lot — If he didn't have a lot I wouldn't bother — If he had
a lot, he was a good prospect and I would make a plan. And
then I would make a proposal that I would design and build
the house according to their approved plan. And it would
use the same specifications in the house that they saw at
4724 Norma Drive, for instance. They'd have seen the
house, had walked through it; so they knew it was plaster,
it had a tile roof, they knew it was going to be tile
floors, and use landscaping up to a certain point. So they
would sign the contract, and away we'd go.

In fact, I built three houses in Coronado that the
owners never saw until the houses were completed. They
[the buyers] were in the navy. One was Lieutenant Com-
mander Mort Seligman, and one was a commander. Matt
Gardner. They came through different times at Coronado,
and they said, "I'm going to be here as long as it takes
you to get the house designed" — which would be a couple of
weeks — "I'll leave the money with the bank, and they'll pay
you out as you need it." Neither communicated or saw their
house until it was all finished.

So being the whole one-man band, you can control it,
you see. You can make more music with less overhead cost
than you can with the present day where you have all these
various subs, building departments, state and federal

regulations, unions, and on and on. The costs are so very
high.

Let me take a specific example as of right now. This
happened just last year, 1981, at the end of the year. We
were finishing up a large home in Rancho Santa Fe. The
contractor wanted some information about locating an outlet
which apparently had been located in the wrong position.
So I went down to the job, among other things to see. I am
using this outlet as a specific example. It was an electri-
cal outlet where you put your cord plug, it was not located
to plan.

The owner said, "Well, as long as it's not exactly
where it was supposed to be, I don't mind paying for it.
Let's move it where you want it." I didn't think it really
made any difference. Well, anyway, the owner was a perfec-
tionist, so he said, "Let's put it where we ought to have
it or we can install another one."

So we decided to move it. I said the electrician
would have to move and locate the outlet according to plan
at his expense. So there was to be no charge for the move,
but the contractor said, "I'll have to write up a change
order." So he wrote the change order. He put, "One
electrical outlet, moved at owner's request." I later
found out he had charged us $50, plus overhead and profit.
LASKEY: For the outlet?

MAY: For moving the outlet. It was an electric conduit,
steel conduit. The [sub ]contractor then added on 15
percent overhead and then 10 percent profit. So that
amounted to $63.

Then the contractor took that billing, and it came
through to me and that's where I picked it up. I was
checking the bills on the billing. And here the contractor
had added his overhead at 10 percent, which is in his
contract, and profit [at] 10 percent. So he took the $63
and put ten on and ten again amounting to $76. And then my
contract calls for 15 percent of final cost, so that
brought the original $50 extra to $114, an error which
should not have been charged in the first place. So that
went into the cost in the billing, so the final labor cost
came out over 100 percent. So here you have two contrac-
tors charging 25 and 20 percent on every change order. [My
company] charges 15 percent on top of that. Well, that's
just too much, too much. It's all supervisory cost that
produces no value to the house. Nothing is treated as
value. So all these percentages, that's just one of the
big problems. And there's lots of problems why costs keep
rising.

One of the other problems are extras. The same thing
happens there. These are extras but nonextras, why —
There are many ways of making more money by not building it

in quite right and that type of thing, and so you need
supervision. I don't want to get into that right now. But
this makes my point that it used to be so much easier to
build.

One thing I did have [was] the knack to visualize how
it would look when it was finished. I mean, just a little
rough sketch, and I could tell. And I did a lot of self-
learning. Self-teaching, I should call it. I had a friend
in Del Mar, named Bill Mushet. He built a very attractive
type of a ranch house that I always admired. Very simple
and just good lines. He was older than I, and we were very
good friends. I would see him every now and then. He had
a little store up there, and I used to go and visit with
him.

I remember the great houses in Los Angeles. They were
published in the great old Architectural Digest, which was
run by Mr. J. C. Brasfield. In those days, he ran only the
fine houses, and he had wonderful taste. Nearly every
architect of note has had his houses in the old original
Architectural Digest. It came out four times a year, and
it really covered some of the great houses. Wallace Neff
and Gordon Kaufmann and Paul Williams. I could go on and
on with all the great architects and their work that
appeared in those years, 1925 and on. I was conscious of

those ardent architects. The Home magazine and Sunset
magazine I used to take.

I didn't [borrow] whatever came before me. Mr. George
Marston of San Diego told me, when I was first starting,
"An architect is one who remembers." But I didn't ever do
any copying. I didn't believe in that and luckily didn't
have to.

One of my friends said, "You shouldn't even look at
the magazines because they can influence you badly. Just
stay pure and then do what you like to do good."

But I don't think that is quite right. I think the
more you know, the better you can judge. If your judgment
is not good, and, if you see some piece of roofing that you
think is bad, or bad scale, or bad ornamentation, or
unnecessary or bad use of materials, I mean, you should — I
got in the habit, as I looked at things, of just criticiz-
ing it, "This is wrong, this is wrong." I can hardly see
anything now that I don't criticize. And I think right-
fully so. But it's funny how you find these things.

People bring in their drawings on subdivision approval
of the architecture, and I'll look at them and see things
you just wouldn't believe. Fenestrations all mixed up.
They don't realize fenestrations should follow the form of
the house. The change of materials on an outside corner

100

and item after item that they don't know what they are
doing. And these are fine architects.

Just the other day I picked up a paper I was going to
send to one of my associates in Arizona. And there was
this great big building out in — The most horrible building
I ever saw. [laughter] It was out in Chatsworth. The
title in the Times was "New York Builder Comes to L.A. to
Build Big Building." This big building looked like about
five Cinderella houses piled on a pile, one on top of each
other. It was the worst thing I ever saw in my life. This
was quite a while back, and they said they were going to
sell it for a million and a half dollars, which I thought
was really breaking the bank in those days, because we
hadn't quite hit that point in the San Fernando Valley of
houses being that expensive. Here in Bel-Air and Beverly
Hills, some were. But it was no problem at all to take
that house apart.

If I see something that looks ridiculous, I say,
"What's wrong with it?" I would see a picture with about
eighteen sofa pillows on the sofa, so you can't sit down,
[laughter] It was so bad. These tastes, these fads come
and go, come and go.

I recall with great interest, I was working on my new
book and I was going through an old book published by the
AIA in 1932. That was right in the bottom of the

101

Depression, it might have been '33. But it was the "House
of Tomorrow" by the AIA, pictures of all the houses that
their members had designed, that their architects had built
in the late twenties. And there are some fine famous archi-
tects in there too. They were the most sad looking group
of houses you ever saw. Some were flat top with iron pipe,
flat decks, and curved windows on a curved wall. And there
was just an air that you knew — I made a statement at that
time — in fact I wrote it in the book — that there can't be a
house of tomorrow because tomorrow never comes. And
anybody who is foolish and vain enough to stick his neck
out and say "this is the house of tomorrow" is God, and I
don't think there is anyone that smart yet.

Now they have this postmodern thing that has "come
in." That to me is just, you know, why? It depreciates
the neighborhood. The next-door neighbor gets one, and
[the rest of the neighbors are] sick and sad. And I've
seen two or three of them out here that I believe should be
burned down. They don't contribute to the community. The
definition of a good house is how it fits in with its
neighbors. And when you make it stand out, out of char-
acter with the community — We have a restriction in our
deeds which we put on all the lots we sold when we were
subdividing, and that was no "freak houses," which covers
an awful multitude of sins, because there are a bunch of

102

houses that, you know, aren't machines for living. The
architect can say that they are, but they're not good
machines.

LASKEY: Well, that's an interesting point, because when
you started building in 1932, that was I think when the
International style came into prominence, that was the
house of tomorrow. Did you have any difficulty, as a
builder, dealing with that particular style?
MAY: I didn't know about it. I was so busy building
houses. I built the first house, and away I went. As I
say, I was just myself. Mr. Miracle backing me and a
number of my friends assisting from time to time finan-
cially. I was really unaware of the International style at
all until way up in the — Let's see, it had to be in '45.
I started in '32. I didn't know what it was and could care
less, I guess.

But, I do know that in '45, roughly, Elizabeth Gordon
in House Beautiful magazine did a big feature article, a
complete issue, on my second house in Los Angeles, page
after page after page. That was built in '39, and I don't
think they discovered it was as good as it was until '45.
It was in '45, I think, when they ran this article; it may
have been '43. I went to New York as guest of House
Beautiful magazine and Miss Gordon. They had a broadcast
about the house. I met many people at the press reception.

103

I went to the receptions and met some of the New York
architects. I had a wonderful time as a guest. It was an
educational experience

At that time I bought [Le] Corbusier's book. It just
says "Corbusier" on it. It is a big horizontal book. I
came into Miss Gordon's office one afternoon and she said,
"What's that?"

I said, "I just got this."

And she said, "Throw it away! [laughter] There's
nothing in it for you."

So I didn't even look at it. I thumbed through it.
"Avoid it," she said.

I admired her so very much. She seemed to be able to
pick the best of the best, and the friends who surrounded
her were just great friends and great architects and great
builders and great people on the House Beautiful staff, and
the people whose houses I visited were fine people. I
thought, "Gee, this is the side of road that I want to be
on." So I did not pursue Corbusier.

But commenting on that, I saw the Le Corbusier book
maybe about nine months ago, very deep in all my old books.
I pulled it out and started looking at it, and I was amazed
to see what I saw. He didn't know how to live, and then I
read later on that he was doing this for war workers, for
factory workers' houses. And it was a shame to make

104

factory workers live like he planned [for] them. I saw
that when you walked in the front door, [if he is] sitting
on the cominode and the door was open, you could see the
gentleman of the house sitting in the buff. Now that's the
absolute lowest form of planning anybody can do if they
have one iota of semblance of good living or breeding. I
saw places where they had the toilet so far back and so
many things in the front so that you couldn't get to it. I
saw things you could not believe: going up an outdoor
stairway to get to the bedroom, in the rain and the cold
and the sleet, the way they built the houses in Europe. So
I realized what Elizabeth Gordon was saying, and I'm glad
that I didn't get much influence from it, or any rather.
LASKEY: What you said in an earlier part in the interview
that you don't think that you were influenced by your own
background and by the housing that you lived in —
MAY: Oh, I do — oh, I do. No, I was influenced by the
houses I lived in —

LASKEY: At least by your heritage.

MAY: Yes. Oh, yes, that's where the influence came from.
I think I said, maybe I didn't make it clear enough, was
that when I decided to build the house in San Diego, why,
everybody else was building tiny, little boxes *[with the

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

105

garage on the back corner of the lot with a driveway
wasting space that should have been used for living. They
were little boxes, with a flat roof and a fringe of tile
across the front. ] It would be about twenty-by-twenty-two
or -twenty-five [square feet], which they would divide into
three or four rooms for bedroom, den, bathroom, one common
bathroom, and the dining room-kitchen in the square block,
and in the back of the lot would be an eighteen-by-eighteen
square foot garage. And you would have a long driveway
going in — the worst place in the world to put the driveway.

That's the first thing we did. In the first house
that we built, we made the driveway short and put the
garage out front. We made that a part of the enclosure, so
the house enclosed the patio, and the patio was U-shaped.

A lot of things influenced me. I had a friend who had
a big beautiful home that I used to visit, and they had
these beautiful plumbing fixtures. It was done by a Los
Angeles architect, Mr. Barton, who worked with his wife.
He built houses in Talmadge Park. He built this house and
it had this "beautiful" orchid and black tile. I say
"beautiful" in quotes, it didn't look very good. It was in
1929. Shiny as it could be, just a slick shine, and big
white grouts, quarter-inch white grouts between each tile.
Each one was laid like it was a jewel, a masterpiece of
value. And here was a washbasin standing on a great big

106

porcelain pedestal leg. Underneath it was a bunch of
handles, hot and cold water supply, and people would hang
the washrag on [them] and hang the toilet brush on [them],
on the handles. And it was just a — I thought, "Why in
the world are people living like that?"

And then, if you didn't have a pedestal — That was
deluxe to get a pedestal. That was 1929 — No, it was 1930,
1931. It had a great big base that tapered up to the big,
big basin. If you were real deluxe, you got a great big,
big one. Then the super-super, they had two of them,
[laughter] They came out much later with two basins on one
big leg. It was really pretty bad. Then at the time, of
course they didn't know, they had porcelain handles, and
then people would twist the handles and cut their hand.
They cut their hand so many times they had them changed to
metal handles. That's just incidental.

So anyhow, if you didn't like the pedestal lavatory,
you could go back to what they had used from the day I was
born, I guess. What first came was a wall-hung lavatory.
It just was bolted to the wall. And you still saw the same
trim, with the hot water and cold water pipes coming out
and under and going up to the bowl and drain trap. Then
you had all kinds of bathroom supplies [with] nowhere to
put them. I won't go into details, but they had the deluxe
which used to have two handles with the water coming out of

107

a single spout. The cheap way was to have a hot water
spout and a cold water spout, and then you mixed the water
in your hands without trying to burn them. And each spout
cost five dollars more. And when you built a house in
those days, five dollars was five dollars, so you usually
took the wall-hung lavatory with the hot water and the cold
water [spouts] and a rubber plug. That was it.

But anyhow, I rebelled, and so on my first house, and
I think I have been credited with — I know I should be, and
[I think] I have been — in innovating the pullman lavatory.
My first house, that would be in 1931 I think we have
established, I couldn't get any lavatories to build in, and
the big one was too big and too thick and too much metal on
it to build in. So I conceived of using a kitchen sink;
the kitchen sinks at that time came single, twenty-by-
thirty inches and double. So I just ordered the small
special twenty-by-twenty-four kitchen sinks and put them
on *[the top of a cabinet. The cabinet had two doors cover-
ing the sink, two or three stacks of drawers on each side
for bath linens and towels. Medicines were in a locked
drawer. And a window or a mirror was over the sink. The
top and splash was tiled or with marble on which you could
place your toiletries. Compared to the old wall-hung or

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

108

pedestal lavatory, great functional and beauty progress was
made.] In those days they didn't have garbage grinders, so
there were just small holes in the sinks, so there was a
small hole there. Just what I wanted.

Then, it seemed so ridiculous to put handles and a
spout on a flat surface, and build it like the big, big
pedestal lavatory, and then try to keep the pedestal top
clean with a washrag or a piece of cloth or anything to
wipe and polish it up, and keep the spout and the faucet
handles beside the spout on the deck clean. It was just
impossible. I was always my mother's housecleaner , espe-
cially bath and kitchen. Oftentimes, she was not well, so
all my growing years, my brother and I, we learned how to
take care of the house and help her and work in the kitchen
and cook and do things to help her. So I knew what it was
to put a dish rag between all those spouts and handles, so
I thought of putting a shower, no, a bathtub filler on the
wall with two handles above my bathroom kitchen shink. And
it would mix into a shower combination so that you had a
handle for hot and a handle for cold and the spout came out
of the wall and into the bowl like a fountain. You would
turn on the water as much as you want and wash your hands
like in a fountain. There would be fresh water all the
time, instead of washing in the dirty, old water in the

109

bowl. Anyhow, that was my first one, *[to my knowledge, on
my first house in 1931 was the first built-in lavatory
which became known as the "pullman lavatory."] From then
on we never used a lavatory. Everything was built-in
pullmans with kitchen sinks. And one day they caught on, a
number of years later, plumbing fixture companies like
American Standard offered oval porcelain bowls, and every-
body does them now.

In fact, in 1940, they came out with a new mixing
valve called the Moen , right after the war [started], in
•42, '43. But it didn't get going very fast, but you could
lift the lever and then twist the lever and you got hot or
cold water. It was called the Moen valve. It made more
sense because you only had one plate on the wall, and then
a little knob, so you could turn it to a shower or turn it
to a tub. Then they also had a Moen valve which just had
one mounting on the deck with the handle coming out of the
center of the spout. You turned the handle right or left
or up and down for volume. And then you only had one thing
to clean. So I succumbed and went into specifying using
those.

I used those for a number of years until one day I
thought, "What in the world happened to my old idea of it

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

110

being on the wall?" You still had one thing to clean, and
you still had all of these problems of [something] more
mechanical to care [for], these automatic valves. You
always had to have them fixed. So I went back, and, for
the last three or four years, we have done nothing but wall-
supply water for lavatories again. And everybody loves
them because you just take one wipe of the deck and it's
clean.

But that's off the subject; you asked me where I got
the idea. Well, I just got ideas; I would look at things
and see that isn't very good. I could do a lot better. I
rebelled against not using concrete slabs for subfloors, I
wanted the concrete slab to keep the house low on the
ground, because if you can't walk out of the living room or
the bedroom or the kitchen onto the ground, if you have to
go down steps, why, you're not living like a real Califor-
nian lives from the house to the patio. We never had steps
down from the house to the patio. And we always built on
the same level, up a few inches so water wouldn't run in,
but you walked out of your room and you didn't go down
steps. You can't get a tie or a continuity or a relation
to the garden if you are looking down steps at it. I call
it "ground contact."

So, I started studying on how to make satisfactory
concrete slabs. The first one, on my first house, I worked

111

out was quite unique. I laid the whole — We built the
foundation, and in between the foundation we laid hollow
tile with airspace in them. It was a building tile that
they made in San Diego in those days; it was hard burned

clay that had hollow cells from the bottom to the top

hollow cells with solid top and bottom. So I laid those
over the whole floor and then poured the concrete slab on
top of that, and I had anchored in, or locked in, a dead
airspace under the floor so that stopped capillary attrac-
tion. It kept the floor warm, and the air stopped mois-
ture. It was expensive. You're putting down two floors.
Because right then, you could just grout it in and have a
floor all ready, except it wasn't strong enough with the
hollow spaces.

LASKEY: Now, when was this? This was in the 1930s?
MAY: This was in my first house, in 1931.
LASKEY: In your first house?

MAY: Yes. And of course my method was unknown to the
bulding code. The FHA [Federal Housing Administration]
came in '32, '33, and they wouldn't allow cement floors at
all. But I had built a lot of successful houses by that
time, quite a few houses, with cement slabs.
LASKEY: Did you have any difficulty with your clients with
the cement floors? Weren't they used to wood floors?

112

MAY: No, they liked them very much. * [You see, there was
the base upon which we could lay wood, linoleum, asphalt
tile, carpeting, or floor tile, or any other floor, and be
close to the ground.] The ones who lived around the world,
they lived with tile floors. You go to Spain, you don't
have many wood floors. You go to Mexico, Portugal, and
mainly it's all tile. Japan has both. But the warm
countries like California had lots of tile floors, but in
the '20s and '30s, they were laid over wood subfloors and
were too high off of the ground.

And then I found a man in Los Angeles, Mr. A. B. Rice,
who was putting cement floors down quite successfully, and
he was very helpful to me. I went up to see him, and he
wrote me a letter and sent me a sketch of how he did it.
He did it with "rock cushion" which came to be the actual
way * [ to lay cement floors--over a rock cushion that has
air space. He was the man — A. B. Rice who invented the
idea. Mr. Rice is deep in my memory. He was a very fine
man. Incidentally, this system I pioneered then was
finally approved by the FHA and the VA. In one of the
major swings after World War II, my plans permitted the
thousands upon thousands of tract houses all over the U.S.
and helped the spread of the ranch house idea — ground

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

113

contact — no steps from the floor to the garden and out-of-
door patios. This foundation and slab plan was published
in Architectural Forum^ using a photograph of mine in its
Book of Low Cost Houses in 1935.]

114

TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO
JUNE 9, 1982

MAY: The sketch that my friend Mr. A. B. Rice from Los
Angeles sent me will show grade under the foundation walls,
and then a six-inch layer of two-inch well-graded crushed
rock placed on the ground, above this layer of paper then
known as Sisalkraft. It was a kraft paper with sisal
fibers in it, so it didn't punch through holes. It was
real tough, a real tough paper. That was laid on top of
the rock, and then the slab was poured on top of that, a
three-and-a-half -inch slab, and screed off from form to
form. So it was very simple. All this was done after the
plumbing had been installed and the electrical lines and
any drains put in. So, when they finished that, we were
all set to screed it off and all set to start building the
house. It was one simple operation.

I'll stay on the foundations for a minute now. I
started using that, and my clients liked the house when
they got it. If there was a question, I just showed them
how it was termite proof, because it was all concrete and
no wood beneath them. And there was no ventilation
required. The ventilation in everybody else's houses was
letting cold air in at night, and they would get cold feet,
because the only thing between your feet and the outside
air, the cold night air, was three-quarters-inch of

115

flooring. You would have a half -inch of plywood or maybe
an inch-and-a-half of subflooring and a half-inch of wood
flooring. So you were standing on cold wood, ice cold. I
know that by this office. My feet are cold all the time.
I have to have an electric heat pad under my desk in the
wintertime because of crawl space framing, instead of
rock/air space cement slab construction.

So on this slab you get a solid feeling, and it just
feels like it is well built, and you have no termites. It
is easier to heat because the temperature of the floor then
becomes the mean average temperature of the area you're
building in. This is a known fact.

The [response] was so good that I built a house for
Mr. Tate — M. E. Tate. I think I spoke of him before. He
was one of the first air controllers at Lindbergh Field.
It was right at the time of Lindbergh. His house was a
modest house, but the floor — I took a picture of it,
incidentally, in building it, and all it showed was a
corner that had three stakes, or four stakes, in the corner
and just one outside board, a header board, to hold the
foundation in. It showed the excavation and it showed the
rock and the paper and the area where we poured the con-
crete.

A short time later. Architectural Forum put out a book
called [The Book of] Low Cost Houses. One of the early

116

pictures in the book was of the Tate house and this method
of foundations, and they commented on how this was a new
way to build foundations. It was so simple. At this time
FHA financing had come in; VA financing had not come in.
The FHA financing would not permit any kind of cement
floor, absolutely none. Nor would they entertain the
prospect of having them submitted to them. So it was quite
a few years later before a few of the ground-breakers, or
what you would call the pioneers, set the way and made them
approve, and then finally FHA and VA approved the method.

I still use this method. The important key to it
though is that many times people will do it and leave out
the rock. Well, that is the whole key. The rock must be
two-inch well-graded. For example, if the fill were all
golf balls, its volume would be one-third airspace. From
the dirt base to the bottom of the slab, of the six inches
it would be one-third airspace spread out over six inches,
so that the capillary attraction can not get through, but
if you were to use mixed gravel, then the mixed gravel
would fill in the voids and make it solid gravel and you
would have no airspace. So it must be well-graded so that
it's all the same size. Now if were a half-inch rock, it
would be not as much because the pieces are smaller and
would come together closer. But the bigger the pieces are,
the more airspace you get when you fill provided they are

117

of equal size. So the two inches is the minimum size that
we ever used for ease of handling.

We never had any problem with our houses anywhere,
except for one time. We were building on the top of a hill
for a wonderful attorney in Los Angeles, Tom Dempsey. He
was a great tax attorney here. Taxes were just becoming a
nuisance to people. And we built a fine house out in
Northridge. It was the exact top of the hill, and every-
thing fell in all directions from it.

We designed the house, and we were getting ready to
build it when the concrete constructor said, "You know," he
said, "I've been putting in foundations all my life and I

know the foundation is very good"--Mr. Dempsey was there

"Mr. Dempsey, I know the foundation is good, but I can save
you some money. You know when you build on the top of the
hill you don't need any rock because everything slopes
away, so there is no moisture."

I was young, and I bit. I said, "That sounds good."
And Mr. Dempsey, he said, "It sounds good to me, too."
So we saved a few dollars. It wasn't much in those
days.

Anyhow, I found out that the wonderful Mr. Concrete
Contractor wasn't so smart. Water is on top of a hill;
capillary attraction will draw water right up a hill. And
rain water off the roof wet the ground and the slab on

118

grades and warped the floor, just sucked it right in. We
had vapor coming through the slab. We had a terrible time.
So from that day forward I never, ever built without the
rock cushion and the vapor seal. Also that was the end of
free advice without testing.

LASKEY: That brings up the risky point of experimenting
with materials.

MAY: I learned many lessons. One good thing: I made lots
of errors, but I never made the second error twice if I
could help it. I never let anybody else do it if I was
connected with it. And as I said, I never again ever did
that. Never did. And never would, because I knew it
wouldn't work. But I made lots of mistakes but always on
my own experimental homes. And, as you said, if you make
mistakes you do it better the next time.

Designwise, when I built my first house, I made it a
little too high in front. The whole house was about six
inches too high, and, then compounded, it was up on a five-,
foot rise of the land. The land sloped up to the building
site, on a slope, so when you looked up, you kind of looked
up under it. In other words, it could have been a foot
lower, and it would have looked a lot better. When you
look up at a house, it should be lower. Just for general
reasons — just for general appearance. And when you're
looking down on it, it should be higher, otherwise it looks

119

like the roof is touching the ground. That's one of the
things you learn in design, by doing the wrong [thing] you
learn, and you should tell the difference. But a lot of
people can't tell the difference.

In fact I'm starting a new file right now that's going
to be a — I'm at a point now in my practice where I can
choose my clients and I turn down a house, unless there is
a real reason for it. I'm preparing a test for possible
clients. It will say, "Do you like this?" or "Do you like
this?" They'll go through it and tell me. I've done some
houses recently — No, I have done a house recently where
the client had no taste at all and knew nothing about the
arts. Couldn't judge or decide anything between right,
best, or wrong. And it has been a terrible drain on my
time.

LASKEY: Really?

MAY: Yes, but I'm conscientious and I want to make the
house as good as it can be. It's a fine house in a fine
neighborhood, amongst the most prestigious houses in
Southern California. The house should blend in, but he is
doing all kinds of things to make it bad. I fight [with
him] all the time. It's just too much work. I'd rather
not have the house. But I can't give up once I start.
But, again, they hire you and pay you a handsome fee for

120

the work and then don't take your advice. It's not very
smart.

LASKEY: That's a good point. Where does the client's
responsibility start, and where does the designer's respon-
sibility start, and then who's in charge here?
MAY: Well, I came to the point so a paragraph in my
contract now says there will be no changes made whatsoever
in design or change in any drawing without my written
permission, and that includes landscape architect, the
interior decorator, the owner, contractor, and any friend.

I invoke it all the time, because [I say,] "Why do
that? Why not do it the right way? You've hired me to do
what I do best. I'm telling you how to do it the proper
way. It makes no difference to me, except I want to see a
good job for you."

And they usually come around. Except one project:
"No," he says, "I still like it my way." [laughter]
LASKEY: It must be hard on you.
MAY: It is. It takes a lot out of me.

LASKEY: I noticed in your very early designs you did them
in Spanish, you had the rooms written in Spanish —
MAY : Yes .

LASKEY: Any reason for that?

MAY: Just youth. Youth is my way. I would have a fire-
place in every room and no heat. [laughter]

121

LASKEY: How did you happen to come to Los Angeles?
MAY: That's a very interesting story. I had built my
third house for sale in Los Angeles, and I was doing good
business by that time. I was just as busy as I could be
building houses all over down there. I think we figured
that in five years we built fifty houses. That would be
ten houses a year, which is almost impossible. I think it
was a few more years than that. My memory may be not quite
right, but it was a lot of houses. We're cataloging them
now.

But the third house I built for sale; it was the one
that Mr. George Marston, as I said earlier, gave me as a
gift, a lot to get his Presidio Hills subdivision started.
He sold and I built four or five houses in the subdivision
as a result of his generosity. Anyhow, the house was open
for inspection. I told you about Admiral [Chester W. ]
Nimitz coming through; he was then Lieutenant Commander
Nimitz. And Commander Bill [William F. ] Halsey, he came
through my model house. They were all stationed in San
Diego at that time; everybody who had anything to do with
World War II, and the Japanese War, was stationed or came
through San Diego. That was the big naval base for them,
and I built ranch houses for many naval people.

But, anyhow, the third house — One day a big car drove
up, and a man came out and said he was Mr. C. Arnholt

122

Smith. He said his brother [John A. Smith] was going to
build a big home in Los Angeles. He had told him about my
house, and he wondered if I would be interested. And I
said I certainly would. So he said he'll be coming down
one of these days and I'll call you. So the date was made,
and the house was on Altamirano Way. It has since had the
catastrophe of a woman who couldn't afford to live in it
after a divorce, she who turned on the shut-off gas meter.
Nobody knew about it, so she turned it back on. She came
home one night and lit a match and blew the house up. It
burned to the ground. One of my best houses. I do have
pictures of it though. She wasn't hurt or anything but the
house burned.

The day came, and I was all dressed up ready to meet
with Mr. Smith's brother who was the one who wanted to
build a big home near Los Angeles. And he came. He came
in a big Pierce-Arrow, the kind with headlights out on the
fenders. [One of the] great big old automobiles. It had
two men in front, two men in livery. One was driving, one
was riding there all full of pomp and ready to do his
ceremonies. They came to the house. He jumped out, and he
ran around and opened the door for Mrs. Smith. And then he
ran over [to the other side] and opened the door for Mr.
Smith. They came towards me and said he was Mr. Arnholt
Smith's older brother and they wanted to see the house. So

123

I took them through. I had a good time showing them the
house. Mr. Smith smoked a big cigar, I remember. He was
dark-haired, very handsome, and smoking this big cigar.
Quite young, I guess maybe fifteen years older than I was.

So he told me that he had this property at La Habra.
It was a big ranch, but he lived in the city, in Hollywood.
But he wanted to move out to the country. He was a farmer
at heart. Although he was in the oil business, he was a
farmer at heart. He wanted to raise vegetables and fruits,
and he wondered how much it would cost if I came up to do
it. So I gulped hard and said I'd design it for him and
come up as much as often for $500. That was a lot of
money, $500. You could live five months on $500. And so
he said, "Well, that's interesting. You'll hear from me."

Anyhow, the word came to come up. So I went up and
spent a wonderful day with them, and they took me out to
the housing show at the Pan Pacific Auditorium. We looked
at all kinds of things and new building materials. We went
out to La Habra and saw the site, and then I drove home to
San Diego and started drawing.

To make a long story, that's how I got the commission
to design the house. I made more trips than you could
shake a stick at. I used to come up; I would drive all
night to get here. And then start work in the daytime and
work all day and then go to the Mayflower Hotel for $3 for

124

the night and then go across the street to the Biltmore
Bowl. You could dance and hear Jimmy Grier's Orchestra and
pay no cover charge before nine p.m. and have dinner for a
dollar and a half. So those were my expenses for the trip
up except for the gasoline. But, I made many, many trips,
and the house turned out very fine. *[I learned a great
deal from Mr. Smith's father, who supervised and built it.
Being on the San Andreas fault, it was built of solid
reinforced brick with handmade floor tile and handmade
mission tile roof.] It was published in many magazines,
and many of the manufacturers used pictures to advertise
their products, like Simon and Groutlock brick, and Ther-
mador Electric. So it had lots of publicity.

But when he got all through, Mr. Smith paid me my
balance. Then he said, "I know you haven't made any money
on this job. "

I said, "I know that. I didn't expect you to."

And he said, "You did not complain about it. I like
that. I'm not going to give you any more money. That's
not the way you do business. Business is business. But
here's what I think. I think you should give up San Diego
and come to L.A. If you want to do it, I'll back you."

And so I said, "Gee, I'd love to do that."

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

125

He said, "Well, you come up and look around."

So I did, and I decided I wanted to move to L.A.

So I came up, and we bought a lot and made a little
contract. He put up the money, and I got a draw. He got
interest, and I got the draw to live on. Then I started
making the change to L.A. We immediately started building
a house for sale in Stone Canyon of Bel-Air. We bought it
from Mr. [Alonso] Bell, at 969 Somma Way by Stone Canyon
Road. We built our first house together as joint ventur-
ers. He had a corporation. First National Finance Corpora-
tion, that did the financing and that was a front for him.

We then built the house, and as usual we had it just a
short time. The widow of a great banker in Los Angeles in
those days, the Farmers Bank-- Victor [H.] Rossetti was the
great banker. That name will go down in history books as
one of the first of the great bankers. He was as important
to L.A. as [Amadeo P.] Giannini was to the Bank of America.
His bank became the Security Bank finally. It was his
widow who bought it, but she never moved in. She had a big
house in Beverly Hills. She bought just because she liked
it, I guess.

LASKEY: Now this was in Stone Canyon?
MAY: Stone Canyon.
LASKKEY: Now where was Mr. [J. A.] Smith's house?

126

MAY: Mr. Smith's house was in La Habra. There was a

picture in one of the magazines that says the oil wells and

the orange groves and the hills as far as you can see are

his. The whole horizon is his ranch.

LASKEY: It was your California ranch-style house.

MAY: Yes. Being on the San Andreas fault, it's built with

reinforcing. So it's never moved since the day we built

it. And every material and detail was just as fine as you

could do in those days. It was a good plan.

The plan is, again I keep saying over and over, the
plan is what makes the house. If you have a bad plan, and
you put gold all the way through it, or make it out of
gold, it's not a good house. The plan is what counts. A
good plan and bad materials is better than a bad plan with
good materials. So it's got to be a good plan.
LASKEY: But you're obviously very interested in materials
too.
MAY: Oh, yes. But plan first.

Then Mr. Smith and I wanted to build more houses, and
we always sold them. I always sold my houses. They were
unique, and there are always a few people who want unique
things. It's just like custom clothes, I guess. They cost
more. And I guess they are worth more. At least my wife
tells me that. She buys clothes and still has them. [tape
recorder turned off]

127

LASKEY: Before you left San Diego to come to Los Angeles,
you built the first of your own houses of which there were
to be a series.

MAY: Yes. I didn't know that they were going to be a
series. I just built a house. In San Diego I built my
first house for my family. It was on Adams Avenue, and it
was what I called a rancheria. Everything else had been
haciendas up to that point.
LASKEY: What was the difference?

MAY: [The] hacienda [has] a tile roof, Mexican, and [is]
more husky in rafter sizes, and the walls are quite a
little thicker. [But] the plan and the livability [are]
the same in either; they are both California living. The
rancheria is a coined name. It is a Spanish name meaning
"covered thatch," like an arbor; that's called a rancheria
in old California. But I called a rancheria sort of a
coined name for a house, meaning the difference between
hacienda, which is a tile roof, and a rancheria, which is a
shingle roof. I did not have shakes on my first house, I
just used shingles. It gave it a very much less expensive
look. The shingles and the lightness of the beams. It
made quite a bit of difference, but it was good to have
another string in my bow because we used whitewashed
interiors, whitewashed ceilings and lighter rafters, and it
gave it more of a colonial look so that people who didn't

128

like the Mexican or the Spanish flavor, they had the pure
ranch house. That's what made it a ranch house, not the
Mexican hacienda as much as the rancheria. In the ranche-
ria we had tile floors, the same as in the hacienda.

By this time, being my own house too, I was able to do
more experimenting. You can't experiment when you are
building for somebody else, because if you do, you're stuck
with it. If it turns wrong, you lose your reputation. So
I never do anything, and most builders won't do anything,
unless I've seen it tried out a while. But they will try
it out on themselves.

In this case, I had bought up what just recently
turned out to be a very rare company, if I had kept it,
from an art point of view. It was the Batchelder Tile
Company. I bought the whole slug of it. They brought it
down to San Diego on one of Mr. Miracle's trucks and put it
on his vacant lot at his office. It was everything from
floor tiles to wall tiles. They had these beautiful,
beautiful patinas that Batchelder had worked out.

Now, I read about how he was one of the greatest tile
men of all time. He had his kilns up at Malibu. I didn't
realize the value of it. In fact, I used it in job after
job after job. Mr. Miracle financed me on it, but we made
money putting it in. We used it on a house in Coronado for
a young lieutenant. We used some in my third house in Los

129

Angeles, bringing it back from San Diego. We used some
[in] the bathrooms. We still had some left over, so we
shipped it from San Diego back to Los Angeles and used it
in some houses. It was finally used up.

But that was an interesting thing, because having all
this tile, I wanted to make the rancheria for my first
house with tile all the way through. So the minute they
started to screed the cement slab level, so it was a wet
slab, and they screed across it. I had a couple of men
with me, and they immediately started handing me tile. I
had another man help me, and we laid the tile as fast as
they could lay the concrete. So, we paid no attention to
partitions. We just cut around toilets where they stuck
through and pipes and broke tile around for the bolts to
fasten the mudsills to the slab. The tile went right on
out to the edge of the slab so that the tile was on top of
the slab, and then the mudsill was on top of the tile. In
doing this, by nightfall we had laid the entire tile floor,
Three of us in one day. Nowadays, they would lay it
afterwards and cut every tile between every partition. We
had no cutting at all. If it stuck out too far, we just
let it stick out and then, after it dried, we broke it off,
These are the kind of things you can do when you have no
one watching you, like a building inspector, and you have
the will to do it. Now, they make you check the slab and

130

they make you check this and they won't let you do that.
And yet the house is still standing and standing beauti-
fully, the last time I saw it.

The other things we did in my first own house was, I
had them build the furniture again, and we had an all-brick
patio laid in sand, which is the cheapest way to lay it.
And we had moved in a proverbial olive tree. We used the
outdoor furniture on wheels that I made.
LASKEY: The furniture was basically mission style?
MAY: Yes, Mission Monterey style. But I put wheels, big
wooden wheels on it, like a carreta, which is a Spanish
cart. I put handles on one end, so you could lift it and
pull it around like a wheelbarrow. It was rather interest-
ing. The coffee table had big wheels on it. It shows in a
few pictures. Many of our buildings have been published.

In fact this house was well published. It first
appeared in a magazine called Arts and Decoration. It was
called, I think, "Grandchild of the Haciendas," or some-
thing to that effect. ["An Hacienda's Grandchild"] And as
a result we had lots of people go through. We entertained
a great deal, and people had gotten used to this different,
forgotten style.

So, at that time we started getting orders for this
type of a house. The Bonita Women's Club was sponsored and
financed by a very wealthy woman, I may have spoken of her

131

earlier, Mrs. Hiram T. Horton. Her husband, with his
brother, owned the Chicago Bridge and Iron Works, a big,
big company out of Chicago. And she made a gift to the
women of Bonita, which is a community where the Bonita
Women's Club is, of the building. She wanted to know if I
could build it for $3,500. I said, "I'm sure I could."

So, we drew out one sheet of drawings. It was big.
We made a big beamed ceiling, big beams in it, antique
wood, wood floors, all on joists, which made it a cheap way
of doing it. I built the whole thing well within the
$3,500 limit, and then she made a present of the clubhouse.
It's called the Bonita Women's Club.

Just recently I had a letter from the chairman of the
Bonita Women's Club. It was their fiftieth anniversary.
She had to make a speech, and she wanted me to furnish her
some information, which I sat down and did. She promised
to send me some pictures of it, but I never —

Other houses while I was living in San Diego: there
was a j.g. [junior grade] lieutenant, Nicholas J. Frank,
and he was in the U.S.N. [United States Navy], an Annapolis
graduate. He came to San Diego, stationed. We became
friends through a mutual friend, and he asked me to build a
house. We built them a house. That house brought the one
next door for Colonel Matt Gardner, who was one of the
leading fliers on the carriers during World War II. He

132

finally retired as Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic

Fleet.

LASKEY: Now, you weren't flying yet?

MAY: I was not flying yet, no. You see, this was before

'35. This was about '33 and '34. That was well before the

war was even thought to be [imminent]. Although these boys

knew they were working towards something, but they didn't

know what. In fact, they told me that when they went

through Annapolis they were trained to fight China. That

was the big thing in those days. I was surprised it was

Japan. I guess they were surprised too.

The rancheria, I call it ranch house, became quite
popular. We always had the proverbial olive tree in the
patio. There were all variations on it. We built about
fifty-fifty from then on, 50 percent ranch houses and 50
percent haciendas, as we called them.

Then we had in Presidio Hills [the house] that Mr.
Smith saw that had me go to Los Angeles. Then we had the
Wade Langston [house]. They were a charming couple from
the South, from Alabama, [who] came out there to live.
They had seen my house and wondered if I'd build one for
them in "La Jolla Hermosa," which is one of the delightful
areas of La Jolla south of the main town. So, we built our
first house there for them. They brought in the old things
that I had not run into yet, really. I mean, I knew old

133

Spanish pieces, among the old grilles (re jas ) that they
had, but all new furniture I made. They brought an old
wellhead from Spain, beautiful filigree lace ironwork, and
they brought a pair of iron gates, which were lovely. We
put them in between an arch, and I had my first taste of
working old things into new architecture and giving the
feeling of old. The house was very much of a success. It
brought more houses, a house across the street, a house
next door for Colonel and Mrs. 0. H. B. Trenchard, then
another house down the street, *[and each new house brought
another commission. At that time and for twenty years
more, charging only one fee, I designed the house and
others built it on contract. ]

Then, about this time, Mrs. Horton had engaged me to
do the Women's Club at Bonita. One day I had come up to
visit her at her beautiful home, with Mr. Horton, and they
said that they had some land they couldn't sell in La
Jolla. They knew that I was building out there and asked
if I would be interested in building some. And I said I
would, and I said, "I'll talk to Mr. Miracle."

So, Mrs. Horton said, "Now, you've been in business
long enough, so you just go ahead and do this for yourself.
I'll arrange that for you." People seemed to help young

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

134

people in those days, not like they do now. Now, they
don't think much of young people.

Anyhow, I talked to Mr. Miracle, and he was happy
because he was just doing it to help me out. So if I had
new wings, go fly with them. So, we made arrangements with
Mrs. Horton, and she said she would pay me a profit on each
one instead of working on a percentage. So, I quoted her a
fee for every house I built, and they paid very promptly.
They were lovely people to work with.

We built the first one, and she took a great interest
in it. She was a great gardener and had a beautiful big
home out at Bonita with a big swimming pool and stables and
rolling acres, hundreds and hundreds of acres, and horses.
I'll never forget their living room. It was twenty-by-
thirty, which seemed so big to me (and so small fifty years
later). The living room in my little house, the first one,
was thirteen-by-twenty . Now here was one twenty-by-thirty,
and I just thought how wonderful to be rich and have large
rooms and space. Now we make them thirty-five-by-fifty-
five all the time. But anyhow, their house worked well.
The first house we built, Mrs. Horton came out and did the
landscaping.

Then she threw me a curve. She said, "I want to
really experiment with this house. You won't mind will
you?"

135

"Of course, I wouldn't."

So, she wanted to paint the living room ceiling, which
were open rafters, baby blue. She said, "Then you get the
feeling of the sky. You get the feeling that there's no
roof overhead and you feel like you're really out of
doors. "

Well, I went along with her. I didn't think much of
it, but I never expressed my feelings. Anyhow, it sold
very promptly. And I think it's still blue. [laughter]
But it was nestled in the hillside and it was a very nice
house and it was probably bigger than the next three we
built for them, all with great ocean views and all on
Hillside Drive in La Jolla. They had more property up the
hill. So, we built one more hacienda type with tile roof
and an arched doorway. Then we built three in a row with
shingle roofs and picket fences, very much of an eastern
look, which was good for people coming from the East.

And we seemed to get such nice people. Reuben Fleet
had just come to San Diego with his big airplane factory.
He was welcomed to become one of the leading citizens. And
I think the city gave him all the land if he would bring
his factory out. That was San Diego's first big attempt to
go industrial. Everything had been parks and geraniums up
to that time — And the navy. But his daughter, Mrs. Alvin
Nelson, Mr. Fleet's daughter, she took a fancy to one of

136

the houses. We became great friends. And she got them
moved in. They had some wonderful furniture from the East,
and we have some pictures of it. Beautiful colonial
furniture that really fit in the house and gave it a
completely different look [from] Colonial California,
Monterey.

And then they had friends, and those friends bought
more houses. It just seemed like it was that way all the
time that I built. I can only think of one person in my
whole time that really was not very happy to build for.
Everybody was such good friends. We were all good friends.
You couldn't do anything but please them, which you were
delighted to do. So all you had to do was keep working
until they were pleased. And there was never such a thing
as cutting off the power if they didn't pay; they always
paid.

I just came out with a wealth of wonderful friends.
They go from Gianni Agnelli, who owns Fiat [Motor Company],,
to Bill Lear, who's Lear jet, and heads of corporations.
They've just been wonderful to work with. I was fortunate
in the fact that we built a sort of unique type of house
because it was different from the rest. And as a result it
probably stood out more, and as a result, we got people who
were leaders who didn't want to conform. They didn't have
to have a house with southern pillars because they had had

137

one in the South. They built what they wanted, and they
knew what they wanted.

I think I told you, maybe I didn't, that when the

banks were closed in San Diego, the big main bank there

did I tell you this? — a gentleman came down, and nobody
knew who he was, but he had plenty of money. He looked at
houses around town, and then he hired me to build a house
in Presidio Hills. That was Mr. Marston's subdivision,
where I had been given a free lot to start things. He
built the biggest house I had ever built up to that point
except the [J. A. ] Smith house. The building permit was
taken out for $10,000, for Alex Highland, his name was. It
was the biggest permit issued since I had been in San Diego
and was conscious of building permits. Let's say, the
biggest one I had ever seen. Perhaps there was a bigger
permit, but I hadn't seen it. But it was a big house. It
was big, and they loved it. It had a second story. I came
across pictures of it. It looked pretty good. I've gone
by and looked at it. It really has stood up beautifully.
It's a really good house. It hasn't dated an inch. The
other box-type bungalow houses that were built in '32 are
all obsolete, all old-fashioned. This house still is in
good character, in good taste.

The thing about it, the strange thing, was that he
came out and pretty soon he was head of the bank. The

138

government had sent him out to take over the bank that had
gone under, but nobody knew it. When they closed the
banks, before they opened it up, they had put him in there
to take charge. So he was the head of the bank when I
built the house.

Then we had houses in Loma Portal, which is another
fine area out by Point Loma. We built one for one promi-
nent young doctor. I remember a story that was funny. I
came out one day. I used to visit my people and see how
they liked their houses. And one day, when he was all
moved in, he was in the patio and he had to duck when he
saw me coming.

And he said, "Oh, it's you! Come on in. I'm flying
my kite; I can't fly it out in the street because if a
doctor flies a kite in the street, they'd think he was
nuts!" [laughter] So, he was in the patio flying a kite.

And then we did one for Admiral [Ammen] Farenholt. He
wanted a big two-story colonial, and he was set on a formal
house with a door in the center and then two windows
upstairs, one on each side, and two windows downstairs
lining up with [those] upstairs on each side. It was a
fine house. He was very pleased. Even though they would
travel a lot, I guess, she was quite provincial, like she
lived in the East. So we made it like a Monterey. It had
a balcony in front and back. It was a Monterey style with

139

tile roof. It didn't look anything like an eastern house,
at all. It had all the earmarks of a western house.

We had jobs out in the country. David Llewellyn, who
was Llewellyn Iron Works, which up to when I came to L.A.
built all the elevators before Otis [Elevator Company] came
on the scene. They were elevator people here in L.A., and
we built a horse ranch for him down in San Diego.

Oh, house after house, I can't remember them all.
But, now we're going through our files, finding people that
I had forgotten about. One was for Marston Burnham. They
were a prominent family, and they were in the mortgage-
lending business and insurance. It turned out to be that
they were relatives of the famous Burnham of Chicago, the
architect.

LASKEY: Oh, Daniel Burnham.
MAY: Daniel Burnham. They were relatives.

And we built a house up at Warner Hot Springs for the
owner of the hot springs, Mrs. Warner. I had built these
San Diego houses.

But, about that time I was moving into my house that I
had started in Los Angeles. As soon as we sold the Stone
Canyon house to Mr. and Mrs. Ney, we started building
another house that we called the Lily Pond house. It was
on a lot I had chosen in Mandeville Canyon, and it was
right across the street from a lot that I had purchased for

140

my own use to build a house. Let's see, I paid $1,500 for
the lot. It was a half acre, and they gave me a 10 percent
discount if I built within one year. Then Mr. [J. A.]
Smith and I bought the Lily Pond lot, which was two lots.
One had the whole lily pond on it, about 200-by-200. We
put the house on the edge of the pond, with the lawn
sloping down to the water. We bought a canoe and tied it up
there, and it made a very beautiful setting. We have some
beautiful photographs of it. And then we opened it for
sale.

Then what happened was that we had the Gray Lines
[Tours]. All the people who came out to L.A. in those
early thirties, they'd get on a bus and go see movie star
homes.

LASKEY: They still do.

MAY: They had a big bus that did that. So somebody told
them it was the Lily Pons house. She was a great opera
soprano at the time and very popular, so to go see Lily
Pons's house, it was one of the great trips you could take.
We never told them any differently. But they advertised it
as the Lily Pons house.

One day I was — By this time I had finished up most
of my work in San Diego, although I was going back and
forth, but I would sit on the house until we sold it. And
my house was finished at the same time that the Lily Pon^

141

house was, so I moved into Los Angeles by this time. This
was '37.

LASKEY: Now did you move here because of the bigger market
for houses?

MAY: Bigger market. And Mr. Smith told me that San Diego
would never amount to anything, although he had investments
down there. He didn't say it that way, he said it much
better. He said, "You should get out of San Diego because
there will never be any oil there. If you don't have oil,
you won't have banking, and without banking, why, you're
not going to have a very big city." And he said, "I think
you should be up where the oil is. We know it is up there
because we've got it, and you're never going to get it in
San Diego. "

And I said, "How do you know?"

He said, "It's real simple, because the way we drill
the oil wells we always drill one well all the way down, as
deep as we can go, to find out how much more there would be
underneath. You just don't stop there on one well." And
he said, "We've done it in San Diego, we've gone down as
far as we think we should go and we start hitting the kind
of land that is on top of the ground in Los Angeles."

And Mr. Smith was right. There are no big oil wells.
They haven't even found gas down there. So that was the
reason I changed. He was a very, very wonderful man. He

142

was very like my second father and able to do more than Dad
did — No, that's not true. But he was very much like a
father. Anytime I would get in a bit of trouble, why, he
was right by my side and pull me out and give me the
business.

I'll never forget the first time I went down to visit
him. I had come to L.A., and I think I had moved in then.
So I had got the feel of Hollywood, you know, and L.A. and
being a "big shot". So I bought a sport shirt and no
necktie and went down to his office and went in. They
finally ushered me in, and he took one look at me and said,
"Where did you get that outfit?!"

And I said, "I thought I should dress like the Los
Angeles people do."

He said, "You get right out of here and don't you ever
come into this office again, don't you come near this
office, without a necktie on! Do you understand that?"

And I said, "Yes, sir."

And I never came without a necktie. Recently, forty
years later, I occasionally appear with no tie, but only
when it is appropriate. He did so many things for me that
very few people would've done. Mr. J. A. Smith really was
a father to me. My dad, C. C. May, met Mr. Smith and
thanked him for all the kind things he did to help my
career, advice, encouragement, and all.

143

One time, the architects got after me for saying I was
an architect. You know you can't say you are an architect,
you can't hold yourself out to be an architect under the
law, but you can write a letter to a prospective owner and

say. This is to advise you that I am not an architect

which then allows you to practice architecture. I always
did [that].

I had the Stone Canyon house open for inspection. I
loved my work, but sometimes got bored, even though I was
young. At the end of a long day, someone came in [when] I
was ready to close up the house. He was a little guy in to
inspect the house. He drove up in a small, inexpensive
car, and, from his looks, he could not afford the house.
We were asking $19,500, the lot cost $9,500. This little
fellow came in and walked around with his head up in the
air. You can always tell a builder or someone in the trade
because they always look up at the ceiling.
LASKEY: Oh, really?

MAY: They always look up at the ceiling, to see how it is
built, I guess.

Anyhow, I walked him through and he didn't look like
that much of a prospect, so I kind of let him go by him-
self. He came back to the front doors, and I was up there
waiting.

144

He came back and said, "Are you the architect of this
house?"

And I was so tired — Usually I would always say, "No,
I'm not. I designed the house, but I'm not an architect."
But, I said, "Yes."

And he said, "OK, I'm Ben Silver." He pushed out his
badge, took out his badge, and he said, "I'm on the Board
of Architectural Examiners." He gave me his card, "Well,
you come down and see me first thing tomorrow morning at my
office. "

Gee, I could have gone right through the ground,
except I didn't. I went straight down to Mr. Smith's
office, like going home to Father.

And Mr. Smith said, "He said that to you?" And he
said, "He did? Well, you go and see Harold Morton." And
Harold Morton was one of the great lawyers in those days.
And one of the three that ran the Independent Oil Producers
Association. John Smith, Harold Morton, and William Kech,
the oil man from the Superior Oil Co., [the three] were
partners in a corporation called Independent Petroleum
Producers Association. They were all in the oil business,
and they had the best of lawyers and they had the best
geologists, as proved by their record.

145

So I went right over to Mr. Morton's office. He came
out and said, "John tells me that you have a problem. Come
see Chet Dolly. He's our bright young man here."

I went in to [Chester F. ] Dolly and told him what the
architectural inspector had said. And he said, "Oh, that's
no problem." And Chester Dolly said to relax, nothing to
worry about, that he'd take care of it.

So he wrote a letter to Ben Silver and sent me a copy.
He said, "I'll take care of it." And I received a copy the
next day, and it said: "Dear Mr. Silver, You have made
threats against our client. Cliff May. Will you please
file charges immediately, and we will produce him on twenty-
four hours notice."

That's the last that we ever heard of Mr. Ben Silver.
So that's the kind of protection that I got in the old
days, and then I learned —

Then about that time, Mr. Smith said, "You'd better
start learning what makes the world go around." He said,
"You should do this: go after the architects."

So I had a couple of builders that thought we ought
to, and a couple of architects thought we ought to — There
were several architects who thought the architects were
being too tough. Vincent Palmer was one. They were at
that time, they would — After you graduated from college,
you had to have ten years training in an architect's office

146

before you could take the examination. I didn't want to be
an architect, but Mr. Smith thought I ought to learn what
makes things go.

I'll make it real short. They had their assemblymen
and senators that the oil companies backed, in Sacramento.
So Mr. Smith wrote a bill, had one [an assemblyman or
senator] write him up a bill.

[The architects] were always after the builders to
stop drawing plans. I was invited to a couple of archi-
tects' meetings where the speakers spoke about how the
builders, how they should open up and have more architects
and do better work and take more money and get architects
to do this instead of just a few chosen few. There was
this boy who said that they would have a better profession
if they did that, but then nobody bought that.

So, anyway, Mr. Smith said, "They got the architects'
bill through when the earthquake shook down Long Beach.
Why aren't the architects checking their own buildings when
they shook down, but they blamed the builders? Their own
builders didn't follow the drawings."

So Mr. Smith's friends proposed an architects bill
[that] they had to be licensed. And then they put through
what they call the Riley Act, which is the earthquake
ordinance that all schools have to be built by a licensed
engineer or architect.

147

So the bill [was introduced] that all the architects
had to be reexamined. And oh, gee, they [the architects]
were up in arms. We did that to help the builders.

I was on the Building Contractors Association board of
directors, and we were putting up money for our bills. The
architects were putting up money for their bills. And so
we fought and we fought. They would get almost ready to go
in, and we would write letters and send them up to Sacra-
mento and lobby and work away. I was learning all this,
what makes the world go. And the architects would do the
same, and then we would come. . .

The last time, they would say, "Well, we can't do it
♦-hie? time; we can't get enough votes." And so down it
would go.

So it would be another two years before they would
reintroduce the bill, and so up they would come again. We
did it for about ten years, just fighting it out all the
time and trying, you know. They're trying to knock us, and.
we're trying to knock them.

And one day, somehow a truce was made. I remember
Harry Hanson and Paul Burkhardt of the builders and myself
and some of the architects said, "Let's just stop this
fighting business," We said, "Let's not do it this year."
So we agreed we wouldn't.

148

All of a sudden we got a call from the assemblyman,
"We've got a bill ready to go, and we'll vote for you." And
we never even asked him to. So, then we found out that
that's the way they do it. They take in these bills, and
they take in these suckers like we were, and they would get
donations to their campaigns, and then they'd [introduce]
the bill, but then they'd never put it through. You'd
think that they were going to. This was the old days now
that I'm talking about. And maybe it has been cleaned up,
and maybe it hasn't. I knew many of the men who later on
ended up in the government. One of the great ones was one
of our big supervisors here. He was the boy who used to
sit outside the door, and he used to check us into the
assembly or into the senate room. He would just check you
off, and he later became one of our supervisors. One of
the men is still in the assembly that we used to work with,
Ralph Dills.

It was great learning, but I don't know why I'm
talking about this except that it was all part of learning
economics from Mr. Smith, what to do and what not to do.
It was just a wonderful association. With that, we went on
to buy this Riviera Ranch land from his ranch company that
ran seventy-six lots.

He said, "Do anything you want with it."

And I said, "I'd like to make big, big houses on it."

149

And he said, "Fine. Go ahead. It's yours."

So I designed it for about twelve big houses, and then
he looked at it, the engineer and Mr. Smith, and so he
said, "If we'd put a few more lots in there we'd make more
money. "

And that was my downfall, I shouldn't have done it,
because it was so great and would be more like Bel-Air. So
we stuck in about six more lots, and the six more lots just
made it good, but not great. It's great now because we
restrict the architecture to nothing but ranch houses that
we built.

I was the designer and builder all this time, but I
didn't do any drawings for anybody else, only for myself.
I designed them and I built them. So I had one fee for two
jobs. The people had to sign up that they would have me
build it, or I wouldn't give them a deed until the contract
was signed and legal. So that way I was able to control
the architecture. I could put a kitchen next to a kitchen
on one house and a bedroom next to a bedroom, instead of a
kitchen next to a bedroom. We made forty feet between
houses, which meant a vacant lot between every house,
almost a vacant lot by most city standards.

We had wonderful [plans. We wanted to] put [in] a
big gate. I'll never forget it. Now they want to put it
in. We were way ahead of them. In 1939 we designed the

150

gates, a big pair of gates nobody gets in. Now they're
talking about putting gates, if they can stop the other
people from coming through on account of the public street.
We designed a big stable up where the school is now, where
the Trancas stable is now. We had a great big stable
planned for that, for the people that lived in the group.
So the plans were great, but as I say, we kind of cheapened
it by making them a little smaller.

At that same time the war was getting ready to break,
and it broke. Then that stopped all building. By that
time I had going a great house. Some of the UCLA people
say it's my masterpiece, next to my own, and I think it
probably is. That was building, and I had other things
going when the freeze — They froze all building. Every-
thing under construction they gave a permit to finish.

And at that time Smith said, "I've got some land down
at Wilmington, an oil-well field that didn't come in, and
it is just right to build war-worker houses in Wilmington.
Let's look at it," So I went down and looked at it and I
designed a house to go there, a whole tract of houses.

And then it came the time when Mr. Smith said, "You
can't do two things and do them well." Which I sure
learned. He said, "You can't build cheap houses and build
good houses. You must make a choice. You can either build

151

down there and build more houses, or you can build up here
and build good houses."

I had enough big houses going to keep me busy, so I
opted to build big houses. Which I'm glad. And I gave the
plans over to another set of builders that we had had. He
went on to build it with another set of builders.
LASKEY : What was the house that you think was your master-
piece?

MAY: It was a house that I built for a man named Frederic
M. Blow. And how I got — Did I give you that?
LASKEY: No.

MAY: And how I got these people I don't think that — It's
unusual, but they like what we did. One day, a wonderful
woman, Mrs. Juliet Van Rosendahl — who passed away just this
last year, and I regret that I didn't get to see her more
in her later years — came to my house. I had just built it,
and I had my homemade furniture from San Diego in it.
Everything was homemade and mainly Spanish, but it was a
ranch house with wall-to-wall carpet; I thought it was
great, which I think is terrible now, but at that time [I
thought] it was great.
LASKEY: Very popular then.

MAY: It was the only thing. We had the best kind. The
war was on, but it was really good.

152

She said she had heard of the house, and she wondered
could she see my house, and I took her in. She went all
through it, and she was very lovely. Anyway, she was a
coach for Bette Davis and all the young girls that were
coming in as movie actresses but who needed that finesse of
how to put their gloves on and how to take them off and how
to speak French and manners and carriage and all the things
that they have to learn. And she was this high-powered
coach and knew everybody.

So she said, "Number one, I think your house is great,
but I think the furnishings are very bad and you should
find out right now. "

LASKEY: Now what house are you talking about?
MAY: My second house in Los Angeles. [CM No. 3]
LASKEY: Your own second house.

MAY: I had moved to Los Angeles by then when this hap-
pened. And I said, "What am I going to do?"

And she said, "Well, you go see Paul T. Frankl." I
had never heard of him. And, she said, "He will help you.
And you stay with him. Between you and Mr. Frankl and your
house, you will really have something."

153

TAPE NUMBER: HI, SIDE ONE
JUNE 9, 1982

MAY: I immediately went down to meet Mr. Paul Frankl. He
was gracious and showed me some very exciting photographs
and furniture he had in a beautiful studio across the
street from the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire [Boulevard].
The upshot of it was that he came out the next day or so
and looked my house over and made suggestions. I immedi-
ately switched the basic furniture in the living room and
dining room, I believe, to Frankl furniture. He gave me a
lot of encouragement and help.

It was the beginning of a long friendship with Mr. and
Mrs. Frankl and their daughter, Paulette, who was the age
of one of my daughters. You might say, that "horsewise,"
they grew up together. The Frankls were interested in
horses for their only child, and of course we had horses,
so they visited us a great deal. In the meantime, Paul
worked with me on nearly every job I could steer him to.
I'm talking about the [Frederic M. ] Blow job, and, when we
were on the Blow job, he did the rattan and the tropical
furniture for the playroom, which was a very outstanding
room. The Blows, of course, wanted all the old-fashioned
French furniture like she had in the south of France; she
used to call it the "Souths of France."

Mr. Blow was a very good friend of Mrs. Van Rosendahl .
One day she came to my house and said, "I need to see you

154

immediately. I have a friend who's arriving this after-
noon. He'll be here for two hours. If you can find a lot
and you can design a house while he's here for two hours,
why, he'll leave the money and you can build it while he's
gone. "

I said, "Well, I've got the lot, I can assure you of
that."

And so I set right to work. She brought him out two
hours later. They were on a boat on an around-the-world
cruise, Mr. and Mrs. Blow. She was a charming, beautiful
French girl. Mr. Blow, I found out later, was one of the
heirs to the Westclox fortune. Money was no object. Mr.
[John A.] Smith and Mr. Blow were the first two real
millionaires I worked for. I mean, millionaires !

He liked the plan. In fact, I showed him our house,
and I showed him the Lily Pon^ house. I used the Lily Pond
house for an example, I said, "It'll be just like this,
even with the white-painted tile roof. There'll be a
specification here on the plan."

So he said, "That's fine. OK — F.M. Blow." Then he
gave me his card and said, "Call this bank and they'll [set
up an account] before I go. Just draw on it."

And that was all the contract we had. So away I went.
LASKEY: Now, where was the lot?

155

MAY: It belonged to Mr. Andrew [M. ] Chaffey, who was
another old famous banker. He started the California Bank,
lived in that area, and had a lot of property. This one
piece was for sale. He was saving the piece next to it,
which was to the south and higher up on Oakmont, higher in
elevation but lower towards the ocean on Oakmont Drive. He
was saving it for his own future home to be built. I met
Mr. Chaffey through the engineer that did our Riviera Ranch
subdivision and did a lot of subdivision engineering and
land development work for me. The upshot was that Mr.
Chaffey sold us the lot and we immediately went to work on
the house.

When the Blows came back, it was all finished. We had
the swimming pool and we had — I guess they sent sketches
back for the furnishings, and then they brought a lot of
furniture out when they came. Mrs. Van Rosendahl helped.
She had exquisite taste. It turned out to be one of our
great houses.

But secretly, Mrs. Blow was a little disappointed.
She was hoping to have what she called a "Souths of France"
house, and this was really a western floor plan and it had
western materials. So a few years later Mr. Blow had his
eye on the lot next door that Mr. Chaffey was going to
build on, and he wondered if there would be any way he
could buy it. This was still pretty deep depression; this

156

was way before '39. This house was built in '37 [or] '38,
because it was before the war that we got the house above
and started building. It was during the war that they
stopped the construction. Mr. Blow made an offer that Mr.
Chaffey could not refuse, and so Mr. Chaffey sold the land
to us and we built a great house.

We'd become very great friends socially. They were at
our place, and we were at their place. And they loved to
entertain; parties were going on all the time at the house
next door which they were living in. The other one was to
be built. They would go back to Paris for three or four
months at a time.

The upshot of it was that at the time we were working
on drawings, Mrs. Blow seemed a little unhappy and said she
wanted a house with big towers and winding stairways. So
Freddie Blow said he knew an architect who was really quite
a wonderful architect, and wondered if I would mind having
an associate with me. I said, "Gee, I would love it." His
name was Wallace Frost. He taught me so much about stone.
I didn't know anything about stone at that point. I knew
how to make adobe bricks, that's about all, but not a real
cut-stone house like they do in the East.

So Mr. Frost came out, took my drawings, and kept the
same floor plans, which is an important thing to me because
the floor plans are the way you live in California, and he

157

adapted the stonework of the south of France, with corbels
and moldings and architraves and cut fireplaces and cut
columns and chiseled stairs and stone floors. All that he
gave me, the know-how to do it.

The first lesson was we had to get some stonemasons,
no more bricklayers around here, and there weren't any
stonemasons. Old ones, he wanted old ones. Finally, we
found a group of them out at Forest Lawn, and they were
available. They came over and did our stonework. Moon-
lighted, I guess, when they didn't have something to do and
they had to leave for a few days.

It was all quarried out in the Santa Ynez Canyon,
which is the last canyon as you go toward the ocean.
There's a big quarry there. They'd go out in the field,
and they'd pick out big pieces of stone [from] the side of
a mountain. They'd say, "This is the way the grain is."
Then they would mark it, then they would get cutters in,
and they would cut it and chisel out. We had pieces of
stone that would be eight feet long and two feet high and
fifteen inches wide that wouldn't break; they were cut for
lintels.

It was a house that could never be built again. In
those days those masons, those engineers, and the mechanics
were master craftsmen. They don't have them anymore. You

158

might find one here but not enough to build a house. Just
no way.

We started out to build the spiral stairs. Each
[step] was cast and then chiseled out of stone. It started
up at a certain point and when it got a certain tread on
the top of the last tier, that had to be level with the
door going outdoors, which had been already built out of
stone. And you can't stretch the stone, it had to be right
on. And it was right on. Those things you could not do
today, even with our advancements in surveying. You don't
have the men who can do it.
LASKEY: Were the floors stone, too?

MAY: The floors were stone. Except we had plank floors in
some places and old handmade tile in some other places. It
was furnished beautifully. It was just built for their own
unique way of living. Great for entertainment. It had a
wonderful library, with big panels in it. I learned so
much from paneling that I did not know at the time. Every
job I do I guess I learned on it; I tried never to make the
mistake again.

LASKEY: Now I think at one point the Blow house was
remodeled or sort of defaced —

MAY: Mrs. Blow passed away, unexpectedly. Quite young.
Mr. Blow was quite upset and lived there for quite a few
years. Then we built a small house down below, a

159

guesthouse for him. Then he moved in there, because it was
just too big for him by himself. Later on he — I was real
busy and I don't know how it happened. It never should
have happened. But another architect came along, and he
built a house on another piece of the lot that he and I had
developed together, a subdivision. This was leftover, so
he used that for a house.

It wasn't a very good house. He didn't like it too
well, because after having the other two it was quite a
comedown. The guesthouse I built for him was really
spectacular. It was just a three-room house with a great
big plate-glass window about eighteen feet high. You
entered on the balcony. It was on the side of a hill.
Then you looked down two stories, from one story down to
the other and then up through the glass. Anyhow, Mr. Blow
then moved up to Santa Barbara, and all he took with him
was a few real wonderful pieces of furniture. He passed
away. We'd see him when we'd go up there. We saw him
quite a few times, but all of a sudden they said he'd been
dead for about a half a year. Quite shocking to me. Susie
was buried out in a Catholic cemetery at Playa del Rey.
That's the last we heard of Freddie.

Freddie's uncle owned the big ranch called the San
Fernando Rey, which was purchased from Mr. Blow's uncle by
John Galvin. That's one of the big brick Santa Barbara

160

ranches. We built a house on that for Mr. Galvin later on.
In fact, it was a school. We worked on his house that was
designed by Joe Pluckett, who was one of the great Santa
Barbara architects, who is deceased. The present owner of
the school we built for the Galvins is Mike Nichols. It
was a school for three children. I'll never forget; the
Galvins were one of my very wealthy clients. My first
question about this time became, "What budget shall we plan
for?" Because so many times I'd design the wrong kind of a
house, not knowing they wanted a big house, or designing a
big house and they wanted a little house. So I've got to
find out where they are, really. And I said, "I'm like a
doctor, you've got to tell me where the aches are before I
can properly come up with what you want. "

Anyhow, Mr. Galvin to my question answered, "Mr. May,
that is none of your business, and anything Mrs. Galvin
wants, she can have."

So she said, "I want all the walls three feet thick."

So he said, "That's what we will have."

It didn't have to be, but she wanted them three feet
thick. I said, "Well, it's going to make the rooms very
dark because the walls will be so thick."

He said, "That's the way she wants it, isn't it?"

161

I said, "That's right." So, I said, "And we'll have a
beautiful skylight that will let in the sunshine and you'll
have all the thick walls."

And he said, "That's fine."

So that saved me, because you couldn't have done it
without skylights. That was the beginning of our sky-
lights, one of the early beginnings.
LASKEY: What year was this?

MAY: That was in, golly, I'm guessing now, it was right
after the Pacesetter [House], '45, '48. It was interesting
though, because it was a school for his three children.
They didn't want them to go to public school. Private
school was good enough. So, we built the school. We had
the piano practice room all soundproofed so they could
practice piano. They hired a piano teacher from some
conservatory in the East. She came out with her child.
They hired the head of the English department at Stanford
University for the English teacher. The equestrian teacher
was the coach for the Olympic team in horsemanship. And he
had this kind of staff, about five people. Some of them
could teach two languages. Each of them had one or two
children, so with their three children they had about five
or six children in the school. They were given homes built
on the place and complete board and everything. It was

162

real good. Then Mr. Galvin tired of that holding and went

to live in Ireland.

LASKEY: And just left the school?

MAY: Yes. He sold the ranch, but he kept the big cattle

part. That's where the Rancheros Visitadores ride is every

year. And the little boy when I built the house is living

on the ranch; he ' s a grown man. He's in complete charge of

this big ranch.

SECOND PART
JULY 21, 1982
LASKEY: Mr. May, you're noted particularly for the develop-
ment of the ranch style, and I thought this might be a good
time for you to discuss what the ranch style or ranch house
is and how you happened to develop that style.
MAY: All right, I guess style is a word, and you know the
words style and fashion , you can get into a lot of that.
I'm sure the ranch house has never been in fashion because,
as I understand it, fashion comes and goes. Style is
developed and built upon and stays with us. The ranch
house, I think, goes back to the first primitive peple who
came to this part of the country, and from there it goes
back to the first primitive people who were in Spain and
Andalusia and the Italian and the warm belt all around the
world. Before we had architects and professional builders,
people built by their own hands to protect themselves from

153

the climate. You see ice houses made out of blocks of ice
in Iceland and Eskimo land, and then you see sombody living
under trees in the [tropics].

What I'm saying is, not facetiously, is that the
fundamental of any area is that [people] build with the
materials at hand. Obviously, [there was not alternative]
before we had the technology we needed to put things
together like cement and sand to make cement tile. So they
used the materials they had. I actually know of history,
without studying somebody else's history, just by observa-
tion, going back to about 1800 when the Estudillo house we
talked about earlier was built in 1825 and the missions
were being built here in California. I worshipped in them
and attended mass in them as a child and realized that here
was material that was just the earth of the area piled into
big chunks. That was brought here, of course, by the
padres from Spain, when they came over to populize and
discover the new country. So the adobe brick goes back to
Roman times. And, if you go back to Roman times, it goes
back to Egyptian times. You can go back as far as you want
to. It's just using the earth. So it's just native
material.

Later, architects would come and be real smart and use
native materials. Smart people were using that before these
new architects were ever born. It makes so much more
sense, because, number one, it's cheap and you can use it

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with your own hands. Also, it fits in colorwise and
temperaturewise because it's mud or stone, as the case may
be, or a mixture. The walls, of necessity, would be very
thick. It's what we call gravity architecture. In other
words, the wall is so thick that it can't fall over because
of its own inertness and its own weight. And that's best
exemplified by the first early California houses. They
were built around courtyards for protection, but also they
did not have any possibility for making great big spans
like they do now, to make a room thirty feet wide. Well,
of course missions did; they had tremendous labor and
tremendous wealth. But the average person, I'm speaking of
domestic architecture, he could not make great spans other
than the side of a tree he could cut and drag with his
animals or his friends, which gave you this span between
the two walls, where the tree became, in Spanish a viga.
In the tropics they have another name for it. I think viga
is what it's called also in New Mexico. So there we have
materials determining the plan for the house.

The plan of the house is the most important thing of
anything in architecture. You can have the greatest
building site in the world and have a bad plan, one that
doesn't work, one that is inconvenient, one that's expen-
sive to operate in, one that wastes time, one that's
dangerous. I could go on with ten more items that would

165

make the plan not good. No matter how much money you spent
for it, no matter what great workmanship you put into it,
if the plan is not good, it won't be a good house. So, we
go back to the plan.

To go back to the California ranch house, why it's
endured is because the plan has been shaped by the materi-
als. The materials are native, and they go well with the
community. And they're cheap. So that's the thing we're
having trouble with right now: everything costs too much.
Of course, it's labor that makes it cost now. In the old
days, labor was free. You call that the "sweat equity."
They got their labor for nothing. One day of their life
they contributed towards building their house.

The ranch house grew from the original, little, narrow-
winged house build around a courtyard, and many times not
so little. By the use of buttresses they were able to get
bigger spans as the trees they collected were larger. Then
they came up with the age-old idea of using posts to
support the beams. If you wanted to make a wider living
room, let's say, they would put a post in the center and it
would support two trees, butt to butt. They would tie them
together with rawhide, wet it, and then it would dry and it
would shrink and tighten up. They had a certain amount of
iron that they used to forge pieces of steel to hold things
together. Mainly, the first ones I guess were rawhide.

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The plan, I'm getting back to the plan, the plan of the
California ranch house is what has made it survive.

The first houses were built in 1800. The Estudillo
house, which was one of the grand houses of its time, was
1825. Santa Margarita was one of the great, great houses
that was somewhat later, about 1830, 1835, and it was
considered one of the prize houses in California. Very few
people saw it up until the Marine Corps took over the
Rancho Santa Margarita portion. My aunt continued to farm
on the de las Flores portion, because she had a life
tenancy. She farmed on that until her death, which was
about twenty years ago, at which time the Marine Corps took
it over. They have left the old building, which is sort of
a shame, because they're not taking very good care of it.

Adobe went up and down the coast of California.
Monterey had adobe, but they had the influence of the
Yankee sea captains, which is all pretty common knowledge.
They came in with their picket fences and their two-story
effect and their stairways and balconies and railings the
way they built them back East. They built around the
chimney and that gave them the square block, and the
Monterey was just a variation on that. Instead of being a
square block it became a big rectangle in which the fire-
places were all in the center. It would be double fire-
places, fireplaces and hearth on both floors with the flues

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going on up. It had to have four fireplaces to heat the
house, and that pretty well established the type we call
the Monterey. Then there's the combination of the Monterey
and the one-story ranch house, which is partially two-story
and partially one-story.

LASKEY: I'm not familiar with that. I'm trying to think
of an example.

MAY: Well, the Customs House at Monterey is a two-story
Monterey. And the Larkin House is a very famous house. It
has a balcony the entire length of the building. The plan
is a rectangle, and the bedrooms are all upstairs gener-
ally.

LASKEY: This is the Monterey —
MAY: That would be the Monterey type, yes.

LASKEY: That's a very distinctive kind of an architecture,
opposed to the ranch [style] that we were talking about.
MAY: Yes and no. It's distinctive in that you look at it
and say, "That's Monterey." It has the materials of the
ranch house, and it has everything but the plan. That's
why I said the plan is so important. I wouldn't give you a
nickel for a Monterey house against a ranch house if I had
to live in it. The Monterey is more compact; you enter
into the entrance hall through the front door, then there's
usually an overhanging balcony so the front door is protec-
ted from the rain, which is great. But once you go inside

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you're in the same thing I've fought against — the box, A
plan that is a box, a square that started with the old Cape
Cod. All the houses of the East, from Cape Cod down to the
thousands of houses that Bill [William J. ] Levitt and his
associates built after World War II. They're all varia-
tions of the box, we discussed that before, with a garage
in the back. I think Bill's big contribution was putting
the garage up in front and making the house look bigger.
But still you walk in and all the rooms are within four
walls.

LASKEY: The box.

MAY: Then we have the box within a box, and that's even
worse, whereby you just take the one big room which you
used to have, which was a great room, and break it up into
smaller rooms, kitchen in one, dining room in one, living
room in one, and a bedroom in one. So you had the box
within a box. The lack of cross-ventilation which they
have is not present in the ranch house. The ranch house
opens on two sides at least, sometimes three sides, so you
have a breeze blowing through the ranch house. Four
[forms], I've spoken before, gives you the protection from
the elements. In some parts of it, you can have your
poppies outdoors, you can entertain outdoors in privacy.
In our modern day that's wonderful because you have a

169

hundred foot lot, and you have a courtyard and have another
world inside of your courtyard.

Many people in the East call what we call a patio an
atrium, atrium meaning, I guess, being covered with glass.
Ours were covered many times with canvas when canvas became
available from the old ship sails. Sailing ships with old
canvases they used to make — We call them sky shades now,
but they were all patio covers. You see them all through
the Mediterranean areas, where they are sometimes two
stories high, but they protect the streets from the sun.
Again, the Monterey house couldn't do that because it's a
box. The ranch house could do it because it has a patio
and a courtyard that you can cover.

Then again, when you're in a Monterey type — I know
when I say Monterey I'm only comparing that as being an
opposite type but similar and a relative to the ranch
house. When you're inside, you're looking out the window
and you're looking at the street or the backyard. In those
days they liked to look at the street where the action was.
When you take that type of architecture and bring it down
to the present day, why, you're looking at traffic on the
street, or else you're looking at your neighbor besides
you, or else you're looking at your backyard. The court-
yard in our type of house which I took a fancy to in my
experience living on the Las Flores and the Santa Margarita

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ranches and visiting the Estudillo house and others, and
being in those types of houses, I just inherently realized
how much better the living was than in the typical house
which was being built when I was a boy, being raised in
1908 and on. When I became conscious in 1910, 1915, why,
everybody was living in boxes.

Since I talked to you, I was back in San Diego, and I
took my camera with me this time and went back to where I
was born. Across the street were the four Irving Gill
houses. One of them was so overgrown I couldn't get close
enough to get a picture of it, but I got a picture of the
three others. Irving Gill, famous Irving Gill and all of
the great things he contributed, it still is a box and it's
just a box with Irving Gill's trademarks on it. When you
look at it, you know it's not another house; it's by
somebody who knew what they were doing. The single-car
garage was the vogue in those days, because nobody had the
money to have two cars. So they always had a single-car
garage out front, which is modern. You knew that it wasn't
an old California bungalow when you see it. But you look
at it, and it doesn't have [room for living], because as I
say, I was raised in those houses and my neighbors' chil-
dren .

LASKEY: You must have a great deal more flexibility in the
ranch house than in the —

171

MAY: That's right because with a plan we can make a ranch
house straight like the Monterey, with its curses, but it's
also the economy, four corners. We can then make an L.
The L can protect you and give you cross-ventilation. Then
we can go to the U, [or] close the fourth side in and make
it a complete 0, a closed view. Then we can put a second
story on one portion of it, which we did a lot of times.
Many times we'd make the open U, then put the second story
on the center section so you could have a complete patio
with a balcony looking down into the courtyard. And that
was what we called a Monterey adaptation — a ranch house,
Monterey- type .

With the ranch house, you can leave the four forms I
first spoke of and you can go on and make an X, and you can
make a Y, and you can make a Z, and you can make it any
form you want. With that, in my work, we could point a
wing at the rising sun for the breakfast room where the
kitchen would be. Or you could point the living room and
the master bedroom to the south where the best exposures
are. It's like a piece of rope, you could bend it around
and get the absolute best out of it.

Our first houses were on reasonably sized lots. We
started on lots as small as fifty by a hundred. My first
house was that small. We came out right to the property
line with the house, which we owned, and at that time the

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zoning didn't stop you. Then sixty years later, someone
came up with the great idea that if you built to the
property line you'd pick up four feet. When I built my
first house, we did that. Granted it wasn't a great thing
to do because it took four feet away from the neighbor who
then didn't have the ventilation, but it was the beginning
of land use to get the maximum use out of the land.
There's a subdivision down in San [Juan] Capistrano that
did one of the best jobs I've ever seen, that I saw about
fifteen or twenty years ago. All of the houses were
designed right to the property line, and then, they had
courtyards so that you didn't know who was on the other
side. With that, each person gained four to five feet on
the length of his lot.

LASKEY: Well, I've always been curious about that because
particularly in the Mediterranean and in Mexico, that's the
way the houses are built, you know, the facades to the
street, with the interior open, which gives you a lot of
privacy, also a lot of air, and freedom in this kind of
climate. So I've been curious why builders here didn't
adopt that style. It makes sense.

MAY: Mainly, I think it starts way back in George
Washington's time, or at the time of the Frenchman [Pierre]
L'Enfant, who laid out Washington, D.C. They decided that
everybody would have a lawn in the front and, besides that.

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lines and sidelines. When they got to land planning, their
idea of land planning, they didn't want to get the density,
because we had a tremendous amount of land in the United
States in those days when the country was aborning. That
just seemed to become the way they did it.

When I became conscious of houses, why, everything was
fifty-, sixty-, seventy-foot lots, and a hundred foot deep.
The big improvement in those days [was that] they had
alleys. In the alley they picked up all the garbage and
trash, and that kept the front of your house pretty clean.
That's what Beverly Hills did and still does. But L.A.
does not, so we have this tremendous amount of garbage once
a week out on the street, which the dogs and the cats dump
over. It's a real problem, which will be solved one of
these days.

Tell you a quick story: Herbert Hoover was president
of the United States, and we were getting ready not to
have — Things were getting a little bit tough, the boom was
on, but he realized that we had to make progress. So they
had a housing conference in 1928 or '29. Which I have a
copy of someplace, I hope I can find it someday. They just
kicked around, like the Rand Corporation now does, ideas
what we have to do to make this civilization work better.
And somebody said, "We have to grind up garbage; we can't

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take garbage down the streets in trucks like we do. We've
got to grind it up."

Somebody said, "Well, what do you do with it?"

"We will put it down the sewer."

They said, "Impossible."

But immediately, in '32, I had a garbage grinder made
by General Electric. They made the first one, and away
they went. It was just one man's idea, but it made a
tremendous impact. Soon out went the alleys in subdivi-
sions, because down the street went the garbage. Then the
tin-can smasher came along, and then, also, though it never
did go, they had gas appliances which you put in all kinds
of trash — paper, cardboard, weeds, and green flowers that
you were going to throw out. By slow gas action, it just
dried it all out, and it all came out powder. I had one in
one of my houses, until one day I put a sack of old walnuts
infested with bugs and about burned the house down.
[ laughter ]

LASKEY: Really. What happened?

MAY: I overloaded it. It just got tremendously hot and
started smoking. The vent wasn't big enough for it. That
was the early days, when they were learning. Then they
learned how to take care of that. They still haven't
learned how to take care of the trash. We make more trash
than anyplace in the world. You can see how that simple

175

thing, the garbage grinder, did affect our subdivisions by
finally getting garbage trucks off the streets, because a
garbage truck going down an alley isn't as bad as parked
out in front of your house, where your cars and people are
arriving at the front door.

LASKEY: Trash is one thing, but garbage is something else.
MAY: That's right. So we keep making progress, but the
ranch house has outlived them all. It's still popular. It
was popular back in those days, and after World War II it
became the most popular. It passed the Cape Cod, which was
the most popular prior to World War II. Good Housekeeping
magazine kept quite a record on that. I think the maga-
zine's fallen, but Good Housekeeping was one of the house-
hold magazines that really was, I guess, sort of a bible to
most women.

LASKEY: Can you trace the movement across the country of
the ranch house?

MAY: Yes. If you go through the South you see many houses
that aren't ranch houses but live like ranch houses. That
would be like in New Mexico. They had the pueblo style
that came, but the pueblo style had courtyards. In fact,
the Pueblo Indians built the big pueblos around great
courtyards. The Taos Indians have a tremendous courtyard
inside, with the buildings all around the outside, of
course, for protection.

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The ranch house kind of went into nonpopularity when
labor started to come in. When the forty-niners came out,
they wanted quick housing. Except for the forty-niners who
married into the old families, they didn't know what was
going on in the way of good living. They just threw up
shacks, as you know, everyplace, anyplace. Monterey grew
slowly and they had some houses that were built then. But
the era of the great old house went out, I'm guessing,
around the sixties or seventies, and around the eighties
and nineties after the gold rush was over and things had
settled down. After California became a state in 1849, I
think it was, or the year 1850, the influx of people was
just tremendous. They brought with them the knowledge of
the East, and by that time lumber was being cut into boards
to make houses. We had the eastern know-how coming out to
do the designing, and with the wonderful mild climate, at
least in the southern parts of California and in the eleven
western states, some people just built as they knew how to
build.

Going back into it, there was no one person when I
started it, I would say, who built ranch houses. A lot of
the old-timers built ranch houses because they built just
in a natural way, as we said, to protect themselves and
that was the best way to do it. With the boards coming out
and with the sawmills coming — I think Sutter's Mill was a

177

sawmill that was sawing boards when they discovered gold.
But the boards made a board-kind of a building, and that's
why San Francisco is so filled with just these board houses
smack up against one another going up and down the hills.
Except out on the ranches and down on the peninsula, you'd
see nothing but shacks.

Of course, there were great palaces, but the great
palaces were just the same as the great palaces were in
Europe or in the eastern United States in the late nine-
ties.

But the ranch house, when I became conscious of what
houses were, there were none built. Gill built the closest
thing. He did spread out a few. He built a box of a
house, then he'd connect it with a long portico of arches
that created a feeling of space and a feeling of a court-
yard. But the ones that he did in my neighborhood were not
what you would call ranch houses. They were California and
Gill's were old California. Distinctive. The Frank Lloyd .
Wright houses, I don't think there were any in San Diego
that I knew of, ever.

LASKEY: There are some [R. M. ] Schindler houses there.
MAY: Schindler houses, but they were glass and two-story.
I don't know enough about it to say. I know they were
there, and they created a great effect and had a great
influence. But there's not a Schindler house going that I

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can't figure out that a ranch house is twice as good to
live in.

People don't know how to live. People just do not
know how to live. They live like they were taught.
Elizabeth Gordon of House Beautiful told me time and again,
"Don't forget now, people can't judge any better than they
know. " You can give them a fine glass of the greatest
cabernet sauvignon and take a glass of dago red and give it
to an Indian, I mean just anybody who doesn't know, and
seldom can they tell which is the great wine. They can be
influenced by your expressions as you taste it, and they
follow you. They don't just say, "This is great" or "This
is not good." Unless you have a taste, a natural taste,
why, you can't tell.

And that goes for living. Some people, you see them
in pictures, they sit down. They pass the big dish, and
they pass around the plates. Some have French service,
European service. If they have help, then the plate is
passed to them. That's taste.

If you're going to build a house for somebody, then
you say, "What kind of a house are you going to have?" If
they're going to have the kind that they put a stack of
dishes in the kitchen and stick everything on one plate and
everybody carries their own plate in, that's going to be
one kind of a house. If you have a house that they have

179

china, fine china, and sterling and crystal, and it would
require a butler's pantry to store it in, why, that's going
to be a different kind of a house. And so again we are
back to the plan.

The kind of house is no better than the plan. You
can't get around it. If you get the best location in town
and have a bad plan, you'll have a bad house. But you can
take the second best location in town and have a fabulous
plan and without question have a better house.

Again, I say, ranch house makes the plan. With the
ranch house you have so much more adaptability. We've done
ranch houses now since 1931. Every one we do, we've never
had two alike except when someone says, "I want one like
this." Which we won't do. The reason we say we won't do
it, we can ' t do it even if we wanted to, is because, number
one, the owner never has exactly the same tastes as other
people do. There's never been two lots with exactly the
same exposure. One will have a different slope to it, one
will have a different view, one will have a different wind
direction, one will have a different condition, one will
have to be graded differently, one will have trees, one
will be in the desert. They're never the same.

If you took a plan that somebody did and they said,
"This is absolutely perfect, it'll fit me perfectly," I'd
point out that that fit the couple that built it perfectly.

180

at least at the time they built it, and there came a time
when it didn't fit them perfectly, and they didn't like it
at all. And so here these people say, "This is perfect for
me"?

And you say, "Well, maybe we can build you a better
one. We can design a better house right now, and we'll
make it the way you want it. You won't be paying for
things that are in that [earlier] plan that you won't
want. "

So again, back to the plan.
LASKEY: And, also, I guess what you're saying is that
deciding, with the materials and the plan and the site,
everyone has got to be considered.
MAY: That's correct.

LASKEY: You go out to the site, I assume?
MAY: Every site we do, we go, yes. Even in foreign
countries, it's part of the condition that we go to look at
it, because you're flying blind if you don't. You will see
things that they won't see. That's my business, and that's
what they're hiring me for. Many times we go and help them
pick out the site. And many times I've had clients — I had
one just recently, the Rosenweigs from Washington, D.C.,
about two years ago, called and said they were overlooking
the Potomac River, which was just beautiful. And they
could hardly wait until I got there, when could I come?

181

would I come? I would. And we went. We had a lovely
luncheon at their club, and we went out to see the site. I
looked at it, and I thought, gee, I'd have a hard time
building a house on this site. It's beautiful, but it's so
steep and there are so many trees and, if I would take the
trees out, why, it won't be so beautiful as it is. The
Potomac looked beautiful, but yet next door you didn't know
what was going to happen because there was no restrictions
on the property.

I got back, and I said, "Look, I've come all the way
from L.A. to visit with you, and you're going to take me to
your beautiful home. I wouldn't trade this home for any
I've seen on the Potomac."

And they said, "Oh, but the noise is so loud."

And I said, "What noise?"

And they said, "Well, the freeway."

And so we said, "Well, you can plant that out. This
has just happened so slowly that you haven't even got
accustomed to it."

To make a long story short, the point was that they
agreed that where they were was a lot better. I pointed
out the pitfalls on the hillside, and having to take out
the trees, and then it would be another ten years to get
back to at least as high as they were. It was so steep
that they'd need walls. They had a lovely home.

182

Beautifully furnished. Great taste. So that's why I go,
because if I said, "Yes, I can do it," and then look — and I
couldn't have done a house. Nobody could have done a house
on that site, I don't believe.

The ranch house has surely spread. Going back to San
Diego, there was nobody — Gill wasn't, Frank Lloyd Wright
surely wasn't, Schindler wasn't building ranch houses,
[Richard] Neutra, who came later, was not.

The nearest thing to it would be the San Diego Exposi-
tion. They brought Bertram Goodhue, and he, of course, was
a great expert on the Mediterranean. He did one fabulous
job. He incidentally was-- Young was associated with
Bertram Goodhue, and I have a very wonderful personally
published book by George Marston (I've spoken of him
several times). George Marston was considered the god-
father of the San Diego park system. He was the one who
said they had to have parks. He put his own money where
his vocal chords were. He made donations, and he donated
Presidio Park, the biggest park. He was on the committee
that selected the two great Olmstead brothers from Saint
Louis, the greatest landscape architects of the time for
city planning, to come out and lay out Balboa Park. In his
memoirs there was a note about how he was part of the
original deal with Bertram Goodhue. Bertram Goodhue went
along without him, apparently. I think that Gill did the

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Balboa Park bridge. It is very distinctive of Gill's
style, tall arches and the symmetry and the way they march
right across the canyon. I'm only surmising that he
probably got that bridge designed about the time that there
was a falling out. I've never seen it anywhere, but I do
know from the facts I have read that Gill goes a part. And
I see that marked. [thumbs through book] Then I see that
he's no longer with Bertram Goodhue but has quit the whole
thing.

Another interesting thing I read, and I'll put it down
for history, and this is in the book, but you may never
come across it, because these are private editions. It
happened that the Olmstead brothers had designed the park
at the request of Marston and other civic leaders. The
Balboa Park was to be the great park in San Diego. I
believe it is one of the great parks in the United States.
So the design was all laid out by Olmstead and the peripher-
ies were all set and the boundaries were all set, and then
the exposition was proposed. It was the completion of the
Panama Canal in 1914 or '15. That's when the exposition
was. It was planned by Frank Balcher, a leading citizen,
and many other men that my father and I knew as leading
citizens as I grew up. Along with Balcher, there was 0. W.
Cotton, who was a great real estate man down there. They
were on the board, and they hired Bertram Goodhue. I think

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a citizen at that time was Gill. So that's the way it
started.

Along the way the park [board] submitted to Olmstead
that Bertram Goodhue wanted to put the exposition right in
the center of the park. To which there was a big
consternation in the Olmstead brothers' office. They said
that nobody was going to take their park and put an
exposition in the center of it. That was not where you put
parks. You put an exposition on the side of the park.
There was a beautiful point, down below the park, where the
exposition should go on, to preserve and free up the entire
park. So they took that information back to the board, and
the board said, "Well, that makes sense." They went back
to Goodhue, and Goodhue said it didn't make sense and that
he was going to put the exposition where he wanted it, he
was the architect, and there's no place like the center of
the park, with the park all around it. At which time they
then wrote — The letters are in the book: "Dear Olmsteads,
will you please reconsider? You have Mr. Goodhue's
assurance that he wants to work with you and have it where
it is."

And then the letter from Olmstead: "Knowing what
you're doing to the people of San Diego in your own good
intentions by putting the exposition in the wrong place, in
our professional capacity we can have no part of it. We
send hereby our resignation." So they resigned. Oh, they

185

said, "We will not reconsider, so please do not call us to
reconsider. "

And then they went ahead and put the [exposition] in
the center. And it turned out pretty good, because Goodhue
did such a great job and with the bridge going across the
center and some of the key buildings as great as they were.
They tore down the temporary buildings, and then they
rehabilitated others. They were built so well, and the
ones they preserved didn't deteriorate because of the mild
climate. They rebuilt some of the buildings and renamed
them. Now they've got the buildings scattered through the
park, which I think is better, but it was the Olmstead
brothers' idea that it was all to be torn down, you see.
So here we have a landscape architect with a two-legged
stool that I told you about, the third leg, well, it worked
out.

So, I'm back now to saying the role that the Spanish
architecture had. Now, I say in the park you saw it. You
saw the Spanish architecture, Mediterranean, arcades, wide
porches. You saw botanical gardens, which were a different
form of architecture, which went all through the United
States at that time and all the world's fairs, the Saint
Louis World's Fair and the Chicago. We had a distinctive
style. We had old California emerging in this actually
native Spanish architecture. Definitely Spanish. There's

186

nothing ranch house about it anyplace. They built an
Indian village; later that became a Boy Scout village.
LASKEY: It's still there, I think.

MAY: I think it's still there. Then some of the buildings
that weren't so good they tore down, and they had a commit-
tee that rehabilitated them. I think they got WPA help for
some. But still, no ranch house as such. So in 1920, '21,
'22, there was nobody building ranch houses to my knowl-
edge. I was playing in the orchestra. Did I tell you that
in the orchestra I played for [Charles] Lindbergh?
LASKEY: Yes.

MAY: I'll get that in there again. I didn't know who he
was.

LASKEY: Didn't know who he was? That's amazing.
MAY: Will Rogers was the master of ceremonies and key
speaker .

Anyhow there was no house that I really thought was
great, although I liked this Monterey furniture that Barker
Brothers was manufacturing. I guess up here there might
have been a few ranch houses going. Bill [William W. ]
Wurster did one up in Paso de Tiempo, which is one of the
great ones. And I will tell you a story about that. When
we did our first book, I guess it was 1947, I wrote to Mr.
Wurster and asked him if we could use photographs of the
Paso de Tiempo house. It's in the book, and it's a great

187

ranch house. It has a tower, board and battens, everything
a ranch house is supposed to be in that era. It was
differentiated from the hacienda, which is the adobe. We
called it rancheria and other people called it ranch house.
He didn't call it a ranch house, but it was just a big
normal natural house, built of natural materials and
redwood. Anyhow, he wrote back and said, "You're very
welcome to it, but please do not give me name credit." He
did not want to be associated with it.
LASKEY: Really?

MAY: Which is amazing because this is one of the best
things I think he ever did.

LASKEY: Well, his style changed somewhat after that, and
then he became associated with the Bay Area style.
MAY: Yes. He was teaching at Cal [University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley].

Then there were several other people about that time I
am talking about. This had to be after the Depression.
During the Depression, there were three or four architects,
their names escape me now, who were doing very passable
ranch houses, some built out of adobe. There were four or
five. I can furnish the names to you, but at this moment I
just don't recall them. *[Sam Hammill; Bill Mushet;

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcripts.

188

Clarence Cullimore; Clarence Tantau; Joseph Plunkett;
William Bain] In San Diego there was really nobody that
was doing it. So in '31, I told you about the Depression
and my getting started, I decided to build my first house.
I knew what I wanted to do and I drew it on a piece of
paper and got the permit. It was around the new patio. It
was my first house.

189

TAPE NUMBER: IV, STOE ONE
SEPTEMBER 15, 1982

LASKEY: In talking about your early development of the
ranch style house in San Diego, you said you were probably
the only architect or designer who built exclusively in the
ranch style house, and you've never changed from that style
after fifty years.

MAY: Of course, what the ranch house style is it's an easy
thing to pin down and nearly everything that is well done
could come under the classification if it was a one-story
house. In the first book that I did with Sunset magazine
we defined what the ranch house was and we kicked it around
for a long time. After many photographs and many discus-
sions and seeing many houses and talking about many houses,
we came up with the idea that any house that was one-story
and lived like a ranch house was a ranch house. The idea
being that if it had cross-ventilation and if it had one-
story so you could walk out without going down lots of
steps to get to the courtyard or patio, or if it had a
courtyard or patio or walls protecting it and had privacy,
and it was not a box but was stretched out somewhat, it
would be a ranch house. If it lives like a ranch house, it
is a ranch house.

You can take another house and say, well, you've got
four steps to the front door. It's got a porch on the
front and you go into the entrance hall and there's a

190

living room on one side and a dining room on the other
side. Behind that are rooms, why, that doesn't live like a
ranch house, so it's not a ranch house. It's one of a
thousand kinds — well, not a thousand, but, let us say, one
of twenty kinds of architecture. It could be a colonial,
Spanish, it could be Georgian, it could be just anything,
but the ranch house was this informal way of living, the
old California way.

And when we discussed the fact that it was native to
California, in my travels I've never seen anything else we
could call a ranch house. In Australia, I've not seen one.
We built one in Australia. In all of my traveling there I
didn't see anything else we would call a California ranch
house. They had farmhouses, but, the ranches I was on,
they were quite traditional, and I guess they had an
influence from out of England.

An English country house is nothing like a ranch
house, and in the south of France there isn't. There is in
Spain, of course, and on the border south of France where
you might get a few; but in residential, no. Even the
Spanish houses had the courtyards, but they were two-story
and they weren't low and spread and rambling.

In the hundreds of books and photographs that I have,
there are many, many houses in the foreign countries that
are really boxes. They're just boxes, but they do have

191

courtyards formed by being built against other people's
houses. And they do enter into the garden, and they make
adaptations of the weather. I guess what does determine
pretty much the shape of a house, what kind of a house you
have and determines the floor plan, is the climatic condi-
tion, if you're sensitive to that. But many people have
the climatic condition in Southern California, and then
they build to the climate back in, say, Michigan. Many
people come out here, and they still want a box with forced
hot air, two-story, and many of the amenities and ways of
living that they had back in the East.

So back again to the ranch house, it's an informal way
of living out of doors. I remember my first contact with
Miss Elizabeth Gordon, of House Beautiful. I've talked
about her before. She is one of the favorites of everybody
in the California architectural profession, because she's
done so much to promote and explain the California way of
life to the rest of the country through her magazine. When
she first came out, she said this was another world. She
was born, I believe, in Iowa and she was working in New
York City, commuting from New York up to Dobbs Ferry, a
beautiful bit of country. They had a beautiful country
estate. Her married name was Norcross, Mr. and Mrs. Carl
Norcross. He was with the March of Time and a colonel in
the United States Air Force under General [Ira C. ] Eaker in

192

England and came back to Time-Life and became one of the
editors of House and Home. So it was a great marriage for
architecture, both being interested in all kinds of hous-
ing, he writing for the Time-Life on House and Home, and
she for the Hearst Corporation with House Beautiful. She
said many times how much indebted she was to finding
California and finding the kind of living out here that she
had never dreamed existed.

And I think it all goes back to what we said about the
climate dictates housing. Should if you observe it and
* [recognize what can be done in design by working with it,
like enclosing the out of doors with the walls of the
outside and letting the sun in with skylights, sliding
glass doors.] Back East it's not so advantageous except
through improvements in housing. Since the advancements in
technology, we've all kinds of changed techniques and
materials. We have houses back in Kansas City, where I
have a picture of the snow all over. We had snow melting
in the inner patio. We just melted the snow, and it looked
like springtime in the patio, with snow all around. We did
the same thing at Lake Tahoe, where Lake Tahoe gives us the
contrast with back East with below zero temperatures, and
yet the skylights and the snow-- I visited the house one

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

193

time when the snow was up to your waist almost, and we
needed chains to get in. Inside the house the snow had
melted back from the skylight and you look out to blue sky
and snow all over the roof. They were so proud of the
house. The owner said that the thermostat went off during
the day because of the tremendous snow load insulation on
top, and the solar heat from the sun coming through the
snow and the skylight kept them warm.
LASKEY: Sort of a solar insulated installation —
MAY: It wasn't planned or engineered, so how it actually
worked I don't know, but it was very warm.
LASKEY: Well, it's sort of interesting, while you were
talking — There was the indigenous architecture, the ranch
house, which sort of nothing happened when the Americans
developed this area. They moved the eastern architecture
here.

MAY: That's where more people came from the East to
colonize and did not know what we really had.
LASKEY: Exactly, until you came along almost single-
handedly to remove that kind of architecture. And then you
moved that ranch style back East.

MAY: Well, that's the way it worked, and, of course I
guess we give all the credit probably, or much of it, to
Elizabeth Gordon and Carl Norcross. Miss Gordon did a

194

tremendous amount of publicity on ranch houses, and on mine
especially.

I had started in San Diego in '31, and we're research-
ing my records of it now for [University of California]
Santa Barbara. Dr. [David] Gebhard, he may be working on
the book, but he wanted to know the speed with which the
ranch house caught on. At the time I didn't know what I
was doing, I was just building houses, the kind of houses I
thought they should be, and I didn't even think of them as
being ranch houses. We called one a rancheria that had a
shingled roof, and in Indian, in Mexican, that means a
covered thatch like a ramada (bower). The word rancheria
was not really a ranch house but just a word that sounded
like ranch house. Then when we had the tile roof, we
called it a hacienda, which doesn't mean hacienda, which
means a big spread in Spanish, like a big ranch, hacienda.
It doesn't mean a house, but we called them haciendas and
rancherias and seemed to get away with it.

But going back to Dr. Gebhard and collecting of the
historical ranch house information, we started out and the
dates which seem familiar, I wouldn't have them, had I not
been studying them over the last six or seven months.

The first house I did in San Diego was in 1931, in the
middle of the Depression. We've gone over that. But the
rate at which they came was sort of phenomenal, because I

195

started very slowly. Built one, then sold it. Then we
built another one and sold it, and then I built mine at the
same time. So we got two in one period, and then we sold
that and built another one. By that time I was building
three, then three went to eight, and pretty soon had five
or six going all the time, starting, building, and finish-
ing all over the city and county. So when we got through
in five to six years in San Diego, I didn't stop to count
at the time, but I had close to fifty houses. In those
five or six years to have built around fifty houses, almost
a house a month, now seems impossible. *[But plans were
simple, three or four pages vs. thirty-plus now, inspec-
tions easy, houses were all cash, so no financing. We
worked six days a week and eight to ten hours a day in
summer. ]

LASKEY: Now these were all custom-made houses, too?
MAY: All custom * [designed and built by me as contractor.
That's another reason we needed so few plans. I also only
took one profit, which was small in those depression years,
the thirties.] The first ones were slower, because we
built one for sale and then you had to sell it and do
another one, so it took longer than if you were building

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

196

for owners. You could build two or three at once that way,
because you had no selling to do.

Incidentally, all of my houses were always built for
all cash. We never had a loan on a house. I don't think I
ever built an FHA [Federal Housing Authority] house in my
life, except the Low Cost Houses of 1951-1953. I don't
remember building any veterans' houses for veterans' loans.

But the people — we've talked about this I think
before — but the people that seemed to like my houses, which
I called ranch houses, called California houses, were
people who were world travelers. People from the navy and
people from the army and wealthy people who had been around
the world and had seen other countries seemed to like them
better than the provincial people who didn't understand
them. Here people lived right in that beautiful weather,
but they didn't realize how * [much more pleasure they would
have from a house designed for the specific building site
and for California weather. ]

So continuing with the thought I had and in answer to
your question, the magazines came in spreading the ranch
house idea. After I'd done around fifty, most of which had
been published in about — Well, I think that nearly every
one of them was in a magazine in some form or other.

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

197

Sunset magazine used them on their cover and on six or
seven feature articles and put little squibs about them
from time to time. The third house I did was in American
Home, the February 1935 issue, and that had a big national
circulation in those days. My house was in California Arts
and Architecture, April 1935, which was just here in the
West, local subscriptions. *[Then all the other magazines-
— Good Housekeeping with Dorothy Draper, the professional
magazines, and especially Elizabeth Gordon of House Beauti-
ful published my houses. California Arts and Architecture,
at that time, was becoming and became an important magazine
in the so-called modern movement.] Magazine after magazine
the houses appeared in.

Then when Elizabeth Gordon came. Sunset said they
"found me first," and then there may have been a bit of
rival jealousy there. They didn't know why I was going
with them [House Beautiful] when "they [Sunset] discovered
me." I didn't really know what "discovered" meant in those
days. I was just busy building houses. Finally, Miss
Gordon really went to town on my houses. My own house must
have been featured in eight or ten different issues, and
two issues were big, big issues about the house. The first
being her idea about "Meeting A Family Who Really Knows How

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

198

To Live," and then showed all the things we did that the
average person didn't do or even knew about — like walk-in
cold room and walk-in freezer. We had the first gas dryer
that had come out, experimental, and we had a lot of
"first" things in that house. My business was trying out
these new ideas before trying them out on clients.
LASKEY: Now this was your first —

MAY: Third house built for my family, and the second
family house in Los Angeles. The second house was built in
Mandeville Canyon in West Los Angeles in 1935-36, when we
moved to Los Angeles. That was where I met Miss Elizabeth
Gordon, in the third house, you see. And she showed
pictures of how we had can closets that opened, and the
cans were on the doors and the cans were inside. The can
closet was a spice closet with all the spices you can buy
and then you dump it into your own cans. One picture was a
novel idea; we had the first home incinerator that you
could incinerate wet material in. It didn't do very well,
but the idea was that you could throw in your garbage and
it dried it out and it reduced down to about the size of a
walnut. And you could load and load and load, but it
* [didn't dry the garbage. So we put a sack of walnuts in

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

199

it and the house cdught on fire — that's an example of why I
always tried new ideas on myself.]

The thing I always tried, was *[new ideas for living
and holding to the time proven ideas of patios, low rambl-
ing structures, and simplicity, and space.] And that was
while raising the children.

We had the first residential intercoms. One man had
started making intercoms in '38 or 1939. We just opened a
cabinet we had at the head of the bed, and we listened to
the children in their different rooms. It was really quite
unusual. We had a microphone at the dining room table. It
makes a lot of sense because of the household help. For-
merly when you wanted something, you used to ring a buzzer,
then she'd hear the buzzer and come into the dining room
and say, "What is it?" And you'd whisper you needed a fork
or you wanted her to clear the dishes. With the microphone
you just pushed it down and said, "The dishes please" or
whatever it was. And she knew it was time to come. It
really saved time. So it was great. But that was no big
deal.

We had the horses under the same roof so that in the
wintertime, in the rain or any bad weather we had, you
could feed the horses without going out with slickers and

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

200

boots on. And we built a four-car garage so we had a place

for the kids to play on rainy days without tearing the

house apart.

LASKEY: A four-car garage in 1938? That must have been

quite unique!

MAY: It was, but I wanted to build a little ahead of what

was going to be coming. I'll get into that. When it

really came we were so far ahead in living ideas that

nobody liked it, but only because they didn't comprehend.

Now it's here.

But we had a little tack and buggy room and we had * [a
three-stall stable and paddock which connected to the
bridle trails and in the Santa Monica Mountains next door
and Riviera Country Club and polo fields across Sunset
Boulevard with its horse underpass.] We had a paddle
tennis court before it became the thing to do. Now it's
tennis. But paddle tennis, in those days you could get a
court on and you didn't have to spoil the whole lot.

In our bathrooms we had the first bidet. I had built
a house for a French couple, and they taught me what a
bidet was. So our house had the first bidet. It had a lot
of "firsts," not because we were trying to be first, but I
was just anxious to see what's new and how it would work.

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

201

We'd get it, and so it turns out to be first. But nobody
knew what a bidet was. It has a spout in the center that
has a right and left lever, and if you turn it the right
way it doesn't use the spout, and if you turn it the left
way it spouts so hard it hits the ceiling. [laughter]

We'd have parties, and this house was a well-built
house, but in '39 we didn't even think of a powder room.
We should have, but we didn't. So we'd use the master bath
which had double baths, a Mr. bath and a Mrs. bath. The
women would go into the bidet, usually they'd go in pairs,
and, I guess, they'd say, "What is this?" They'd lean over
and turn the water on and, if the spout was right, they'd
get a big splash in the face. It was so bad that when they
came out you knew they had been soaked. [laughter]
LASKEY: Oh, my!

MAY: Then we got around it by saying to watch out for it,
then they got [soaked] more than ever. But since that time
I've never built a fine home without a bidet. And we use
now two bidets, one for Mr. and one for Mrs. It's really a
great habit.
LASKEY: Really!

MAY: The French use it, of course. They use it, the book
says, to wash their private parts. And that's why you hear
about the "French and the English bathing only once a
week." And that's a true story. I have a friend who built

202

a big chain of motels, and he was asked to do some over in
England. That's the chain that has a little bear in a
nightshirt going up a flight of stairs, I can't think of
the name —

LASKEY: Oh, TraveLodge.

MAY: TraveLodge. He was a friend from San Diego, and he
founded it. Scott King his name was. He went over to the
"consortium," or whatever they call it to make a presenta-
tion to build a chain of them in England. When he got
there why he brought a plan and they saw it. They said,
"What are these?"

He said, "These are bathrooms."

They said, "You mean in each room there is a bathroom?
We don't do that here. We have a nice bathroom at the end
of the hall." I think with that Scott gave up. But that's
not a joke, but I guess that's all changed now.

At the time we were building, a bathroom was an
expensive area and still is. Many houses had one bathroom
for the three bedrooms. When it got to the time of Wallace
Neff, why, he built a very, very expensive house and then
usually had a bathroom for two guestrooms to share, and
then it became really deluxe when they had a Mr. and Mrs.
bath. A lot of people still don't include double baths,
but we hardly ever do a house without them. I'm talking

203

about ranch houses now, but this applies to any kind of a
house.

The thing about the ranch house, in spreading it out,
it does cost a little more to do. So that's why it maybe
became known as more of an expensive house to build than,
let's say, a conventional square house with four corners.
In a ranch house we have more windows because we have them
on both sides of the room. We have more rafter overhang,
more outside plaster. The plumbing has to run longer
distances. The wiring has to go longer distances; the
voltage drops, which is easy to take care of. Then there's
more rafters to cut. In a square house you'd cut, say,
sixteen rafters on each side, and you are finished. On a
ranch house you could have sixteen rafters just on one
room. So the cost was a factor.

LASKEY: But doesn't it also make it better constructed?
MAY: Oh yes. But it could be the same construction. You
could have a badly built ranch house and a fine built
conventional house, or vice versa. But there's just more
work, more things to do. But it's like anything. The more
expensive yacht, if you can afford a yacht, has better
equipment than a tugboat or a rowboat. It's just a matter
of question. The reason I probably had the no-loan houses
was because they were a little more expensive houses to do,
and they were attractive to an income bracket that they

204

were able to afford to build a house without having to
place a mortgage on it.

LASKEY: Well, it's interesting because you have built both
obviously the very nice, the very big, and very expensive
custom houses and then also you've gotten involved in low-
cost housing.

MAY: That's right. There's two factors in it. One, we
did build small ranch houses, just as well as we could
build them. Like my first house, it had a small two-car
garage, a little passageway you entered into the patio, and
it had a kitchen, a little breakfast nook, and a dining
room, and then a little living room. I remember thirteen-
by-twenty was the size of it, and [it had] a ten-by-twelve
bedroom, and the master bedroom was twelve-by-f ourteen , and
a fireplace in the living room in the corner, which gave a
little more space but made it harder to furnish.

So we built many, many of our houses. The little ones
we could build in ninety days. We didn't need much in the
way of drawings, because there was nothing complicated. In
fact, all my houses were under $10-12,000, which would be
times twenty now, it would be $20,000. In other words, I
would say I built as many houses under $100,000 over my
lifetime as I did over $100,000, when you take in the
Depression years.

205

LASKEY: But I was going to say, isn't it a little hard to
equate the values because —

MAY: You can do it an easier way by saying this, first of
all, the houses in the twenties were small and, in the
thirties, they were even a little smaller, because the
Depression was on then and people had houses with less
space. Then, in the thirties, they started to get a little
bit bigger, and, in the early forties, we went to war and
they stopped building. Then after the war, the boom was on
and people started building larger houses, and we began
having two and three cars in the garage. In the twenties,
you only had one car in the garage, and, in the thirties,
you had two cars, but the house was smaller.

I'm trying to relate the size of the houses with the
cost per square foot. When I started you could build for
$2.50 per square foot in 1931 — $2.50. Then it went up to
$3, and then $3.25 and then $3.50, then $4. When I came to
L.A. it was about $4. That would be 1935. It stayed at $4
until the war started. After the war, it started to creep
up to $5. For a while, we were on $6 and $7, and then
there were $8, then it hit $10, and then we were $12,
$12.50 we did a house per square foot. Then all of a
sudden as labor unions came and as there was a greater
selection of building materials [which] got more expensive
and also people began demanding bigger houses and more

206

things in the houses — In the first houses we built, we
didn't include equipment. For $12.50 a square foot, the
owner bought the stove, the refrigerator, and now that's
all built in, and it's part of the cost per square foot.
Also, you can finance appliances, which you couldn't in the
old days. When you built the old house and you had a
mortgage on it, you had to pay cash for your stove and
refrigerator. So with all of those and many [other]
factors added together, the whole sum total of it is that
the price has been going up slowly but steadily since 1931.
And its price curve has been going up like, as Brendan Gill
of the New Yorker magazine said, "as the profile of the
Eiffel Tower." It starts out real flat, then it starts
getting steeper and steeper, as you get up to the top and
in 1982 we haven't reached it.
LASKEY: It spirals.

MAY: And our houses have gone from the $2.50 a [square]
foot to where we are at, one house only, a $180 a square
foot. But $180 a square foot is like comparing a Model T
Ford with a computerized new Cadillac.
LASKEY: A hundred and eighty dollars?

MAY: That's per square foot. But that's with antique
doors, with hand-carved corbels and decorative items built
in, and with radiant heating, with heat pumps (water-well
extraction through a heat pump), for both heating and

207

cooling, putting water back in the earth, water system of
filtration, and handmade custom floortile, and imported
marble materials * [double glazing, skylights, garden
lights, soundproof design, and central controlled lighting,
et cetera.] That's an expensive house.

But the average house right now is being built for a
about $100 a [square] foot. There are houses that have
been built — There's no use talking about it, but when
these Arabs come and build houses some cost $1,000 a square
foot. But the whole story again is that the ranch house £s
slightly more to build because it has more in it, more
overhangs, as I said, and more roof and more spread, but it
offers more.

So going back to Miss Elizabeth Gordon. She publi-
cized my second Los Angeles house in 1942, and we got a
tremendous amount of inquiry on it. She got good press,
and they did other articles. They had commissioned Maynard
Parker, who was one of the great architectural photogra-
phers of the time out there, and he became their exclusive
photographer. He would find houses for them. He had good
taste, and he showed Miss Gordon more than my share of
houses for her to choose from. Out of that came the spread
back East. I did my first book with Sunset magazine. It

* Mr. May added the following bracketed material during
his review of the tape transcript.

208

was called Western Ranch Houses by Sunset magazine in
collaboration with Cliff May.

[As] I look back now at an old copy, I was just on the
paper cover, and when the paper dust jacket fell off I
wasn't in the book. [laughter] But I did all the work
putting it together. In those days there were some ranch
houses we could not get good pictures of. I think it was
about '47, and the ranch house popularity was just a
building then, and there was no place where you could come
in and say, "Here's a fine ranch house," with photographs
showing foliage and gardens and patios. So I gathered what
ranch house photos I could find, and they would be over-
grown with plants and couldn't really see the building
behind the shrubbery. So we hired Frank Jamison, who was
one of the fine architectural delineators of our time, and
he would remove the shrubbery and make sketches of the
building, and we were then able to show the ranch house
properly. Out of the hundreds of photographs we were able
to collect of ranch houses the majority of the book was, as
I recall, all sketches — There were a few pages where the
book shows "The Camera Examines The Ranch House." And we
had a few fine photographs including Bill Wurster's wonder-
ful ranch house at Santa Cruz. The book was a big seller,
over 50,000 copies, and they would print edition after
edition. The book came out I think in about '46 or '47.

209

with the coining of World War II, I was unable to build
because all luxury construction was shut down by the
government, but any job that was under construction
received priority to continue. So I did have about two or
three jobs. One of the best jobs I ever did was under
construction — we'll talk about that someday — it's the F. M.
Blow, the Frederic Blow house on a wooded mountain top in
Brentwood on Oakmont Drive.
LASKEY: We've discussed that.

MAY: We did. The UCLA critics say that it's one of my
best, but they call my fifth residence, Mandalay, my
masterpiece. We continued to finish the Blow house. The
book in the meantime was being put together.

I was champing at the bit, not being able to create
anything new, so I decided to design a house I would build
as soon as the war was over. It was quite an advance over
anything I had done. It featured a courtyard with sky
shades (we coined the word "sky shades"), which were big
silken shades, like they use in Spain, only they made
theirs out of burlap. They'd pull them across on rollers
so you could control the sun in the courtyard. The maga-
zine that later published the house after it had been built
called them "wind shutters," but they were big louvers that
lifted up or could be closed to stop the wind. They opened
up into a second patio with an enclosed walled-in swimmming

210

pool. And the kitchen opened into the barbecue and the
outdoors, so you could take everything from the kitchen
right to the barbecue without going through the house with
it or going out the back porch, which most people have to
do. Or pass it out the kitchen window, which was worse.
LASKEY: Right!

MAY: The sketches and my drawings were made, and then we
got the idea in the book, well, let's end the book with
this house. This is the way that things will be after —
Cliff May's ranch house thinking after the war, or some-
thing like that. So it was the last five or six pages in
the book, and we had these wonderful Jamison sketches of
it. And it described what I was going to do.

Well, the war was over, and the building business
started to pick up. It took a while to get organized and
started but residential home building was improving. They
had been building lots and lots of war-worker houses, and
now, they converted to veterans' houses. The Veterans
Administration had loans for them. FHA was created prior
to the war, of course, and now they were working to make
loans for the flood of people who wanted to build. FHA was
for everybody. The Vets [VA] was a better deal but only
for veterans. *[The ranch house style and California

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcripts.

211

weather had been seen by millions of the "flying men" from
the East, South, and Midwest. It gave them ideas of a new
way of life. It was another plus for the ranch house and
sparked its spread eastward. ]

I approached Sunset — for whom I'd built the Sunset
Magazine Building; at that time the Sunset Book Building
had not yet been built — and suggested they should be the
ones to sponsor building Ranch Book's "Cliff May After The
War House." I would build it on one of our key sites in
the Riviera Ranch, which is the subdivision Mr. Smith
financially made possible. We've talked about where all
the houses are designed by me and built by me or we
wouldn't sell the land to you. They said that publishing
was their business and not building houses. They welcomed
me to get anybody else who would do it.

Well, House Beautiful just grabbed it, and having the
ball, they really ran. In fact, I had the house under
construction when they saw it and said, "Let's go." Then
they took it over, and Elizabeth Gordon with her tremendous
dynamic personality [that] could convince anybody of
anything, and her whole magazine staff, headed by Mrs.
Frances Hearst, set out to convince the world that this is
the way to live in California. In doing so. Miss Gordon
convinced her publisher, Mr. Richard Hoefer, that this
should be the first [issue of the magazine] ever published

212

that was all color and only one house exclusively. There
would be no black-and-white pictures of the house and there
would be nothing in the magazine except this house, its
furnishings, and landscaping. It would be on the cover
*[and would be called the Pacesetter House, and the first
of a series of Pacesetter Houses to be built throughout the
U.S.] It would be furnished by all the big advertisers who
would get priority to put their materials into the house.
So she had these [advertisers]-- Celanese beg[ged] to have
their draperies included, and we had Mr. Edward Wormley,
the great furniture designer, designing the furniture for
Dunbar in the living room, and we had Heeramanic of New
York City lending us pre-Columbian art to feature the
trend. Miss Gordon wanted to combine the old feeling with
contemporary in the Dunbar furniture. Paul Frankl came in
to do some of the interiors for us and had wonderful advice
on how to bring indoors outdoors. And everybody and his
friend, if qualified, was in on the act.

Prior to the publishing, we had three great parties.
I remember Miss Gordon wanted to find out what the best
California champagne was at that time, because nothing was
good enough for House Beautiful 's party. Korbel was
chosen.

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

213

House Beautiful and the staff had three great parties.
The first night was for the press. It was a wild party,
well, not wild but everybody really was singing and having
a wonderful time. I had just gone on a diet. They said I
couldn't have anything to drink for thirty days, and I was
taking some tests, so I was cold sober and these people
seemed awfully happy and noisy. [laughter]

The next night was for the people that worked and
contributed to the project, and the architects, all the
architects, all the architects around. Famous architects
from San Francisco came down, and I remember one of the
great ones from Chicago, Elizabeth's friend and favorite
architect; his name was Samuel Marx. He came all the way
out from Chicago. Of course, Dunbar sent their people out,
and Ed Wormley was here. Robjohns Gibbings came. All of
the people interested in furnishings and interiors were
present at this wonderful second night.

And then the third night was the night for the first
ladies of Los Angeles and socialites, that's what I'm
trying to say; corporation executives and their wives and
on and on. One was business, one was fun, and one was
social.

As a result, we had a tremendous amount of people
wanting to go through it, so we opened the house to inspec-
tion with the proceeds to go to charity. I don't remember

214

the charity we had, but they sent their young ladies out
and would take people through. It was open daily. It was
for sale. We had a pretty high price on it, because we put
a tremendous amount of experimental work in it. *[It was a
new era in postwar luxury housing — one of a kind.] A
couple, Mr. and Mrs. Neil Monroe came. He was the RIT dye
[Putnam Dye Works] — It was the RIT dye that was the big
dye company in those days.
LASKEY: It still is.

MAY: It used to be in the Middle West. They lived in one
of my houses in Riviera Ranch, but one day they came over
and took one look at it and said they'd buy it. And did.
We kept it open another ten days or two weeks, and then
they moved in. They bought all the furniture, too.

The House Beautiful staff and executives who executed
the project were such wonderful and nice people. All the
invitations that went out, they were all engraved. And the
parties were as beautiful as could be done — done so beauti-
fully.

I'll never forget one thing though, about how observ-
ing and practical Miss Gordon was. She said we'd have no
smoking in the house because these aren't all our furnish-
ings, and we don't want anybody smoking in the house. "Get

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

215

a great big handsome tub if you can, a big copper tub, and
we'll fill it full of pure white sand." Then they put up a
sign that said, "No Smoking In The Pacesetter House,
Please" — tastefully done. And she said, "Now watch, this
whole tub will fill up with just-lighted cigarettes.
Whenever anybody comes to see something, believe it or not,
especially smokers are nervous and unsure of themselves and
as they walk across the motorcourt to the front door, they
will light a cigarette, and when they see the sign they'll
put it out, watch." And I was amazed to see all the
cigarettes that were just lighted before they came in.

The House Beautiful Pacesetter House brought a
tremendous amount of recognition and business for me and
spread the ranch house idea across the nation. I finally
figured I built probably nine derivatives of the house. I
never built two alike. We couldn't anyhow, because, as
I've explained, the sites are never the same and families
are never the same and they all want to make a change.
LASKEY: Were they mostly in Southern California?
MAY: No, no, that's it, they were all away from Southern
California. I think of one being way back in Ohio, and
there was one in Knoxville. We did one in Bartlesville
[Oklahoma] for the chairman of the board of Phillips
Petroleum, Mr. and Mrs. K. S. "Boots" Adams.
LASKEY: That's a phenomenal house.

216

MAY: We did one in Texas. We did one up in Wyoming — No,
Pendleton, Oregon is where the annual rodeo is. And we did
one I believe in San Diego, and we did one in New Orleans
that never got out of the ground because Mr. Joe W. Brown
died before we got the foundations in, and so they were
never able to finish it.

Then we also did something else. Elizabeth Gordon had
this terrific idea; she included in the back of the article
a "Pacesetter House For All Climates." And she showed how
it could be built in cold climates and how it could be done
in super-hot climates. Then she had another "Pacesetter
House For Limited Budgets." I'll never forget, we built
the house right next door, a Pacesetter House built on a
limited budget, so we had two side by side. And that was
for a friend, his name was Austin Peterson. He was the
producer for the You Asked For It television show. Then he
retired to Honolulu and [the show] started up again, but it
didn't go very well. He had to come back and straighten
the new company out. He licensed them, so, he's back on
the credits again. But I think he likes Honolulu better
than Los Angeles because he's still there.

The House Beautiful publicity, though, kept going.
Before House Beautiful 's opening, they had prephotographed

217

it, * [hundreds of color photographs were taken by Maynard
Parker, the famous architectural photographer.] Then a big
issue came out, and for the fourth time I had my name on
the cover of a national magazine. It had "House Beauti-
ful ' s Pacesetter House by Cliff May," that was the cover
shot, which I'm very proud of.

LASKEY: That certainly had to have been a pivotal point in
your career.

MAY: I guess it was, because I am told, over a million
people had seen it. We got letters from all over, and at
that time they asked me to be on the staff of House Beauti-
ful magazine as consultant, the construction consultant.
So I was on the masthead for several years, I don't remem-
ber how long.

But I do remember I would do things like, well, people
would write in and say "Our shingles leak when we've got
ice from snow on the roof, what's the trouble?" So I would
write the solution was put a string of electric heat cable
under the eavshingles and it will melt the ice down, which
will allow the roof to drain and not back up and leak.
LASKEY: Well, that must date the beginning of the spread
of the ranch-style house across the country.

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

218

MAY: That's right. That was when the public started to
wake up to the possibilities of the ranch house style. In
'47 it was published. In '48, '49, and '50 we were deluged
with as many as we could build, more than our share. In
the meantime, one thing I didn't say is that when I left
San Diego in '35 — I think I told you this story about Mr.
[J. A.] Smith suggesting that I come to L.A. and advising
me that it would be a better future for me.
LASKEY: Yes.

MAY: And when I left San Diego, there were about four
builders that knew I had a good thing and they all started
copying it my houses. Instead of coming up with their own
style of outdoor living, they just copied down to a T, so
much so that I still get letters from people saying, "I
bought a Cliff May house, will you verify it? I'm told
it's a Cliff May house."

So I have to write and tell them, "It sounds like it."
Or I get the address and then I say, "It's a Cliff May-
inspired house."

LASKEY: But it wasn't a Cliff May house.
MAY: One was an architect and he still insisted that it
was, so I finally went down one day and saw it, but it
wasn't. But he was so sure and he measured it. [I said]
"I can't see why you'd bother about one of my houses
because you could build one of your own."

219

He said, "I'd rather live in one of yours."
[laughter] And he was disappointed it wasn't one.

About that time the magazine, House and Home picked it
up. Oh, that's another story, which I'll come to, but
Sunset and House and Home and others ran page after page,
describing ranch house living, with many of our houses on
their covers. In fact, we even came out with a house, we
called it the "Magazine Cover House," one of those low-cost
houses. We had a tremendous amount of publicity. My last
house for my family, CM No. 5, was in the process of being
planned during the "Pacesetter House" building and showing.
LASKEY: Now which house is this?
MAY: The house, CM No. 5, now called Mandalay. You've

seen that, haven't you?

LASKEY: No, I haven't but —

MAY: Oh, you must see it then. Why don't you come on

Monday? Jody Greenwald from UCLA is having a class house

tour.

LASKEY: I work, so I can't, but thank you.

MAY: OK. We're going to see that and the one — You ought

to take a day off from work, and we'll go up to what some

have called the masterpiece, the Zubin Mehta house, which

was the Blow house.

220

I worked design for a long time on CM House No. 5,
Mandalay, having lived for twenty years in what I called
the No. 1, 2, 3, and 4 houses. The one that Elizabeth
Gordon started off with. No. 3, was built in '38, '39,
which was way before the Pacesetter House. For CM No. 5,
when the designs were completed and the job started, I went
back to New York to talk about House Beautiful publishing
the No. 5 house. But when Elizabeth Gordon found out how
big the living room was, thirty feet wide and fifty feet
long, she said that House Beautiful wouldn't be interested
at all because it was just too big for their readers.

I said, "Elizabeth, you say that's what has been wrong
with houses — the living rooms are too tight, too little.
And Frank Lloyd Wright always says, 'Get them bigger, get
them bigger. You're building lots of little houses; you
ought to be building bigger and better houses.'" *[I
reminded her of her speech to the Los Angeles chapter of
the Building Contractors Association at the Los Angeles
Ambassador hotel in 1943, "You builders must stop building
the nasty little houses you have been building."] But to
no avail.

I was terribly disappointed after our long and wonder-
ful association. I came home and went straight to the

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

221

great Paul C. Frankl , who was, as I've said, my personal
friend; our families were very close. When I told him that
the House Beautiful [people] said it's too big, he looked
at the floor plan and looked at it again. And he said,
"Hummph, Cliff, you'll see the day when it isn't big
enough. Can you make it any bigger now?"

I said, "No, because I've got the foundations all
poured and the plumbing all in."

He says, "Well, there must be someplace where it needs
enlarging. I'll help."

I said, "Well, I could push the front porch out, which
will enlarge the entry."

[He said,] "Well, do it then. And how about widening
the south end at the living room?"

So I pushed out the living room about eight feet,
which made an alcove in the living room, without which the
house would have been a bust. It just made the living room
by making the room wider on the south view end.
LASKEY: Really?

MAY: It taught me something. No room should be a rectan-
gle. If it can it should have angles or twists or an
around-the-corner look. Frankl said he didn't think the
rooms were big enough to be in scale with the fifty-five
acre setting and site. And, believe me, since that day
we've made thirteen additions to the size of the house.

222

We've increased the area thirteen times, * [and the living
room is still too tight. I have to move the chimney nine
feet out and extend the living room ten feet for what I
would now call perfection. The three-car carport needs
three more spaces.] I'm going to put another three on.
Now, I've got two cars that are outside, old cars that I
want to keep. Now the maid comes and leaves her old car
parked out front all day long and wrecks the appearance of
the house. So if we can get rid of her car in the new
carport, it would look better. So, now we need another
three-car garage or carport. [laughter] That's the truth,
it's no joke. I've got the plans right here on slides,
that's one of the slide shows. Paul T. Frankl was right
thirty years ago.

LASKEY: Oh, I've seen many, many pictures of Mandalay —
MAY: Well, I have the original 1951-52 plan and then each
new addition added with a red line and docked in red.
LASKEY: — and then the additions to it. Well, that's part
of what you were talking about the last time we talked was
the importance of the plan in any house that you design.
MAY: That's right. That's what I was going to tell you a
little later on now.

The next thing was that the editor of House and
Garden , Harriet Burket, saw Mandalay and said, "Gee, that's

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

223

exactly what we want. We'll do a new series and we'll call
this the first of the—" They called it the "Hallmark
House." *[It was published in the February issue, 1957,
was listed on the cover, and nineteen full pages were used
to describe what we now call Mandalay.] They gave me the
House and Garden Hallmark House award for the first
Hallmark House. Mandalay was followed by a series of
Hallmark Houses. And they did the same thing that House
Beautiful did with my first Pacesetter House. They did an
exclusively Mandalay issue. And it was great publicity.
*[And again as House Beautiful had done, they spread "Ranch
House" across the nation and even to Europe in the French
edition of House and Garden. ]

House and Home was showing a lot of my work, and that
was going to the builders, and the builders were being
affected in their work by what was selling in California,
the ranch house. And in the meantime, Chris [Christian]
Choate and I had in the early fifties decided — He had been
doing my sketches, my color paintings, for the clients.
LASKEY: How did you happen to meet Chris Choate?
MAY: I heard that he was one of the best architectural
watercolor artists here on the Coast — and I guess that goes
for the East, too. He's one of the tops nationwide, all

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

224

over. He works for the studios and has this great skill of
being able to complete a drawing in an evening. Next
morning, you have the drawing. So he started doing my
work, and he must have done fifty or sixty houses for me
all in color. Most of the paintings I gave to USC; they
wanted them because he was a graduate and they wanted to
use his work in illustrating classes at USC school of
architecture.

LASKEY: But he was an architect?

MAY: He was an architect, yes. He didn't have a big
practice. He loved to be painting for other architects,
and he lived in his self-designed house, the only house I
ever built not designed by me. I don't think he made his
living completely from architecture. He also taught at
UCLA. Well, anyway, we hit if off.

One day we were talking about low-cost houses, just
kicking things around. He was very philosophical and very
down-to-earth and practical in many ways, and he could
always get to the bottom of a question. [He said] "Well,
the first thing you want to do, if you want to build a
house and have only a little money is put up a wall, a
front wall, and you could hide behind it and they couldn't
see you." [laughter]
LASKEY: That's a good idea.

225

MAY: "Then," he says, "if you've got enough money, you put
up another wall and make an L, so it wouldn't blow down in
the wind. And then, as your money comes in, you do it two
more times and you get four walls, and then at least it
protects you from the wind. Next thing, you put some
burlap over half of it, so you have part in the shade and
part in the sun . "

Anyway it went on like that, and then I came up with
this one: in one corner you just put glass shower doors
for the other two sides and make a bathroom. Shower doors
are the cheapest thing you can buy to enclose space. And
then we decided we'd put two of them in, two corners made
out of glass shower doors. We got the roof on, and that's
all there was. Floor, walls, and the roof, and then the
bathroom. We had to have a kitchen. That was just one
piece of plumbing. So we put in a half wall and put the
plumbing in that, you could see over the top of it. Before
you knew it, we had a great house with only one set of
rafters, and corners made out of glass, with no partitions
inside. We made wardrobe closets on wheels, and they were
two feet by four feet, six feet high. They had concealed
rubber-tire rollers, and you pushed them wherever you
wanted to. So you could make rooms out of the cabinets,
and when you leave —
LASKEY: Great idea!

226

MAY: So the cabinets were personal property. If you sold
your house, you could take your closets with you. That's
all there was. We got this, and so I decided, "I'll build
it, and I'll move into it to try it out." So I built it.

I had three children and a little Japanese housekeeper
enclosed in 1,600 square feet. We had it so that the
living room had a sofa and it had beds that looked like
sofas, like what they later did in motels [but] we got
there first. I think we had a beautiful headboard, and
beds came off at right angles, twin beds, and we had those
built-in so there would be no dirt under them. They just
sat on plywood on rollers, so there was no dirt and you
never had to clean under them. All of these things we
tried to make it easier for cleaning.

Then we put radiant heat over the whole floor; so no
matter where you put your movable closets, why, you were
warm because the heat was in the floor. You couldn't do
this with hot air, you see.

Then we did lighting with lights all around the edge
and wherever you needed them on the purlin beam the length
of the room. We had floor plugs in a few key places where
you had planters and where you could put lamps. We had a
hanging light for over the dining room table.

Then we had a big twelve foot, six inch, Frankl dining
room table, and here's a 1,600 foot house, which is one

227

third more the size of a tract house. They were approxi-
mately 1,200 square feet. So we had the size of a two-car
garage added to a tract house, that's the size we were. We
could seat ten comfortably for dinner, if you pushed the
movable partitions back, and twelve if required.
LASKEY: Did you ever build any more of those?
MAY: Strangest thing in the world. There was tremendous
publicity. Pageant magazine called it the house with the
hole in the roof, and two or three magazines ran it, includ-
ing Popular Mechanics, in three foreign editions. House
and Home ran it and ran it and ran it. Nobody could
understand it. And it was so big for such a little house
that people just couldn't believe it. A long time ago,
though, I discovered people can't judge any better than
they know, especially in housing.

One night, Carl Norcross, who's Elizabeth Gordon's
husband, came out to Los Angeles, to spend the night. He
was with House and Home. I was baching there. We had a
couple of drinks and later said he wanted to get to bed.

He said, "Where do I sleep? Which room?"

I said, "Well, how big a room would you like to sleep
in?"

He said, ""I'll take the biggest one you've got."

228

So we had a few more drinks, then pushed all the
partitions back, and we made a room that was 25-by-20. And
I said that's the biggest room for a 1,600 foot house.

I couldn't sell it to anybody. My children built
houses, and they didn't want to have any part of it. There
were a lot of mistakes that I made that I know how to
correct now. The noise was — It should have been low piped
music coming out of every wall at every point so the
background music would take over.

LASKEY: What I think is interesting is that the idea of
that developed. Office space eventually became like that.
MAY: Well, now it's back. I've got three people who I'm
designing houses for who want one great big room. In fact,
Bea Arthur last night, we were out to dinner, she said,
"I've got an idea, I want you to make one house with one
great big room and nothing else in it." Everybody's going
that way. So we're coming out in my new book with — I just
got an article from one of my clients. He started building
a year ago, drawing the plans, but he hasn't been able to
sell his house so we've just been working slowly. I told
him, "What you want is one great room, like mine, a great
big one. Big fireplace and terrace and a spacious living
room, the greatest luxury a family can have — space!"

229

TAPE NUMBER: IV, STOE TWO
SEPTEMBER 15, 1982

MAY: You see, this was done in 1950, when we lived in this
house. In '51-52 I built our present house with three
rooms, which was way ahead of its time. Now I get more
calls from people who have had a big house, and they say,
"Mr. May, I want one great big wonderful room like you have
and then a nice, luxurious bedroom suite, and that's all I
want. We don't mind if we eat in a corner or niche of the
living room. We've seen yours and we like that."

All of a sudden I started analysing what I have, and I
have about 9,000 feet at my house, Mandalay. We have a
great big living room that we've enlarged twice, once when
Frankl, seeing the proposed plan, said, "Enlarge it," and
then again when we added the dining room. And, still I'd
like to push it out again in one or two more places. So I
know the size they'd like to have. We have that and a
wonderful kitchen that ties into the dining area we added,
a master bedroom with two luxurious bath and dressing rooms
for Mrs. May and for me. Period. That's all we need.
We've got two bedrooms and another bath and her office and
a maid or housekeeper's room and a bath and a laundry, a
playroom and a poolroom, and my music room, of course, I
need, and an entrance hall. We could do without all of the
last ones, I said, except the music room, which is just an
alcove off of the twenty-by-twenty entrance. We're

230

literally living in what everybody's asking for: one
tremendous room with everything in it, an alcove for music
or for books and a place for game playing or bridge or
whatever, a big sitting group around a huge friendly
fireplace, and a dining room tucked around the corner and a
functional kitchen, very luxurious master bathrooms and
dressing rooms, that's all you need.

And you're up in the million-dollar class, because of
space, and yet you are paying half the price or less. So
nearly every client with whom I have talked recently has
said, "That's what we want." So we have quite a few jobs
under way with this new but old idea.

Now I've a better idea on that. We'll make that for a
young couple with the great living room, and when the time
comes we'll have planned it~if they can get the land,
that's the problem, if they can get the land — if they can,
they will add on a wing for the first child. Which is what
we did with Mr. and Mrs. Bill [Lawrence William] Lane
[Jr.], chairman of Sunset magazine. For the next child, we
added another preplanned wing. Bill then said he could
afford the garage and we put that on. He owns Sunset
magazine now, he and his brother — Mr. and Mrs. Lane, Sr.,
who founded Sunset have passed away — and now he can afford
what he wants. But we kept adding and adding as his income

231

increased and the magazine went up in the world, and as he
needed more space — the growing house, preplanned.

He never would have been able to do it all at once.
So he put his money in the location for his family to live,
the one thing that most people weren't smart enough to do,
he bought location. But had he bought a house, he would
have then had to compromise the location to get all the
rooms he did not need at that time. There were no chil-
dren. So we have this one great living room — original
structure, it was a great living room — and a kitchen and a
spacious master bedroom. So there you have the idea right
there when he added on. He built it in Westridge, which is
horse country. He's right near the Sunset Magazine
Building, within a stone's throw of the office. If he'd
gone out where he could have afforded it, house and lot, he
would have been blocked in now with the traffic.
LASKEY: So you were just about thirty years ahead of your
time when you developed it.

MAY: On that one we were. The fact is that it was an
experiment. We just tried things out. We'd try to keep
ahead of everybody. Everybody thinks they're ahead of
everybody, but we've had a wonderful time trying out
things. Being ahead, you know, isn't always the greatest
thing. Sometimes you are ahead and it is wrong, or you are
right too soon.

232

LASKEY: That has to be worked out,

MAY: Yes, a lot of times you can be right too soon.
That's what happened to me on the low-cost house. We were
talking about that, Chris Choate and his wonderful ideas.
Out of this idea of just playing around with one wall, two,
three, then four walls, then a roof, we got what we called
the Skylight House. In addition to that, I didn't tell you
that we had the skylight so that it opened and closed by a
motor. It was so complicated that we had to have an
airplane rigger rig them so they wouldn't rack when they
opened.

We could push a button and the practically the whole
roof would open up. You'd look up at the sky and the flies
would come sailing in and the leaves would fall off the
sycamore trees and land in the living room and you'd have
to pick up the leaves. One night we forgot to close it,
and we were out in Pasadena. The storms come from the
west, and all of a sudden it started raining in Pasadena.
We said, "Oh! great! What's going to happen to the house?"
We went racing home and found the skylight open and the
nylon skyshades pulled across. The skyshades were nylon;
full of water. So I was able to get some buckets and poke
a hole in the fabric and drain it in these buckets. The
floor was an experimental wood floor (later changed to old

233

tile), which was stupid, too. But that's the way you
learn.

Anyhow, the Skylight House was then sold to a very
charming lovely woman, you probably know her, Newby Foster
of Foster's in Westwood.
LASKEY: Oh, yes.

MAY: And she has impeccable taste. She furnished it with
the most beautiful pieces. A year later, she said, "I have
the absolute perfect place for all the movable cabinets, so
I'm going to give you three of them I don't need. I'm
going to fasten down the ones I need and put in real
furniture cabinets to replace the three."

So she froze the location of the cabinets which were
the room dividers. Now the floor plan is not flexible.
She wants it the way it is. She's lived in that house now
since 1953 and knows how the adjustable floor plan suits
her best.

LASKEY: Where was this?

MAY: It's in my development Sullivan Canyon Ranches, on
Old Ranch Road.
LASKEY: In Mandeville.

MAY: Sullivan [Canyon], west of Mandeville.
LASKEY: Sullivan Canyon.

MAY: Yes. And she loves it. I talk to her often. When
she has a problem she calls, which is natural, and I help

234

her. She says she never really will change — a perfect
house. When I had it, it was a perfect house for us,
experimenting. It didn't cost anything to build, and we
were there with three children and a housekeeper, and there
never was an unpleasant day. It's like anything new,
people take a while to catch on. People wouldn't use
dishwashers for a long, long time.

LASKEY: Well, they have to see someone else do it. It was
like your spreading of the ranch house when these obviously
influential people in various parts of the country did this
thing, and that was new and then other people would look at
it. Obviously, it's taken thirty years for people to come
to the idea of one space and a functional kind of this-is-
all-we-need.

MAY: We've had a lot of people copy our houses. I spoke
about the house in San Diego. We got into copyright one
day. I decided that it was like an artist who would paint
a beautiful picture and somebody would take it and make a
lithograph of it and sell lithographs and the poor artist
would sit there and starve. We always say, "the starving
artist," you know. It shouldn't be that way. Victor
Herbert in music said he could copyright a song like "At
Dawning." I think that was a composition for piano. When
Victor Herbert wrote a song, something like that, anybody
could play it over the radio and make money for playing it

235

over the air, or anyone talented enough could hire instru-
mentalists from the union who would be paid to play music
that Victor Herbert composed and pay Herbert nothing. So
he formed with a few other composers ASCAP, the [American]
Society of Composers, Authors [and Publishers], and they
put the bite on individual radio stations and later the TV
networks and stations. Now they pay a tremendous fee every
year. If you get into ASCAP and you compose a few good
songs, why, you can almost live on the royalties.
LASKY: Which seems fair.

MAY: I did houses for several composers. We did the David
Rose house in Riviera Ranch, and that's where he composed
"Holiday for Strings." And we designed a house for Lou
Alter, who wrote "Manhattan" among other compositions, and
we are doing one for Mr. and Mrs. Jimmie Van Heusen. They
might be starving authors without ASCAP.

Architects are the same way: you work hard to build
something unique, that's a new idea. Then the builders
come in and just copy it, usually badly, and that kills it.

We've also had an influence on a lot of houses, which
I think is good. You see houses and you can say, "Well,
here's one of the houses to which I contributed." You look
at it and you just know it isn't your house because it
dosesn't look quite right, like an illegitimate child, but

236

there it is. But at least it's better than what they would
have had, so there's been some contribution.

There's one right here right across from the Brentwood
Country Club. You look at it, you can see all the earmarks
of my work. A young man did it, and he did quite a few and
did pretty well, but just gave up, I guess, and couldn't
make a go of it. I see houses all over this county and all
over the state that I believe have been influenced by my
experimenting and designs.

Of course the low-cost house that Chris [Choate] and I
did later — we copyrighted that — they really copied us on
that one. We came up with the idea of doing a really good
low-cost House Building System. Chris had this idea of —
The trouble with most prefabricated houses, prefabricating
parts of it, being like the whole wall, you move it out and
it's big and unwieldy, and he had the idea of Tinkertoy
parts — interchangeable. By looking at the part you knew
where it went. There were no plans, you just say that
and —

LASKEY: You mean so that an individual could actually put
up their own house?

MAY: Yes, build his own house. But we were much too soon.
It was back in '52, '53, '54. And if we had come out with
it a few years later, it would have been easier. But it
was very simple to figure out what was wrong. We built one

237

house on a site in Sullivan Canyon to make sure it would
work. We put it up in one day. And we had invited three
or four important builders to look at it, and one builder
who was unknown. I believe he'd never built but two
houses, but he came. He fell in love with it and said he
wanted to build 950 of them immediately, and he had the
finances. He turned out to be Ross Cortese and he built
the 950; later he became famous for his Leisure Worlds.
The minute he started building and selling the houses we
designed for him, all the big tract builders down at Long
Beach, their tracts slowed selling. And those are big
fellows like Weingart, Ben Weingart, they're having all the
trouble with his estate now. And the building and loan
man, I can't think of his name, but he's one of the biggest
building and loan men here in town now, he stopped selling-
— Mark Taper! This isn't my story, I read about it in
House and Home. They researched it and found out what the
sales were, and that's included in the article. They
headlined our house as the fastest selling house in America
at that time.

LASKEY: Now the first tract was built in Long Beach?
MAY: *[Not exactly the first. We had done a tract for
Stern and Price in Cupertino, near San Jose, the year

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

238

before, nine hundred houses, and they sold out from four
models, sold as fast as they could sign up the buyers.
That experience started Chris and me to think. ]

But Cortese built [in Long Beach] conventionally
without panels, because in production building, Cortese
thought they could go faster. We did not have the panel
production set up at that time. We had the panels built
one at a time for this first model. It went up fast. We'd
be finished with the panels and roof, and ready for inte-
rior finish before the end of the day.

There's probably fifteen things that many people who
went into the prefab business don't know. For instance,
one thing: we'd do the panels, which takes a tremendous
investment and money to pick the parts all out and have
them all sit in a warehouse and store them and then sort
them out and load them and send them out in a package. So
you're in the financing business, and then your dealer
doesn't have the money to pay you. And so he wants to get
a loan. Then your loan comes from a loan company, and then
you've got to borrow money to finance him. This is just
one of all kinds of pitfalls in it.

LASKEY: Did you have to attend to all those details as
well as the designing of it?

239

MAY: Yes, I did all that myself. I had twenty years of
building and construction experience, so I knew somewhat
more about the construction end than [Chris] did.

SECOND PART
SEPTEMBER 30, 1982
LASKEY: Mr. May, the last time that we talked, one of the
subjects that came up was copyright designs, which is
something that I think that you have a great deal to say on
and have had a great deal of experience with.
MAY: Yes, I have. I certainly didn't start it, but we
sure worked at it hard and learned a great deal.

They say — What is it? "Copying is the sincerest form
of flattery." And that's good up to a point and I like to
help everybody we can, but then people take ideas that you
have spent literally tens of thousands of dollars to
research and develop like we did in our low-cost house.
When I say "we," [I mean] Chris Choate and I. And we
perfected it and we go on the market with it, and they jump
in and copy, it seems to me that we should be given some
right. And the federal government does, too, because they
have copyright laws just to prevent that, and they're
enforceable.

There are two things that determine whether you're
copying. I know that if you have a person who's copying
your drawings and he has access to the drawings, or if he

240

copies drawings that have an error in them and he copies
the error, obviously he has copied. And I think if he does
both, why, it's a cinch. There's no question then at law
that he copied.

This started out a number of years ago. I had been
building a type of house, and we had quite good success
with it. When I left San Diego, as I told you before, many
of the builders picked up and carried on, which I didn't
mind, because it was sort of a compliment, and to help the
people live better than they were in the box houses of San
Diego at that time. That was fine, it didn't bother me.
And I always had more work than I could do for most of my
life. So it still doesn't bother me.

But after we had done the Pacesetter House with
Elizabeth Gordon in House Beautiful, published in 1947,
Chris Choate was doing my color renderings, the big draw-
ings we'd give the client at that time to show what the
finished house would be when it was completed. We were
talking one day about housing and how we could get the cost
down, because by this time cost of housing had just started
to increase in price. I think I told you $2.50 in '31 in
San Diego, then to $3 and gradually up, and, about the time
the Pacesetter House was built, it was around $12 a square
foot. We were seeing what we could do to bring it back
down, never thinking it would go to $100 a foot. Of

241

course, that's not all because of inflation; it is also
that the house contains more and is built better now.

But, back to the copyrighting. We decided we would do
this low-cost house and had some ideas for it. So, I then
contacted one of the young men that was an attorney who was
a specialist in copyright and who worked for the moving
picture industry. He was in charge of copyrighting the
moving pictures and the script that went into them. Every-
thing that they could copyright or patent he handled. One
of many attorneys, I suppose, but he was the one that I
contacted. He seemed to know a great deal about what he
was doing. He told me how we had to put the notice on the
drawings, "Copyright: Cliff May/Chris Choate" and the
date, plus more, such as "reserving all rights," etc. The
drawing (or drawings) was then blueprinted. That would be
the first publishing. That was notice to anyone that you
had a copyright. At that time, within thirty or forty days
of copyrighting, you had to send the drawing into
Washington with a form. Then you filled it out, and they
sent you back your copy with a copyright notice on it that
said this is copyrighted.

LASKEY: Now you actually could copyright the design of the
building, the floor plans?

MAY: That is correct. The floor plan and the elevations.
And the plot plan. And the details. Everything that goes

242

to make up a set of drawings, including the specifications,
you can copyright. So we proceeded that way. I bring up
having to send it to Washington at that time; the law has
changed as of now in 1982, I'm talking late September. You
publish your drawing; by publishing you publish it with the
blueprinting and issuing the first copies and then subse-
quent copies all with the copyright notice on it. The
copyright has more than just "copyright." It says the
drawings and the details of construction or modes of
construction are the property of— And the recipient agrees
that he accepts those under those conditions, and so forth.
It's quite a long paragraph that's put in small print.
Then it's on our title block on the drawings.

But now, it's got so complicated. Say you send in
fifteen or twenty drawings a year. Now the California
courts and the federal court both issue copyrights. We
also have the unfair competition [law] in California. The
federal copyright holds that if you publish it by blueprint-
ing it and the notice is on, you don't do anything about it
until the day that you decide to sue somebody, or you find
an infringer at that time, then you can send it in to
copyright. It only takes ten days to send it in. With
this new method of publishing it, and then not having to
send it to Washington for copyright, the copyright is valid

243

and you put it on anytime prior to when you want to use the
copyright for a lawsuit.

LASKEY: Is it usual for an architect or a designer to
copyright his plans?

MAY: It is now. It's getting more and more so. I don't
remember anyone who doesn't do it, especially now. In
talking to Ed Martin, who's quite interested in our law-
suit, we sent him the reports from the court reporters, and
they sent their attorneys, who in turn advised them about
what to do.

Now [Deems, Lewis, Martin, and Associates] have their
own computer readouts. They call it the software. They
will sell them to other architects, how to frame a building
by their methods in which they are sold to an engineer for
a price; so it's marketed like a songwriter markets his
songs through records. So it's a good thing, it's a coming
thing, and I think it's a fair thing. Because why share or
give away when you have spent $20,000 to develop a nail-on
sash? As soon as [our nail-on sash] went on the market it
was copied so fast we couldn't get there fast enough. We
had patents on nail-on sashes and doors, which is different
than the copyrights [which covers] the drawings — We were
so busy also that we didn't have a chance to even chase
them on the copyrights or go after them on the copyrights.

244

On the patents it was just like trying to put your finger
in the dam, the dam was building all over the country.

It was a tremendous advance. Up to this point on low-
cost houses, you bought a window frame and if you were
adept and wanted to save a little money you made it your-
self, so there was no window frame profit. But then you
had to buy the windows from the mill and the mill had to
fit the frame. The finish carpenter had to fit again and
hang the door or window and apply the hardware. Then you
built your house; the rough carpenter made the opening in
the wall with the header and double studs on both sides and
then cripples below the window and then rough-saw or a two-
by-four under the window. Then the window slid into the
opening, then you had to put waterproof paper all around it
and make sure that the plaster got under the waterproof
paper and then inside you had to do molding. A pretty
complicated thing to get a window in or a door. A door's
even more [complicated], because you've got a sill. You
have to keep the water from coming in with a sill. So, you
bought separate doors, you bought separate frames, or else
you built your own at more expense.

So to make a big cost saving in the fenestration and
exterior doors in our system, we came up with the idea that
if we just took a window--start with the easy one first —
just a fixed window, buy the window from the mill, and we

245

decided to have four lights, which means four pieces of
glass, two high, so you can see that it would be two high
and two wide; that'd be four lights, two high. So we took
that and we designed it so that it would be nailable to
house framing, made of our patented and copyrighted panels,
to the outside of the building. You nail it to the mudsill
on the bottom and you nail it to the plate on the top, and
you're all done. And that was your five windows in our
smallest plan. Then we had one that had a windowpane that
slid in it, or two that slid in it. You selected where
you'd nail that on with four nails well placed or six well
placed, and you're all finished. It was revolutionary.

And then we came up with the doors, the French doors,
which we used throughout the houses for access because we
figured there was more light and air in a small house, with
950 square feet up to 1,250 feet. So we had the doors
delivered with a two-by-three hinged to the door and the
astragal was on one door, and it took no detail plans to
build the house, because you saw where the door went
because of the modules. It would be between two posts, so
you just center the door between the two posts and then
screw the two-by-three to the building and, then with the
hinges, the doors open and shut. And there was no sill
because we let it overhang the slab only a threshold. So

246

it was as simple as that. It took just hundreds of dollars
off the cost of the house.

So that was the beginning of our copyrighting and
patenting. We had patents on that, but, as I say, it was
so good and so simple that the dam just broke on top of us.
We couldn't do anything about it, so we just kept on going,
keeping ahead.

LASKEY: Now this was in 1947?

MAY: No, I said Chris and I were talking between '47 and
'50. In '50 we made a partnership to go ahead and build
these houses, and this was a result of that partnership of
the "nail-ons." It became called the "nail-on sash," and
it was another method, and a far cheaper way, of building
houses. But it was a first for us, that's for sure. I
mean, we created a first in the building industry with the
"nail-on sash . "

LASKEY: Now, were these the houses that were built in Long
Beach?

MAY: Yes. They did not use the nail-on sash. They used
the nail-on sash fixed, but I think he hung the others.
There was nobody to make them at the time, so I think he
made a combination of — But it was the "nail-on sash," and
that's where it got its biggest promotion.

After that we refined it somewhat. We worked it out
with weatherstrips. Then we had them come, so they would

247

be all primed where you'd put on one coat of paint. We had
them with the locks installed. There was just nothing to
it. That was how we could put a house up in one day. The
sashes were all there. For one guy, we were putting up the
windows and making the frames and hanging the windows and
putting in the sash weights or whatever else to raise and
lower the windows so the mechanical equipment would have
the windows slide up and down, then grease them and paint
them. Then we were all finished, and on to the next house.
LASKEY: You literally could put it up in one day.
MAY: Oh, yes. We have pictures of that. In fact, my
moving pictures, which is quite a rare thing to have now,
we have them showing a house going up, and every hour we
took a picture to show the men working. We do have the
stills.

If you want to stop for a minute, I can just take a
look to refresh my memory of some of these things.
LASKEY: Sure. [tape recorder turned off]
MAY: Another one and a very important simplification on
the low-cost house that we did was that you could recognize
the parts. By looking at the parts you knew where each one
went, so you didn't have to go to a set of drawings and
find the length of the studs, measure, and better yet, no
layout of the framing was required. Everything was all
precut and everything was prefit. We dumped the load; it

248

was made up by the distributor. The whole house came in
one load, and he would dump it. The things on top would be
the first things you used, like the mudsills, and then the
next things would be the outside panels, then the inside
panels, then the roof, and that was the end of the house
for the day. We had that whole assembly up, having previ-
ously put in the slab and the plumbing and the electrical.
LASKEY: And I see here the cost is $7,495 at the time.
MAY: That's right. And we were selling those on your lot
for $7,400 in Cupertino, the first one.

LASKEY: Now this was the house that you eventually lost
the lawsuits on?

MAY: No, we never lost a lawsuit on it. This is the one
we won all the lawsuits on. All of them. But the first
one —

LASKEY: That's what I mean.

MAY: Yes. One of the first ones was that the builder came
down from Fresno, and he came to the office and said he
wanted to build our houses and that he was willing to pay
us $50 a house. We told him, no, the price was a $150 a
house, but he could sure make more money with us than he
could by trying to make shortcuts.

"Well," he said, "all I pay is $50 and I'm going to go
copy the house anyhow."

249

I said nothing until we found out that it was just
exactly our house as well as he could do. So we had a very
good attorney, and he just went to San Francisco and saw
the head of the Bank of America, who had the financing, and
said, "Look, you're copying our houses. We'll file a
lawsuit against you and the builder. You're carrying the
financing. We don't want to do it."

The bank said, "We don't want you to do it either.
Who should we send the check to?"

So they sent us checks. We got $150 a house until the
whole tract was built, paid for by the bank. That's what
the bank thought about our copyrights.

This was the second one. The first lawsuit — I keep a
record of these, someday you could make a copy of this
suit. I'm trying to get them in order. The first suit was
a [firm] named Norlie Brothers, and they were up in-- No, I
take that back, it wasn't Norlie.
LASKEY: [Sam] Caplan?

MAY: Caplan. No, Caplan was the second one.
LASKEY: Oh, was he?

MAY: Yes, and the first one was an old man [Carsten F.
Dedekam] who was financing a young builder, and the builder
was Ben H. Hardister. And Hardister was all ready to go on
pref abrication. He knew a lot about it. He hadn't done it
yet, but he was all set to go. As a result, he came down

250

to see us and we told him, fine, we'd go with him and make
him one of our dealers. So, he was to make all of his own
parts and put them together and sell them to other people,
which was the beginning of our distributionship. We were
going to have distributors, then assign territories to each
distributor, who would have an exclusive distributorship,
who would then assemble the parts so that other builders
could erect them.

In this case, Hardister built his own parts and
erected them. He was just getting started. Anyhow, he
stopped paying us and started changing it to what his
thoughts should be. We had a contract with him, so we
filed suit. Here it is, it's the second suit, let's see.
No, I'm wrong.

LASKEY: That was in July of '53. Now your suit with Alcap
[Investment Corporation] —

MAY: Alcap, let's see — The first one was with Hardister,
and it says the old man was seventy-six and in poor health
who had not been building and wanted to get out of it.
Meantime, this young man took the plans and changed them.
It says that Judge [Hilliard] Comstock reached his decision
on the basis of six separate agreements Hardister and
Dedekam signed with May and Choate. The six agreements:
one of them was that they promised to respect the confiden-
tial nature of May's designs and acknowledged May and

251

Choate's ownership of them and agreed not to "contest or
assist others in contesting the ownership, the scope, or
validity" of the L.A. partners' copyrights or patents. And
the judge ruled the contracts required a "confidence that
should remain inviolate." He added: "Whether the plain-
tiffs have any valuable secrets or not, the defendant knows
the facts, whatever they are, through a special confidence
that he accepted. The property may be denied, but the
confidence cannot be. . . . The first thing to be sure of
is that the defendant shall not fraudulently abuse the
trust reposed in him. ... If there is any disadvantage in
the fact that he knew the plaintiff's secret, he must take
the burden with the good."

So, that was our first one. I don't remember what we
received, but we were handsomely paid, as I remember it.
For value, we had good value.
LASKEY: I see.

MAY: Then the second one, I think I told you, was the one •
in Fresno which was the Alcap Investment [Corporation],
which was a man named [Sam] Caplan.

LASKEY: Now, was he the man who violated the arrangement
that you'd had? Who wanted to pay the — ?

MAY: Let's turn this off here, I think there's a mistake.
[tape recorder turned off] Caplan was the first successful
copyright lawsuit we had and Hardister was the second.

252

LASKEY: Right.

MAY: And the way I prove that now is that we had a differ-
ent attorney on Caplan. That was [William H. ] Nicholas,
LASKEY: First, you went from Caplan to Hardister and then
to William [M. ] Bray, which seems to have been the most
important of the lawsuits.

MAY: That's right. William Bray was an AIA architect and
was quite well known and he — [tape recorder turned off]
He obtained a job for a prominent family's son [Jay
Beesemyer ] , who was building houses — now the name of the
family [Beesemyer] was well known in mortgage circles.

We first became aware of the house when we were told
that their houses were being built in an area where we knew
there were no houses, so we went by and took a picture of
the house. I remember when it was used in the magazine it
said, "May and Bray--Which Is Which?" And the magazine got
them switched, they didn't have them right either.
LASKEY: Oh, really? Now where was the house built?
MAY: It was built in — Bristol Manor was the name of it.
It was built out in Santa Ana, where the big boom was going
on at that time.

To put a few things in here, by copying they say:
"There are various ways of copying plans. The direct
method would be to trace, photograph, or blueprint the
original plans. An indirect method would be to commit them

253

to memory, and retrace them. Even more indirectly , a copy
would be made according to instructions from a third party
who had seen the original plans. The new thinking on the
subject goes a step further and asks, if the copyist makes
his plans after having looked at, studied, perhaps measured
and photographed the original building (which is not in
itself eligible for copyright protection, only its plans
are, we must remember), has he not indeed copied the origi-
nal plans? If this interpretation should be developed and
upheld, it is believed that a complaining architect should
be able to obtain practical legal protection."

And in fact, that's what happened with our [lawsuit].
We were able to show that they had to have plans for
building permits to reproduce the building. Anyway it
looked, they had to have a plan from which to work and,
therefore, if they had a plan, they recreated a plan, which
is a copyright infringement.

LASKEY: Now, did he reproduce the house exactly?
MAY: So exactly that we were sent a picture of the house,
Bristol Manor, and they had a picture of our house, and
then the publisher reversed the pictures. He didn't know
which was which they were so much alike.

The way we knew we had Bray, though, was we got a copy
of his drawings. Once you file suit you can demand what-
ever you need to do, and we had made an error in our

254

drawing of the kitchen cabinets. We were making an inexpen-
sive cabinet which would be very functional, no hardware
and everything fit and very few pieces, and we made it and
we had a mistake in it. When we got it finished the drawer
wouldn't open. We didn't pay any attention to it because
we knew how to tell who was doing it how to fix it, and we
were going so fast we just left it there. But Mr. Bray
obviously had the drawings because he copied the drawer
that wouldn't open. Under copyright law there are two
factors you're dead on if they catch you, either one:
possession of the drawings, if you have possession of the
drawings that's prima facie evidence that you copied; the
other is that if you copied a mistake in the drawings.
LASKEY: Where did he get your drawings?
MAY: We don't know. But I do know one thing, we had
another architect, AIA both of them, who copied our draw-
ings at the permission of the owner. And that was the
sixth one I was trying to get for you. I knew we had
another one.

It was Mr. [Fletcher Jones], very wealthy, wealthy; he
came up so fast he was one of the six young men put on the
cover of Time magazine who had made $50 million, I think
before they were thirty or something like that. Maybe I
stretched the $50 million. Maybe it was $10 or $15 [mil-
lion] before they were thirty. His name was Fletcher

255

Jones. He was head of Computer Sciences. He was one of
the first computer geniuses who knew how to do it, way
before anybody else did it, and made a fortune. He engaged
us to do a tremendous house for him. It turned out to be I
was the third architect he had engaged. The other two had
been let go, or left in disgust. One of them was Paul
Williams, preceding me. One was an architect, I can't
remember his name, in Santa Barbara.

It turned out to be the late Mr. Fletcher Jones's
method of doing business, so when I had the drawings
complete, and I had completed everything — racetrack,
grandstands, let-down barns for hot horses to cool them
down, we had stables, a bunkhouse for the workmen,
garages —

LASKEY: This was a personal racetrack?

MAY: This was a personal racetrack in Santa Ynez Valley,
called Westerly Stud. We had the entrance gates, we had a
gateman's house, we had the bunkhouse for all the workmen, •
more buildings than I can remember — hay storage, grain
storage — and then we had the big main house, a three-story
house he wanted. I didn't want it to be three-stories, so
I finally came up with the idea of making it two-stories
for everybody except for the family, which was three-
stories. The three-story side was cut away and opened onto
a lake that we dug. We had the boys have a fire pole so

256

they could go down into the gym room in the basement like

he wanted, but by getting a basement on the third side

which opened to the lake we got sunlight in the rooms

facing south. So the basement had sunlight. We had fire

poles because I knew that the boys would never go down

stairs and back up the stairs, but they'd probably go down

a fire pole and then they'd have to go up the stairs to get

back. So he bought that idea, but it's a big, long story.

We were fired.

LASKEY: You were fired by Mr. Jones? But you had made the

design?

MAY: Yes. All the designs had been made and approved.

And he made payments on them except the last payment he

wouldn't pay, which was typical of Mr. Jones. So the day

before the trial in superior court to get our money that he

owed us on the drawings, not thinking that he'd ever copied

them —

LASKEY: Now you were suing him for what?

MAY: For the balance due on the payments on the contract

for the drawings that we had prepared for him.

LASKEY: I see,

MAY: We got a court order to go to the architects' office

[Morganelli-Heumann and Associates] and went through their

files. They opened up the files and there were all my

drawings in their file. Well, that changed the whole

257

[complexion] of everything because I didn't know they'd
been copying us. Because in his letters to me, he'd said
that "we have wasted so much time with your drawings and
now we're going to have to start from scratch again." So
that threw me off. I thought he was just going to throw
them away.

But, instead of that, he hired another architect to do
it. And the other architect was an interior designer that
had no experience with ranch houses, or my kind of a house.
We didn't see it until later, but when we did see it we
found mistakes like you never could believe. Jones told
the architect to shorten our building because ours was too
long, he said. It was better proportioned longer, and when
it was shortened, he didn't save anything, he just wrecked
the look of the building. When they shortened it, they
didn't know what they were doing, so they put the fire pole
right down through the center stairs. They couldn't even
read their own drawings. So, we found horrible mistakes on
the thing, but everything was copied — A pulpit balcony was
copied right down to the little button on the bottom. Just
a dead copy.

We didn't have too much trouble with that, although we
did have to go to court. We sued him-- The copyright, we
just knew about it because we were going to court the next
day and we'd just found it. The suit was all prepared and

258

we didn't want amends but we wanted to get the money
anyway.

So, we put on the suit, and he didn't even show up the
first day. His cavalier attitude was that he was too good
for the courts. Finally the judge asked, "Well, where ' s
your defendant?"

And he [the attorney] said, "Well, I'll have him here
this afternoon. Your Honor."

And he said, "Well, you'd better, if you want him to
take part in this lawsuit."

So, they brought Mr. Jones in, who was quite arrogant,
and he got up on the stand and, when the judge wasn't
looking, he would mouth obscenities at me. You can't
imagine such a man. The case had a jury and proceeded
along lies and misrepresentations, but we had him where we
wanted him. We knew we had him, because we had the draw-
ings that had been copied, but he didn't know we knew that.

We proceeded along and finally at the end of the
second day he was exasperated and he turned to his lawyer
and said, "Let's wind this up; let's get out of here."

The judge said, "Well, come into my chambers," and
they went into the chambers, and I waited outside. The
jurors were excused.

They came back, and the attorney said, "Well, Mr.
Jones has just fired his attorney, and they're going to pay

259

what they owe you." But Mr. Jones made his attorney pay a
third of it — Half of it, he had to pay half of it because
he said he wasn't being represented properly, which was not
true. The man did a fine job with no reason to win.

The judge came back to the court and announced to the
jury, "This is now Wednesday and if Mr. May has not
received his money by Friday, the balance will double each
day." I think the judge was fed up with Jones's attitude
and he wanted to be sure he got this thing over with.

That afternoon, that was Thursday, I believe, we left
court and at seven o'clock the next morning I got a phone
call from my attorney [Nicholas] that Fletcher Jones had —
[Jones had] told me what a great pilot he was. We talked
flying during our association of building the house and how
he'd just got his instrument rating and how easy it was.
He had a computer mind and he had been able to read the
figures and figure out where he was, but he didn't know how
to fly blind. He couldn't fly like an instrument or a
computer. Anyhow, Mr. Fletcher Jones crashed going
straight down into his ranch and was dead.

The attorney called me to meet at the bank at eight
o'clock. They would open the bank especially for me
because he had a check, Mr. Jones's check. It turned out
it wasn't Mr. Jones's check, it was his own attorney's
check because he was the attorney for the estate. But Mr.

260

Jones had just fired the attorney, to give you an idea how
some attorneys work. So the attorney was fired, but he was
giving me his check to lock himself in. I didn't care.
That was his business. I'm not going to get involved. I
had nothing to do with it, that's all I knew about it.

They gave me the check, and I took it to my bank. My
bank called back and said the check's no good.

So my attorney called him and said, "You've got until
this afternoon before it [the amount] doubles."

And he said, "Take it back to the bank, I've arranged
for a loan now and my check is now good."

So, he'd gotten some money from a loan to make my
check good, so therefore he was now the attorney for the
estate, which he was forever, and the poor dead Mr. Jones
didn't know what happened. But we got paid. Those are the
kind of things you run into. But that's not an everyday
occurrence.

This was the number seven copyright suit. We won
seven in a row and never lost one. We have another one
coming up, the biggest copyright suit in architecture in
history.

LASKEY: You have another one coming up?

MAY: It will be more money involved than any other archi-
tectural copyright suit in history. That's a big

261

statement, but I've been in all of them and I know what
they've been.

LASKEY: What is this one?

MAY: I can't put it on the record yet, but I'll you about
it later. It has to do with copying and not copying and
omitting — omissions. It's interesting. We have even
better representation and better facts now than we did in
the prior cases. In the prior cases, we were making it
while we were on thin, thin ice, well, not thin ice. We
are on new ground, breaking new ground. It, of course,
held with my lawyers' theories, the whole point being that
the artists are being protected more and more. I just
recently found out that there's a law in Europe that they
have. It's a Latin word that means "take care of the
artist's interests, not take care of the artist's money."
Our copyright in America is "take care of the artist's
money and forget about his interests or his art." Our
copyright laws have been broadened constantly to include
this new theory.

Just recently there was a big federal case with the
English scriptwriters suing the American Broadcasting
Company here in America — an American citizen working in
London — and using that theory, why they beat the American
Broadcasting Company for destroying their work by capsuling
it. You write for an hour's show in Britain because

262

there's no advertising. So the whole show takes an hour to
explain and unravel and have a conclusion. The Americans
have to get fifteen minutes of advertising out of every
hour; so they took the work which the artist had agreed
that the British Broadcasting Company would not truncate,
meaning to cut, or would change the meaning or would change
anything that would--wi thout the authority or permission of
the author or the writer. Of course, the American Broad-
casting Company cut out fifteen minutes. When they did,
they made a fool out of the writer because it didn't make
sense, right at the peak, to cut that part out. They
didn't know what — Being businesmen, they didn't know what
the writer was trying to get over or the thought or the
theme or the idea behind the whole play, and it was a
complete diaster. So the result would be that the writer
would be laughed out of town if he tried to do another job
for any other broadcast station, based on what he had done
there. The courts now are swinging back to encourage
artists to be able to do work without fear of having it
stolen from them like they did in the old days. [That's]
just an aside about the artist.

Back to the Fletcher Jones case: We were not [suing
him] on copyrights, we were [suing] on copying. There's a
difference. Copying, that's unfair competition. It's
different from copyright where —

263

LASKEY: Oh, really? What's the difference?
MAY: We didn't go on the basis that it was a copyrighted
drawing with Fletcher Jones. They just had copied the
plan. There wasn't even a copyright notice on in those
days. He just copied them. So that's unfair competition,
to take something of yours. For copyright, otherwise you'd
be in federal court, you see. I take it all back, this
makes the eighth-- We've got another one on top of that.
Six was in the superior court, Fletcher Jones. Then, after
we received our payment that was due us under the contract
for the preparation of the drawings from Fletcher Jones's
attorney, not his estate because his estate had not yet
been created, although it may be created with the attorney
taking over, then we came across the copyright. Then we
realized we had a copyright action. We filed suit against
the architects and the Fletcher Jones estate for copying.
LASKEY: So you sued them both for copying and for copy-
right infringement?

MAY: Yes, and for unfair competition on the first one. We
won that one. So that makes how many now? That's eight,
right?

LASKEY: Seven, I think.

MAY: That makes seven. It's eight that's coming up. In
the federal court it was a tough one because we had the
judge who was, we were told, was prejudiced against the

264

Bank of America, who was the Jones Estate trustee, to judge
for us. Judge Hall, Peirson Hall, I think it was.
LASKEY: Now this is the Caplan?

MAY: No, I'm back now to the last one, which is the number
seven, which is the Fletcher Jones copyright infringement
by the architects Morganelli and Heumann . I referred to
them as the interior designer and another architect who
copied our drawings.
LASKEY: Newman?

MAY: Heumann. The drawings, having had copies, we had a
big list of all the changes from our drawings. We made
duplications and showed every change we found. I spent
probably $30,000 in preparation for drawings and photo-
graphs and time to analyze all the differentials between
all of the —

We made lists of two columns: May had tables to seat
fourteen cowboys. They had tables to seat fourteen cow-
boys. May parked six and a half cars, one being a trailer.
They had six and a half cars. Everything that we did — they
had. We had a stable for forty-two horses. They had a
stable for forty-two. If we had one for thirty-eight, they
had thirty-eight. Just copy, copy. And they copied the
mistakes, as I said. We made a tremendous amount of
preparation, because this was going to be a big, big
lawsuit.

265

We got down to court and we had a judge who was rough.
In court he said, "I don't like the Bank of America and
when the Bank of America comes in here I'm going to sock it
to them." He was really rough like that. I don't know how
he got away with it, but he did. He just let it be known,
not that blatant, but he let it be known that he didn't
like big banks, and he didn't like big this and big that.
The little guy has just as much right in his court as the
big banks.

LASKEY: You were lucky.

MAY: About a week before we were going to trial before
him, he [Judge Hall] died. Then we were shoved in with all
of his work, and all of the work that other people had
before Judge Hall, into another judge's case [load]. The
judge [Manuel L. Real] there was well known in legal
circles, I am told, to be very lax and incompetent. He had
a Spanish name that he insisted on being pronounced in an
Americanized way. Not to bring anything like that in, but
he was an opinionated man who —

So when he got our case, the attorney said, "We're
going to be in trouble because he's got more work than he
knows what to do with and he's going to get rid of it as
easy as he can." He just listened to each side briefly and
he said, "All right, summary judgment for the Fletcher

266

Jones estate." He never heard anything from either side.
Just read the papers and heard no evidence.
LASKEY: Really?
MAY: Really.

So my attorney got up and he said, "Well, just hold
it. I want to say one thing for the record. " And he went
right through the whole thing. The judge couldn't stop
him. He got going and he was not going to be stopped.

He explained the whole thing. How it could not be a
summary judgment, because a summary judgment means that
there are no facts to try. "If everything is what one side
says it is," he says, "that's right, but I think I should
have a chance to explain them." Then you got summary
judgment. But if they say, "The custom in the trade is
that you do it this way," and then the other guy says, "It
is not, the custom of the trade is to do it this way," then
you can't have a summary judgment because you've got to
hear why you can or can't, who's right. If you have a
major disagreement, then you can't have a summary judgment.
But he gave it to Fletcher Jones anyhow with all kinds of
disagreement.

So all that was appealed. So it meant for five years
our waiting. We prepared all of our papers at great, great
expense again. Then we went on the appeal. On the appeal
I was there. There were three appellate judges [Wright,

267

Sneed, and Farris]. The lawyers got up and said, "It's all
settled, we got the judgment, and the court ruled to hold
it. "

There was one colored judge, who was just terrific,
and he said, "What you said now-- Let me get this
straight — "

268

TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE
SEPTEMBER 30, 1982

MAY: The appellate judge, Sneed , after hearing the argu-
ments, called on the opposing attorney for Mr. Fletcher
Jones's estate and said, "Now, if I understand it, lawyer,
what you're saying is that Mr. Jones paid for the drawings
up to the preliminary drawings."

"That's right. Yes, that's right," said the lawyer.

He said, "Well, then, wasn't he [May] supposed to get
another 7.5 percent from the working drawings? Is that
right?"

He said, "No." He said, "He was, but he didn't do the
drawings. Mr. Jones had somebody else to do them."

"Now, what you're telling me, lawyer, is that Mr.
Jones paid Mr. May to do all the design work, and then he
got somebody else to do it, and paid them to do it. So,
then Mr. May didn't get paid for the whole contract?"

"That's right," he said.

"Do you think that's fair? In other words, what
you're saying now is that you could have somebody come out
and just design you a house and then take the drawings and
have somebody else do them and then not pay him. Is that
right?"

He says, "Right."

His Honor said, "Fine."

Then, about a few minutes later they said I won.

269

LASKEY: That's great.

MAY: That's exactly what it was. That's exactly what Mr.
Jones had done with two other architects. I was the third
one to be taken that way. So, as I look back though, I
remember I was talking to Paul Williams, who was —
LASKEY: Now, Paul Williams had been the previous archi-
tect?
MAY: The second architect, whom I followed.

I said, "Why didn't you tell me anything about it?"

"Well," he said, "Cliff," he said, "you know, it
doesn't bother me a bit. It's like a streetcar. There'll
be another streetcar coming along," he said. "Why waste my
time with one I just missed?"

Then I thought back over the years, this is a long
time later now, I never made any money doing this. I mean,
this was something for the good of the profession. I think
they appreciate it, because a lot of friends have told me,
asked me for copies, asked me for information. My lawyers
had lots of calls from architects who've been hurt.

I remember I got a call from Welton Becket and Jack
[B. ] Beardwood, who had designed the record building for
Capitol Records in Hollywood, the big, round building, like
a [stack of] records. They were being sued, and they
called me frantically — what should they do? Not that way.

270

but did I have any ideas for them because they were being
sued for copying a round building —
LASKEY: Oh, really!

MAY: Which obviously they hadn't. In both places people
had the same round building maybe, but I don't think they
copied it. I'm sure they didn't because their head
designer was Woody Woodruff, and Woody didn't have to copy
anybody.

But anyhow, it brought a lot of notoriety. It did
help people, but the point I'm making is that I didn't make
any money on it because at the time, with the inflation we
had going on, the time I spent, the time I did it, and the
good money I spent for attorneys, if a dollar's worth a
dollar, what I got back was fifty-cent dollars. And even
though I got a lot of them back, it didn't pay for my time.
It didn't pay for any of it, I could have done twenty
houses and made a lot more money than generally what I do,
but I just think if you step on somebody and hurt them
unnecessarily and ruthless — Like [Sam] Caplan said, "Nuts
to you!" And then goes and takes your product, well, I
think, I just like to fight back. That's why I've done it.

Now, this Fletcher Jones matter, I spent a tremendous
amount of time, and out of it I got nothing except a cash
settlement, which was good, but the cash settlement all

271

added up to about what I put into the thing. So my time
was all for free.

LASKEY: But do you think in the long run, with all the
lawsuits, that you have improved the climate for other
architects and designers?

MAY: Oh, I'm sure I have, yes, because now the fact that
there is a — There's quite an article written on the Lanham
Act. Now it's in the federal law courts; the Lanham Act is
a federal law that anybody doing business federally, if
they misrepresent in advertising — Let's say, you're making
a cereal, and you're saying this will put hair on your
chest, and you advertise it, and it doesn't put hair on
your chest, why, then you can be liable for an awful lot of
money. Well, if you say this is the best product of its
kind, and there's something that's better and you know at
the time that there's something better — Anytime that you
advertise, knowing what you advertise is false advertising,
then you've violated the Lanham Act.

California has an even better one than the Lanham Act,
except federal is better because you have better judges in
the federal courts, and the trial time is a little quicker
than the state courts. But in the state courts, we have
the same kind of act as the Lanham Act, except that, if
anybody advertises falsely and knowing that what they
advertise is not true, then the attorney general will take

272

charge of the lawsuit for you, and you can have the attor-
ney general do all the law work for you. You [the adver-
tiser] are really liable. But the thing I'm talking about
is the Lanham Act.

In the heading of the Lanham Act, which was brought
into play on the British BBC [British Broadcasting Company]
scriptwriter against the American Broadcasting Company, was
the fact that the artist had rights now that he never had
before. In Europe they give the artist more rights than he
had. Now they're giving them to him here. But in the
broadcast of the —

No, I've lost myself. [tape recorder turned off]
LASKEY: Getting back to Mr. [William] Bray, at what point
does it become plagiarism? At what point does he infringe
on the copyright of your plans? Suppose, for instance, he
had moved a door from one side of a wall to the other,
would that have made him OK? Could he have gotten away
with that?

MAY: No. No, no. It's the intent. They've got to prove
the intent, that he copied. If the four corners are
exactly the same and the ridgepole is exactly the same
height and the windows are exactly the same kind of win-
dows— he may have placed them in different places — but if
to the average person on the street it looked like — In
this they'd say, "If it looks like a Cliff May house," and

273

then he had access to the drawings, then that becomes
unfair competition because he's making houses that look
like Cliff May houses when he's not Cliff May.
LASKEY: So, then, he can't just make little changes and
hope to get around it that way?
MAY: No, no, no, not at all.

LASKEY: Well, then you had another interesting lawsuit
that you had against the General Motors Company, Oldsmo-
bile, which was slightly different.

MAY. Yes, yes, it was different. We had copyrighted draw-
ings in the House and Garden magazine, which the magazine
copyrighted. It was my house. It said, "Cliff May's
house," and it described the patio and everything. One of
the advertising agencies — They have artists that take
this, it's not called "scrap." There's a word for it in
the trade, but they just tear things out. When they see
some beautiful picture of a sunset, let's say, in Monaco or
an ice glacier in Iceland that's suggestive of some kind of.
drink or something, they just tear these scraps, and they
stick them in a file, and then when they get a job for,
let's say, a tropical, moonlit night, someone wants to show
Kahlua or something, they pull a picture out. So, instead
of creating it themselves, they copy it. They're obviously
copying, and if you knew what he was copying from, you
could prove it. So, he was just plain old copying, and

274

there are laws against that. That's stealing, to take
something that you did not create and palm it off as your
own.

And so, this case — We filed, in two other cases. I
told you about Bank, of America. We said, "We'd like
everybody [to know you used a Cliff May house.]" We said,
"We're going to make him pay for it."

And so. General Motors Company's advertising agency,
they said, "Look, don't worry about it. We'll pay you--"
They paid me something, I don't remember what it was, but
then they said, "We'll do better than that: we'll put you
where you should have been. You should have had your name
on that ad. We'll put you on television. The viewers are
five million people. Five million people will see the ad.
We'll have your name mentioned on television."

I thought that was better than asking for a new
Oldsmobile. [laughter]

LASKEY: So, General Motors did that as part of the pay-
ment?

MAY: Yes, Oldsmobile division of General Motors, yes.
LASKEY: That's wonderful.

MAY: And then the other one was — That was the two, wasn't
it? Yes.

LASKEY: It was the idea that in the Olds ad someone had
actually just copied-- They hadn't built a building; they

275

just used the corner of your house as background for their
advertising.

MAY: The idea is that, instead of creating it for your-
self, you copied it. He copied the Japanese lanterns in-
side, and the fascia board he copied. Well, the whole
thing was just a dead copy.
LASKEY: And then the DeVilbiss Company —
MAY: They copied the front of the house.

A great deal of our house was being built in the early
fifties, and they were framing the building when I was
East. I had a design with a chimney that went from one
point, went all the way back to an intersecting wall. But
the mason stopped four feet short of the wall, so the chim-
ney's four feet too short — and then what they called a
"valley" came down behind it, which gave a little piece of
fascia about four feet-- They had to put a piece of roof
between the chimney and the intersecting wall. The chimney
should have gone to the intersecting wall. Then it would
have been a great big, simple mass — "Less is best "--one
wall, one chimney. And here we had one chimney, one wall,
and one connecting wall.

So, anyhow, I saw this ad. I regret that I never kept
a copy of it, I used to try to keep that stuff, but I
didn't used to, like I do now. But, anyhow, I didn't get
it, but I remember it very well. It was the error, right

276

big smack in the middle of the picture. And they said,
"This house is painted by DeVilbiss Paint" or something,
"spray paint," is all they had printed on there. I was
going so fast at that time. I think they said, "Here's a
check for $350," which is what the artwork would have cost.
I think that's all we got. We got a very little bit out of
it. But it was just the idea that they realized they'd
made a mistake and they were sorry. I accepted an apology
letter rather than make trouble.

LASKEY: Would you do it over again if you had —
MAY: Oh, yes, certainly. If somebody swiped my wallet and
I saw who he was, I would go get it, if I could. If he was
bigger than I was, I'd get the law to go. If he was small,
I'd go grab it. I mean, it's stealing. It's taking some-
thing and possessing it for your — No, if it was somebody
that — a GI or a reasonable person who hadn't much money who
came to my house — it happens all the time — I'd say, "Good
luck, wonderful."

A woman called me yesterday from Northern California,
said she bought the old ranch house book [Western Ranch
Houses by Cliff May] .

I said, "It's an old book."

She said, "Do you have any plans for sale?"

I said, "No, I don't sell plans, but you wouldn't want
one anyhow because it's like you bought a 1952 Ford." I

277

said, "It was all in the 1950s, all the houses, 1940s and
'50s." I said, "Unless you want to buy it for a collector's
item, it wouldn't be as good transportation as what you
could get now. "

A new house now is — Well, gee, we have acoustical we
didn't have in those days. We have insulation that we have
to have that we didn't have in those days. We have radiant
heat in the floors. We can cool the house at the same time
as we heat it. It's a great comfort. We have ventilation,
opening sliding doors, shatterproof glass, skylights, baf-
fle walls, plus doors, plus everything.

I said, "You know — "

She said, "Well, my husband is a builder, and we just
couldn't afford it."

I said, "Well, take the book and go to your husband
and just work it out the best you can. Put all these new
things in and use the old plans."

You know, that's fine if they build it for themselves,
not go ahead and build it for somebody else for profit.

SECOND PART
JANUARY 13, 1983
LASKEY: Mr. May, in your career you've combined the tradi-
tional ranch style with innovative designs and immaculate
craftsmanship. As a result, you've had a series of very

278

famous clientele. Have you found that the famous are dif-
ficult to work for?

MAY: No, on the contrary. I give you a quick example, the
chairman of the board of Continental Oil — that's about as
high as you can go in the oil business, I guess.
LASKEY: I think so.

MAY: Of course, I find in dealing with so many people,
meeting them socially in their homes, the reason they got
to the top is that they were gracious, lovely people. Very
seldom do you get an obnoxious person with crudity or
obscenities or rough on his employees or rough on his
friends or rough on his building designer that ever makes
it to the top. The ones at the top I think are the salt of
the earth really from my experience. The only thing that
would change that would be if you went to the top of his
own company, he might be ruthless. But when they're at the
top of a publicly owned company, they're always just
wonderful. Like K. S. "Boots" Adams, the chairman of
Phillips Petroleum, is one of the most wonderful persons
you've ever met. You feel like you've known him all your
life.

LASKEY: How did you happen to —

MAY: The reason they're at the top is that they're smart.
Like the late Tommy [Thomas D. ] Church the famous landscape
architect, said — this is a digression — but like Tommy

279

Church said, "Anybody that hires [me], [I] buy stock in the

company if it's a publicly owned company." I may have told

you this —

LASKEY: No, you didn't.

MAY: "Because if they're smart enough to hire me, they're

smart." [laughter] So, he's made [as much] money buying

stock in their companies as he did for their fee from

practicing landscape architecture.

Many of the people have come, and I've said, "Well,
how would you like to do this, Mr. X?"

And they say, "Look, you're the building designer,
you're the architect, you do it the way you think is best
for me. "

I'm making an expression, but when the decision comes
up — should we do it this way or that way? — he says, "You
make the decision."

That's why they're smart. Then they get the best.
But when they make the decision on something they don't
know, really, other than personal preference, speaking of,
let's say, an aesthetic differential, which can happen — It
seems like the higher they go on the ladder the more
inclined they are to defer to your decision.
LASKEY: Well, the Adams house, the Boots Adams house, is
considered one of your more beautiful houses. How did you
happen to get that assignment?

280

MAY: Well, it's like the old story, if you do one good
deed, you get something in return for it. I told you the
story about the Harold [C. ] Price [house]. Price, Bechtel,
McCone during the war, he was the contractor [of] big-inch
pipeline and the biggest-inch pipeline. They also have a
part of the Alaska pipeline. But he was one of the big
pipeliners in the country. I'd gotten his house, and they'd
seen it in one of the magazines, I think in House Beauti-
ful. And the Prices came out, and I've told you the story
on that — how he wanted to — He wouldn't tell me what the
budget was. He just wanted a small house. That was the
story.

Anyhow, we got that house underway, and Mr. Adams saw
it one time. About that time we'd done the Pacesetter
House, and the two were the catalyst. Mrs. Adams had seen
the Pacesetter House, and Price said he had one of my
houses. So the next day I went to Bartlesville. So I did
two great houses in Bartlesville.

LASKEY: You told me a story about Shirley MacLaine —
MAY: Yes.

LASKEY: — that I thought was very amusing, that you might
want to repeat.

MAY: Well, it's a story of Hollywood. It seems that —
This is human nature. If you do something for somebody
free and help them, they always turn around and bite you.

281

especially in this industry, the movie industry. I've
dealt with — Oh, I could name you a dozen people.

Paul Henreid, when he first came out, why, he was
unknown, and then he later went way on up. In fact, I saw
him not too long ago. He'd changed. I've changed, of
course, too, but he remembered the days when we used to
bang our heads together, trying to get a house, but he
never came to me for the house.

Oh, I could go on. Goff of "Lum and Abner" and the
other chap, Chester Lauck, we spent innumerable days
looking at land all over the San Fernando Valley to build a
house and then when the time came, why, I didn't get the
job because I'd worked free. In those early days, why, you
did your best to get the jobs. But person after person —

I remember way, way back, the great star, [Alia]
Nazimova, she owned the Garden of Allah apartments. That
was her home. I met her there, and we talked about a lot
of things. Then Miriam Hopkins, who was another wild one
at that time, a great star. And Paul T. Frankl asked me to
go up and meet her. So we spent a lot of time, free time,
and then when the time comes they get somebody else.
That's just been the pattern of my lifetime with, as I say,
let's call them "celebrities."

So, one day there was a knock on the door, and some-
body came in. These were the most pleasant two people I

282

ever saw. Here's a young woman, and every time she said
something, she kind of laughed, and the whole spirit around
the office just changed. Her husband, his name was —
LASKEY: Parker, I think.

MAY: Yes, Steve Parker. Mr. and Mrs. Steven Parker, they
introduced themselves as. They said they were going to buy
a lot at the Malibu and wanted to know if I would build for
them.

I said, "Yes, I would. I'd love to."

They came to another meeting. They were so jolly. It
was more fun to be with them than other clients who are
solemn, you know, real serious.

So, then we looked at the map, and I said, "I'm going
to be very frank with you: what you want to do, your lot's
only half big enough. You have to get a lot that's at
least double the size of this one. You can't build — "
They wanted to build, you know, income properties and then
have a deluxe suite for them on the oceanfront, on the
water, at Malibu.

She said, "Oh, I'm so sorry," and then they left.

I thought, "Well, it's still better to be frank with
people than to try to take their money." I'll tell you a
Frank Lloyd Wright story someday that you won't believe.
But a lot of people just take money. They know that they
can't produce, but they take the money to get the drawings.

283

That happened up our canyon just last week. Somebody took
money from somebody where they knew they couldn't build [on
the location]. The architect did a whole set of drawings
knowing that he couldn't [get] a permit. Well, I've never
operated that way, and I guess it pays not to.

On the Parker deal — So, it must have been about six
months later when they called, and they said, could they
come out for an appointment. They had good news. They
came out and they said, "We bought the lot next door." So
that gave them [the] 150 feet that we needed. I think it
was 75-foot lots up at the Malibu at this point.

Anyhow, I said, "That's wonderful. Here we go."

So, they had me get in touch with their business
manager, who's very astute, and we drew the contracts. I
started out with these great ideas that they wanted to do.
I wanted to get light into the center of the house, because
that's the big problem when you live in an apartment house,
condominium, anything. Even the ones we designed for
Twentieth Century-Fox; they ruled it out, but they
shouldn't have. I had a light well in the center. There
we were going to put a glass brick floor in the patio so
that they could lie under the piles and be in the sunshine.

These were all great ideas, but with the business
manager, he was pretty sharp, he said, "We don't want any

284

wild experimenting. We just want to get this solidly
underf eet. "

Anyhow, I was into preliminary drawings with them, and
every time we'd meet, why, it was just a happy, happy expe-
rience. One day I went to the moving pictures, and they
had Around the World in Eighty Days. I wasn't paying any
attention to who was in it, and all of a sudden this face
kept coming on. When the face came on, I said, "Gee, I've
met her someplace." Anyway, it turned out to be Shirley
MacLaine. So I had worked with them quite a ways without
even knowing it. But that was the way I met them.

Then we had one difficult thing. They wanted eight
apartments, and they wanted all eight to have a view on the
ocean. So I said, "That's impossible."

"Well," she said, "that's what we want. Why don't you
just try and do it?"

Well, she had been so pleasant, why, we tried, we
tried. We got seven on the front--and it was almost
impossible — we got seven with ocean views in two stories.
The one that didn't get an ocean view was the apartment
manager. We put him up in the back. It could have been a
lot better than it turned out to be, but the business
manager kept whacking the budget back. It became finished;
it became good but not great.

285

But they've been friends ever since. Whenever a book
[on her] comes out, I get an inscribed copy from her for my
inscribed library.

LASKEY: Well, from the presidents of oil companies to
celebrities! I'm fascinated personally by how you came to
do a house for Roger Gorman. That seems to be totally out
of the realm of the other people that you had done.
MAY: That's right. I have a friend, we go way back, one
of my very best friends. Three of us, Johnny Green of the
oil Johnny Greens, Kelvin Vanderlip of the Vanderlips from
the New York family, and myself, we were just about three
best friends for many, many, many years on the Rancheros
Visitadores Ride in Santa Barbara and the Caballero Cata-
lina Island Ride. We were just generally like three
fellows who seemed to hit it off.

Anyhow, Kelvin became terminally ill and said he had
to sell. He had to make a decision. In fact, I was in on
one of the meetings; he wanted my opinion on the thing. He.
owned the whole Palos Verdes peninsula, and he had a chance
to sell it and leave enough money to have his wife and
three children forever well taken care of — or gamble. He
might be wiped out. And so he made the decision to play it
safe. So they sold, and they've been well taken care of
all their lives. The people who bought it. Great Lakes
Carbon Company, sold the first piece for the whole thing

286

that they paid for it. They got the whole peninsula of
Palos Verdes, everything, for nothing. So, you see, you
just never know. But I think he did the right thing,
because a lot of things could have happened. You just
never know. It was like insurance. He took insurance
instead of a gamble. Well, anyway, that was Kelvin
Vanderlip, a great friend.

So, anyway his widow Ellen has been very close to me
and my family. His widow engaged me to-- Wonderful, a
Gordon Kaufmann house is what they lived in. The original
Mr. [Frank A.] Vanderlip, Kelvin's father, had it designed.
It was sort of the little guesthouse. It was very big
though, and the big main house was going to be built later.
Gordon Kaufmann was the architect for it. Tommy Church
looked at it and said it was one of the greatest Italian
villas he had ever seen in Southern California. So, I was
asked to put an addition off it, which was going to be a
big project — you know, I could have wrecked the house, or
make it good — and add a swimming pool and a stage for the
kids as they're growing up and dressing rooms. I was quite
successful. I left the building alone and came out with a
flat deck type of thing, which we never do, but it was very
appropriate without having to hook onto Mr. Kaufmann 's
house and try to do what he would have done. The addition
looked more like a beautiful arbor that was attached to it.

287

and we had outriggers on it, as I remember it. It became
very wonderful and useful for the family.

Mrs. Vanderlip was one of the great entertainers of
all times. With Kelvin she also was. They used to have
thousands of people out to their villeta, hundreds of
people.

LASKEY: Now, this was in Palos Verdes?
MAY: It was the old Vanderlip estate.

Anyhow, I'm digressing, but giving you the background.
But Mrs. Vanderlip knows about everybody. So anyhow that
was how the Gorman [job] came. She just called them and
said, "You've got to have Cliff May do it."

And they said, "Yes, Mrs. Vanderlip."

Then they wanted a very modern version of a ranch
house. It was a very difficult lot. I also sold them the
lot, which I developed up in the hills behind my home.
They were great to work with, but they knew what they
wanted. They were a young couple, young with very young
children, and they wanted it to be a statement of our
times, "not look over their shoulder," as they said, "like
so many houses. "

So, we made it, planwise, a great space, great open-
ing, and very simple; it looked very modern. What you see
in Spain being built now with the parapet walls and gables.
I think we used shakes instead of tile. They're very happy

288

with it, except the lot isn't big enough, so they're now
looking. I'm also negotiating with them to help them find
a lot, which we've not yet found. [tape recorder turned
off]

LASKEY: On the opposite side of the coin from the expen-
sive, custom-designed homes that you've done, you've been
responsible essentially for changing the housing of a na-
tion with your low-cost housing that you applied the same
standards to that you applied to your large homes, as I
understand it.
MAY: Yeah, that's right.

LASKEY: How many homes have you done, or, I mean, have you
done the plans for, considering the low-cost housing?
MAY: On the low-cost housing, we had a manager who ran
that end of it, and I did the designing. No, Chris
[Choate] did — I did the designing with Chris. Chris did
the basic designing and ran the drafting rooms and getting
out the drawings. I toured the country, meeting people and
helping get model houses open for the different distribu-
tors that we had. We had a manager who did the business
end back here, and he claims we did around 18 [000] to
20 [000]. He couldq't quite put his finger on it, because
we never knew what all the distributors finally did when I
gave up the low-cost house. I worked for three years at it.
I would say we at least built 18,000, based on — We have a

289

map on my office wall that shows the tracts [with] over 50
[houses]. There are a lot of those. Of course, the first
one we did had 950 houses in it. The next one we did had
1,000 houses in it. So, we started off at a pretty fast
clip. Then we had distributors as far east as Pittsburgh.
We had them in all the western states. We had Louisiana
and a whole lot more. I can't remember.
LASKEY: Well, looking at the map, I can see that they
stretched across the entire country. So your influence
obviously was felt in all places.

MAY: I learned a great deal from that, illustrated by —
You should have only one string in your bow and shoot
straight. I had all this experience in custom houses, so
when I went into low-cost houses, I had to start to learn
all over again. If I knew what I know now, I would have
not done it, I believe.
LASKEY: Really?

MAY: Yes, the reason is this, we were right too soon with
something great. We could have changed the nation, I
think. And they're still trying to do it. We had it, I
think, but our problem was that we had too many cities,
counties, and states, all with different regulations.
Although they say they have a uniform code — They do up to
a point. And then we had VA [Veterans Administration]
offices and FHA [Federal Housing Authority] offices.

290

Take California, for example, because that's one of
the biggest states where the most growth took place. We
had, as I recall, seven VA offices. Each one of them had
different requirements, just minor things, one or two
pages, but you still had-- There were changes. FHA, we had
five offices. So, five times seven is thirty-five sets of
drawings for California. Then we had cities, and each city
had it a little different. L.A. electrical code was
different from the uniform, the national electric code.
That's been changed just recently, but at that time. So,
you take five big cities, we must have fifty counties in
California, well, it was just an impossible job to make a
set of drawings that would fit for everybody. We tried to
do it.

We had one great thing. We simplified it down to just
bare necessities. All you need is a slab. You don't need
a foundation under the whole outside edge of the slab,
because we used at every bearing point a drop footing,
whether it was twelve-by-twelve or f ourteen-by-f ourteen
inches square, that goes down two feet in the ground and
supports the load that's going to hit that point.

We had a post at that [point], so we called it post
and beam. We used a five-foot-four- [inch ] module, which
means that every structural member was five-foot-four
apart. That meant that we could go sixteen feet and not

291

cut off a piece of lumber. We came out with something that
revolutionized the sash and door business at the time. We
had about six or seven panels, as I recall. One was an
outside panel. When it was delivered, it had all the board
and batts on it and the paper. All you had to do was tip
it up in place. You tipped two of those together, and you
had ten-foot-eight- [inches ] of wall. You put foundation
bolts in the slab, or you could shoot them with an air gun
as you put them up. Then we had a half panel, which was
the same as that except that it had a window in the top
half. Then we had a pair of doors that nailed onto the
outside. There was no door fitting necessary. They were
all fit when we got them. The windows, you just nailed
them on the outside; there was no fitting. You could slip
it right on square and then just hammer it on. You call
that a "nail-on sash." We took out patents on that, but
they copied it so fast we couldn't protect it.

We have pictures where we would have the house up by
noon. By nightfall the roof would be on; we would be ready
for the rain. They could come and put the drywall in the
next day and wire it in one or two days.

The wiring wasn't very expensive. For instance, we
would throw the lights. We had a central core that had the
bathroom and the heating and the electrical panel and the
kitchen, all backed up to one vent, maybe two vents at the

292

most. That was for the basic one-bath house. All the
lights were at that point. In the living room we had
soffits, which would be a flat area under the ceiling, high
above the door, and continuing from wall to wall. The
soffits had floodlights, so we would take the floodlights
and shoot the light all the way across with the spots to
the far side of the room. Then we wouldn't have to have
any wires on the far side. When you would come to some-
place, say, where you've got to put plugs every five feet,
I think that's it, we'd have to change the drawings for
that one person. So we were just in a constant state of
flux, changing the drawings and trying to file them and
keep them in order. Each distributor was having little
specialties they wanted to do too.

It was great while it lasted. But after three years,
and I probably crossed the United States in a plane — I
used my own plane. I probably crossed the United States
maybe fifteen or twenty times, and it all came to naught,
because we built a lot of houses and housed a lot of peo-
ple, and they all appreciated it. But when we got through,
I hadn't been very happy doing it.

In Arkansas, we had a dealer-distributor who was very
active, and he had houses all over Arkansas because they
were so inexpensive. We used to sell them for $7,500,

293

which included the lot. We had some places that were
cheaper than that because the lots were cheaper.

One client was Ross Cortese. It was very early. He
saw us put up the first house. We put one up in Sullivan
Canyon as an experiment to see how fast we could do it. We
had three or four selected builders, and he heard about it
and asked to come and came with his banker and was so
impressed that he immediately went to work. We designed
950 houses for him at Lakewood. And the story, I think, he
tells about it is that when he started selling them,
everybody else quit until he sold out. That was in the
House and Home magazine. That was based on a Time-Life
report. The reporter had to get it straight, so it was
true.

LASKEY: But you said earlier, at the beginning when you
started to talk, that you thought you came too soon because
if you had, you know, started now, you could have changed
the ideas of the way people lived. But don't you think you
did?

MAY: Well, we did, yes.
LASKEY: Very definitely.

MAY: This was the first time we had a low-cost house that
was not a little box with a garage sitting in the back of
the lot with a driveway eating up the side space. We had
the garages out front. We had them so they could add wings

294

on them. We had a lot of outdoor inducements, like covered
pergolas, or ramadas we called them in Spanish, arbors peo-
ple call them, and walls and baffles and floor-to-ceiling
windows. We had two choices. We either had a floor-to-
ceiling window or one halfway down so that the bed would
fit under it or the sink would fit under it. So, we opened
up the house with a tremendous amount of light.

It fit all — We had them up in Denver, where the snows
abound. We had a good heating system design. That was
also in the core I talked about. Everything came out of
the utility core. Of course, that's what they try to do
now.

What I said about being right too soon, we were. The
price was right, the house was good, and the acceptance was
great. The appearance was good, and it made a neighborhood
look a lot better than the boxes they'd been building.
Everything was going for it. Patios and courtyards and
trees, everything we stand for in Southern California — and
successfully. But the work of getting out drawings and
getting financing, and everybody had a set of drawings,
different, different, and we just had problems, problems,
problems.

I remember going to FHA in San Diego. We had a man
from Life magazine, his name was Peter Ooms , Life photog-
rapher and a pretty sharp boy. We went to the San Diego

295

FHA, because they would not let us do some little thing to
make the house better. They said FHA wouldn't permit it.
So, we were in the chief's office in San Diego. I say
"we." Me, and I think the business manager we had at the
time, and Peter Ooms , who wanted to follow around and get
some photographs. So, Peter said, "Well, as I understand
it, Mr. FHA, here's a house that fits all the qualifica-
tions. It's better; it's cheaper. And yet you won't let
them do it because of the way the door swings. Do I
understand it right?"

And the FHA chief said, "Oh, well, we're going to
change it for May. We're going to let them do it."

He knew it was going to go into a national magazine,
and he'd be pinned himself. So, he changed. But you can't
do that every time. It wasn't big enough to make a fuss.

Most of the stuff that they made us do: they were
right. We had to do it, because that was the way they
ruled. [tape recorder turned off]

LASKEY: Basically, then, you just burned out from having
to deal with all the regulations and the different —
MAY: Yes, I saw down the road-- I'd been passing on
commissions for big houses to friends. I remember one was
Burton Schutt. I sent a couple houses to him. He was one
of our great architects. He's the one credited with
bringing indoor plants from Honolulu here, but I think Paul

296

T. Frankl beat him. They did it both at the same time is
probably what happened.

Then I heard people saying I was not building big
houses anymore, and I realized that's where my heart was.
By "big houses" I mean single-family houses. We built lit-
tle houses too. In those days, that was fifties, early
fifties, after the war, the low-cost house was '50 to '52,
•53, along in there. But most of the houses we built, the
great majority of the houses we built in those days [sold
for] prices going from $10,000 to $25,000 and $30,000. And
then, of course, they went from $30,000 to $50,000 and then
went from $45,000 to $65,000, $95,000, and just kept coming
up as the cost per square foot went up. And also, as the
affluence of America, especially the United States, and
very, very especially in California, the possessions people
had required bigger houses. They had more cars, they had
more clothes, they had more furniture, they had two pianos.
So the houses eventually started to get bigger.

Then also my ranch-type house appealed to ranchers and
farmers. We built a tremendous amount of houses on
ranches. California Land and Cattle Company, George Mee
became a very close personal friend. Mrs. Mee reminded me
of my mother very much. Her voice was almost like
Mother's. But they built a fabulous big adobe ranch up on
the King Ranch up in King County. It was one of the famous

297

ranches up and down the coast, all adobe, a real working
production ranch. Well, another rancher saw it, and he
wanted me to build him one. His name was Irving Bray. He
later became head of all the cattle associations in Califor-
nia, cattlemen, big cattle ranches. Then we actually were
putting houses on ranches. I guess probably 50 percent of
our houses are on ranches. I think of Merced, we had Jack
Schwabacher — Oh, I could make a list of probably twenty-
five or thirty on working ranches, because whenever there
was a piece on the out-of-doors, they thought of our houses
as fitting more than maybe Paul Williams's two-story
colonial would. And so we had a little more than our share
over the years.

LASKEY: Well, when did you do the Mondavi Winery?
MAY: That had to be about fifteen years ago. [Robert
Mondavi] was living in a little, tiny, I guess you'd call
it, Napa Valley house built in the 1890s. His mother and
father had lived there. They owned the Krug Winery. It
was right next to the Krug Winery, and he lived there with
his mother. They had these great dreams of — And then he
had a fight with his brother, and his mother sided with his
brother. So he sued the both of them, and finally he won
enough money to get started, although half the valley — I
say "half the valley," I mean, four or five friends in the
valley put up the money, what he could get. He didn't win

298

the lawsuit till after he had the winery started. But we
had carte blanche to design the winery.

LASKEY: Did he want a Spanish style? Did he want that
kind of building, or did you think of that?
MAY: He didn't know what he wanted. I thought of that,
yes. I said, "You'll have to do the winery [operation
design]. I don't know anything about how to make wine.
You'll have to do that. But I'll take care of the architec-
ture and put it together."

This is interesting though. It should have made Life
magazine, but we didn't think about it at the time and get
the pictures. This is, say, December, and he said, "I've
got to have this all designed and all built so I can take
the spring harvest for the grapes and start to make wine."

I said, "That's only five months, and you can't do the
drawings in five months."

He said, "Well, I don't care. That's what you've got
to do." He said, "I can't lose a whole year." He said,
"That's what you have to do."

He was sort of a driving young man, driving personal-
ity.

I said, "There's absolutely no way."

And so he thought, and he said, "Could you give me a
big slab, and we could crush them out in the open?"

299

I said, "We can do that, sure." So, I designed very
fast, I do design fast, and came up with the idea. So, as
soon as he said, "That's it," why, we had the engineers —
We had an architect from New York named [L.W.] Niemi. He
was out from New York. He was a New York architect. He
was local to the valley. I always like to have a local
architect tend to the working drawings, so he's right on
the job. I give him the designs and then supervise him.
So, he took the job of drawing it up. So, we located the
slab, poured the slab. They got all the pipes in that they
needed, and put the tanks up outside, placed the grape
crusher temporarily to crush the grapes, and they got the
first pressing before the building was started.
LASKEY: What vintage was that? I'll have to buy it.
[laughter]

MAY: I say fifteen years, but it could be looked up. I've
been married for seventeen years, and it was under construc-
tion when — So, you might say sixteen or seventeen years.
LASKEY: Well, you said it didn't make Life magazine —
MAY: That was why it would have been a great thing —
LASKEY: — but it did make the bottle. When you go into a
market or into a liquor store and you see the Mondavi wine
bottles —

MAY: That's right. That's their design. We licensed them
to use my design.

300

LASKEY: Do you want to go up to the bottle and say,
"That's mine"?

MAY: We have a lot of friends who like — We serve Mondavi
wine because I've got a deal with them, wine for life.
LASKEY: How nice.

MAY: It's nice. But I should have taken a penny a bottle,
I'd have been richer. But anyhow —
LASKEY: It's a great building.

MAY: A lot of people like to soak the wine label off and
take it home. [tape recorder turned off]

LASKEY: Well, we've talked about expensive houses and low-
cost housing, what has been your experience in what we call
middle-class housing?

MAY: Well, I've a lot more middle-class, when we're speak-
ing "middle-class," we're speaking pricewise, more middle-
class, of course, because there are just more people in
that bracket than there are people building big houses.
And also a longer period of time.

In San Diego I started in 1930-31. The first house I
built was in '31. While they were big houses at the time,
they're small houses now. The most expensive house I built
in San Diego, I remember the contract price was $10,500.
That's before I left San Diego. That was for the banker
who came out during the Depression under Roosevelt.

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LASKEY: But that was in the thirties, and that was a lot
of money.

MAY: Between '33 and '34. I figure it's about twenty
times now. Take for instance wages. We paid fifty cents
an hour, and twenty times fifty is $10. Well, that's $10
an hour for a wage from fifty cents. But that's wrong.
So, it would be forty times, because carpenters are getting
$20 an hour. That's why the prices on houses have gone up.
To make it, they're paying the same way, but fifty cents to
$20; that's what a top carpenter gets now. That's of
today, January 13--whatever day this is.
LASKEY: Nineteen eighty-three.

MAY: So, anyhow, they were big houses in that day in rela-
tionship— They weren't the little box houses that every-
body was building. In fact, I never built a box house.
I've never lived in a house that I, except for the first
year of marriage, I never lived in a house that I didn't
design. I designed them in order to find out what makes
them tick and how to make them better, and each house I
did, did get better. You know that story.

LASKEY: Well, that brings me to a question that I actually
was going to ask you later, but I think this might be a
good time to discuss it, which is your house now, Mandalay.
First of all, why is it called Mandalay?

302

MAY: That's interesting. I was a youngster and came to
Los Angeles for my first trip to L.A. with my folks. Dad
and Mother. I had a drink of water someplace, and I got
home, and down I went with typhoid. The last thing I remem-
ber was they were shaving my head off. When I came to — I
just about died, I guess. They didn't have the medicines
they do now.

I came to, and Dad was playing a record by Abe Lyman.
It was a big band at the Coconut Grove in L.A., one of the
three bands that recorded on the Pacific Coast. Paul Asche
and Abe Lyman and Vic Meyers were the three bands. Anyhow
Dad was playing "Mandalay." It was a different "Mandalay,"
one written by Abe Lyman. It was Charlie Chaplin's favor-
ite tune. In fact, he had Charlie Chaplin's picture on the
cover, and it said, "To Abe Lyman, 'Mandalay' is my favor-
ite tune. Charlie Chaplin."

So, anyhow, Dad was playing that, so it kind of stuck
with me. You know, it was like being born and knowing what
they were saying or the music they were playing, knowing
what the piece was. But this was coming back to life and
hearing this music. I always liked the melody and words
very much, but that's all I knew. I didn't have the sheet
music. I had the record, and then it got lost.

Then many years later I married my present wife. She
came from Burma. Well, the capital of Burma was named

303

Mandalay, of course. She was born in Burma, but she had
never been to Mandalay. So, one day we said, "Let's go
find the record." So, we found the record out in an old
record shop in the east end of town. We took it home and
played it. All the words just fit. Everything just fit.
So, we said, "Let's just call the place Mandalay."
LASKEY: Oh, that's very nice.

MAY: When we built the gatehouse, we chiseled the name on
the gates. Then I started collecting Mandalay records, and
I've got about forty different kinds.

The greatest coincidences in the world, my life has
been filled with coincidences. I've got a record that's
called "Rose of Mandalay," that's one of the series, one of
the ones I have, and on the back of it is the name "Lisa."
That's the name of that song.
LASKEY: And your wife's name is Lisa.

MAY: On a record. Can you imagine that, to find the name
"Mandalay" and then have "Lisa" on the back? I'm getting
it mounted in plastic so it won't get broken, and keep it.
But that's how the title came.

LASKEY: Was Mandalay, when you designed it — Perhaps you
should describe where it is and what it is.
MAY: I was going to add one thing though. A few years
later I planned a house in the Philippines to be built.
But I had to go to the Philippines under the contract two

304

times to get the job finished for Benny Toda , Mr. and Mrs.
Benigno Toda [Jr.], who owned the Philippine Airlines. So,
we got to the Philippines, and then we decided to go around
the world. And we stopped in Burma. So we did get back to
Mandalay and back to where she was born. [tape recorder
turned off]

We were talking about Mandalay. It's a home that I
built in 1952, while we were on the low-cost house. I had
a wonderful young man here. Jack Lester, who ran the office
for what custom work we were doing, and we did the draw-
ings, and it was built while I was in and out of town. I
was on the road most of those two or three years. It was a
house that I built to end all houses because the site was
so great. It was fifty-five acres at the end of Sullivan
Canyon, adjoining the state park. Will Rogers Park, on the
west. The mountaintops , we own to the mountaintops. It's
very private, and it's very secluded. So the house, as I
say, to end all houses had to have everything I wanted in
it, like radiant heating. We provided for expansion.

I sent drawings to three architect friends and said,
"Please kick the plans apart," and they all came back with
suggestions. Some of them said, "It looks fine the way it
is." One of them said, "Why are you putting a bidet in
Mr.'s bath? It should be in Mrs.'s bath." I wanted it,
and she didn't. [laughter] So that was the reason, but it

305

wasn't a good reason. It should have been there anyhow.
So, the house was criticized very well.

House Beautiful, I was very close with House Beauti-
ful. I had been on the staff for many years, or several
years. Elizabeth Gordon was a dear friend, and she had
done so many of our houses with House Beautiful. I wanted
them to publish it. So, I took the drawings back on a
special trip to New York, sent them ahead of time, and then
I came back to discuss it. They said that they weren't
interested, and I was flabbergasted.

"Frankly," she said, "it's just too big. You can't
have a living room fifty-five [feet] long and furnish it."
She said, "How would you like to try to furnish Grand
Central Station?"

I said, "I can try. But I'm sure I can furnish this
living room. "

"No," she said, "it's just out of the reach and
comprehension of our readership. "

I was going to do it. That was it. I wasn't going to
change it.

So, I went back to L.A. I immediately went to Paul T.
Frankl, who was a dear friend and who was, as I've told
you, one of the big influences in my life. And I said,
"Paul, Elizabeth says it's too big. What do you think?"

306

And he looked at it, and he said — He's a short man,
around five foot two, and shiny head and Viennese and sharp
as a tack. Anyhow he took a look at it, and he said,
"Humpf, humpf." He said, "You'll see the day that this
isn't big enough. How much bigger can you make it now?"
I said, "The foundations are all poured."
He said, "I don't care. How much bigger can you make
it now?"

I said, "Well, I can push this out."
He said, "Do it. Push it out right here and here,
otherwise it's all set." He said, "Make it as big as you
can now. That's all you can do."

And I've never forgotten that because since that time
we've added on fourteen times to the house to increase the
area, fourteen times, and it still isn't big enough.

307

TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO
JANUARY 13, 1983

LASKEY: Did you build Mandalay for yourself as the house
to end all houses, as you mentioned, or was it still as an
experiment? Were you using it partially to experiment with
new ideas?

MAY: Well, to answer your question, every house I built
was the house to end all houses when I built it for myself.

My first house, it was a complete breakaway from
anything that had ever been done. It was a little house
around a courtyard, and it only had maybe 1,200 [square]
feet in it. But it had a beautiful courtyard with a big
olive tree, and in it we had the first garden lighting of
Mr. [E.B. ] Nightingale. He retired from General Electric,
and he was just starting his garden lighting. He lit the
whole thing. We laid the tile floors in one day. We laid
the tile floors and built the house on top of the tile
floors eliminating cutting and fitting tile. It was the
best house at its time.

Then we built the next one up in Los Angeles when I
moved to L.A., and it was the one that I met Paul T. Frankl
and Mrs. Juliette [Van] Rosendahl that helped us get the
contacts. At that time for me it was the best I had done.

The next house was [CM] No, 3. It was down at Riviera

308

Ranch. That was the one Elizabeth Gordon latched onto.
With edition after edition, I think it appeared in ten
editions of House Beautiful in various forms as we added
changes. Every house I would do, I have added changes as
time went along.

Then [CM] No. 4 was the Skylight House. Well, that
was a real revolution, because I figured you had to light
the center of the house, and I had a skylight and that was
about thirty-by-forty or -fifty. It opened up like a clam.
It opened up with the weather. And the daylighting was
absolutely perfect. You had light in the center of the
house, and you had light coming in from both sides. You
had both worlds. That was a big breakthrough for me at
that time. There was nobody interested in skylighting the
way there is now. That was back in 1949. But it had
mistakes in it. We lived in it for a year and a half and
found all the things wrong with it. I'm still —

I just recently used some of the ideas in a house we
did out in Agoura that has movable partitions. I'm now
building for my daughter in Mandeville Canyon. I just
bought the lot, and we're going to build one using all the
principles of that Skylight House with movable partitions
plus just one great room. You can build one great room for
nothing compared with building five little rooms. In one
great room you can seat fifteen people for dinner, sixteen

309

people for dinner with movable partitions. In the same

size house with box rooms, you can't seat ten.

LASKEY: Well, how do you arrange living in a house that

has movable partitions? Is the furniture also movable?

MAY: All furniture's movable obviously.

LASKEY: Well, I mean, do you specifically buy lightweight

furniture?

MAY: No, no.

LASKEY: Do you decorate to accommodate this?

MAY: Well, first of all, real cheap, you put one great big

heating system through the whole house. So you've got one

thermostat that maintains the temperature of all the rooms

the same but those can be added. Then you have certain

fixed things, like the bathrooms. The bathrooms are all

fixed. Their partition has been fastened down, but it

holds things just like a wardrobe. Then there are about

six partitions you move that you can close off to make a

bedroom or a den or you can make the living room bigger or

you can push them all back against the wall and make one

great room. And then the kitchen is one fixed partition

where the plumbing is. You look over the top of the

partition, so you see the ceiling and the skylight. Then

you put a lot of big plants in, and that helps break up

space. With the big plantings — You've seen the pictures,

haven ' t you?

310

LASKEY: Yes, I've seen the pictures of the Skylight House.

MAY: And then with the big planters and with the movable

partitions, once you get what you like, you leave it that

way except when you want to make a change, you just quick

push —

LASKEY: Just push a wall out. [laughter]

MAY: — and the closet moves with you.

LASKEY: It's a great idea, but I was just wondering how

one decorated it. Or whether you buy furniture —

MAY: You need two people to pick up the sofa. It takes

two people. Or one person can shove it hard and it slides.

You don't move it that much once you get your perfect

setup.

In fact, the proof of that is Mrs. Newby Foster. She
bought the Skylight House [CM No. 4] from me and moved in.
It's just the perfect house where she just wouldn't change
a thing except that she did this, she moved the partitions
around the way she wanted them, and then when she found out
they were the way she wanted them--there were two or three
partitions she didn't need, so she gave them to me — she put
them in permanently. So, now it's the way she wants it,
and it's nailed down permanently. No move.
LASKEY: I like the idea of movable partitions.
MAY: It's a great house, but it was way ahead of its time,
way ahead of its time. In fact, as I say, just last year.

311

we used the idea for one job out in Agoura for the Dean
Rasmussens.

LASKEY: Well, your Mandalay has — The living room, your
large living room that you talked about, has a stationary
skylight in the center.

MAY: But we found out — That's what we learned. See, we
had to make the skylight so big that it let in more light
than we needed. You only need so much. Like a knothole
will let in quite a bit of light. If there were a knothole
and if you were in a closet and there is no light, with a
knothole it will let in a lot of light. And then if you
make it twice as big, it won't let in twice as much light.
Pretty soon you get to the point where it won't let in any
more light. You can make it all glass or three-fourths
glass, and it's still the same amount of light.

So, we found that we made the skylight way too big,
and then it had a terrible disadvantage. When you opened
it up, you couldn't screen it, because a horizontal screen .
would sag. If you put enough ribs in it to keep the screen
from sagging, it would pick up dirt because it was horizon-
tal and you couldn't clean it. So, the dirt came in, and
it did come in with the leaves. In the fall you would
sweep leaves off your living room floor. And it was too
big. Also there was the problem of opening and shutting.
We had an airplane rigger work the pulleys. The wires to

312

the pulleys had to oscillate back and forth just right or
it would get racked and then it got stuck. One day it
rained, I think I told you, and we got home just in time to
mop it up and get it closed.

It served a great purpose. That's what all my houses
do. I mean, I learned, so that's why I try to keep ahead
of everybody, because I knew more about skylights at that
time than anybody else did. Then they came out with
plastic skylights, which look like — They spoil the looks
of your house.

LASKEY: The little bubbles.

MAY: Yes. Then they also generated a lot of heat, until
they changed the plastic. But everybody learns. In the
meantime I found — Down the ridge was the first time that's
ever been done. I'd never seen them before, what we did on
the [CM] No. 5 house, that's Mandalay.

So, Mandalay, to answer your question, we made it to
be the biggest glass house there was. Paul T. Frankl
helped me to make it bigger, but I found it wasn't big
enough. By saying "big enough," I mean when you put the
furniture in the living room the way you want it, I like to
have ten feet from the edge of the rug to the wall. It was
five feet. So, when our man comes in to lay the fires,
he's got to go sideways in the five feet with a load of
wood, or he's got to walk across the rug. And so it's not

313

big enough; there's just no question about it. Some
friends say, "Well, you're spoiled. You say it's too
[small] and it isn't too [small]."

I say, "Well, OK, would you like to sit in this chair
and stick your feet out in front of the fire?"

If we could push the master bedroom, if I can push
that chair back five feet, why, he wouldn't stick his feet
in front of the fire. It's just crowded. And when you get
used to space, then you get spoiled.

You start with a nucleus of furniture, around a
conversation group, and then you should have space from
that group out to a wall. You shouldn't be up against the
wall, and that's where I need more space. That's why I
never made that mistake again.

I've had several clients on important big houses say,
"That's too big. "

And I've said, "You've got to believe me now."

On one we had a feud almost. His wife stuck for me,
and he made it into a joke, "It's too big". He's never
going to live in a place where he couldn't find his wife,
he said. When we got all through, now they say it's the
greatest house I ever did.

Most people think the house I did for them is the
greatest one I ever did, because each one is so different.

314

but it fits them. What they mean is, "For us it's the
greatest house you ever did."
LASKEY: Of course.

MAY: But Mandalay is the same way for me. It's the great-
est house I ever did, because I keep changing it. And when
I say we've changed it, we've enlarged the space, I've
added onto the space thirteen times. I have a map-- You
saw the talk, didn't you?
LASKEY: Yes, out at UCLA.

MAY: That doesn't mean we haven't made fifty changes in
wiring and lighting and light fixtures and a wood post to a
wonderful iron post and a light fixture to a different
light fixture and then change and add to the wiring and
change the system to central control, a new automatic
system. When we come into the gates, we can push a button
and all the lights from the gatehouse to the main house all
turn on. If somebody's up there and it looks like any-
thing 's wrong, we push the same button for five seconds and
the sirens go on. There's a new what is called "interfac-
ing"— interfacing lighting system, but this means you've
changed it for the better. We're constantly changing
things, and I'm trying out things. I'll sit down and see
something, and I'll say, "That's wrong."

I think I told you about my books. We have a rule —
I've got a lot of rules I go by. You can say rules are

315

made to be broken. There's a lot of talk about that. But
on the other hand, if you break all the rules you wind up
in jail. You might break a rule once, park once, and get a
ticket and then you've broken a rule. But if you get
fifteen or twenty tickets, you lose your driver's license,
say, for speeding or anything else. We cannot break rules
without — If you break rules in our place you get bad
houses. If you keep to rules, they'll be better. If you
break a few once in a while, then you may get a super
result.

On the rule breaking, in my living room I started to
collect old books. I had one great wall of books. It went
all the way down the east side of the room, and then it
quit. This was the long wall. Then on the short wall,
forming the outside corner, it had plaster and paintings
and some nice things there, but it never looked right. I
have a rule that is never broken, I never change building
materials on an outside corner. If you come to a brick
wall down to here — Say, take a brick wall all the way to
the corner. Then at the outside corner you put plaster up
to meet the brick and make your outside corner, you can see
the bricks are only a brick thick. If you return bricks
around the corner and quit on an inside corner, it'll be
all brick. So you'll see the wall's all brick. It's very

316

simple, but it's very important. So, anyhow, here I was
breaking my own rules in furnishing.

So I saw it one night, and I said, "Gee, there it is."
So, I went up and got more old books and we turned the
corner. Now it's one of the most striking things in the
room. The books turn the corner.

It's all materials. All books or all plaster or all
brick. So, I broke a rule, and it was a rule you can't
break. So, there are some rules you can't break without
detriment. That's why we've built lots of houses for
people. That's why I have in my contracts — you make an
agreement before I start, or I won't do it — no changes will
be made in [the] architecture of any kind. By you or the
landscape architect or the building contractor, I list a
whole bunch of people, so there's no fooling when it says
no one can make a change without my consent in writing.

Now, it's for your benefit. It's not for my benefit.
I mean, if you want to wreck your house, why, you paid for
it, it's your house, you're the owner, but I want to know
about it. Maybe I'll talk you out of it. Maybe I'll try
to do what you want to accomplish and do it better. But I
don't want any — I'm firm. I'm firm about that, because
this was twenty years ago I started this. Because people
would come out —

317

One job, the contractor said, "Well, look, we're on
the top of a mountaintop. " [This was] a big knoll out in
the San Fernando Valley. He said, "There's no way for
moisture to get up into the house because everything's
draining away."

And the owner said, "That's right."

He said, "Well, it's amazing. You've got all this
rock under the house at the foot of the foundation. It's
wasted. We could save $2,000." Today that would be times
twenty. So, $2,000 would be about $40,000.

So, the owner said, "OK, do it."

So, the contractor did it. I didn't know about it.
He didn't tell me. In those days we used linoleum. So,
they put the linoleum down, and, in about a month, why,
the owners called me. He was probably one of the top tax
attorneys, Tom Dempsey , in Los Angeles many years ago. We
looked at it, and it had bubbles all over it. It was
bubbling up. And I said, "There's moisture getting up
here. "

And he said, "Well, how could it?"

I said, "Well, there's no way. I've never had this
happen before."

Anyhow, we found out he had OK'd to take out the rock.
Well, the rock is a moisture barrier and was also solid for
a vapor seal because the rock contains six inches of air

318

from the ground. The fact that it's on top of a mountain
made no difference about water running off. Surface water
would run off, but there's moisture in the ground when you
water the plants. It's the same thing as being in a
meadow. So, there we were stuck. No way to do it. So, we
had to put in a waterproofing layer and then go back to
asphalt tile.

It just proves to me that you cannot let people make
changes on your drawings unless you know what they are,
and, if OK, approve it, you're responsible. So, here I was
responsible, and they didn't build it according to the
drawings. So, now we're very firm on that point. That
gives a better house and makes it good for everybody.

Like Mrs. Welk — There's an article in the [Los
Angeles ] Times [Home] magazine, it was a Lawrence Welk and
his wife interview. Questions and Answers, and they said,
"How did you get along with the builders?"

And she said, "Well, just fine. I painted my rafters
purple. "

I remember that too. I said, "You can't do that.
You'll wreck the house."

She said, "Mr. May, I like purple."

I said, "Yes, but, Mrs. Welk, outside they're going to
be white, and then they're going to come to the wall, and
they're going to be purple inside."

319

She said, "Well, paint them purple outside.

I said, "Then that'll really wreck it."

She said, "I let him just talk himself out and then I
said, 'But, Mr. May, I really would like to have them
purple,' and so he did it."

But that's the answer. If you want to cut your own
throat, why, go ahead, good. I'll let you do it, but I'll
try to keep you from doing it.

So, anyhow, that's the reason for that.

That's what happened in Mandalay. We made mistakes,
but if we made a mistake, and if I ever caught it, I
changed it. If a new thing comes out, and I try it, if it
doesn't work, why, I take it out, charge it to experience.
LASKEY: Well, that's what I was wondering. How you decide
when you can break the rules, or when you experiment and
when you stick to the traditional rules?

MAY: When you're as old as I am and have worked as long
and had as many clients and had as many problems and as
many heartaches and as many triumphs, you learn what rules
you can it break. *[You can't change materials, textures,
or colors on a outside corner; on an exterior corner on the
interior or exterior of the building — never!] And if you
build walls and you put a cant to them instead of straight

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

320

up, they'll look better because we're building with what we
call a gravity material — Old World architecture, adobe and
the old thick walls. If they're vertical, they look like
they're falling over. If you see a tall, tall building, it
looks like it's leaning, falling over. If you put a taper
to it, why, it looks straight. And there' re just a lot of
subtleties one learns from experience that they don't teach
in schools. I don't know why, but they don't.

There are ten or twelve basic rules, any one of which
you break, won't hurt, but it won't be as good. Put them
all together and you'll say, "This is just wonderful." But
you don't know what it is. Like I say, I used to like to
taste some food that's cooked some way and say, "This is
just wonderful." Then ten other cooks will wreck it. It's
all food; it all comes out of the same market.
LASKEY: Same food.
MAY: Same market, same food.

LASKEY: I saw a picture of Mandalay once, of the kitchen,
of the refrigerator, which was a walk-in refrigerator,
which I thought was just wonderful. How did you come up
with that?

MAY: Well, real simple. You see, this is [CM] No. 5. In
[CM] No. 3, World War II was coming, so I added on to No.
3, I added on a big walk-in freezer and cool room. It was
out in a lean-to against the building. So you walked in

321

outdoors. You went outdoors, and it had a padlock on it.
There was no other way to put it, but architecturally it
worked out beautifully.

Well, what I learned was this. The cooler was out of
this world, but the freezer was so big, we ran compressors
to run a great big room as if we were a meat house and we
were a butcher shop and we ended up buying enough meat that
we didn't even fill it. But during the war, it worked out
well because all of the neighbors would get a chance to buy
meat or they'd go out to a ranch and come back with a whole
half a beef cut up, and we'd store it for them. So, we had
the thing just filled with all the neighbors' frozen meat.
And then we had other kinds of frozen things, frozen
vegetables and frozen this and that, but it was way too
big. So when I built Mandalay — Also every time you had to
go outside for the cooler it was terrible because that was
back and forth to get vegetables and things that would be
in the cold room. So, I made the cold room so you could
reach in from the kitchen. You'd have access right beside
it. You didn't see the door. You can see the door to
enter it. It's insulated, but you take food out from the
side and it had three reach-in doors, for different kinds
of produce. Then we just went back to a regular standard
freezer, which I didn't know. You've got to try it out.
It turned out best, but how would you know?

322

As I say, some of these professionals design houses,
and then they don't live the way they design them. Some
designers don't know. Well, you know, if you only have a
pair of blue serge pants or Levis and a sweater, how do you
know how to make tray drawers. I used to learn how. But
you can get too many tray drawers in a house, and you can
have not enough. You can have not enough for double
hanging or single hanging. All those things, I think, come
from experience. Then, many people I've built for don't
really know what they need. We analyze what they — We see
how they are living and show how they can live better.
That's where we get a lot of our work.

We have all kinds of strange things happen. Did I
tell you about the man from Germany? We're building a
fabulous house now. It's one of the biggest ones we've
ever built. And the man has — Money's no object. But he
said, "There's only one thing I want you to do for me. I
want you to put a urinal in the powder room. "

I said, "Why?" and didn't start to work on it. About
the third or fourth sketch, I hadn't shown it.

And he said, "Well, Where's the urinal in the powder
room? "

So, I thought it was about time I had to break the
news, and I said, "In America we don't do that."

He said, "Well, in Germany we do."

323

And so we had a real battle going on.
LASKEY: You were building the house here, not in Germany?
MAY: Yes, right here.

He had a lovely German wife, and she never said a
word. Finally I said, "Now, look, I'm going to be frank
with you. Lovely women, your new neighbors in Montecito,
are going to use the powder room. How'd you like to have
your wife sitting down with a urinal staring her right in
her face?"

"See," she said, "I told you!"

And he backed off. [laughter]

I was exaggerating, because I could have put it around
the corner. But he agreed to take it out.

That's a lot of the work. We do teach people how to
live. And I learn from them. When you get some one —

I have a client. For two generations, he'd lived on a
plantation in Germany, and his parents went to Russia with
one of the vice-presidents of the United States way back.
That type of background. Impeccable background. Inden-
tured servants. And they came out here, they brought their
headman. And they knew things about living that I had
never experienced. I sure learned about it from them, what
to do. It was reflected in the house.

So it was in building like this, it's an education.
We educated about the low-cost house. We educated people

324

how to have and enjoy outdoor living. We educated people
how to have fire pits. When I first started, there was no
such thing as a pullman lavatory. I think I told you I
used these kitchen sinks and we used shower spouts to fill
them. I still do.

LASKEY: Well, you also do a lot with covered pools or
partially covered swimming pools.

MAY: Oh, yes, we helped bring the swimming pool indoors.
Tommy Church and I fought that battle. He said, "No, a
pool is a pool. It doesn't belong inside. Inside, it's a
gymnasium or a YMCA. " But he didn't get the idea that I
had, and that was to bring in light and fresh air and put
sunshine on it, fill the area with plants. The minute you
put sunshine on a swimming pool, it's not a YMCA. So, he
did permit — I say "permit" because when you work with
Tommy, why, he does what he is going to do. The landscap-
ing is his. But, he let me bring the pool halfway in under
a gabled porch, a continuation of the living room. So, we
had one of the posts sitting in the pool, and then the
house porch came out partially over the pool, which was a
beginning. And then with that, I took off and opened up
the roof *[and planted the planters with tropical plants.
That was twenty-two years ago, and I've never planned or

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

325

built an exterior swimming pool since. My porches with
heated decks are used all year long, not just in spring and
summer and useless for six months of the year. Every owner
loves the idea and uses the pool year-round. ]

People say, "Oh, you get condensation all over every-
thing." They don't know what they're talking about. It's
the relation of the size of the pool and the room to the
size of the opening that eliminates condensation. If you
close it over, which is the kind of situation I have right
now — In Georgia, where the temperature goes down to below
freezing, we have two residences with swimming pools
indoors with glass roofs, but you have to have dehumidi-
fiers in operation, which is part of the game. If you want
to have a swimming pool in Georgia or anywhere else in the
world, you want to be able to use it all the year around,
so you pay for dehumidif ication. But it works beautifully.

I've got pictures of many, many pools, I'll show them
to you before you go if you'd like to see one, an indoor
pool. One of the most beautiful pools I ever did is in
Georgia. All the blossoms are outside on the trees;
* [indoor plantings are thriving. You're inside eating on
the terrace like a jungle beside the swimming pool, invit-
ing. The temperature and your comfort is perfect, because]

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

326

dehumidif ication is taking place. Otherwise, in Georgia

it's too cold in the winter to use a pool and too humid and

hot in summer. So it just sits there. In fact one place

we did —

LASKEY: It's not heated?

MAY: Yes, others heat the pool, * [summer and winter. But

it's too cold out of doors in winter and too hot and humid

in summer, unless you can control the climate by enclosing

the pool as we do. ]

LASKEY: You have to heat the room.

MAY: Yes, in winter and cool it in summmer. An outdoor

pool in winter, it's too cold to use. When I was a guest

there, at the adjacent plantation, you couldn't walk across

the lawn to the pool, because the ice was still frozen on

the grass. And then should you put the pool indoors with

no sunshine in winter, the humidity rises. It's no good.

So, the combination was what we did. And, once we did it,

they use their pool all the time. Now the owners want me

to do a pool for them in Cleveland indoor-outdoors.

But, again, to sum up, all these things you've got to
experiment with, do them yourself. You think of these
ideas and then try them. If they don't work, you don't do
them again. If you do them without trying them, why.

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

327

you're liable to be sued. I've never carried any kind of
errors and omissions insurance.
LASKEY: Really?

MAY: Never any kind of insurance, liability insurance on
my designs, because I've never built anything for anybody I
hadn't done myself. So, if it wasn't built the way I did
it, it wasn't worth — I made sure it was built the way I
knew; I wouldn't let them get into trouble. [tape recorder
turned off]

LASKEY: I think the idea that you experimented with all
the changes that you made in your own house first before
you attempted to use it on your clients was rather inter-
esting, because I don't think that's necessarily true in
the case of many architects or designers.

MAY: I think that is true. And I was lucky in doing that.
Of course, one reason was, I specialized. I just built one
kind of a house. Most architects will build anything you
want, I mean, in style and character. I know, Paul
Williams — Let's just take Wallace Neff. He had three
styles. In each one, he was the best there was in all
three styles.

I just had one style. So I was able then to concen-
trate on it. So, anything I learned in my style, like the
ranch house, would fit all the other ranch houses, like
skylighting, daylighting.

328

Then spreading the house out the way I did, we had
problems in heating, and we had problems of — In those
days, before we had radiant heating, we used unit heating.
We had heat for each room, or a heater for each room, a
furnace for each room. Just many things like that just
became a specialty for that type of a house. You wouldn't
think of using a heater for each room in a Paul Williams
house or a Wallace Neff house. They had central heating in
those days. And then with radiant heating, of course that
solved everything. We were then able through a pipe to
carry hot water for a long distance.

And then when it came to cooling, I experimented in
my house. I don't know whether I brought that up. I have
one of the greatest cooling systems devised up to date.
It's a radiant cooling — It's actually what they call
valance cooling. We have a gas water chiller a long
distance away from the house, to quiet the noise, and then
it's piped, insulated pipe, into the rooms. I only instal-
led it in the living room because it was experimental.
However, I've not needed to put it through the whole house.
The living room is so cool, it cools the entry, dining
room, and kitchen beautifully. *[The rest of the house is
automatically dehumidified, making it most comfortable.]

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

329

LASKEY: It sounds wonderful.

MAY: It's the same air, and it just drops from the cooled
valances, which are inconspicuous on the wall at the
ceiling and are concealed. You can't see them.
Architecturally, they're an addition to the room. They
give a third-dimensional look to the corners.

Some of the critics have said, "Well, what do you do
when you have a lot of people and there's no ventilation?"

It's real simple, we just open the door. [laughter]
And it blows it out. The same thing with the radiant heat
because there's no ventilation, but you have the great
ability to to be able to heat the floor. Open the door and
blow it out. Close it up and it's warm again, because
you're heated by radiant rather than hot air.

People with a hot-air system think they're changing
the air, but they don't. They don't really change the air.
They do in commercial buildings, but in residential you
don't. You just take the same air over and over again, and
you can filter it.

See, with hot air, the fixtures, and effects and
furniture — everything's cold; the air is hot. You're
uncomfortable because your body is radiating the cold
walls. If you heat the air long enough, these bodies will
warm up. But if you sit in a chair, it's cold, with hot
air, and it's uncomfortable. With radiant heating, it's a

330

ray of heat like the sunshine. You can stand in the sun,
or you can stand in the shade, the temperature's the same,
but the ray is what gives you that warm feeling. So, with
radiant heating, everything's warm. The bedclothes are
warm, the rugs are warm, the floors are warm. And yet the
air could be cool. Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright used to say,
"Warm feet, cool head." [laughter]

LASKEY: Also that book, which is a point that you made,
the radiant heating allows you to spread out your ranch-
style house, whereas Wallace Neff and Paul Williams built
in a far more traditional style with a central heating
system.

MAY: They all fight the second story. You see, the hot
air rises. It all goes upstairs. Then they beat it by
putting cold air returns downstairs. So they suck the air
back down and then blow it out again. But it's just as
archaic as a gearshift on an automobile. There's no way
you can come out with hot air and call it anything of heat
compared to what we have now.

Now we've gone into solar heating and cooling using
the heat pump, whereby we take water out of a well. Most
of our houses are big enough where we can dig a well. We
take the water out and put it through a heat exchange. We
cool and heat with the same water well, use it for hot
water or swimming pool water, or a pond or lake, or return

331

it back in the ground. So, we're way out in front on that.
That will improve over what we are doing as technology,
experience, and the equipment gets better.

We did a house recently, 1983, for a wonderful couple
in Rancho Santa Fe , the [Rea] Axlines. It has a water
well. There were all kinds of problems, because it was the
first one. But we knew it was right, and Mr. Axline knew
it was right. He wanted to do it; so we did. I talked to
him about two weeks ago. He said that it's just wonderful.
He can't believe how great the heat is and the two-thirds
savings in fuel. I know how good it is, but it's his first
experience with it.

We've had many advances since we built my house
Mandalay in 1953. We now have an insulated floor. We put
the pipes close together, and we install real thin tile on
top. You can't tell the thickness of the tile the way we
lay them. It looks thick. And then we get a very fast
[heat] response from the floor. Like if you take a tin
frying pan and put it on the stove, it will get hot immedi-
ately. If you put a cast-iron [pan] on the stove, it takes
quite a while for it to even get warm. That's the differ-
ence between radiant heating in my house and most everybody
else's house. Our pipes only have about two inches to
heat; so, therefore, we can run the water much cooler. The
hot water, we run it cooler, not so hot, warmer, just warm

332

water, and get a wonderful effect because you're not losing
any heat any place and it doesn't take a long time to get
it up, * [temperature from a cold start. And it keeps a
more even temperature. ]

So, the answer Mr. Axline said was that he couldn't
believe how great the heat was. It was wonderful. He was
heating three times the area for the same price as at the
other house. Three times the area. There's no gas. Gas
has gone up so tremendously. It's all electric. In the
future electric will be the only way to go because no
matter what source of energy you will get, in the future it
will be transmitted over electric, with their easement and
rights of way, distribution stations, etc. We found that
out the hard way.

LASKEY: That's interesting. Your houses are all electric?
MAY: No, no, but they're going to be now with the heat
pumps. See, the gas has become so expensive, and it's
still going up. They deregulated and they have to live up
to the old contracts for the gas, and we're going to get
another bump here in Los Angeles. Ours has gone from
heating our house — I've got the proof of it. I keep
records of it for the reason * [ to convince clients in
regard to heating design and requirements and results — the

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

333

bottom line cost of operation.] I've heated my house with
radiant heating for $50 a month roughly, average over ten
years at first, after 1954. It's now up to $300, using the
same gas, same house. The house is a little larger, but
it's not enough larger in that respect to make much differ-
ence.

LASKEY: Three hundred dollars!

MAY: In winter now it goes up to $500 from the old $50 per
month average. Electric facilities all over the country
have their electric lines * [systems and they are constantly
being improved and upgraded. They are put up with an eye
to the future that they will become the distribution medium
for most all of our energy.] So, when we get the ultimate
source, it's going to be generated into electricity. Even
like deep compressed bottled gas that they bring over from
Sumatra and elsewhere will be converted to electricity;
they will put it over the electric lines. They won't be
hauling it over the streets in tanks like we're doing now.
Of course, that's in the future. They'll be shooting
it through the air or something like that, like they send
television through. I doubt that though, but they probably
will. And solar's not here yet, except to solar heat the
water well, because the amount of collectors it takes, you

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

334

hardly ever get your money back. I think that is pretty
well established. And also with the voltaic cell that's on
the way, they're too expensive yet. Even when the govern-
ment gives you voltaic cells, for experimenting, you can
just barely come out.

LASKEY: But that will be something that should improve in
the future, something they're working on.
MAY: That's right, but the point that the thinkers are,
and I've talked to several of them-- Like when we did the
George Nickel house in Bakersfield, a beautiful ranch house
on the big Kern River project. You can see both ways about
twenty miles of waterfront. I was insisting on the radiant
heating in the floors. They finally came up with the fact
that — We didn't know the possibilities [of a] water well
at that time. That was less than five years ago. So, Mr.
Nickel was on the board of Pacific [Gas and] Electric, in
Northern California, I think, the utility company. And
they said, "Go electric. Because no matter what happens we
can be sending whatever source of fuel over our system. We
can transfer it cheaper there than you can on the roads in
trucks obviously." So, the Nickel residence went all
electric. The bills are pretty high now, but now they are
not so high when you compare my gas bill from $50 to $500.
And so, his is high, but it will stay where it is in
relation to the other fuels.

335

LASKEY: The other costs, right.
MAY: Other fuels, other fuels.

LASKEY: In Mandalay, sort of going off on the other sub-
ject, you have-- I remember seeing a picture of your music
room, in which you have your cut-down pianos. Why did you
do that?

MAY: That was a thing that I * [had to do. There was too
much waste, unusable space there and with our low furni-
ture, two grand pianos were out of scale. Frankl thought
it was a good idea and remarked he wished he had thought of
the idea.] I did it a long time ago. I had the feeling
that when you go into a house, you see a piano, and there's
all that space under the piano, serving no good, just for
one person's legs if he should sit down and play. Then I
realized that you don't put your legs under the piano. So,
I immediately cut one down. I got the right height and
drew it up first and cut it, adding new legs. You sit down
and spread your legs and never put them under the keyboard..
So, I gained all this space visually on top of the piano
instead of underneath. It makes them look like Frankl
furniture, which is low and comfortable. When I see a
grand piano with its full height up on its wheels, it looks
to me like a big elephant in a room, a white elephant. So,

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

336

the idea of putting it down low took on with Frankl ,
because he said, "What you should do is go into business
cutting down pianos." So, that was the stamp of approval.
I know it's right.

We have four of them in [our] house, four grands, and
they're all cut down except Mrs. May's. She wouldn't let
me cut it down. It's her own private piano, so I took the
wheels off and put it back in a corner where you couldn't
see it. [laughter] I put the drums in front of it. We
have a bunch of them. We collect foreign musical instru-
ments. We have a harp from Burma. We have drums from
Mexico and some drums from the Orient. So, I put the drum
collection low in front of the piano, and it kind of
softens and hides it. The rest of the room looks so much
better. In our living room we have two grands dead ahead
when you come in, and they look wonderful.
LASKEY: Well, they look beautiful in the pictures.
MAY: They play just as well —

LASKEY: I think they're right with the look of your
houses, the kind of low, long, spread-out feeling of the
ranch house.

MAY: — unless you're a professional musician. I play, but
I never seem to have time to really play very much. So, I
like to see them there and not have all that space for that

337

one time that your two knees are supposed to go under the
piano.

LASKEY: Well, I was going to ask you, with all the build-
ing that you've done and the designing and the work that
you do, have you had time to keep up with your musical
interests?

MAY: Oh, yes. I do quite a bit — Not as much as I'd like
to, but I belong to a couple of wonderful horseback groups,
like the Rancheros [Visitadores ] , and for one week, we do
nothing but play the piano, from morning till night. * [We
have about ten pianos on the ride; my camp, the Borrachos,
has two Baldwin spinets.]
LASKEY: Really?

MAY: One time we had four pianos going at once. It was
like an Indian roundup, you know when the old covered
wagons used to go around in a circle. They'd make a circle
to keep the Indians away. We made a circle with the
pianos, and the piano players played with their backs to
each other. We had a lot of fun. We carry two pianos with
the Los Caballeros, the ranch group at Catalina, and we
also carry two pianos with our group in Santa Barbara. So
at least twice a year we have a two week workout.

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

338

LASKEY: This leads me into this whole other subject of the
numerous things that you do aside from changing the life-
style of the country, which is your horsemanship, your musi-
cianship, your book collecting, your antique collecting,
traveling —
MAY: Flying.
LASKEY: Flying.

MAY: I collect a lot of things. Besides my collection of
antique parchment books, I collect inscribed books, if I
know the author. I don't collect books as such, unless I
know the author. And in the book collection, I don't
collect unless my houses or I am in the book. There are
quite a few books we've gotten into over the years. I've
got some wonderful inscriptions, from Noguchi, well, gee,
[from] Frank Lloyd Wright. I've got five books of Frank
Lloyd Wright. Bill Lear. I've got Bill Lear's book.
Anybody I knew or worked with, I've got their book. K. S.
"Boots" Adams had a book. That's one of my great collec-
tions. I collect old books, as you know.
LASKEY: Yeah, I was going to say, you also collect rare
books.

MAY: Rare books, yes.
LASKEY: How did you start that?

MAY: Well, Frankl had some very wonderful books that I
always envied. He had about a four-by-eight bookcase

339

filled with these wonderful old books, and I always admired
them. Then, when I was in Spain one time, I just happened
to see some in a window. I went in and bought three or
four and came home with them. Then I just got the idea.
Then I went to Mexico and I started avidly going to the
markets and buying them at the markets. And finally they
looked so great — Acoustically they're wonderful. The
space that's there on the soft binding and the space over
the top of the books is airspace and it goes back to the
wall. Sound waves [don't] bounce back. So, it gives an
acoustical effect, it gives a visual effect, and it gives
an old effect, which we like. It doesn't look like a bunch
of novels you just bought at a bookstore. So, old books
would be one of my serious collections.

And then we collect all kinds of old furniture. I
just came across some of the old fifteenth century corbels
I got from the [William Randolph] Hearst estate. We got
that in about 1950, and I bought everything they had that
would fit our houses — old studs, old doors — which lots of
it has since being incorporated into our house. Still have
some of it left over we haven't used.
LASKEY: Oh, that's exciting.

MAY: Whenever I travel, I always keep an eye open to buy
something that would be better than what we have.

340

LASKEY: Did your collecting come before your traveling or
with your traveling?

MAY: Well, it all came about the same time. I started
traveling very early, you know. We would go to Tijuana,
Mexico, and buy tiles and that type of thing in the old
1930 days in San Diego. The really big impact was when I
came up to L.A. and Mr. [Frederic] Blow at Westclox gave me
all the antique furniture, and I thought he was spoiling my
house. And Frankl gave me [a] shove in the right direction
with the old Oriental pieces. He had a few wonderful old
Mexican pieces. *[Mr. and Mrs. Blow, in appreciation of
the second house I did for them, bought me several things
in Mexico as gifts. The greatest was a Mardonio Magana
stone statue, thirty inches high. It is shown in the New
York Museum of Modern Art book, Modern Mexican Sculpture.
He also came] back with a big chest, he said, "Cliff, this
had your name all over it; so I bought it for you." So, we
still have that lovely piece.

Then Paul Frankl bought me a few pieces in Mexico.
Then, by that time I was swung over to the fact that the
case goods, meaning the hard pieces, like chests of drawers
and buffets and tables should be — There's much more
character if they're old, if you like that. Then the soft

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

341

goods, or the sofas and chairs, should be comfortable

because any old sofa benches are uncomfortable. They're

hard. There was no upholstery on them.

LASKEY: They're terrible. I remember those horsehair hard

sofas .

MAY: But contemporary upholstered pieces and beds and then

antiques mixed in. I think there's quite an article that

was done recently on the mixing of all the old, which gets

back to the fact that the best of any old culture, they all

go together. Oriental and —

LASKEY: Well, what you're trying for is a comfortable

situation. If the seating is comfortable and modern, and

what you're looking at is pleasing and interesting, and the

acoustics are great, what could be nicer?

MAY: That's it! The other thing is that just because it's

old it's not necessarily good. You've got to choose. On

old antique furniture, remember there's one important rule:

if it has feet, cut them off.

LASKEY: Really?

MAY: If the furniture has feet, cut them off. Claw feet,

I mean. It's a pretty good rule. You ought to see a piece

of furniture when you take them off, it looks so much

better. It brings them up to date.

LASKEY: Oh, that's very interesting.

342

MAY: There are lot of rules like that. If you like feet,
keep them, but if you add feet, it won't be as good as if
you take them off. [laughter]

LASKEY: Those wonderful claws holding big, round balls,
you know, like they used to have, you would cut those off?
MAY: Yes. That's an era that's long gone. When I learned
to play the piano, my dad had a piano stool that had claw
feet. I'll never forget it. I don't know where it went.
Probably some duck shooter got it. That's the way they
used to shoot ducks. You could raise or lower the height,
and you get just the right height and spin the top.
LASKEY: That's amazing. What about your flying?
MAY: Oh, I love it. It's made it possible to get a lot of
places faster than I could have. *[I have 3,800 hours
flying to my jobs all over the United States and Mexico. )
In the old days, I used to play the saxophone when I flew
on long trips. I had auto pilot, so I could sit right
there and look and think. You can either put your hands in
your lap or you can look at a map or you can pick up a
saxophone and play the saxophone^ *[ looking straight ahead,
safely, while flying.] I had a little baby, a little small
one, a curved soprano. I always kept it in the

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

343

airplane. I'd play it coming home, but as I grew older, I
came to where I felt kind of tired upon arrival at home.

I told a doctor friend one day, and he said, "Well,
gee, you're blowing at 8,000 feet." He said, "Try saving
the blowing for when you're on the ground, sea level;
you'll do better."

But then with the flying a lot of wonderful things
have happened. We met a whole different group of people.
That's one thing that happened. I have the horse group of
friends, and I've got the flying group of friends, and I've
got Mrs. May's group of friends —
LASKEY: The architectural group and design.
MAY: The architectural group, that's right. And you can
go on. There must be five or six or seven, at least six
groups that each have different spheres around them. We're
pretty active in all of them. We have one of the great
things in the Aviation Country Club of California. It's a
group of fliers who have planes and no place to go. So
every ninety days — They have a tour chairman who picks out
the very best place there is, always top, first-class. We
go to places — like once we went to Creel, which is way up
in Mexico. It's the Grand Canyon of Mexico. You fly down
to a little Mexican town near Navojoa — Culiacan, I think it
is — then you get on the train the next day, and then you go
chugging up the hill. They put that train through about

344

fifteen tunnels to get up there. In one tunnel you go in
and make a complete turnaround in the mountain and come
back out. It's really fascinating. We go to places like
that. We take our own music with us, and several members
play the piano.

LASKEY: Oh, it sounds marvelous.

MAY: They're all exciting people. Cross-section of
everything, attorneys, ranchers, builders. You've got
doctors, merchants, test pilots, aeronautical engineers —
it's a cross-section of America. These people have air-
planes, but they all have this common interest of flying
together. Lately they've taken up golf; so these days
wherever we go, we go to the big golf course.

The first place they went was to the Caribbean islands
on one trip, where they all flew to New Orleans and then
all took a jet plane. Then they've also gone to Honolulu
but via the airlines. [tape recorder turned off]
LASKEY: We're coming near the end of the interview, Mr.
May, and I wonder if there's anything that we haven't
talked about that you would like to talk about.
MAY: I think of one thing that I've — Maybe I haven't
invented it or discovered it, but I've noticed so many
[people], like musical [composers], Tchaikovsky; I'm not
too familiar with them, but many of them, the older they
get, the better their work seems to get because they remain

345

active. In other words, what I'm trying to say, people in
the arts seem to produce better as they get older. Frank
Lloyd Wright, all the architects that I know of, the older
they got, the better work they did. Look at Wallace Nef f ,
his work got better and better. And Paul Frankl's work got
better and better. John Lautner's is getting better and
better. A. Quincy Jones's did. Everybody in the arts,
[their] work got better. [Irving] Gill's got better, as
[he] got older and more experienced. When they practiced
right up to where they died, stayed in practice, didn't
retire, why, it seems to me most of their work was better.
I know mine. I look back at things I did and say, "I
wonder why I did it that way," because I think I can do
them better now than I could then. I'm approaching seventy-
five now. I feel like I'm better equipped than I was ten
years ago. Each year I think I do better than I did the
year before. But, then, now the thought is if you go to a
different type of endeavor, electronics [or] computers, you
burn out at thirty-five. Boys coming out of school are
better equipped now, they tell me, than men at thirty-five
and forty who haven't kept up by going back to school. In
the computer sciences, in that field, you're an old man at
fifty plus, and in architecture you're just getting
started. Mr. Wright died at eighty-plus, wasn't it?
LASKEY: No, he was in his nineties.

346

MAY: He was running his school, Taliesin West, out there

in Arizona with an iron hand.

LASKEY: He was indeed.

May: So, the thought I had was that the arts seem to be

more kindly to ability and old age than any of the other

forms of endeavor. A baseball player. A fighter's

finished at thirty. Any form you want to take. They

retire. Mandatory retirement for airline pilots is now

below sixty, and now they're trying to get that lowered, I

understand. You take just any endeavor you want to take.

I can't think of any except maybe authors and songwriters

maybe. But all the arts and artists seem to be able to

keep on producing better and better as long as they want to

work.

LASKEY: It's true. I thinking of the [Will] Durants and

how long they wrote, and they kept getting better. But of

course, I think you need the basic interest and the basic

knowledge and the basic abilities to start with, and from

then, particularly in a field like architecture, it is

true.

MAY: Maybe that's why they go into that work, because they

love it.

LASKEY: You need to love it.

347

MAY: To be an artist to start out is to be a beggar,

almost. Imagine a man who paints pictures. When he first

starts, he's got a long road.

LASKEY: Look at Picasso as another example of what you're

talking about.

MAY: That's right. But anyhow, it's worthy of a little

bit of thought.

LASKEY: Well, in that case, what's next?

MAY: Well, my next one is I'm doing a house that couldn't

be built. I'm doing it now. We designed a house to be

built on a hilltop of eight acres. The owner changed his

mind, and now we're building on a hilltop of five hundred

acres. We're building it for a man who can afford to

build * [anything he fancies, and what great fun it is for

me to do. ]

"I can afford it," * [my friend for whom we're build-
ing it says. "I can afford this." And about five more,
which will be the race track, main barns, let down barns,
viewing stands, trainers quarters, and bunk houses, and
mess hall and on and on.]

So, the challenge is unlimited. I'm proposing a
heliport for them because they go back and forth to San
Francisco where they race their horses, their main base

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

348

track. Why should they not helicopter right into San
Francisco airport, right where the racetrack is? We're
going to do a lot of things there that — I'm just fortunate
having clients like this. And yet, you say you have a
client, how did you get him? For twenty years we rode
horseback together, and, for twenty years, he told me he
was going to build a house someday, and now we're building
it.

I have story after story I could tell you, but I'll
tell you one short one with a moral or lesson. The one we
did for Mr. and Mrs. Joe W. Brown. That's not Joe E. Brown
the comedian, but Joe W. Brown. He was Senator Huey Long's
partner in New Orleans. He ran the gambling. Huey Long
arranged it and the politics. When Huey Long died, Joe W.
Brown inherited everything. So, when gambling in New
Orleans stopped, Joe W. Brown had to get out of [Louisi-
ana], So, he went to Las Vegas, taking all of his employ-
ees who were gamblers. So, he bought the biggest profes-
sional gambling place, the Golden Nugget. It was [in]
downtown Vegas. And he brought all his gamblers and put
them to work. We designed a large ranch house for them
*[on 15,000 acres on the Louisiana Delta — which, inciden-
tally became the biggest natural gas field in Louisiana.

* Mr. May added the following bracketed section during his
review of the tape transcript.

349

But for three years they were undecided about the ranch
house style for them] and came back and talked to me about
getting started each year. The fourth year they said,
"We're going to go." They finally made up their minds. On
the fifth year [the] drawings completed, we were all ready
to go. We had a large lake dug and raised the level of the
land where they were going to build because it was too low
and flooded. They were under way, foundations in, and
ready to go, when Mr. Brown dropped dead. I now look back
and I see there were three years, three wonderful years,
they could have lived in their house. Money was no object,
but he and she were unable to make up their minds. In the
meantime they lived upstairs in a small apartment over the
gambling house, the Golden Nugget, that they owned in Las
Vegas.

The other funny thing was, when they came out to Las
Vegas, Mr. Brown told each employee to be Brown's guest and
do any one thing he would like to do, anything he wanted
really to do and let Mr. Brown know what it is. When they
moved from the New Orleans delta, which is low and flat for
hundreds of miles, to Las Vegas, one employee said, "All I
want to do is sit on a mountain. I've never seen one."
LASKEY: And he never got it built?

350

MAY: No, never got it built. The Chris Choate drawing for
the house, lake, gate house are on the wall. I'll show
you.

Gatehouses, caretakers' houses, we even had the house
so you could hose it out. We had scuppers everyplace. So,
the furniture we were to design would be so that the water
would flood under it up to three inches clearance; so you
could hose water on and wash the floors just like you do
the patio, and with warm floors, [they] would dry quickly.
All the floors radiant heated. Crazy ideas, but it takes a
lot of crazy ideas to find out the right one. Mrs. Brown
thought it was the best idea in the house. And so did I.
LASKEY: I think it's a great way to end our interview, the
fact that you're beginning to build a house that wasn't
going to be built, or the house that couldn't be built.
MAY: As Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright told me more than once,
"You'll find out that the best houses never get built."
LASKEY: But you're going to build it.
MAY: I'm going to build it now.
LASKEY: Thank you very much, Mr. May.

MAY: I've enjoyed working with you. It's a great plea-
sure.
LASKEY: Good luck on the house. I hope to see it.

351

INDEX

Adams, K.S.

281,

Alter, Lou,

"Boots," 216, 279,
339

i-lX UCL , ijWU, 236

Architect/client relationship,

120-21, 317-20, 323-25
Architectural Digest, 99
Axline, Rea, 332, 333

Balboa Park, San Diego,

history of, 183-86
Bathroom fixtures, 106-11,

201-2
Beardwood, Jack B., 270-71
Becket, Welton, 270-71
Blow, Frederic M., 154-60, 341
Bray, Irving, 298
Bray, William, lawsuit

against, 253-55
Brown, Joe W. , 217, 349-51
Building costs, 93-99, 205-8,

297, 301-2
Building regulations, 91-93,

290-91, 295-96
Burnham, Marston, 140

Califo

-Spa

164

-Mon

-con

169

190

Choate

Church

Corns to
Copyri

Corman
Cortes
Cotton

rnia arch

nish peri

-67

terey sty

temporary

-70, 172-

-91

, Christi

, Thomas

287, 325
ck, Hilli
ght laws
See May,
copyr igh
lawsuits
, Roger,
e , Ross ,
, O.W. an

itecture
od, 3-6, 29,

le, 168-70

ranch house,
73, 187-89,

an, 224-26, 237
D. , 279-80,

ard, 251-52

in architecture,

Clif f-
t problems and

288-89

238, 294

d family, 60-61

Dedekam, Carsten F. , lawsuit
against, 250-52

Dempsey, Tom, 118-19, 318-19
DeVilbliss Company, copyright

problems with, 276-77
Dolly, Chester F., 146

Eagles Fly West (book by Ed

Ainsworth ) , 18
Estudillo family (maternal
ancestors ) , 1-2
-home and property, 1, 2-3,
12, 30, 32-34

Faren
Feder

Fleet

Fletc
Floor
Forwa
Foste
Frank
Frank

Frost

holt, Ammen, 139-4 0
al Housing Authority

(FHA), 112, 117, 211,

295-96
family (childhood

neighbors in San

Diego) , 44
her, Ed and family, 60
ing systems, 111-18
rd , John, 63-65
r, Newby, 234, 311
, Nicholas J. , 132
1, Paul T. , 154, 222,

296-97, 306-7, 339-40,

341, 346
, Wallace, 157-58

Galvin, John, 160-63
Garbage disposal, 175-76
Gardner, Matt, 96, 132
General Motors Company,

lawsuit against,

274-75
Gill, Irving, 45-46, 47-48,

86, 178, 183-84, 346
Goodhue, Bertram, 184-86
Gordon, Elizabeth, 103-4, 179,

192, 198-99, 208, 212-

13, 215-16, 217, 221,

306

Hale, William F. , 90
Hall, Peirson, 266
Hardister, Ben H., lawsuit
against, 250-52

352

Heating systems, 329-35
Highland, Alex, 62, 138-39
Hopkins, Miriam, 282
Horton, Mr. and Mrs. Hiram T,

132, 134-36
House Beautiful. See Gordon,

El izabeth

International style

architecture, 102-3,
104-5

Johnston, Paul C, 70
Jones, A. Quincy, 346
Jones, Fletcher, lawsuit

against, 255-61,

263-70

King, Scott, 203
Knecht, Oscar, 91

Lane, Lawrence V^illiam, Jr.,

231-32
Langston, Wade, 133-34
Las Flores Ranch (home of Jane

Magee), 7-8, 19-28
Lauck, Chester, 282
Lautner, John, 346
Le Corbusier, Charles Edouard

Jeanneret-Gr is , 104-5
Lester, Jack, 305
Levitt, William J., 169
Lichty, R.C. , 82
Llewellyn, David, 140
Low-cost housing, 225-29, 231-

33, 237-39, 248-49,

289-96

MacLaine, Shirley, 283-85
Magee, Bill (maternal uncle),

17-18
Magee, Henry (maternal

grandfather), 2, 18
Magee, Jane (maternal aunt),

6-7, 15. See also Las

Flores Ranch
Marshall, John, 41-42
Marston, George W. , 59, 61-62,

183
May, Beatrice Magee

(mother ) , 55

May, Charles Clifford

(father), 39-41, 53-55,
68, 72
May, Charles E. (paternal

grandfather), 36-38
May, Cliff, See also

Architect/client
relationship; Bathroom
fixtures; Flooring
systems; Garbage
disposal; Heating
systems; Low-cost
housing; Nail-on sash;
Refrigerators, walk-in;
Skylights; Swimming
pools
-ancestry, 1-2, 10-12, 36-41
-childhood and adolescence,

6-9, 13-28, 42-80
-buildings designed by

-Adams, K.S., house, 216,

218
-Alter, Lou, house, 236
-Axline, Rea, house, 332,

333
-Blow, Frederic M., house,

157-59
-Bonita Women's Club

building, 132
-Bray, Irving, house, 298
-Brown, Joe W. , house,

217, 349-51
-Burnham, Marston, house,

140
-CM No. 1, 128-31
-CM No. 2, 152-53, 308
-CM No. 3, 198-202, 308-9,

321-22
-CM No. 4. See Skylight

House
-CM No. 5. See Mandalay
-Corman, Roger, house,

288-89
-Dempsey, Tom, house,

118-19, 318-19
-Farenholt, Ammen, house,

139-40
-Frank, Nicholas J.,

house, 132
-Galvin, John, house,
161-62

353

96,

-Gardner, Matt, house,

132
-Highland, Alex, house,

62, 138
-Horton, Hiram T. , houses,

134-36
-Lane, Lawrence William,

Jr. , house , 231-32
-Langston, Wade, house,

133-34
-Lily Pond house, 140-41
-Llewellyn, David, house,

140
-Mandalay, 221-24, 230-31,

303-7, 313-17, 322, 336-

37, 340
-Mee, George, house,

297-98
-Mondavi Winery, 298-301
-Nickel, George, house,

335
-O'Leary, Arthur J.,

house, 82-83, 85, 106,

108-10, 111-12, 119
-Pacesetter House, 210-13,

216
-Parker, Steven,

apartments, 283-85
-Peterson, Austin, house,

217
-Price, Harold C, house,
281

-Riviera Ranch

development, 149-51
-Rose, David, house, ^^-
-Schwabacher , Jack, house,

298
-Seligman, Mort, house, 96
-Skylight House, 233-34,

309, 311
-Smith, John A., house,

124-25, 127
-Stone Canyon house, 126,

140
-Tate, M.E., house, 116
-Toda, Benigno, Jr.,

house, 304-5
-Trenchard, O.H.B., house,

134

-Vanderlip, Kelvin, house,

addition to, 287-88
-Van Heusen, Jimmie,

house, 236
-Welk, Lawrence, house,
319-20
-copyright problems and
lawsuits, 235-36, 240-44,
249-77
-house interiors and
furnishings, 81, 131, 152,
154, 221-23, 226-31, 309-
11, 313-14, 336-37, 340,
341-42
-interests

-antique furniture

collecting, 340-42
-book collecting, 339-40
-flying, 343-45
-music, 53-54, 67-72, 74-
75, 76-77, 337-38, 343
-membership in social clubs
-Aviation Country Club of

California, 344-45
-Pioneer Pacific

Broadcasters, 67
-Rancheros Visitadores,
338
-philosophy of architecture,
29-30, 52, 86-90, 100-106,
163-74, 176-81, 190-92.
May, Henry C. (brother), 56-58
Mee, George, 297-98
Miracle, Oliver Ulysses, 83-84
Mondavi, Robert, 298-99
Morganelli-Heumann and
Associates, lawsuit
against, 257-58, 264-69
Mushet, Bill, 99

Nail-on sash, 244-46, 291-92
Nazimova, Alia, 282
Neff, Wallace, 328, 346
Nickel, George, 335
Nightingale, E.B., 308
Norcross, Carl, 192-93, 228
Norcross, Elizabeth. See
Gordon, Elizabeth

354

O'Leary, Arthur J., 82-83
Olmstead brothers, 184-85
Ooms, Peter, 295-96

Palmer, Vincent, 146
Parker, Steven, 283-85
Pedrorena, Victoria de

(maternal grandmother), 1,

2, 10
Peterson, Austin, 217
Price, Harold C. , 281
Pullman lavatory. See

bathroom fixtures

See

Ramona's marriage place.

Estudillo-home and

property
Ranch house. See California

architecture-Spanish

period; California

architecture-contemporary

ranch house
Real, Manuel L. , 266
Refrigerators, walk-in, 321-22
Rice, A.B. , 113, 115
Rose, David, 236

San Diego exposition, 183-86
Santa Margarita Ranch, 5, 9,

167
Schindler, Rudolph M. , 178-79
Schutt, Burton, 296
Schwabacher, Jack, 298
Seligman, Mort, 96

123-27, 142-

Silver, Ben, 144-46
Skylights, 233, 312-13
Smith , John A. ,

51 passim
Smythe, William
Spreckels, John

company, 32-33, 59
Styris family (childhood

neighbors in San Diego),

41, 42-44, 46-47, 65
Swimming pools, 325-27

E,
D,

, 30-31
and

Tate, M.E. , 116
Toda , Benigno, Jr,
Trenchard , O.H.B.

, 304-5
134

Vanderlip, Ellen, 287-88
Vanderlip, Kelvin, 286-87
Van Heusen, Jimmie, 236
Van Rosendahl, Juliet, 152-53
Veterans Administration (VA),
117, 211, 291

Waterman, Hazel, 33-34
Welk, Fern, 319-20
Western Ranch Houses ( book

published by May in

collaboration with Sunset

Magazine) , 209
Williams, Paul, 270
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 89, 221,

331, 339, 346, 351
Wurster, William W. , 187-88

Young, Harry, 21-23
Young, Kim, 21-22

355

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