“Spence’s Cabins”
by Pablo Capra
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| Spence's Cabins, 1930s, c/o Beverly Spence Kirkpatrick |
In 1907, the newly widowed Keturah Catherine Spence (1857-1940) left Brantford, Canada to start over in Los Angeles. Catherine, as she called herself, risked her fortune on an avocado orchard, becoming one of the first commercial growers in the US.
Just as avocado toast is a staple on today’s menus, avocados quickly became part of the California lifestyle. The one perceived drawback was that English-speakers couldn’t pronounce the original name, ahuacate.
The word “avocado” is a Los Angeles invention, selected at the Hotel Alexandria in 1915 by a group of farmers calling themselves the California Avocado Association, which surely included Catherine.
The success of Catherine’s orchard allowed her to buy a house in present-day Koreatown, two building lots in San Diego, and to rent a house in La Jolla for the summer. She also became active in society as a member of the Scottish-expatriate Caledonian Club, since both of her parents were born in Scotland.
Catherine had already raised five children before coming to Los Angeles, some of whom followed her there.
Her son William McKay Spence (1879-1961) came in 1911, seeking a better climate to recover from an illness so severe that he’d lost a kidney. With his wife Florence (1883-1976) and children Frances (1907-1948) and Thomas (1910-1974), he moved into a house in Hollywood that Catherine bought for them.
At first, Florence worked at Bullock’s department store in downtown LA. After William recovered, he got jobs as a telephone operator and a gas station attendant in downtown, and they had three more children: Marion (1913-2002), Howard (1915-1929), and Edna Mae (1920-2016).
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| Florence, William, and Edna Mae Spence with Skippy the dog, 1936, c/o Beverly Spence Kirkpatrick |
In 1921, William’s family rented one of the first vacation cabins at Topanga Beach. When the coast highway was raised for a another lagoon bridge in 1933, it walled their Topanga Canyon Lane cabin into what became known as The Gulch, and later The Snake Pit.
In the late 1920s, Catherine somehow lost her orchard. To keep going, she sold the house that she’d bought for William, causing a rift between them, and forcing him to move his family to the beach cabin.
William’s Topanga neighbors helped him find work in the area. Clayton Rust (1886-1974) hired him at his Topanga Service Station and Charles Potter (1882-1956) hired him at Potter’s Store, both located at the Topanga intersection. William also got a job driving a bus, again probably with the help of Rust, a former bus driver. It may have been the Big Blue Bus, which started in Santa Monica in 1928.
However, the Spences weren’t out of trouble yet. In 1929, they suffered their most devastating loss when 14-year-old Howard died from diabetes. That same year, the Great Depression began.
To restore stability, William created a motel business called Spence’s Cabins by taking over the house next door, subdividing it into six units, and building an arched sign that joined the properties. He beautified the grounds with canna lilies and palms, and planted fruit trees to help feed his family like peaches, figs, bananas, and of course avocados… some of which were still being enjoyed by residents many decades later. For Depression-era meat, he raised rabbits because they bred quickly, and he could make a profit by selling some.
The children got through the hard time by focusing on school.
Edna Mae, in particular, immersed herself in activities at Madison Elementary School and Lincoln Junior High in Santa Monica. She played the Onion in a play about vegetables, helped recreate a Native American village, and managed a playground sports club. She was awarded certificates for her writing skills and her attendance record, not missing a single day or even being late for a whole semester. Later, she married a popular State Beach lifeguard and volleyball player named Nathan “Nate” Shargo (1910-2007), and moved to the Pacific Palisades.
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| Thomas Spence, c.1930, c/o Beverly Spence Kirkpatrick |
Thomas studied art at Woodbury University in downtown LA, excelling at velvet paintings of cowboys, bullfighters, and island girls. At Topanga Beach, he fixed up a boat he named “Popeye,” and motored around the bay with his best friend Jake Fields (1913-1999), a talented sailor who already raced yachts in his teens. Jake’s mother was Lillian Fields (1883-1941), who at different times ran Cooper’s Camp and Elkhorn Camp.
In 1931, Thomas crossed paths with another young sailor named Frank Chapman, 22, who turned out to be a pirate. “The spirit of Old John Silver must have shuddered over [Frank’s] clumsiness,” however, because while trying to tow away a boat moored offshore, his own boat’s propeller became tangled in fishing nets. Thomas saw Frank’s boat spinning in circles, and not understanding the situation, he paddled out in a canoe to offer help. Frank asked to be taken ashore instead, and then ran away.
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| Thomas Spence’s boat “Popeye,” 1931, c/o Beverly Spence Kirkpatrick |
Thomas studied art at Woodbury University in downtown LA, excelling at velvet paintings of cowboys, bullfighters, and island girls. At Topanga Beach, he fixed up a boat he named “Popeye,” and motored around the bay with his best friend Jake Fields (1913-1999), a talented sailor who already raced yachts in his teens. Jake’s mother was Lillie Fields (1883-1941), who at different times managed Cooper’s Camp and Elkhorn Camp.
In 1931, Thomas crossed paths with another young sailor named Frank Chapman, 22, who turned out to be a pirate. “The spirit of Old John Silver must have shuddered over [Frank’s] clumsiness,” however, because while trying to tow away a boat moored offshore, his own boat’s propeller became tangled in fishing nets. Thomas saw Frank’s boat spinning in circles, and not understanding the situation, he paddled out in a canoe to offer help. Frank asked to be taken ashore instead, and then ran away.
The fishermen were angry about their broken nets and called Malibu Constable Harland McNabb (1888-1962), who “nabbed” Frank farther on down the coast highway. It was later learned that Frank’s “only known address was the Pacific Ocean,” and that he’d stolen his boat in Wilmington two days earlier.
Thomas moved to his own cabin on Valley View Dr. in Topanga. He worked as a Big Blue Bus driver, and learned to fly planes in his free time. Later, he got a job at the aerospace company Northrop.
In 1936, Thomas married Roberta Robirds (1918-1998), a classmate of Edna Mae, and moved to Santa Monica. Roberta’s distant cousins, Oby Robirds (1903-1967) and his partially blind sister Isabell (b.1908), had been neighbors of the Spences on Topanga Lane. Roberta made Thomas give up his pilots license after they had their first child, Beverly (b.1938), followed by Robert (b.1941), Richard (b.1943), and Donna (b.1948).
Beverly lives in Irvine today, and remembers visiting her grandparents at Topanga Beach. Part of the fun was being able to stay in one of the cabins. She enjoyed humming songs to Florence, who could quickly pick them up on the piano. In the backyard, she saw a clothesline being used to stretch rabbit skins. And walking along the creek to the beach, she was spooked by the water snakes in the lagoon.
Like many motels, Spence’s Cabins attracted a few sketchy characters.
One was Horace Hurd (1917-1987), who got too drunk while celebrating his brother’s arrival and began fighting with his wife Ann. Thomas tried to intervene, but was pummeled to the ground, while Beverly watched in horror. Fortunately, Thomas’s injuries weren’t serious, but Ann had to be taken to the emergency room for her elbow. Horace and Ann later divorced, yet Horace managed to rise from this low point to become a beloved sportswriter in Oregon known as “Red” Hurd.
Another problem tenant was Jacqueline Henninger, 34, who was stealing valuables from beach houses during parties. She was finally caught after she asked to use the phone of Louis L. Golden (b.1889), on Old Malibu Road, and left with his “17 jewel wrist watch.” Her baffling denial of the theft was that she’d only taken the watch as a “keepsake.”
In 1938, a major flood swept the area.
Monday night numerous homes were flooded with several feet of water, but the worst damage centered at the Spence’s cabins, which were swung completely around and half buried in deposits of sand and debris.
—“Malibu Brevities,” Evening Outlook, 1938-03-02
This was followed by two fires in the same year. The first was caught early when William rushed into the smoking house of Greek fisherman John Fonducas and rescued his housekeeper, who had fallen asleep with a cigarette. The second was the big Topanga fire, which damaged Spence’s Cabins, and destroyed “nearly 50 homes and cabins at Topanga Beach.”
Miraculously, by 1940, the Spence family was back on solid footing. According to Marion, William’s business had grown to include 32 units, which suggests that he may also have been co-managing the Topanga Beach Auto Court with Swiss-born John P. Amacher (1895-1979), who later became a politician in Oregon.
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| Thomas Spence's children Beverly and Richard, at the the former site of Spence's Cabins in 2019, c/o Beverly Spence Kirkpatrick |
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This is an excerpt from the book Topanga Beach: A History, 1820s-1920s. Author Pablo Capra is a former Lower Topanga resident, and continues to preserve the history of that neighborhood on his website, www.brasstackspress.com, and as a board member of the Topanga Historical Society, www.topangahistoricalsociety.org.
