About Us

A Short Summary of the Early History of the Santa Monica Meeting

At the prompting of Edith Sperry and Nina Heaton, who had been members of Orange Grove Meeting in Pasadena, the first meeting for worship of the Santa Monica Friends Group was held Sunday afternoon Oct.6, 1946 at 5:30 P.M. in a classroom in the Trinity Baptist Church at 10th and California Streets. It was attended by 26 persons.

On November 17th of that same year, the group held its first business meeting at the home of Edith Sperry.  The following officers were installed: Edith Sperry, clerk; Katherine Franz, secretary; Charlotte Braunsteiner, treasurer; Nina Heaton, hospitality and publicity.  There was $1.00 in the treasury.

For the next several years the group met for worship in various churches, the YM and YWCA's (it was too noisy) and in the homes of the members. Meetings for business followed pot luck dinners in members’ homes.

By 1950 attendance had dwindled and an experiment was tried for a while of having a half hour social time followed by a half hour meeting for worship.

By 1952, when meeting for worship was held at Edith Sperry's new and larger home at 1907 12th Street (near Pico), the group felt more settled and they applied for membership in the Pacific Yearly Meeting.  On Dec. 13th of that year we were accepted as a full-fledged meeting with 15 adult members and 3 children.

In mid 1953, a newly formed children's meeting was held at Art and Ethel Rose's home in Mar Vista. It was Ethel who also proposed that we issue a monthly newsletter- Friendly Notes- and she became our first editor.

In 1955 a long relationship was started with the Seventh Day Adventist Church, which was and is a black congregation at 20th and Delaware.

(during our discussion I asked Betty Smith if it had been considered somewhat controversial -- this being back in the mid 50's -- having a white congregation utilizing a black church.  It was unusual, she said, there wasn't a lot of interaction between blacks and whites at the time, and then went on to share the anecdote of her husband, Myron Smith and another prominent member of our meeting, Gordon Goodhart, helping the Seventh Day Adventist congregation paint their church and getting a bit of a cultural education in the process.  Myron and Gordon, both possessing well developed scientific/engineering minds and habits, learned that it was possible to work at a slower pace, have fun in the process and still get the job done.)

Since the Seventh Day Adventists worship on Saturday, our meeting was able to rent rooms for both worship and children’s classes on Sunday morning.  Family meetings were started at this time, held before the meeting for worship.

(Betty remembered these as times for the meeting’s children and their parents to spend some worshipful quality time together and perhaps to sing a song or tell a story.)

In 1958 we had 33 children enrolled in the Sunday School. There were 18 adult members and a similar number of attenders.  There was not enough room at the Seventh Day Adventist church for all of the kids classes, so the nursery and kindergarten groups met at Tom and Pat Sciutto’s home.  In Oct 1959 the meeting for worship again was held in Edith Sperry's home, while the children's classes continued at the church.

The desire to have meeting house of our own, so kids and parents could meet at the same location at the same time, had grown quite strong.  It was time to have a home of our own.

The buying and the fundraising.

In 1956, with an eye toward a future time when the meeting could have its own home, Edith Sperry and Marianna Read combined their money and bought two adjacent lots on Harvard St.  The purchase price of 1440-1442 Harvard St., on which stood a duplex, was about $16,000.  1444 Harvard was an avocado grove with a small cottage in the back.  Its selling price was about $13,000.  Edith and Marianna paid $7000 as a down payment, the balance to be paid off within 12 years, at $200 a month. The tenants of the duplex and of the cottage were each paying about $65 a month rent.

In the Sept 1958 meeting for business, having a year considering different options, the meeting made the decision to adopt a specific plan of action.  The meeting would buy the two lots from Edith and Marianna, at the same price that they had paid for it.  This would have to happen in stages, as money became available.  But the initial plan was to first buy the 1444 lot, with the avocado grove and cottage, and when that was paid off, to build a modest $15,000 building, with the primary concern being classrooms for the many kids in Sunday school.  When further money became available, the 1440-1442 lot with the duplex would be purchased, which would make possible a future expansion of the building.  Marianna Read offered her share in the lots as a gift to the meeting. Edith Sperry was to be repaid on a monthly basis.

A decision having been reached, serious fund-raising activities began, some becoming annual events that were to continue for the next several years. Among the many and varied fundraisers were a luncheon at Helms bakery, rummage sales, candy sales, cake sales, sales of Quaker date books, bazaars, hootenannys and the Topanga Banjo and Fiddle Contest.

(Margaret Zumwinkle related how two guitar-playing, folk music loving members of our meeting Margot Slocum and Peg Benepe, created the Topanga Banjo and Fiddle Contest as a means to raise money for our buying-the-land-and-building-the-building-fund.  It was held initially at the Topanga Canyon home of members Ian and Jane Thierman, the same (I am told) wonderful property where for many years our meeting had an annual summer picnic.  This was the most profitable of the many fundraisers, but as Lee Storey recounted, from her experience with the event in the late 1960's, it was a fundraiser that required the participation of most of the meeting members in order to pull it off.  In later years, after the meeting house was built, the proceeds from the event went to the AFSC and other helping organizations.

Jumping ahead a bit in our narrative, once we had our meeting house, Margot Slocum was again helpful in securing needed funds. Margot taught guitar classes through UCLA extension. She was able to use the meeting house as her classroom, and the room rental fee paid by UCLA went toward our monthly utility and maintenance bills.

Betty Smith remembered spending one day in a kitchen with other members and making 36 apple pies for a bazaar.  It was also related that our meeting engaged in a ticket "scalping" fundraiser.  The Bay Cities Jewish Center (26th and Santa Monica Blvd) would yearly stage a play and have several performances, as a fundraiser of its own. Our meeting arranged to buy all the tickets, at $.25 a piece, and sell them to the public at $.75 a ticket.

Apparently in early 1960, Edith Sperry married Jay Morgan, who lived in San Francisco.  In June she resigned as clerk of our meeting, an office she had held for almost all of the preceding 14 years, and moved north.  An illness, apparently cancer, that had started to show itself by the Spring of that year, progressed very rapidly and by August she was very weak in body. She died on August 5, 1960.  She bequeathed to our meeting the proceeds from the sale of her home at 1907 12th Street, about $32,000.  This money, plus the approximately $19,000 the meeting had been able raise during the preceding two years, enabled us to buy both lots, and to build a $50,000 structure large enough for our children's education and worship needs.

Marianna Read, who with Edith had initially purchased the land, and who had given her share as a gift to the meeting, died in January 1962. Neither were to live to see the fruition of what they had initiated, the creation of the meeting's own home.

(Betty related how she and Ruth Kennedy were the executors of Edith's estate and had to see to the leasing and eventual sale of the house, as well as helping to look after Edith's parents, who continued to live for a time in a separate structure in the rear of Edith's 1907 12th St. property.  It took a couple of years before the $32,000 was available for the meeting's use, but the knowledge of this bequest, allowed our meeting to alter its 1958, 3 phase, graduated plan of buying and building, and instead to proceed with the larger building that we have today.

In researching our early years, I had been especially curious to learn as much as I could about Edith Grace Sperry.  The head librarian at Santa Monica College from 1942 until 1960, she was both practical and intellectual; determined and active, but rather reserved--not one to grab the spotlight of attention.  Colin Edward's mother, Mary, who happened to come to meeting for worship on Dec. 2, but couldn't stay for our Adult Ed. discussion, shared with me that , as a teenager in the late 1940's and early 1950's, she attended our meeting and was befriended by Edith.  Mary had no car, and Edith several times went out of her way to drive Mary to events that without Edith, Mary would have had to miss.  The friendship of Edith and our meeting, led to Mary's decision to enroll in a Quaker school, Earlham College in Indiana.

Edith didn't marry until late in life, not until she was 54 years old, and lived for only about 7 months after her marriage.  I had wondered if she and her husband had known of her illness, had known that she only had a few months to live.  Betty Smith, who had visited the comatose Edith at the hospital in San Francisco shortly before Edith's passing, does not believe that Edith knew of her impending sickness at the time she decided to wed.

The building (oh boy, what an endeavor of planning!)

In 1961 we were again meeting in the Seventh Day Adventist Church, with the younger children meeting at the home of Nancy Neely.  The building committee was in full swing with a great expenditure of effort and many, many, hours of discussion and decison.  Architect and builder were hired. Ian Thierman's company cleared the lots, preserving as many of the avocado trees as he could, including two that used to be in our courtyard.  The building was done, a final work party held on Dec. 8, 1962; the first business meeting December 12th and the first meeting for worship Dec. 16th, 1962.

Esther Schou shared a coincidence: Alvin Dingman, the architect, would later become Esther Schou's daughter's father-in-law. According to Betty Smith, Alvin Dingman also played an important role as an occasional facilitator/ mediator for the building committee members who were at times at odds with one another concerning the myriad decisions and choices to be made about design and furnishings.  Peg Benepe Engwall, now living in Anacortes, WA, related to me that the choice of an outside light fixture was particularly problematic, but thankfully, in Peg's words, 'left none of us in lasting enmity so that a rival meeting house had to be built across the street."  Jane Thierman, who now lives in Santa Rosa remembers the process as being similar to a family that goes through a difficult time but emerges stronger, and more understanding and tolerant of one another at the end.

The chronology of our meeting having arrived at the opening of our Meeting House in Dec. 1962, our Adult Ed. presentation ended with our panelists remembering some of our memorable members.

The much-loved Kennedy sisters, Ruth and Elsie. Birthright Quakers, born in New Jersey but educated in England. Trained in nursing and education, they loved children and worked with World War I refugees. In later years, as members of our meeting, they would care for the children of our meeting when their parents were out of town, or come and stay for a week to help a mother who had just given birth.  They lived in bungalows on the property of Marianna Read, who herself was a birthright English Quaker and longtime teacher at Santa Monica High School. Dick Zumwinkle, witty, sweet, courageous. Harriet Wendell, flamboyant, theatrical, would help the kids stage marvelous Christmas plays, Parl Welch, wealthy, well-traveled, opinionated; the tireless activist Ian Thierman … and then as the Adult Ed. hour had ended and people had to depart, our assemblage was asked to take a moment of silence to thank those people whom we did not have time to recall, such as Ruth Brown, Larry and Paula Carter, Gordon and Ruth Goodhart, Fran and Jim Goodwin, Herbert and Trauted Gutman, Nina Heaton, Alice Herman, Don McLarty, Pat and Tom Sciutto, Charles and Miriam Swift.

Thanks and acknowledgements to: Esther Schou, Lee Storey, Margaret Zumwinkle and Betty Smith for sharing their memories and knowledge in person; to Margot Slocum, who had planned to attend, but finally could not, due to family commitments; to Ian Thierman, Jane Thierman, Peg Engwall and Pat Sciutto, who shared their memories by phone and email; to Anthony Manousos for critical phone numbers and addresses; Tanna Moontaro for last minute logistical and moral support (photo copying and literally , as they sang in My Fair Lady, "getting me to the church on time") to Eleanor Singleton, archivist at the Santa Monica Community College who provided some basic information on Edith Grace Sperry along with greatly appreciated photographs, including the color photographic portrait, which, coincidentally, is displayed at the SMC library directly across from Eleanor's desk. And finally, to kindred spirit Elsie Kennedy, whose own one and one-quarter page "Short Summary of the Early History of the Santa Monica Meeting" was of great help and from which I copied verbatim wherever I could.

- Curtis Raynor, Dec. 2001