User:LoraWSteere/Lora Woodhead Steere

The Three Lives of Lora Woodhead Steere (1888-1984)''' Big text</big ''' Pioneer, Artist, Naturalist, Teacher, and Community Builder' Bold text '

by Robert B. Smith (Idyllwild Area Historical Society)

Early Years Big text

Lora Mae Woodhead was born on May 13, 1888, into a socially prominent Los Angeles family. Five years earlier, her father, Charles B. Woodhead, had married fellow Ohioan Ida Gard, and they already had two daughters, Blanche and Florence, with Charlene still to come. Since migrating to California in 1873, C.B. had built and sold a highly successful wholesale produce business, using the proceeds to invest in a temporarily depressed real estate market and to pursue his new-found interest in raising cattle. In a decision that would indirectly, but significantly, shape the course of Lora’s life, C.B. had bought an interest in a 1200-acre ranch near San Jacinto, on the future site of Mt. San Jacinto Junior College. ''' San Jacinto and Idyllwild, California ''' Big text

This drew C.B. and Ida to explore inland Southern California, and one path they took was a road newly opened to the public from the brand new townsite of Hemet up into Strawberry Valley in the San Jacinto Mountains. By 1890, when the family vacationed there, it was spawning a collection of small inns and campgrounds, including the just-opened “Camp Idylwilde.” During that trip two-year-old Lora experienced her first trek up a mountain, riding the front of her mother’s saddle all the way to San Jacinto Peak.

The natural world, especially as embodied in these mountains, was thus imprinted in Lora’s consciousness nearly from birth and would be reinforced throughout childhood by summer vacations both in Idyllwild and on the San Jacinto ranch, where the family had acquired sole ownership. Love of nature colored her early attraction to art. When she was not lying on the floor of the elegant Woodhead home, copying comics from the Los Angeles Times with colored crayons, she would be in the back yard, fashioning objects from adobe mud.

 High School and College Big text

At the University of Southern California Academy she was a bright student and prominent basketball player, graduating in 1907 along with her older sisters, whose education had been delayed. C.B. and Ida then took the family on a leisurely, year-long world tour, concentrating on Europe, where Lora got her first professional training, studying modeling and sculpture at Schule Reiman in Berlin. Upon their return she entered Stanford University, where her unique blend of interests and talents merged still further. While earning a biology degree in three years, she used laboratory specimens to hone her drawing skills and was invited by a doctoral candidate, Stillman Berry, to illustrate his scientific publications on Cephalopods (squids, octopi, and such). Two decades later, she would still be collaborating with Dr. Berry, by then a distinguished zoologist.

 Marriage and Children Big text

During Lora’s college years, the once-obnoxious older brother of a dear friend from elementary school reentered her life. By graduation she had irretrievably fallen for the now Lt. Thomas Steere of the U. S. Army, introducing a domestic third strand to her life. Lora and Tom married in 1914, honeymooned at Dark Canyon near Idyllwild, and moved to his duty station in Boston Harbor, just as the World War broke out. A chaotic decade of military life ensued, during which the family moved about, Tom rose to the rank of Major, and Lora gave birth to three children, Florence, Charles, and John.

While attentive to her growing family, Lora remained intent on developing her artistic talent. In Boston she studied at the Museum of Fine Arts School. Her children served as models for sculptures. She was ready when opportunity struck, during a 1921 voyage home from the Philippines on an Army transport that carried a number of Senators and Congressmen. Tom arranged for her to do bronze portraits of several, which led to her opening a portraiture studio in Washington for several months, while her family lived at the San Jacinto ranch.

Meanwhile, the elder Woodheads’ ranching business had acquainted them with San Jacinto banker Claudius Emerson. In 1917 Emerson bought the well-known Idyllwild Inn and 1000 adjoining acres, where he envisioned developing much more than a resort. As soon as he offered subdivided lots the Woodheads bought land and built a new cabin on Strawberry Creek, an instant summer magnet for their extended family.

The first few postwar years settled the course of Lora’s life once and for all. The war experience, especially a tour in Siberia, had taken its toll on Tom Steere, and he never could readjust to the noisy chaos of growing children, now numbering four with the addition of James. Lora’s remarkable solution was to urge Tom to divorce her and marry her best friend, Agnes Campbell. Lora remained devoted to Tom, and he bounced in and out of her life into the 1940s, before finally marrying Agnes.

By 1924, Lora had settled with her children into a Hollywood home near her parents, which she had personally designed to serve not only the family, but as a highly productive studio for the next quarter-century. To minimize distractions, she turned the sound-insulated attic '''wholly over to the children.

Art''' Big text

Feeding her passion for nature along with her art and family, Lora in 1927 completed a graduate degree in paleontology from George Washington University, then earned a credential that enabled her to enhance the family income by launching a new career teaching night school sculpture classes in Los Angeles high schools.

Lora believed that her familiarity with nature and biological knowledge enhanced the quality of her sculpture, adding life to the product. Her reputation grew as she exhibited her work throughout the country. In 1932, the owners of Helms Bakery commissioned five life-size bronzes of athletes for the Olympics. Her celebrity commissions eventually would include personages as varied as Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln (her favorite), Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and distant cousin and astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

Beneath the surface, Lora’s life as a devoted single mother raising four children was hardly easy. Normal stresses were compounded by tragedy when a baseball accident killed her teenage son Charles in 1933. (A quarter-century later she would lose son John to a traffic accident.) That she maintained a productive equilibrium stemmed in part from religious faith, but also to a serenity reinforced by the mountains to which she returned regularly.  Bold text 

Idyllwild and ISOMATA

As grandchildren began to absorb her attention after World War II, a seemingly inevitable retreat into retirement halted abruptly one day in 1946, when she met Max Krone. Sought out by Krone both for her artistic repute and her Idyllwild presence, she found herself instantly captivated by him and his dream of a mountain art school. (“I had known him less than an hour before I was making out a check for thousands of dollars,” she recalled.) The next year Ida died—C.B. had passed on in 1935—leaving Lora an inheritance that enabled her to fund one of the first structures at the new Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts (ISOMATA), a sculpture studio. She was a natural choice to pilot ISOMATA’S first class in 1949, a year before the school’s formal launch. That class was held on a freshly poured concrete pad in the shadow of the embryonic campus’s “Great Rock,” which would become a patio wall for the Lora Steere Sculpture Studio.

The ISOMATA opportunity was a crowning touch, knitting together the three lives of Lora Steere, the bedrock forces that made her a unique woman. It gave her an influential creative outlet. It provided a magnet for family and friends. And it solidified her attachment to the natural mountain environment.

Lora made Idyllwild her permanent home, despite wintering with children or friends in the flatlands. When mandatory retirement took her out of the city schools in 1953, she filled the winter void by signing up for long-desired lapidary classes. At the same time, she abandoned the old family cabin in Idyllwild to camp on land she had purchased in a new development for ISOMATA faculty just across Strawberry Creek from the campus. Immediately, she laid plans to build a new home there on Idyllmont, where she would enjoy perhaps her most satisfying years, with nature, art, and human companionship close at hand.

Throughout her sixteen summers at ISOMATA she took no salary, instead directing that students’ tuition be channeled into the sculpture program. Her influence was reflected not only in an early appointment to the ISOMATA Board of Trustees, but also in less formal ways. Her complaint that noise from a newly inaugurated Children’s Program (a program she herself had proposed) was disruptive to nearby sculpture classes brought an instant invitation from Dr. Krone to scout out and select any twenty acres on campus that could handle the program “at a safe distance.” Most significantly, she inspired and guided a steady stream of talented students.

Her home across the creek gave Lora a place for her family to visit and social interaction with literary, hiking, and supper groups. In 1950 she had inaugurated a long-lasting tradition of weekly outdoor potluck suppers that would draw up to 125 friends and associates. When her house was destroyed by fire, family, campus, and community rallied to see it rebuilt. After Agnes Steere died, Lora reunited with Tom. In 1976, at the tender ages of 88 and 92, they remarried, giving her the pleasure of sharing the last two years of his life in her Idyllwild home.

 Tahquitz Peak Big text

The mountains gave Lora an uplifting environment for daily living, from her garden close at hand to the heights overlooking Idyllwild. She thought nothing of hiking to the Tahquitz Peak lookout and back before breakfast. When the inevitable deterioration of even the fittest of bodies left her unable to walk, friends fashioned her wheelchair into a modified sedan chair and carried her to Tahquitz Peak for her last two visits in 1982 and 1983. So, at the age of 95 she earned her 81 and final Squirrel Card, a fitting final achievement of one extraordinary person.

''' End of Life ''' Big text

When her aged body failed at last, hospice workers enabled the family to bring a smile to her face by taking her back to her familiar mountain home for her last few days. There she died on June 17, 1984.

Probably nothing better embodied Lora’s seamless blend of art, nature, and human relationships than her legendary rattlesnake encounters. More than once, be it during an art class’s field trip or outdoor session, the sudden appearance of a rattler instantly became the occasion to broaden children’s education with topics like alertness in the wild, snake behavior (both alive and dead) and anatomy, skinning and mounting, and finally cooking, with the delicious outcome shared by all.

As her grandson John Steere summed it up: “She sculpted lives as consciously and creatively as she molded clay.”

Lora Woodhead Steere (1888-1984)