One of a Kind

Westways cover artist Merv Corning enjoyed a long and varied career in California

By Matthew W. Roth
Westways



Merv Corning's watercolor painting, Wood Plank Road, appeared on the June 1975 cover of Westways.

Merv Corning (1926–2006) was a California original. Not just because he was born and raised in Santa Ana and spent his entire working life in the state. Not just because his most famous paintings, depicting World War I aviation and the stars of the National Football League, connect with California’s aircraft industry and its sporting heritage. And not just because his favorite leisure activity, riding his Harley-Davidson Softail, drew him, like millions of others, to the scenic roadways of the Golden State. Subtler, deeper factors inextricably linked Corning with California in the second half of the 20th century.

Merv Corning approached life with an unbridled sense of possibility. He had no formal training, yet he never wavered from his commitment to work as an artist. He started at age 13 as a helper at a Santa Ana sign shop, painting signs on the sides of buildings. The boss would rig a scaffold, apply a chalk outline, and leave Corning with a supply of paint and a small color original for guidance.

In long days on the scaffold, Corning resolved to become an artist. After serving in the merchant marine during World War II, he got a job producing pen-and-ink drawings for newspaper ads.

In a series of jobs at ad agencies and department stores, Corning learned illustration techniques, layout, copywriting, and other tasks connected with commercial art. He never forgot those lessons. “There’s a great purity to this art,” he said, recalling his days drawing for print ads. “You only had black and white to create dimension.”

In 1953, Corning joined Studio Artists Inc., a consortium of Los Angeles artists who provided commercial design services. In 1959, one client, Leach Corporation, asked for a series of paintings of World War I airplanes; over the next 11 years, Corning produced 43 paintings on that theme. They have been displayed at the Pentagon, acquired by the Air Force Archives, and reprinted countless times in aviation journals and general-interest publications.

Corning’s association with the National Football League began in 1967 and lasted for the rest of his life. He painted posters, program covers, and the Most Valuable Player portrait from each Super Bowl. In 1981, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., hung his portrait of Johnny Unitas in a show on sports heroes, and the 1992 Super Bowl game program called him “football’s preeminent artist.”

Although most acclaimed for his work in military and macho themes, Corning’s keen observations of nature and his interest in the texture of everyday places reveal an empathy for life’s quiet moments, too. His ability to evoke the mood or feeling of a landscape attracted Westways to his art. His first cover, in October 1965, delivered on this promise; it depicts two fishermen at dawn, the sun illuminating far-off peaks, the nearby hills still in shadow. The 16 covers Westways commissioned from Corning all shimmer with immediacy, with the alchemy of a medium that can seduce us into thinking that we are in his pictures.

The Westways covers helped Corning develop a distinctive creative vision, and he left Studio Artists in 1968 to concentrate on his own art. Throughout an enormously productive career, Corning never lost focus on the job at hand—the current painting—and he took joy from his work. Though frequently invited to serve as a judge for juried shows, he disliked rejecting anyone, and the notes he left for other artists express his thoughts about his chosen field with a candid eloquence. This excerpt from one such note captures his belief about artists and their place in the world:

The very fact that we all are artists means we possess a sensitivity beyond most normal people, and for that we should be grateful. It’s not about winning or losing. It’s creating, and it is special, and we are special.

Merv Corning self-portrait 2000



Matthew W. Roth is the Auto Club’s historian. He would like to thank Tula Corning for access to her late husband’s archives.

Examining the Wheels of History

How Two Auto Club Employees Push the Past Into the Future

by Jay Berman
Los Angeles Downtown News

Morgan Yates (left), the corporate archivist of the Automobile Club of Southern California, and Matthew Roth, the club's historian and archives manager, at the Auto Club's Downtown building. Photo by Gary Leonard.

A century ago, when the Automobile Club of Southern California was still young, its employees pointed the way for the area's earliest drivers by installing directional signs along the largely unpaved roadsides.

"These people had an awareness of the impact of their work and they saved things," recalled Matthew Roth, the Auto Club's historian and archives manager, in a recent interview at the organization's landmark Downtown headquarters building.

"They kept a record of what they were doing, and they defined their mission as to do things that weren't being done.

"Here was this new technology determining how people would travel, how cities would be built. There were functions that the Auto Club identified to ease the relationship between this transforming technology and society. So they did a bunch of things that were later done by the public sector, including the directional signs and the issuing of license plates before there was a DMV."

Today, with the club in its 108th year, it is still, in many ways, pointing the way for residents with its historical and educational programs. One of these was through its participation as sponsor and co-producer of Sunshine & Shadow: In Search of Jake Lee, a retrospective of the late painter's work which closed April 13 at the Chinese American Museum.

Another is through a partnership in which it provides historic photos from Auto Club archives - there are more than 30,000 in the collection - to Angels Walk L.A., which displays them on kiosks adjacent to such Downtown Los Angeles sites as Olvera Street, the Bradbury Building, the Million Dollar Theatre and the Grand Central Market.

Still another example is the organization's involvement in the UCLA History-Geography Project, a partnership between the Auto Club and the university in which about two dozen teachers from Southern California meet for a week each summer at the 1923 Auto Club building. The teachers study photos, maps and travel literature from the club's collection and they incorporate them into a lesson plan to be taught in the next school year.

Roth, who has worked on the project with colleague Morgan Yates, the club's corporate archivist, since it began in 2005, said its success in increasing geographic literacy is based on the fact that "you can't understand a place without understanding its time."

The program began when secondary school teacher Mary Miller contacted Roth and Yates. It started in UCLA's Geography Department, then was expanded and moved into the School of Education. Miller was joined by Emma Hipolito, also a secondary school teacher. Today, they are co-directors of the program.

"The goal is to increase the quality of inner-city education," Roth said. "The premise is that once you open a mind, it's really hard to close it."

The program has involved teachers from the LAUSD, as well as Pomona, Glendale, Burbank, Pasadena and private schools. "They get a solid week of training from the highly theoretical - how we think about urban areas and history - and a lot of hands-on practical training. By the end of the week, they are supposed to be pretty far along with their lesson plan," Roth said.

Community Involvement

The program gives Roth, who has a doctorate in urban history, the kind of community involvement he was looking for when he joined the organization in 1995.

"I was given a list of goals," he recalled. "One of them was to accomplish something like this. It was a lot of effort, but we responded to individual queries from teachers. But it was one at a time. Then, a teacher from Fremont High School allowed us to come in. We saw the implementation of her lesson plan - showing the transformation of economic geography, where factories were and what they made and how they transformed daily lives.

"It was one of my best days ever in working for the Auto Club, seeing kids dealing with material we had provided."

Roth is an expert on the transportation history of Southern California. While he directs the club's involvement in museum exhibits, such as the retrospective on painter Lee, his duties overlap those of Yates, the archivist. Yates, who joined the club in 1999, coordinates the Angels Walk photos, and he writes a monthly column on historic sites for Westways, the club's magazine since 1934.

Recent columns have focused on such Downtown sites as the old Los Angeles County Courthouse and the Times building, along with the nearby KFI building on Vermont Avenue, the Bimini Baths, also on Vermont, and Mount Washington.

Roth and Yates also are involved in the organization's relationship with news media and with film and TV production. "We still have a public affairs function," Roth said. "There is frequent demand to illustrate stories. The Daily News did a series last year on a retrospective of the San Fernando Valley's early history, and we supplied several photos for that."

In the area of television and film production, Roth and Yates have "worked on everything from documentaries to TV news to big studios," Yates said. "We'll get a call from someone who wants photographs or old maps," he said, "and we see what we have with an idea of incorporating it into their work."

While some films might be looking - as Yates said - "for historical accuracy," others are in search of what Roth called "the semblance of historical accuracy. They're in the business of creating illusions," he said. "They might want to know what a traffic signal might have looked like at a certain time."

Landmark Figures

Despite the group's work and programs geared toward tomorrow, many Auto Club members still associate the organization with its early posting of signs, issuance of license plates, the first road maps and, for a time, even its own theft bureau, which employed detectives to track down members' stolen cars.

"It was 1915," Roth said. "Vehicle theft was becoming a problem for the first time. The Auto Club would look for members' cars on its own, and also give awards to police officers who caught auto thieves."

The names of several early club employees have survived the decades, and Roth and Yates recall their accomplishments fondly. Attorney Galen Davis, for example, was a 30-year employee who was a key figure in the standardizing of traffic codes throughout the state.

Then there was Ernest East, who was with the Auto Club from 1921, when such automotive brands as Franklins, Durants and Hudsons shared Southern California roads, until 1957, when the Volkswagen bug was becoming popular.

In 1928, East, who eventually became chief engineer and served on the Los Angeles Traffic Commission, was concerned about traffic safety at Sunset Junction, where Sunset and Hollywood boulevards intersect with four other streets.

"There were six lanes of traffic plus two rail lines," Roth said. "There were no signals. It was a very dangerous intersection, no lane markers, no stop signs. Plus, pedestrians were crossing the street to get out to the trolleys. East put a 16-millimeter camera onto a pole, let it run and analyzed the data."

Roth cautions against calling East's move a predecessor to traffic cameras. "He was just documenting conditions as a way of influencing public policy," Roth said. "There were some traffic signals in the city, but they weren't everywhere. What he did was geared toward safety, toward transportation; where we needed parking, where we needed bridges.

"That's what he was filming for. That's what he did."

Mountains of problems for travelers

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA HISTORY

It wasn't until well into the 20th century that engineers finally made the journey between Los Angeles and Bakersfield fairly easy and safe.

By Cecilia Rasmussen, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

Whether they've taken the Ridge Route, Highway 99 and Newhall Pass or Interstate 5, for more than 150 years travelers making their way between Los Angeles and Bakersfield through the San Gabriel and Tehachapi mountains have found the route a pain in the neck.

The current 40-mile stretch of the Golden State Freeway, which includes the Grapevine, is plenty steep and winding, but drivers should know that it is a big improvement on its predecessors.

It is the fourth in a series of highways cut through the rugged mountains. Entrepreneurs forged the first route, in 1854, by digging a 60-foot-deep, 240-foot-long gash on the eastern edge of the Santa Susana Mountains called the Newhall Pass, where the current Golden State and Antelope Valley freeways join.

Beale's Cut, as it came to be called, created a narrow, steep passage for horses, stagecoaches and foot traffic, and is credited with spurring the development of Los Angeles.

But the first automobile to cross the mountains, in 1902, had to travel upward in reverse to keep gasoline flowing to the engine -- and the cut's 30% grade was too steep for early cars.

Beale's Cut can still be found between Sierra Highway and the Antelope Valley Freeway, south of Clampitt Road. It was all but abandoned in 1910 when the 435-foot-long Newhall Tunnel was dug about a quarter of a mile west, with an incline of only about 7%.

Still, even the tunnel didn't solve the problem. It was too narrow and traffic jammed up at one end. Meanwhile, after voters in 1910 approved an $18-million state highway bond issue, California's engineers began planning a shorter, more direct route over the mountains, one that would save travelers 58 miles.

The 48-mile Ridge Route opened in 1915 at Castaic Junction, about five miles northwest of the Newhall Pass. It had 697 curves.

The Ridge Route was considered a major feat of highway engineering -- the first modern highway directly linking Los Angeles with the San Joaquin Valley -- and it helped link Northern and Southern California.

Horse-drawn graders had carved out the 20-foot-wide dirt road that zigzagged along the ridge tops so that it resembled a giant grapevine. But the 6.5-mile "Grapevine" segment of the route, from Fort Tejon to the San Joaquin Valley, had already been so named for a different reason by Spanish Lt. Francisco Ruiz, who, after hacking his way through thick patches of Cimarron grapevines in 1806, called the area Cañon de las Uvas, or Grapevine Canyon.

In 1915, the Automobile Club of Southern California called the Ridge Route "the last word in scientific highway building." But four years later, about the time the paving was completed, the club wrote that because of the route's "tortuous" curves, steep grades and sharp drop-offs, it was "potentially one of the most dangerous in the world."

A maximum speed limit of 15 mph was supposed to provide safety. But scores of drivers ignored the limit and their cars tumbled into the canyons below. For those who made the trip safely, the Sandberg Hotel, built by Norwegian-born rancher Harald Sandberg, was a welcome sight near the top.

In 1921, the fancy Lebec Hotel opened in Kern County, about five miles north of the Sandberg, with 300 registered guests. It became a famed hideaway for such celebrities as Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Clara Bow, Buster Keaton and Bugsy Siegel.

Charles Lindbergh landed his plane in a wheat field near the Lebec Hotel in 1929 and spent time there experimenting with flying a glider. His wife, Anne, was quite fond of the hotel's chocolate malts, according to Harrison Scott, author of "Ridge Route: The Road That United California."

The hotel -- and the town that grew up around it -- got its name from a carving in the trunk of a massive oak: "Peter le Beck Killed by a Bear Oct. 17 1837."

Depression-era migrants flocking to California's fields in overloaded jalopies thought of the trip over the mountains as a route to a better life.

In "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck describes the Joad family's brutal trek, one taken by many of those Great Plains refugees known as Okies.

Steinbeck described the moment when the Joads' car crested the top of a mountain road, and they saw the Central Valley:

"Al jammed on the brake and stopped in the middle of the road, and, 'Jesus Christ! Look!' he said. The vineyards, the orchards, the great flat valley, green and beautiful, the trees set in rows, and the farm houses."

He could have been talking about the view from the Ridge Route, or the one from Highway 99, which opened in 1933. Highway 99, or the Ridge Alternate, was significantly shorter and much less curvy, though still steep and treacherous.

It cut the eight-hour Ridge Route drive in half time-wise, but still was the site of many a breakdown and much discomfort.

"In 1954, I drove my 1931 Willys Roadster up the Castaic Grade and on through the more modern Ridge Route [Highway 99], much of which is now covered with Pyramid Lake," retired veterinarian Charles Jenner of Los Alamitos said in a recent e-mail. "That was a tough drive as the Willys kept overheating." It took him two days to get from Los Angeles to Davis, he said.

In 1970, today's eight-lane, 40-mile section of Interstate 5 was completed.

Few people remembered the old roads that had gone before -- at least until Scott came along.

In 1991, the retired Torrance phone company engineer decided to drive the old Ridge Route for the first time since he was a teenager. He soon launched a one-man crusade to get a 17.6-mile stretch through U.S. Forest Service property from Castaic to Gorman onto the National Register of Historic Places. He succeeded in 1997. He also published his own history of the road.

"Only foundations, walls and steps are left from places like the Tumble Inn and Sandberg Inn," Scott said in a recent interview. The Lebec Hotel, he said, burned down in 1971.

Scott and a nonprofit group that he founded, the Ridge Route Preservation Organization, are working to maintain the roadway, which he describes as "poor and decaying." The group holds monthly work parties, helping the Forest Service clean drains full of dirt and debris.

The volunteers have put up nearly a dozen stone monuments paying tribute to area pioneers and colorful sites.

Scott is working to gain federal Scenic Byway status for the Ridge Route. It would be, he said, "just another notch on the gun belt that would allow our organization to build a museum and parking areas along the route."

They're All Over the Map

COLUMN ONE
The Auto Club's intrepid cartographers traverse the rural Southwest cataloging the uncharted features of a changing landscape.

John O'Dell
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

VIRGIN MOUNTAINS, Ariz. — Shane Henry steered his truck along a dusty road, emerging from a steep, cool pine forest and dead-ending on the edge of a precipice. The uncharted spot provided a breathtaking, 30-mile-wide panoramic view of the Virgin River Gorge, stretching northeast into Utah.

For Henry, a field cartographer for the Automobile Club of Southern California, it was a great day of discovery. After finding the overlook, he spotted ruins of a forgotten century-old cattle ranch near a pair of freshwater springs. Between overlook and ruins, he had also found 10 miles of a drivable dirt road. None are on the Auto Club's current "Indian Country" road map, but all his finds will be on a new version due out in two years.

Despite the popularity of Global Positioning System navigation and earth-blanketing satellite photography, there are still places few have seen and roads few have traveled. Henry and his senior road-mapping colleague, John Skinner, are helping to find them.

The duo of Skinner and Henry doesn't have the same poetic ring as Lewis and Clark. But 200 years after the famous explorers began their mapping trip through the American West, Skinner and Henry are doing much the same work, traveling the rugged backcountry of the Southwest, looking for something new.

The two explorers are a rarity in the modern world of mapmaking. Rand McNally Co. and the various AAA groups are the primary publishers of U.S. road maps. Most full-time field researchers work on roadways in urban and suburban areas.

Skinner and Henry "are probably the only ones in the U.S. doing what they do" with backcountry mapping, says Bill Scharf, head of the Auto Club's cartography division. The Los Angeles-based club publishes 90 different maps and distributes 7 million road maps annually. It tries to update them every other year.

Every dirt road and trail shown on them will eventually be driven and rated by the Auto Club's field cartographers. But they rarely work together.

"There's too much work to do to team up," Skinner says.

They spend 10 months a year on the road, racking up about 60,000 miles each in four-wheel-drive trucks. The Auto Club provides the trucks, which are adorned with the club's logo and a banner: "Map Unit."

Their territory is vast. Skinner and Henry cover the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevada, rural regions of 13 Southern California counties and all of Baja California. They also map the Four Corners area — a 130,000-square-mile region surrounding the point where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah all touch — which is included in the club's celebrated Indian Country map.

That map is a fixture in tourists' cars and ranchers' pickups alike. Its accuracy is why "everyone around here uses it," says Ed Chamberlin, curator of the Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site museum on the Navajo Reservation in Ganado, Ariz.

Novelist Tony Hillerman, whose mysteries featuring Navajo Tribal Police Lt. Joe Leaphorn have brought the Four Corners region alive for millions of readers, has also made the map a key part of his fictional cop's crime-fighting arsenal.

Henry, 42, a former actor, has been on the job for three years; Skinner, 59, is a trained geographer who has been riding trail for the Auto Club for 22 years.

John Skinner reviews a map while working near Barstow. (John O’Dell / LAT)

Skinner quit in the '90s and moved to Arizona for three years in pursuit of a romance that ultimately failed. When the heartbreak healed, he asked for his old job back and hit the road again.

"This job is not good for relationships," says Skinner, who has been engaged three times but has never married.

Skinner and Henry work in trucks loaded with GPS navigation systems and highly detailed federal topographical maps to trace their tracks. Backseats and cargo areas are filled with piles of extra maps, cellphones, tents and food. They carry jacks, flares, survival kits, tire pumps, extra fuel lines, transmission oil and fan belts.

As they drive, Skinner and Henry continually check special odometers, accurate to within one-thousandth of a mile, to verify that the distances already listed on maps are precise. They also rate road conditions to ensure that routes haven't been washed out by flash floods or altered by construction. Their discoveries may include stone quarries, mines, washes, overlooks, abandoned towns and a dizzying variety of unpaved roads.

Dirt roads on AAA maps are rated from graded and gravel-topped thoroughfares to badly eroded and rutted tracks best suited for four-wheel-drive enthusiasts.

"We want to make sure that if a mom in her Volvo decides to take one of these roads, she'll be able to make it," Henry says.

On the job, Skinner and Henry usually sleep in motels, not tents. Still, notes Denis Cosgrove, a cultural geography professor at UCLA, the two are throwbacks who resemble "the early topographers, trekking out into inaccessible places and trying to reduce a part of the world to a page on a map."

The job has its perils.

Skinner and Henry have had encounters with mountain lions and rattlesnakes. And they give wide berth to desert compounds littered with the glass vials and metal cooking pots that mark the illegal drug-making operations of modern outlaws.

The mapmakers say their work requires a big helping of self-confidence. Henry was on a rough dirt road in the mountains northwest of Lake Powell in Utah when he saw the road ahead disappearing between some rocks. Usually he would get out and walk the route to see where it went before proceeding, but it was late and he was tired, so he just drove on.

As Henry passed the curve it turned into a narrow, terrifying stretch made up of loose rock rubble with a 200-foot drop on one side. He kept going, in part because an Auto Club map indicated that the road led across the mountain summit.

But about 200 yards from the top he found himself trapped. The road's loose rock had turned into a series of 18-inch-high granite ledges.

"Those steps were just a little too high for my truck tires to roll over," Henry says.

He couldn't make a U-turn because the road was too narrow. One option was to back downhill, but he faced a mile-long path of scree with the long drop on one side. So he decided to keep going up. He exited the truck very carefully, so he wouldn't slip off the precipice, then gathered rocks to build a little ramp so he could drive over the step. Then every 30 feet or so he stopped because of another granite step and had to build a new ramp. It took Henry four hours to drive 200 yards.

"This is a good example of why we drive all these roads," he says. On the older map it showed as a rough but usable dirt road across the summit. "But it had deteriorated so badly it was impassable for most people, so I took it out" for the new map, he says.

Skinner and Henry can trace their jobs back to 1905, when AAA published its first road map and helped pioneer the industry at a time when motorists were few and marked roads fewer. In those days, maps were basically logbooks written to describe trips with descriptions of key geographic spots, gas stations, historic buildings, river bends, anything to guide drivers.

Later, auto clubs and other promoters invented names for roads and posted road signs for travelers to follow. But there was no uniformity. The same road could be called one name by a city, another by a real estate developer who had published his own map and something else by a local travel and touring club.

It wasn't until 1916, when Rand McNally started its own route numbering system, that travelers heading south from Boston to Florida could follow a route that retained the same name from state to state — as long as they used Rand McNally maps. Finally, in 1924, the federal government adopted a uniform numbering system so that major travel routes would retain their identities across the country.

Both Skinner and Henry took circuitous routes to land their current jobs.

Skinner was a ship navigator in the Navy, then earned a degree in geography from Cal State Fresno. He worked four years for a local AAA office as a tourist counselor, offering maps and advice on trips. When a job opened up as a field cartographer in 1979, he took it.

Shane Henry inspects a U.S. Geological Survey marker. (John O’Dell / LAT)

Henry grew up in rural Oregon and earned a master of fine arts degree in classical theater at the University of Alabama. He spent 15 years traveling the country as an actor and dancer in regional theaters. He met Skinner by chance when Skinner was on a mapping trip in Los Padres National Forest and was fixing a flat tire. Henry was out hiking and struck up a conversation. Skinner told him about an opening for another map researcher.

A typical day of mapping covers 30 to 50 miles of dirt roads.

On trips to Baja California and Indian Country, Skinner and Henry often travel for three weeks at time. But the Auto Club requires them to take off one day in seven.

"It can be a real pain when you are out in the middle of nowhere, and the only thing you can do with your day off is sit around a lonely motel or campsite," Henry says.

Although he and Skinner meet plenty of storekeepers, restaurant workers and travelers in their work, their return visits are so far apart that friendships rarely form.

"You do have to like to work by yourself," Henry says.

Yet of the 10 field cartographers the Southern California club has hired in the last 35 years, only one has quit for good to pursue a more normal lifestyle. That was Dan Goodwin, now a 44-year-old environmental health and safety manager for a manufacturer in Pasadena.

In 1986, with a newly minted geography degree from UC Santa Barbara, Goodwin thought the job would be perfect, but eventually the loneliness got to him.

"I found myself wishing that I had someone with me on those road trips to share it with," he says. Goodwin quit in 1989.

The club prides itself on the accuracy of its maps, but errors do occur. Sometimes a field researcher fails to properly record the distance between road junctions, or omits a creek or gives a bad road a better rating than it deserves.

"Every once in a while we'll get a call or a letter from someone who took a car or a Winnebago too far down a road and got stuck or found that the road was a lot nastier than the map suggested," says Jim Kendall, the local Auto Club's map research chief. So when Skinner or Henry makes a rare appearance at the club's Costa Mesa office, he is often handed a pile of complaints to check out before the next map is printed.

Sometimes the cartographers find the mistakes on their own.

On a trip near Capitol Reef National Park in southern Utah last year, Henry drove across a little creek and stopped for lunch. Then a sudden thunderstorm hit and dumped enough water to swell the creek into a torrent. A creek that had been 6 inches deep was now 3 feet deep, and it would have flooded Henry's engine had he tried to drive back. But his Auto Club map showed he was near a dirt road leading to a highway, so he took it.

Unfortunately, the map failed to show that the road crossed the same creek again before reaching the highway. When he arrived at the second crossing, the water was deep and running fast. But Henry carries a pair of 6-foot boards in his pickup for just such emergencies, and he spent several hours piling up rocks so he could lay the boards over them as a makeshift bridge.

After driving across, Henry says, "I saw a homemade sign someone had put up that said, 'Creek may rise without warning.' "

That second crossing is now on the Auto Club's Indian Country map.