Histories

My father, Homer Ansley, was born in 1895 at Medical Lake, Washington. He became interested in art as a young boy. When he graduated from high school in Washington, he decided to come to San Francisco to study art at the Academy of Fine Arts. He was interested in all sorts of mediums - oils, pastels, ink drawings. He even dabbled in wood blocks and etchings.
My parents married in 1923. My father was an artist working in San Francisco, and I think my mother was working in a clerical job someplace in San Francisco when they met.
My dad had studios in various places in the city over the years. He had one on California Street for awhile. After he and my mother separated in the late 1930s, he moved into a studio in the old Montgomery Block Building, which was subsequently torn down and the Transamerica Pyramid Building now stands. In the early years, Mark Twain had lived in the Montgomery Block and Dr. Sun Yat-sen worked there before going back to China. A number of well-known people had worked and lived in that building.
During the Depression, it was hard for my father to make a living solely as an artist. He and a friend opened a shop where they designed and made lighting fixtures and furniture. They did the fixtures for a number of large mansions in San Francisco and on the Peninsula. Currently, in our dining room there is a chandelier that he originally designed and built for Marjorie Robinson Bryant.
My father is listed in most of the books of early California artists as doing portraits and landscapes and that sort of thing. He worked for Foster & Kleiser making up some of their billboard ads...whatever he could make a buck at during the Depression. He also worked for the WPA supervising and doing some of the work on murals in Coit Tower and other places in San Francisco.
My father was always working so we were never really short of funds. His problem was that he couldn't afford to work at what he most wanted to do - oil paint. His father had been in mining and engineering - an inventor of mining machinery. My dad was always interested in mechanical things. He had sort of a room or shop that the built in the back of our garage.
He also became interested in photography. He used to take moving pictures with a little eight millimeter camera. He would develop and print those pictures. He made the shop sort of like a darkroom. I remember seeing those film strips stretched across the room. We have a lot of old eight millimeter films of the family and the kids, now transferred onto video tape. Someone had a sixteen millimeter camera and they took some beautiful films out in front of the Paul Shoup house when I was less than two years old. It was about 1926. We were probably living in Palo Alto at the time but were over at the Shoup house.
There was a picture of myself with my mother and my dad. They made a little story out of it... (The story goes...) I was wandering around and my nanny was supposed to be taking care of me. this handsome gentleman comes along and my nanny is flirting with him. There I am, all alone, and a car comes along with a man on the running board. He jumps off the running board and grabs me! Off they go, down the road! That was "The Abduction of Gordon Ansley." That was the end of it. They never knew what happened to me! I enjoy watching that scene particularly because of the quality and clarity of the sixteen millimeter film.