PASADENA: CALIFORNIA'S SMALL TOWN AMERICA

PASADENA: CALIFORNIA'S SMALL TOWN AMERICA Story and photography by Margaret & Eric Anderson Other former homes worth visiting are the Wrigley Mansion, built between 1908 and 1914 and today the home of the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Association and the Gamble House, built by Greene and Greene in 1908 using rare and exotic woods, the finest example of Southern California's turn of the century Arts and Crafts movement. Illustrating a different culture is the Pacific Asia Museum on North Los Robles Avenue. The building designed in 1971 in the Chinese Imperial Palace Courtyard style and now on the National Register of Historic Places pays tribute to the arts of Asia and endeavors to be a "gateway to the Pacific Rim." From Tang Dynasty burial ceramics and soapstone sculptures to Thailand Buddha screens and ivory carvings, its exhibits delight the senses as does the Chinese garden courtyard. The museum has a research library and runs travel programs in Asia for its members. But of course the main museum attractions in Pasadena are the famous two: the Norton Simon Museum on West Colorado Boulevard and the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens on Oxford Road, San Marino.
	Norton Simon was born in 1907 in Portland, Oregon. At the age of 24 he invested in a bankrupt orange juice bottling plant that he turned into the Hunt Foods empire. He married the actress Jennifer Jones in 1971 but his passion was art. He reorganized the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art in 1974, the museum that now bears his name and carries his collection. The amazing thing about this collection, widely regarded as one of the world's greatest, is that it was amassed over a period of only 25 years. To our eye, its French Impressionist array does not sparkle like those in Paris, France, but Simon was not buying direct from impoverished living artists but years after the Impressionists had died.
Money can only go so far. The sculptures, however, are magnificent: works by Degas, Rodin and Mooreey charm visitors every way they turn.
	Henry Edwards Huntington was born in 1950, half a century before Simon, on the other coast from him in Onconta, New York. At the age of 21 Huntington joined his uncle's railroad company. As his fortunes flourished he fell in love with Southern California and bought the ranch that later became where he based his museum. His neighbor to the west across a small canyon was George S. Patton, Sr., the father of the famous World War II general. The canyon was often the stake in card games between the two friends-changing hands often according to each player's luck at the table.