At 98, Artist and Author Is Full of the Future

Light poured into the Laguna Beach apartment. As a visitor came to her door, Catherine Moore Richter, 98, lifted clear blue eyes from a worktable littered with drawings, letters, notebooks.

A loom stood before one set of windows. Watercolors, block prints and oil paintings hung in frames on the walls. Bits of tapestry she had woven were draped on chairs. A linen towel printed with her drawings of four old Laguna houses hung on the side of a tall bureau, the top covered with rolled-up drawings and paintings.

“I’m either drawing or writing all the time,” Richter said after she’d led her guest inside. “I think we can make life very interesting for ourselves if we study what’s around us. . . . I have great curiosity.”

Age hasn’t slowed Richter down much. Last year she privately published “A. Leprechaun,” a children’s story, and this year she published the “Laguna Beach Souvenire! Coloring Book,” a collection of her drawings.

Recently, she had a book-signing engagement at Fahrenheit 45l Book Store in Laguna. That was “a lot of fun” because some children attended along with the adults, Richter

said. “A 6-year-old girl took a piece of paper and made a squinchy little drawing and gave it to me.”

Richter is “kind of a legend in an unlegendary time,” said Lauri Pelissero, a spokeswoman for the Laguna Beach Art Museum. Richter and her husband, the late Henry L. Richter, were long active with the Laguna Art Assn., and after Henry Richter’s death Catherine established the Richter-Moore Award. Through the award, cash prizes are given to the creators of paintings selected for excellence in overall composition in an annual juried show at the museum, Pelissero said.

Richter is the oldest member of the museum, Pelissero said. At a reception to celebrate the museum’s recent reopening after extensive renovations, she said, Richter “walked through with her walker and got a standing ovation.”

A Laguna resident since 1962, Richter still manages on her own but has some housekeeping help. “I like to be by myself,” she said. “I’m a loner, because I have so many things I want to do. I have to do my own thinking.” She also likes to meet and learn about new people, but getting out isn’t as easy as it once was. Four years ago she cracked a pelvic bone (“the wind blew me over”), and now her physical activity is restricted.

‘Quite a Philosopher’

Until the accident, she used to walk a mile downtown and back every day, Richter said. “That’s what I miss. . . . I have excellent health otherwise. If your mind is clear, you don’t have guilt: Do what you can joyfully, and what you can’t do, release it.

“I’m quite a philosopher,” she said and quoted one of the “little poems” she likes to write: “I’m only one bee; I don’t have to be a whole hive.”

Catherine Moore was born in La Veta, Colo., in 1888. She grew up in Grand Junction and later attended Colorado State Teachers College in Greeley, where she earned a teaching credential. She also studied drawing, design and interior decoration at the Chicago Art Institute and took private lessons in china painting and the art of making books. She learned typing and shorthand at a business school.

For four years after she left Chicago, she did office work for her father, the manager of a Colorado fruit-growers association. “Then Henry came along and that changed the picture,” Richter said. “I had to learn to be very dignified.” She was married to Henry Richter, a German-Austrian painter and art professor 18 years her senior, in 1915.

The attraction was partly professional. Henry Richter, who had had a one-man show at the Chicago Art Institute in 1906, was already an established artist. On one pre-engagement sketching excursion, “I just stood there and watched that man paint. It was like magic,” Richter remembered.

The Richters moved to Long Beach in 1920, after both had taught at Western State College in Gunnison, Colo., and at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. In California, they raised two children--Henry Jr. (“a genius” who now designs communications systems, Richter said) and Elsa (“an expert kindergarten teacher”).

Richter taught art at Polytechnic High School in Long Beach for several years but stopped working full time after her son’s birth in 1927. In 1939, the family moved to Rolling Hills.

Husband Taught, Painted

During these years, Richter’s husband taught art and created and sold paintings (some of his work was shown in Laguna galleries), and Richter herself made and sold many watercolors and drawings of local homes, churches and businesses. She also carried out several carving commissions and made jewelry. During World War II, she worked as what she calls a “bootleg artist,” drawing and designing mechanisms at the Douglas Aircraft plant, and she used her leisure time to work with clay and learn how to weave tapestries.

In addition, she illustrated two books (“Bibi the Baker’s Horse” and “Two Young Corsicans”) written by Anna Bird Stewart and published by J. B. Lippincott and Co. in the 1940s.

Henry Richter died in 1960. In 1962 Catherine Richter went to Mexico to become a student again.

For five months she studied watercolor painting, lithography, Mexican history and Spanish at the San Miguel Instituto de Allende. During her stay she also filled a notebook with her thoughts and drawings.

“I’m just a crazy person with a pencil, you know,” Richter said, opening the notebook to point out a sketch of a “demented woman” in a doorway. “This one I’m going to make a watercolor from,” she said, pointing to a highly detailed drawing of a building.

Trips to Europe, Hawaii

In 1972, Richter made drawings for two privately published books (“Happiness Is Remembering” and “Little Blue Heaven”) written by a friend, Hertha Dial. She also took several trips--to Honolulu, through Scandinavia, to Greece and to Ireland. On each trip she painted and filled books with drawings.

“I came home from Ireland with 23 watercolors” and sold nearly all of them at a party, Richter said. “Then I thought, ‘Well, I have that money, and money goes so fast, I’ll spend it,’ ” she said. She spent it on a bus trip to New England, North Carolina and Florida.

In recent years increasing weakness has made her stop traveling, Richter said, but she has no intention of discontinuing her work. At present, she is making the final drawings for “This Is The Day!,” the last book Dial wrote before she died in September.

“When I get this book of Hertha’s done, I want to write a book about my husband. It (the book) begins in 1818, when Henry’s father was born in Germany,” Richter said. “And then I’m going to have some weaving for fun.”

A member of the National League of American Pen Women’s Long Beach chapter, Richter also has several stories to finish writing. “I’m always attempting to do something new,” she said.

‘My Favorite Town’

Her coloring book is a collection of scenes observed over the years around “my favorite town--Laguna Beach,” she said. “A. Leprechaun,” on the other hand, came from a dream Richter had three years ago of traveling and “violently” arguing with one of Ireland’s little people.

When she woke up, “I was just so enthusiastic, I jumped out of bed at 3 a.m. and wrote down all the things we’d done,” Richter said. Later she revised and illustrated the story.

Said Helen Murillo, a friend and neighbor since 1969: “She’s a very cheery person, and she has a great deal of wisdom. She’s quite self-sufficient.”

In one of her notebooks, between the drawings and her own thoughts, Richter had copied a line from Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher: “The universe is a vast becoming.”

Elsewhere she’d copied an idea from Bias, “the ancient Greek of Samos”: “Wisdom should be cherished as a means of travel from youth to old age, for it is more lasting than any other possession.”

Richter said: “Life is a great climb. You never climb to the top. You’re always on your way.”