Contractors Never Work So Quickly for Us

The 25th Pasadena Showcase of Design is supposed to open to the public Sunday, but if it does it will be a miracle.

The house this year is a large Mediterranean villa overlooking the Flintridge La Canada foothills. When I visited the site a week ago so many tradesmen were there I had to park a block and a half away.

Landscapers swarmed over the five-acre estate, finishing pools and gardens. The new concrete court in front of the entrance was still wet. A plywood staircase was being built to handle the crowds.

Inside, not a room was finished. Tile men were still at work in the kitchen. There were no seats on the dining room chairs. The grand music room with its 20-foot vaulted ceiling was bare of furniture. Artists were still painting flowers on bedroom walls. A toilet sat in an upstairs hallway.

The 9,000-square-foot house was designed by architect Henry Carlton Newton and built in 1924 for Harry G. Johansing Sr. and his wife, the former Mary Emily Farfsing, at a cost of $75,000.

Johansing was an insurance agent and sportsman. He and his wife had come here from Cincinnati. They had four girls and three boys, who evidently had an idyllic childhood. The boys lived in one upstairs wing and the girls in the other, with their parents’ master bedroom in between. The children used pull-down beds.

The yard was their jungle. The boys had one enormous tree house and the girls another, with a drawbridge to keep the boys out. In the spring, when there was water in the creek, the boys followed it down to Devile’s Gate Dam and launched home-made rafts, much to the dismay of their mother.

For the Showcase, a new formal Roman-style swimming pool had been built. The tennis court had been put in by the Johansings. They didn’t have a pool, I was told, because their father had given the children a choice--pool or tennis court, and they had chosen the court because they could use it for other activities. But as teen-agers and young adults they danced on a pavilion lighted by Chinese lanterns.

A grand piano was yet to be placed in an alcove off the music room. It had once held a pipe organ that Johansing played for nightly musicals. His wife sang. The music room had also held a grand piano, a harp and a xylophone. Sometimes members of the Civic Light Opera came to sing, and a church choir used the room for practice while their church was being built. That’s how the rich entertained themselves before television.

The walls of the nursery, in which the children were kept, successively, as infants, were being decorated with hand-painted bluebells, delphiniums and Queen Anne’s lace; fairies at the top of the bedposts held a lacy canopy over the crib.

I had received a letter from a landscaper, Leo Snider, saying he had installed an English trysting garden, and finding no suitable poem with “tryst” in it, he had written one himself and attributed it to William Wordsworth:

Speak soft but quick where we will tryst

Where arms were held and lips were kissed

By waters old, ‘ere much he missed!

“My question,” he said, “is whether it is illegal to so attribute a saying to another, and if so, is it so if the person is dead or only so if it is really awful poetry?”

I found Snider at work in his garden. Beds of marigolds and white and purple petunias surrounded a small pool under a live oak. A nice place to tryst. I told him I didn’t think Wordsworth would sue, though he might turn over in his grave.

The Showcase will be open to the public Sunday through May 21; 10 a.m to 4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. (Mornings are full.) Free parking and shuttle service from the Rose Bowl.

Don’t worry about its not being finished. The Pasadena Junior Philharmonic Committee and their hordes of landscapers and interior decorators somehow always manage to bring off this miracle.

As for a poem with tryst in it, how about this:

By the petunias we will tryst

Under the live oak in the mist

I’m attributing it to William Shakespeare.