Taming the Past

Floyd Humeston, 66, was just a 4-year-old when he started hanging around the bold tamers at Gay’s Lion Farm in El Monte. When he could, the boy persuaded trainers to teach him their tricks. Other times, he resigned himself to simply selling peanuts to the weekend crowds who flocked to Gay’s and gawked at such motion picture hams as Leo, the MGM lion.

The farm is long gone--closed in 1942 and mostly paved over in the ‘50s to make way for the San Bernardino Freeway. But Humeston, a Whittier resident, returned to El Monte on Thursday for the dedication of a public arts project that pays homage to Gay’s.

Through joint funding by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the city, a $60,000 metalwork representation of showbiz lions now looms over commuters at the El Monte Metrolink Station, said Clara Potes-Fellow, an MTA spokeswoman.

The silhouetted felines play with an early motion picture camera, a microphone and a lion tamer’s chair atop the rail station canopies.

The real cats at the farm were mostly caged, though the public was allowed to play with cubs and some “tame lions,” said Humeston, who eventually went on to tame Fearless Fagan, the leading lion of many 1940s and ‘50s MGM films.

“It really was quite a place. Strictly elegant,” Humeston said. “Colonel [Charles] Gay didn’t have an awful lot of lions, not over 20 at any time, but he had paths [through the farm] and foliage to make it look like a jungle.”

Fagan and Humeston got their start together in the jungle, which was opened in 1925 by Charles and Muriel Gay and stood as a city attraction until its closure 18 years later. According to an advertising pamphlet in the farm’s glory days: “To visit the great Southwest and not see Gay’s Lion Farm is like going to Egypt and not seeing the pyramids.”

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Gay’s didn’t hold up like the pyramids: A McDonald’s restaurant was built where the farm’s entrance used to stand, and after half a century of redevelopment, the El Monte site is now unrecognizable to Humeston.

“It used to be you could lie down and take a nap in the middle of Highway 66 and not worry about getting run over,” he said. “Now I feel like I’m on a foreign planet.”

The MTA artwork, created by Victor Henderson and Elizabeth Garrison, may bring old-time El Monte and the motion picture golden age back to modern earth.

The piece is one of 70 commissioned by the MTA’s Metro Art Program to beautify bus terminals and rail stations throughout Los Angeles County.

Commuter art will remind travelers where they are in a way that a station sign can’t, said MTA board member John Fasana. “Public art is a wonderful way to create stations that reflect the history and character of each community,” said Fasana.

There is one aspect of history that the metallic lions can’t reflect: the mighty, terrifying, weekly roars. The Gay’s policy of sending the lions to bed without dinner every Monday night was one that neighbors heard about. Oh, did they hear about it, town historians said.

Sound effects aside, Humeston said, the artwork is an effective memorial to the lions that once ruled El Monte’s tax base.

“Even though I only worked there a little bit,” he said, “the place really hits a soft spot for me.”