Founder of Magee’s Kitchen Dies at 102

Driving home from the family food stand in downtown Los Angeles’ Grand Central Market more than six decades ago, Blanche Magee noticed several farmers selling produce from the backs of their trucks. She thought they looked hungry.

The next day she returned with a basket of turkey sandwiches and coffee and started selling them.

By the time Earl B. Gilmore approved the formal opening of Farmers Market at 3rd Street and Fairfax Avenue in 1934, Blanche had convinced him he needed to include a modest little restaurant--hers.

She and her husband, Raymond, opened Magee’s Kitchen, today’s only survivor among the original Farmers Market tenants. Eventually they added Magee’s House of Nuts.

Magee was still checking on the proffered turkey sandwiches as recently as six years ago, when Farmers Market turned 60 and she was well into her 90s.

Snowdie Blanche Sizelove Magee, the market matriarch, died March 7 at a Claremont elder-care facility. She was 102.

Over the years Magee and her family added innovations that helped make Farmers Market a favorite with residents and tourists alike.

“We paid $100 out of our own meager earnings to bring the first electricity into the market,” she recalled 10 years ago, “so we could refrigerate our homemade products and connect the peanut butter machine.”

They also built the market’s first restrooms so shoppers didn’t need to walk down the street to a gas station, and enhanced facilities for al fresco dining.

“When our customers began eating Magee’s salads out of the containers while they shopped, I introduced the first paper-plate luncheons,” she said in 1990, “and fought with the management to put in a few tables and chairs, so people would no longer need to sit on overturned orange crates.”

In her own landmark stalls, Magee mixed nuts and sold them at affordable prices--a rarity in the 1940s for consumers accustomed to plain bags of peanuts or walnuts or almonds.

Maintaining family traditions, she served up hearty Irish corned beef and cabbage and Midwestern fare for decades, watching Farmers Market evolve around her.

The first year was a nightmare of rain and mud that threatened to end the noble Depression-era experiment, she told The Times in 1994.

“My husband and I begged the tenants to stay one more year, because the sun would shine again,” she said. “They did.”

She watched as the Gilmore 19th century dairy farm, which had sprouted oil wells, added the Pan Pacific Auditorium; the country’s first pump-your-own gas station; a combination walk-in, drive-in movie theater; a ballpark for the city’s first baseball team, the Hollywood Stars; and an 18,000-seat sports stadium for auto racing, a one-time-only water ballet featuring Esther Williams and the city’s first professional football team, the Bulldogs. She also saw the Gilmores sell off a piece of the land to CBS, which built its Television City.

Except for the network studio, those additions are all gone. But Blanche Magee’s pioneer eateries remain, complete with the 1903 grinding machine to make peanut butter, and are now run by her daughter-in-law, Phyllis Magee.

Unlike many younger and more recent tenants, Blanche Magee took decades of change philosophically. Perhaps surprisingly for a pioneer merchant, she became a supporter of the Gilmore Co.’s current redevelopment project for the area surrounding the market stalls.

“I believe that this proposal is necessary to the continued life of the market,” she wrote in a letter to The Times in 1990. “If the Gilmore Co. fulfills the promise of maintaining the integrity of the market while developing the surrounding property into a viable enterprise, the Farmers Market will continue to be an asset to the Fairfax community, to Los Angeles and all of Southern California.

“At 92,” she continued, “I must confess that I miss the old market of the ‘40s and ‘50s. But I also know that change is necessary for all life to flourish . . . else it will stagnate and die.”

Born in Marengo, Ind., on Jan. 10, 1898, Snowdie Blanche Sizelove acquired her unusual first name after a brother observed that it was snowing the day she was born. None too happy with the name, she insisted from her teens that she be known as Blanche.

The Sizeloves moved to California when she was 6, settling first in Oakland and then in Los Angeles. The family started a market in Long Beach, where her father made and marketed homemade peanut butter and horseradish, skills Blanche later found useful in her own business.

A year after marrying Raymond Magee in 1916, Blanche and her new husband opened a 7-foot by 7-foot food stall in Grand Central Market between Broadway and Hill streets in downtown Los Angeles. On hand for the market’s grand opening, they saw silent film legend Mary Pickford cut the ceremonial ribbon.

Her husband died in 1962, but Magee continued working in the Farmers Market food stall for another 15 years before retiring to Claremont. When there was time, she painted landscapes and pictures of her children and grandchildren.

Magee is survived by five children, Virginia, Raymond, Mary, Jack and Paul; 17 grandchildren, 24 great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren.