Tea and memories

There’s a party going on with plenty of food, music and dancing, just like the good old days when the Duke jammed, Ella scatted and Lionel banged those vibes about a half mile away on Central Avenue. In the backyard of an elegant Craftsman mansion not far from downtown, guests gather around tables draped in pink lace over green linens and await refreshments. But no champagne corks pop, no crystal flutes clink. Tea, the specialty of this house, flows at the third anniversary party for Lady Effie’s Tea Parlor.

Here, in a lovingly restored family home now open to the public, Vonnie P. Gipson, 62, serves 24 varieties of tea, dainty sandwiches, little sweets -- and memories -- in the old-fashioned parlor and dining room. Upstairs, in the bedrooms where her aunts and uncles once lived, only the beds have been removed to make room for more tables set with china abloom with roses.

“I wanted Aunt Effie to continue to live,” Gipson says.

The party this afternoon is in honor of her Aunt Effie, the svelte lady who wore a gardenia in her hair a la the jazz singer Billie Holiday. She left Gipson this house, stuffed with period furniture and vintage clothing, and hundreds of old photographs.

It also honors her Great-Aunt Sarah, the first in her large Texas family to join the great black migration to Los Angeles, seeking jobs then as plentiful as oranges. She led them to this large home at 453 E. Adams Blvd. back when many of the black elite still owned homes, did their business and socialized in a neighborhood they called the Eastside.

By day, Effie Mae Miles and Sarah Marshall cooked for rich white folks like the one whose autographed picture hangs in an upstairs bedroom. “Hi-Yo Effie, Be good or I will come and get you,” reads the inscription from Bob Livingston, who played the masked hero in a Lone Ranger film serial. The photo is dated 1940.

On their own time, the two ladies appeared to this manor born. Swanky in their hats, gloves, Lilli Ann suits and big Buick Roadmasters, Plymouths and Cadillacs, Mrs. Miles and her beloved husband, James, and Mrs. Marshall and her husband of the moment lived the lifestyles of the rich, sometimes with the famous.

“Best Wishes, Mrs. Miles,” reads the autographed photo of the Nat King Cole Trio, hanging below that of the Lone Ranger. It is dated 1958.

“Duke Ellington came here. Ella Fitzgerald came here,” says Willie Morgan, 77, Aunt Sarah’s “nephew by marriage.” Sitting near lemon, fig, grapefruit and apple trees at this alfresco gala, he reminisces about the jazz greats who jammed at the clubs on Central Avenue, in its heyday the musical, social and business epicenter for blacks in segregated L.A. “When they wanted to have their private things, they would come here.”

This house has lots of history.

Sarah Lillian Marshall, then Robinson, came first, like droves of black Texans -- including the family of former Mayor Tom Bradley, who packed into the old jalopy and headed west. They had heard the good news about Los Angeles.

On Feb. 12, 1909, on what would have been the 100th birthday of “The Great Emancipator,” President Abraham Lincoln, this newspaper published an eight-page special section about the accomplishments of Negroes in L.A. Profiling doctors, dentists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, educators, ministers, nurses, club women, recent graduates and prominent students, it told the stories of former slaves and their children who had prospered in Southern California in the 44 years since freedom:

“They are engaged in business -- some of them on a large scale; they are practicing in the professions; they maintain highly organized bodies of Christian worshipers; they have hundreds of good, comfortable homes, and not a few that rival in elegance and luxury the best in the whole city; they buy and read books; their children attend the schools and often outstrip their white companions in ability; music and art appeal to them and are fostered and advanced by them....”

Word spread.

“Los Angeles is wonderful. Nowhere in the United States is the Negro so well and beautifully housed, nor the average of efficiency and intelligence in the colored population so high. Here is an aggressive, hopeful group -- with some wealth, large industrial opportunity and a buoyant spirit,” the prominent black scholar W.E.B. DuBois wrote in the July 1913 issue of Crisis, the magazine he edited for the then-nascent National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

In the roaring ‘20s, Aunt Sarah rode the Southern Pacific to Los Angeles. In the ‘30s her niece Effie Mae came out along with her husband, James Miles, then a chauffeur. In the ‘40s another niece, Effie Mae’s younger sister Classie, followed and, like those before her, quickly found work.

Service jobs carried little stigma among African Americans at that time. Racial prejudice forced many smart black women to live in or take day work. Similarly, many overqualified black men served as butlers, chauffeurs and valets, earning more as hired help than they had as sharecroppers, in service and even as teachers back home. “It often happens that those in domestic services secure exceptionally high wages,” according to “The Story of the Negro in L.A.,” a 1936 Works Progress Administration book.

While those wages barely covered the bills for some families, Gipson’s relatives could afford to pamper themselves. Married and childless, these women worked. Their husbands, military veterans, held good jobs too. James Miles, a carpenter, also drove a forklift at a lumberyard long enough to get a gold watch, now mounted along with his wooden levels over the back stairs. And for years they paid nothing to live in a marvelous, simply marvelous, house.

In 1907, prominent architect Thornton Fitzhugh prepared plans for two residences on East Adams Boulevard for his sisters. He had designed the Pacific Electric Building on South Main Street downtown. Filled with marble and mahogany, it housed the historic headquarters of the Southern Pacific Railroad, a terminal for the electric trolleys called Red Cars and the private Jonathan Club, exclusively for wealthy white men like Fitzhugh.

In his design for his sisters’ homes, originally two connected mansions on three lots, he again chose luxury. The grand two-story house that remains has about 4,000 square feet and more than a dozen rooms, and cost $1,800 to build at a time when, according to state labor records, the average wage in L.A. was 35 cents an hour.

In those days, “East Adams was a very fashionable street, nicely lined with trees. Most of the people who lived here would probably have had their own carriages and horses,” says Greg Fischer, a historian by hobby. A friend of “Miss Vonnie,” he stands on the second-floor balcony, pointing across the street to a gray, barn-like carriage house looming behind a Victorian home. On a tour a few days before the anniversary party, he marvels at the gothic relief work on the oak door and matching hand-carved window trim, the gleaming wainscoting, plentiful paneling, numerous built-ins and highly polished oak floors.

How a black family from Teague, Texas, settled in this imposing residence remains a matter of conjecture for Gipson, who has researched the history of the house. The story starts in 1936, when Dr. Etta Gray bought it from one of the architect’s sisters. The Stanford-trained physician converted the back rooms into a clinic for poor patients.

But Gray never lived here, Gipson says. “Aunt Effie and Uncle James were the caretakers,” she says. “Everyone thought they owned it.”

Did Gray know the family back in Texas, where she’d lived as a child? Why did Aunt Sarah live in the servants’ quarters before moving into an upstairs bedroom? When did Aunt Effie and Uncle James move in? However it happened, they made the most of it, living large.

“In the ‘40s and ‘50s, they used to have weekend parties.... All the big-timers, the big bands, came here when [blacks] had to stay at the Dunbar and nowhere else,” says Uncle Willie. He reminisces about a time when Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong and other black celebrities -- no matter how famous, how rich or how many records they sold -- could stay only at the black-owned Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue.

This is a house with connections.

“Little Jimmy Hahn” -- now Mayor James K. Hahn -- was so well-behaved when he visited with his politician father, Kenny Hahn, that Aunt Effie told her nieces and nephews to act like him. (The mayor can’t place this house among the many he visited as a child. But the names do sound familiar, and he says that if the boy was well behaved, it was probably he.)

L.A.’s first black city councilman, Gil Lindsay, a music promoter on Central Avenue, would stop by, often gobbling down a slice of sweet potato pie and begging for another to take with him.

“Aunt Sarah was a good cook,” Uncle Willie says, as evidenced by the half-dozen old rolling pins that hang on the kitchen wall along with a collection of measuring cups. “She could cook anything. She used to make those good rolls, pies, chicken and dumplings and tea cakes.”

Aunt Sarah married four times and outlived all of her husbands. She made enough money to buy an apartment building nearby and property in Beverly Hills, but she kept a bedroom at the East Adams house. Her hats, mink collar, silk bed jacket and china plates remain in that room. Photographs show a proper, bespectacled, determined woman.

In a photo hanging in their bedroom, Aunt Effie poses with Uncle James, the man she married at age 16 to get out of the house in rural Texas, longed for during his service in World War II and loved for six decades until death them did part. Her black coat, with a label from the exclusive I. Magnin department store, hangs on a coatrack in the corner.

Pictures of husbands, uncles, brothers, nephews and cousins, most in their World War II uniforms, hang on both sides of the corridor connecting the bedrooms. Russian Leather cologne, Dr. Porter’s Oil (“a healing aid”) and other manly items remain in a bathroom, indicating that this place was never a house for ladies only.

In 1959, Vonnie Gipson, then Porter, followed her family to California to attend L.A. City College. Her aunts spoiled her, taking her shopping every Monday.

“Aunt Classie had a yellow Studebaker convertible. The actor George Brent gave it to her,” she says. “My friends and I would ride in it to the beach.”

This house holds so many good memories.

“My husband asked me to marry him in this dining room,” Gipson says. They wed in 1962, while he was on leave from the Marines.

That year, Aunt Classie died.

In 1970, Dr. Gray died a few months short of her 90th birthday. Aunt Effie and Uncle James bought the house for $17,500 from her estate, legalizing the family’s hold on it.

In 1984, Aunt Sarah died a few years shy of her 100th birthday.

In 1990, Uncle James died, leaving Aunt Effie alone in the house.

In 1993, she died at the age of 81, leaving the house to her niece.

For seven years, Gipson and her husband, Melvin, a major in the Marines, drove back and forth from their home in Orange County to restore the house.

“The soul of the house was good,” the retired officer says. And not much else. “There were cracks in the ceiling. None of the bathrooms worked. It was uninhabitable.”

They scrubbed, sanded, painted and wrote checks. They salvaged old papers, china, silver, teapots, a kerosene lamp, a butter churn, clocks, radios, phonographs, hundreds of 45s, 78s and LPs, photos and other mementos.

To finance the project, they rented the house for quinceaneras, coming-out parties for young Latinas on their 15th birthday. They also opened it for weddings with hundreds of guests, and for television shoots. An inheritance from an old friend came just in time.

The idea for a tea parlor originated with a visit Gipson made with the Officers Wives League to the Victorian Manor Tea Room in Orange County. With guidance from the owners, she proceeded, and now there’s a party going on.

Pink and green balloons, Aunt Effie’s favorite colors, lead the way to the festivities. Laughter, dance music and soulful crooning mingle with gleeful shouts of recognition. Gipson’s sister Betty Glasco is in from Dallas. “Hey, Uncle Willie,” she calls.

Vonnie Gipson takes center stage. Dressed to the nines in a purple suit and red hat with a sassy plume, she says a few words about the glamorous grande dames in her family who made all of this possible.

Then it’s time for tea. The dainty offerings are served one table at a time, causing a few impatient guests to grumble. “Relax,” the owner, cook and server says. “Don’t be in such a hurry. This is not a restaurant.”

Relax, as Aunt Effie and Aunt Sarah would have. Enjoy the party.

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Lady Effie’s Tea Parlor

Where: 453 E. Adams Blvd., South L.A. (west of San Pedro Boulevard, east of Broadway)

When: Open Tuesdays through Sundays, noon to 4 p.m.; (213) 749-2204. Reservations and proper dress required.

What: Standard Service -- tea cake; cucumber, egg salad and chicken salad finger sandwiches; and a trio of bite-sized sweets -- is $15. Second Menu -- tea cake; salmon salad, ham salad and goat cheese finger sandwiches; and sweets -- is $19 and must be ordered 72 hours in advance.