An Inspiration for Making the Season Bright

It took the dreams of a polio victim to set a Boyle Heights house ablaze with Christmas lights, delights and trainloads of real snow -- inspiring a homespun Yuletide tradition that shows no signs of stopping.

These days, holiday merrymakers are accustomed to lavish Christmas displays in places such as Candy Cane Lane in Woodland Hills and Naples Island in Long Beach -- the handiwork of some well-heeled people.

But George Skinner did it all himself, and he did it even though he didn’t have a penny and couldn’t walk without the help of leg braces and two canes.

In the bleak heart of the Depression, something about his tiny bungalow with its white picket fence at 919 S. Mathews St. epitomized Christmas. Or maybe it was the generous spirit of the man himself.

The house appeared on the front pages of local newspapers in 1936, drawing 80,000 visitors the first year and 100,000 the next, The Times reported. The display included twinkling lights, a cascading waterfall, a wishing well and a replica of Snow White’s cottage. Carols serenaded passersby from an old phonograph.

Skinner’s “Christmas House” is gone now, just like Skinner himself. But his indomitable spirit of bringing his community together spread throughout neighborhoods, his daughter says, inspiring today’s Yuletide decorating.

In 1934, the Canadian-born Skinner was attending business college and living with his father, Albert, a tool-and-die maker, in Boyle Heights. He was young, strong and seemingly invincible.

Then, weeks after his 22nd birthday, while swimming laps at Los Angeles City College, he simply stopped. His girlfriend screamed for help as he began sinking to the bottom. He was pulled from the water nearly lifeless; he’d been stricken with polio, paralyzed from the neck down.

Skinner spent the next two years at Los Angeles County General Hospital, now Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, where a 650-pound, casket-like iron lung encased his body and filled his chest with air.

Neighbors and church friends brought him homemade goodies, cards, letters and books. Moved by their generosity, he promised himself that he would one day repay them, somehow.

Skinner found inspiration in President Franklin D. Roosevelt, also a polio victim, and his famous weekly fireside chats. In one particular radio broadcast, Roosevelt spoke of the healing waters and hydrotherapy in Warm Springs, Ga.

But the Los Angeles hospital offered free use of its hydrotherapeutic pool only to those under 21. Skinner was older, and his father could not afford the treatment.

Skinner asked a nurse’s aide to take down his words; he wanted to send a letter to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

After the first lady intervened, the hospital offered the therapy to Skinner without charge, as long as he agreed to try to pay when he could.

By May 1936, Skinner was well enough to go home. He hobbled to his dad’s bullet-nosed Studebaker wearing steel braces on his legs and a body brace on his upper torso, and carrying a cane in each hand. He worked out daily in a makeshift backyard gym his father built.

Despite his dire financial straits, Skinner began designing and planning his first holiday celebration as a thank-you for friends. He wanted to help people shake off the holiday blues of Depression-era Los Angeles, even if only for a few moments.

He enlisted his father and friends to decorate the house inside and out, and members of the American Legion Sunrise Post 357 volunteered to help. He persuaded business owners and movie studio executives to lend props and costumes or give small donations.

Eight months after leaving the hospital, Skinner had his Christmas House.

In December 1936, and for the next two Decembers, both Skinners traded off dressing as Santa and greeting visitors. The younger Skinner listened to children’s Christmas wishes by building a wishing well equipped with a speaker and microphone.

Sometimes he played Santa by voice, listening behind the closed garage door -- sort of like a priest in a confessional. Along with wishes for bikes, wagons and dolls, he occasionally heard requests that Santa put food on the table, find a job for Dad or help divorced parents get back together.

Next, he and his father had the furniture moved out temporarily to make way for dozens of lavishly ornamented trees.

Angelenos who didn’t read about Skinner’s “Christmas House” in the paper heard about it on the radio. Traffic was bumper to bumper as awestruck gawkers rolled by to see the display, which stayed up from mid-December until mid-January.

Trucks dumped snow on the front lawn, shipped in on railroad cars from Utah. When the snow melted, Skinner spray-painted and scattered 200 pounds of white cornflakes mixed with glittering mica chips over the cotton-topped lawn.

But on Dec. 8, 1938, as crowds waited for the doors to open for the third season, a couple and their daughter slipped inside for a peek. Skinner was outside talking to reporters when he saw the man who had slipped in drop a lighted cigarette in the living room -- which was filled with dozens of Douglas fir trees.

The house went up in flames. No one was injured, but the interior was gutted and the Skinners had no fire insurance.

Exterior decorations were still intact. The ever-optimistic father and son moved their beds and kitchen into the garage; the neighbors carted off debris.

Headlines in a local newspaper blared: “Fire Fails to Halt Spirit of Yuletide.”

“We will bring the spirit back,” Skinner told the press.

Six days before Christmas -- and 11 days after the fire -- the Skinner house opened. Another 100,000 people came to see it that season, The Times reported, including a visitor who was so impressed with Skinner’s jerry-built broadcasting studio that he offered him a job as a radio announcer and engineer.

Skinner married Pearl Majoros, who had been his nurse’s aide in the hospital and written letters for him. They moved to Hollywood, where they bought a house on Curson Avenue and brought up their two daughters. They decorated this house with the same flair as the one in Boyle Heights.

Skinner died in 1978, his wife in 1995.

But Skinner’s daughter Georja Skinner, a filmmaker who lives in Maui, Hawaii, has preserved her father’s story in a new book, “The Christmas House: How One Man’s Dream Changed the Way We Celebrate Christmas.”

“My father was such an inspiration to so many people,” she said in a recent interview.

“I felt it was important to share his story with others who may be down on their luck or have given up hope. As he told me, ‘If you believe, anything is possible.’ ”