Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood by Todd McCarthy Page A

Howard diedat 2:30 A.M . on January 6, 1916, at the age of seventy. The official cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage, with a secondary cause of arteriosclerosis.
    As befitting a man of his stature, C.W. had a large funeral. In ill health already, suffering from cancer of the uterus, Euphemia could not easily absorb the shock of her husband’s sudden death. She died just three months later, on April 13,also at seventy.
    In the distribution of C.W.’s estate, which finally took place in October 1918, it was revealed that his net worth, after the sale of his home, other property, and stocks, came to $264,090; this would have made him a millionaire many times over in 1990’s adjusted dollars. The great bulk of it went to his already very comfortable daughters, with Bernice receiving a lump sum of$115,315 and Helen getting $57,657 immediately and an equal amount to be apportioned out in stages to her monthly. Helen’s children each received $5,736 (about $120,000 in current dollars), perhaps not enough to set them up for life, but plenty to send them into their adult lives in high style and without need of mundane employment.
    The story of C. W. Howard had a bizarre postscript. Some yearslater, after his daughter Helen had become a confirmed, perhaps even fanatic, Christian Scientist and adherent of cremation, she returned to Neenah. She had her father, mother, and brother Neil dug up and cremated (in Milwaukee, as no one closer by would do it). After mixing the ashes in an urn, she went out to Riverside Park and threw it in the river, where it was discovered decades later, withthe names and dates still legible, by scuba divers. The grave marker, a big red marble ball six feet in diameter that C.W. had bought for himself at the 1896 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Helen sold to the Abenschein family, whose grave it still marks today.

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Boy of Privilege
    Pasadena in the first decade of the twentieth century was a garden grown of imported privilege and prosperity, an enclave of wealth and immaculate conservatism populated mostly by well-to-do former Midwesterners, like the Hawkses, seeking the year-round comfort of one of the most ideal climates in the country. Vast orange groves surrounded impeccably manicured estates anda prosperous but unhurried downtown on Colorado Boulevard, and to the north and east soaring mountain peaks, which were topped with snow during the winter, formed a spectacular backdrop to the intense green of the city.
    During the winter visits, Frank Hawks had installed his family at the ultrafashionable Maryland Hotel, and that is where they lived when they came out to stay in 1906, beforerenting a house for a short time at 408 Arroyo Terrace. Frank, still only in his early forties, didn’t need to work. But he and C.W. made some hotel investments along the West Coast that gave Frank the excuse to travel occasionally, and he bought some orange groves in Glendora, less than twenty miles to the east, that engaged his active interest.
    One of the most distinguished academic facilitiesin southern California at the time was the Throop Polytechnic Institute, which later became the California Institute of Technology. Founded in 1893, the school was just down the street from the large, comfortable house Frank found for the family at 998 San Pasqual, which has long since been torn down. Throop, pronounced “Troop,” at the time encompassed all levels of classes, beginning with gradeschool, and that is where Howard attended the sixth grade. But when the Throop trustees decided to concentrate all their effort on advanced education, the Grammar School Department was reorganized into a separate entity.
    The new Polytechnic Elementary School opened on October 10, 1907, and Howard, Kenneth, William, and Grace Hawks were among the 106 pupils enrolled. Frank Hawks soon became atrustee and remained onthe board for a decade. The school was, and still is, a coed, nonsectarian establishment that, in addition to the