a lay analyst, gave birth to a daughter in China and a son in London, and returned to California with her husband to found, in 1943 in San Francisco, the world’s first Jungian training center. The description she gives of her 1961 return to the ranch is suggestive. All such returns, she tells us, involved a learned process of “reaching into the mood of the place,” of shedding “city demands.” She had come to understand the necessity of cultivating “calming” through “the monotony of walking,” of encouraging the accelerated onset of what others might call by other names but she called “the big letdown”: “Our coast requires a descent always. For those new to the place the letdown is more often experienced as an unpleasant locked-in feeling, an immobilizing depression.”
What we seem to have here, then, is a story of an acquisitive grandfather, a father who retreated into the huge holding that allowed him to play El Patrón (even the daughter who reveres him mentions, in the guise of a virtue, “his power of passivity”), and a daughter, Jane Hollister, who ran guiltily for daylight. It was nonetheless Jane Hollister Wheelwright, not her brothers or cousins, who inherited from the father in 1961 the power to vote more than half the shares in the ranches. “My father must have known that I was as stubborn as he and would try to tackle the problems; and as the only woman I would be outside male competition,” she wrote in The Ranch Papers. “But the outrage it caused only compounded the existing situation, and so the struggle began amongst the seven of us.” That the nature of this struggle is not described in The Ranch Papers is a telling lacuna. It would appear to have focused, since the need to sell was a given, on the terms of the sale: to whom, for how much, in return for what contingent agreements. One senses that the daughter may have favored, probably more than her brothers and cousins did, the ultimate buyer: a Los Angeles developer, described in The Ranch Papers , again ideally, as “an enterprising but environment-minded Los Angeles man,” whose plan was to rezone the property into hundred-acre parcels and present the whole as an exclusive planned retreat.
In California as elsewhere, a buyer with a plan for this kind of low-density development signifies something quite specific: this is a buyer who means to pay less for the land than one with a plan for more intensive development. During the same years when the Hollisters were falling out over this issue, James Irvine’s great-granddaughter, Joan Irvine Smith, someone else who had “shared in the glamour of immensely, privately owned land,” was fighting the same kind of family fight, but from a different angle: it was Joan Irvine who successfully insisted, against the opposition of some in her own family, that the eighty-eight thousand acres that remained of the Irvine ranch in Orange County be intensively developed. Whether Jane Hollister’s decision to divide her grandfather’s ranch into hundred-acre parcels was in the end more intrinsically tuned to the spirit of the place than Joan Irvine’s quite different decision remains an unresolved question. I recall in the early seventies seeing advertising for what came to be called “Hollister Ranch,” emphasizing how very few select achievers could hope to live there. As it happens my father had been at Berkeley with one of the Hollisters, someone of an age to have been one of Jane Hollisters brothers or cousins; I do not remember his name and my father is dead. I remember this at all only because, every time we drove south and again at the time the ranch was sold, my father mentioned that the effort to keep their holding intact had left the Hollisters unable to afford, in the early 1930s, during the Depression, to let one of their children finish Berkeley. This was offered as a lesson, I am unsure to what point.
T he lesson Jane Hollister Wheelwright took from the sale of her
What we seem to have here, then, is a story of an acquisitive grandfather, a father who retreated into the huge holding that allowed him to play El Patrón (even the daughter who reveres him mentions, in the guise of a virtue, “his power of passivity”), and a daughter, Jane Hollister, who ran guiltily for daylight. It was nonetheless Jane Hollister Wheelwright, not her brothers or cousins, who inherited from the father in 1961 the power to vote more than half the shares in the ranches. “My father must have known that I was as stubborn as he and would try to tackle the problems; and as the only woman I would be outside male competition,” she wrote in The Ranch Papers. “But the outrage it caused only compounded the existing situation, and so the struggle began amongst the seven of us.” That the nature of this struggle is not described in The Ranch Papers is a telling lacuna. It would appear to have focused, since the need to sell was a given, on the terms of the sale: to whom, for how much, in return for what contingent agreements. One senses that the daughter may have favored, probably more than her brothers and cousins did, the ultimate buyer: a Los Angeles developer, described in The Ranch Papers , again ideally, as “an enterprising but environment-minded Los Angeles man,” whose plan was to rezone the property into hundred-acre parcels and present the whole as an exclusive planned retreat.
In California as elsewhere, a buyer with a plan for this kind of low-density development signifies something quite specific: this is a buyer who means to pay less for the land than one with a plan for more intensive development. During the same years when the Hollisters were falling out over this issue, James Irvine’s great-granddaughter, Joan Irvine Smith, someone else who had “shared in the glamour of immensely, privately owned land,” was fighting the same kind of family fight, but from a different angle: it was Joan Irvine who successfully insisted, against the opposition of some in her own family, that the eighty-eight thousand acres that remained of the Irvine ranch in Orange County be intensively developed. Whether Jane Hollister’s decision to divide her grandfather’s ranch into hundred-acre parcels was in the end more intrinsically tuned to the spirit of the place than Joan Irvine’s quite different decision remains an unresolved question. I recall in the early seventies seeing advertising for what came to be called “Hollister Ranch,” emphasizing how very few select achievers could hope to live there. As it happens my father had been at Berkeley with one of the Hollisters, someone of an age to have been one of Jane Hollisters brothers or cousins; I do not remember his name and my father is dead. I remember this at all only because, every time we drove south and again at the time the ranch was sold, my father mentioned that the effort to keep their holding intact had left the Hollisters unable to afford, in the early 1930s, during the Depression, to let one of their children finish Berkeley. This was offered as a lesson, I am unsure to what point.
T he lesson Jane Hollister Wheelwright took from the sale of her
Similar Books
