One of My Many Unusual Assignments

(BTW, In last month’s report, I told of Murray Hunt. He was, as I wrote, repre­senting Spartan Typog­ra­pher. In 1970, Murray visited the studio where I worked (the Wharf­side Building, across from the Cannery). Murray gave me this gift of this vintage wood type from his personal collec­tion. At that time the letter had a reddish smooth surface. If I would’ve known better, I would have kept it in a warm dry area. It has changed during the last forty-plus years.)

Ann in studio 

Wood Type 

Murry Hunt 

In 1970 I was 28 years old.The assign­ment for Spring Valley Lake was one of the many varied assign­ments that I had as a free-lance artist. This assign­ment was from Wilton, Coombs & Colnett, Inc., an agency which was located at 40 Hotaling Place (the oldest alley in San Francisco).
Their client for this 2 page news­paper ad was Boise Cascade Prop­er­ties Sales Corpo­ra­tion Exclu­sive Sales Agents, located in Beverly Hills. The loca­tion of this new man-made lake, for housing and recre­ation, was north of San Bernardino and a little south of Victorville.

The copy in the ad says:
​“It’s about a 90-minute ride from down­town Los Angeles…Who Knows, if you’ve taken a fancy in a partic­ular lot by noon you’ll be able to have an old-fashioned picnic right there on you own land! The new prop­erty offered a private country club, designer by Cliff May, a chal­lenging Robert Trent Jones golf course, eques­trian center in the ​“western tradi­tion” , a master-planned second home commu­nity, on ​“A Lake with a Future, Just 96 Freeway Miles from Los Angeles”.

With no way to search infor­ma­tion about this devel­op­ment in those days, I was just given the shape of the new lake. and asked to add the recre­ational oppor­tu­ni­ties. If I had had today’s online searches, I could have followed infor­ma­tion from the site and even seen the photos of the creation of the lake. Today, one can find the cost of buying a home in that community.

I found this on-line:
Lake construc­tion began in June 1969. The exca­va­tion of the lake basin was one of the largest earth moving projects in the history of the Victor Valley at that time. On January 1, 1970, pumps began to fill the lake with 1,080,000,000 gallons of water. It took slightly over one month for the mile long lake basin to be filled.
Spring Valley Lake houses a 200 surface acre man-made lake.
Loss from evap­o­ra­tion is prob­ably much heavier than most people would believe. Ninety inches of water a year is lost to evap­o­ra­tion, sixteen inches per month during the months of June and July. That means the loss of two thou­sand gallons every minute of the day during June and July or an annual loss of 1500 acre feet of water. This puts the water lost to evap­o­ra­tion at many millions of gallons yearly. The lake is everyone’s concern as prop­erty owners in Spring Valley Lake each own a share.

Sam 

Cliff Wilton 

Here above, are photos of Cliff Wilton and Samm Coombs from our 2009 annual Geezer picnic at the Corte Madera Park. This was about 40 years after the Spring Valley Lake assignment.

Ann Thompson