6 – 13 November 2014MONTECITO JOURNAL36 • The Voice of the Village •

Barbara Museum of Art. According to Gebhard, an architectural historian, these three residences best represent-ed Lutah’s work during three different periods.

Dozens of smaller lenders also shared their precious Lutah ephem-era with the museum. The Montecito Association History Committee, for instance, loaned several photos from their collection in addition to Lutah’s brown knit cap, a hand-painted Christmas card, and her diary. Most importantly, they loaned the tapes of an interview Lutah gave in 1980 to Kit McMahon, co-founder of the History Committee and first curator, and Margaret Waterfall, a volunteer. Lutah, for that matter, had been on the Montecito Association History Committee board in the early days of the organization, which was founded in 1975.

These tapes, together with pub-lished interviews and the recollec-tions of friends and colleagues, pro-vide the basis for what is known about

Lutah. The museum’s new interactive table, sponsored by museum trustee Eleanor Van Cott, gives six audio portions of Lutah’s story that include snippets from the 1980 oral interview tied together by narrative based on its transcript.

The Way It Was: In the Beginning

Lutah Maria Riggs was born in Ohio in 1896 to Charles and Lucinda Riggs. Her father was a physician who deserted the family when she was quite young. By 1910, Lutah and her mother had moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, where her mother was a nurse for a private family. While liv-ing in Indiana, Lucinda met and mar-ried Theodore Dickscheidt, and short-ly thereafter Lutah and she moved to Santa Barbara, where he had family and had found work.

When Lutah was a senior in high school back in Indiana, she had seen an advertisement for small plots of land along the shores of Lake Michigan. She became intrigued with the idea of building a small summer cottage on one of those lots. When a friend recommended she study architecture, she thought again of her dream cabin and decided to follow that course of study when she arrived in California.

Lutah and her mother came to Santa Barbara in October 1914, and the junior college, then located on the top floor of the old stone high school building on the corner of Anapamu and De la Vina streets, had already begun the fall session. Nevertheless, they allowed her to enroll, and she was able to take classes, such as trig-onometry and advanced art, that prepared her for architecture school. During that first year, she also had a role in the Junior College play called The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife. Lutah played the footman to Madam de la Bruine but did not see her future in thespian pursuits.

Winning a ScholarshipTaking the proper classes was only

one step toward attaining her goal. “I knew I couldn’t get to Berkeley’s architecture school until I had earned enough money and saved to get

Celebrating History by Hattie BeresfordLutah Maria Riggs

Ms Beresford is a retired English and American his-tory teacher of 30 years in the Santa Barbara School District. She is author of two Noticias, “El Mirasol: From Swan to Albatross” and “Santa Barbara Grocers,” for the Santa Barbara Historical Society.

Timelines, architectural display models, renderings, blueprints, and an oversized umbrella are

among scores of artifacts helping to tell the story of Santa Barbara’s incredible woman architect, Lutah Maria Riggs. Opening with a bang at an elegant reception in the Santa Barbara Historical Museum’s charm-ing Spanish courtyard on October 22, the latest museum exhibition was an immediate hit.

The exhibit is a collaboration between the museum and dozens of backers and lenders, most nota-bly the Art, Architecture, and Design Museum, UC Santa Barbara, and the Lutah Maria Riggs Society. The orga-nization has been finding and cata-loging Lutah Maria’s works for the past two years while researching the details of her life and career for the documentary LUTAH, which debuted at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in 2014.

Though downplaying her role in the process, Gretchen Lieff was a major force behind the creation of the documentary and is one of the driving forces behind the funding of the exhibition. The collaboration between local experts and the muse-

um’s executive director Lynn Brittnerand museum staff has led to a rich and thoughtful exhibit that reintroduces Santa Barbara to its most amazing woman architect.

Among the impressive artifacts are three ¼-inch scale, balsawood models of homes designed by Lutah. Created by local architect Martha Gray, with assistance from her brother William, the models stood in an earlier exhibit of Lutah’s work organized in 1993 by the late David Gebhard for the Santa

Santa Barbara Historical Museum’s executive director Lynn Brittner (left) with Gretchen Lieff, exhibition sponsor at the opening of the Lutah Maria Riggs Exhibition

Penny Knowles, J. Oswald da Ros, exhibition sponsor, and Leslie Power enjoy the reception

(from left) Santa Barbara Historical Museum trustee and exhibition sponsor John Woodward; curator Daniel Calderon, and trustee William S. Burtness stand behind Kellam de Forest, Lutah Maria Riggs Society member and historic preser-vationist

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6 – 13 November 2014 MONTECITO JOURNAL 37

there,” she says in the 1980 interview. “Not just for the train up there. You had to have some money to live on, and then there’s the tuition.

“I worked for two summers at Woolworth’s as a bookkeeper. I kept the books every night. I’d go there after school and work on the books.” Slowly, the money piled up.

In the end, however, it was a schol-arship contest that made it possible for her to attend architecture school. Thomas Storke, publisher of the Daily News, held a subscription contest, the grand prize being living and tuition money for one year of college. Lutah saw her chance and started ringing doorbells.

“Oh, my gosh,” she tells Kit and Margaret, “I did nothing but walk. I had no car for transportation. I walked all the way, ringing every doorbell on Foothill Road clear to Carpinteria, and up and down the streets ringing doorbells and telling them who I was and what I was trying to do in Santa Barbara. And, by golly, I got some subscriptions!”

Then she went to the bank and asked the bank manager for a loan of $10. He said, “Well, we don’t make loans like that. What do you want it for?”

She told him that she wanted to pay her expenses for a bus and lodging in Solvang so she could try to get some subscriptions up there. “He was an awfully nice man,” says Lutah. “He loaned me the ten dollars himself!”

Her trip to Solvang was not success-ful, however. “I didn’t get a darned subscription up there!” says Lutah.

She had made an unfortunate mis-take. “Well, the man who was renting me the room in this hotel wanted to know why I was there, and I told him what I was doing and I happened to say, ‘I came to do the town’ which

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I N T E L L U R I D E O N T O U R

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was the wrong thing to say, but I had already said it, and he went around and warned everybody in town that I ‘came to do the town. Don’t give her anything.’ I didn’t get a thing there. Well, it taught me what to say and not to say, and to keep my mouth shut.”

In the end, Lutah won the scholar-ship contest, and, after some haggling with Thomas Stroke, who initially wanted her to go to Stanford, she had the money in hand for architecture school at Berkeley. The day had finally come that she could board the north-bound train to her destiny.

The Rest of the StoryFor the rest of Lutah’s story, see clips

from the documentary that are stream-ing in the exhibit, peruse the timeta-ble, take in her renderings, study the architectural displays and blueprints, be charmed by her picnic basket and box of pastels, read her notes, and listen to her voice and the narrative based on her interviews through the headsets on the interactive table.

Major sponsors of the Lutah Maria Riggs exhibition are the Lutah Maria Riggs Society, Brent Harris and Lisa Meulbroek Harris, Gretchen and Robert Lieff, Oswald J. Da Ros, Heleneand Jerry Beaver, Anne and Michael Towbes, Santa Barbara Beautiful, and John C. Woodward. •MJ

The collaboration between local experts and museum staff has created a rich and thought-ful exhibit that reintroduces Santa Barbara to its most amazing woman architect

On display at the exhibit is Lutah’s rendering for the chapel at the Santa Barbara Cemetery that won the approval of the Cemetery Board and drove the working drawings and design