A Love Affair With Santa Monica

By Jorge Casuso

Nov. 6 -- It’s fitting that it took Santa Monica to bring Bob and Louise Gabriel together.

The two longtime local civic leaders didn’t live far from each other in their native Detroit, but it wasn’t until they found themselves in Santa Monica that they met and fell in love – with each other and with the city they have called home since 1946.

“I had vacationed here with my mother and fell in love with Santa Monica,” said Louise, who is the president and CEO of the Santa Monica Historical Society Museum.

“I loved Palisades Park. I was so impressed. I must have taken a hundred pictures of the palm trees and the beach. I just felt I belonged here. It seemed to have everything you could want.”

Bob, whose family had moved to Santa Monica, was back from military service in the Pacific and hadn’t made up his mind whether he would stay. Then he met Louise. “I guess it was love at first sight, by me, anyway,” he recalled.

Since their move west, the couple has been dedicated to making Santa Monica a better place to live and work and to ensuring that its past is not forgotten.

Earlier this year, the Gabriels were presented with the Chamber of Commerce’s Roy E. Naylor Award for Lifetime Achievement for their half-century of dedication to the community. Members of countless civic organizations, the Gabriels have been major players in the city’s history.

Louise and Bob Gabriel with vintage clothing that is part of the Historical Society Museum collection.

Bob, who had made a living after returning from World War II by teaching school, selling garbage disposals and running a market, joined up with a small insurance company run out of a house Downtown after returning from the Korean War.

“Economics sort of pushed that,” Gabriel said, noting that teachers with a Ph.D. made only $6,500, and “I didn't have a Ph.D. I didn’t know a thing. I didn’t know a policy from a piece of Kleenex,” recalled Gabriel, who bought the company and for a time branched out into real estate. (He has held a license since 1957.)

For decades, Bob has been at the center of civic and political life, serving on the City Council and as president of the Chamber of Commerce and the Santa Monica Convention and Visitors Bureau, as well as serving on the Parks and Recreation Commission.

While Bob was busy with current affairs, Louise fell in love with the history and lore of her adopted home after serving as one of the lead organizers of Santa Monica’s centennial celebration in 1975.

“It had a very rich and colorful history, and because we loved the area, we appreciated all those who had started Santa Monica,” Louise said. “We knew they struggled.”

That same year Louise founded the Santa Monica Historical Society. For the next three decades, she would search out the artifacts that brought the beach city’s colorful past to life.

“We made a lot of contacts, put a lot of time into that,” Louise said. “We knew a lot of old timers. I spent a lot of time picking up things.”

Louise and her volunteers gathered up photographs and clothing, music sheets, maps and documents. They picked up lanterns used on the old railroad and hurricane lamps, crystal and school supplies. Word got around, and soon objects began arriving. One day, a package from Ohio came in the mail.

“It was so heavy, I couldn’t imagine what was in there,” Louise recalled. “There were stamps covering the entire package. There was no explanation.”

The package contained a guest book from the Santa Monica Hotel, the city’s first hotel, which was built near the pier in the 1880s. One of the guests who penned her name in the book was the wife of Sen. John P. Jones, the founder of Santa Monica.

“We had a storage area,” Louise recalled. “We had accumulated so much, I was anxious to get them out for the public to view.”

In 1987, Louise founded the Santa Monica Historical Society Museum in a small space on Third Street, moving it the following year to 20th Street and Colorado Avenue, before settling into its current site at 1539 Euclid Street.

Since Louise began her search for artifacts, the museum’s belongings have ballooned, filling numerous storage spaces.

The museum’s holding now includes the largest local photo collection in Southern California, numbering about half a million pictures, including the entire photo collection from the now defunct Outlook newspaper, and 97,000 pictures from the personal collection of local photographer Bill Beebe.

The museum will finally be able to showcase all its artifacts when it moves into a permanent home in the new Main Library currently under construction Downtown.

After years of making and preserving Santa Monica’s history, the Gabriels still feel the same way about the town they fell in love with more than half a century ago.

“It was a nice old urban city, and we still feel the same way about it,” Bob said. “It’s the place to be.”