Arthur Judson Hodge

Arthur Judson Hodge, sometimes called A.J. Hodge, youngest of the four children of Jennie Edith Martin and Jacob Sylvester Hodge, was born 26 July 1877 in Delavan, Faribault County, MN. His paternal grandparents Daniel Freeman Hodge and Eliza Jane Bugh had come to the Delavan area in the 1860s, and their farm had been Jacob’s last home before he headed out into the world as a young adult. In years prior to Arthur’s birth, Jacob and Jennie had lived in Winslow, Stephenson County, IL and adjacent Martintown, Green County, WI, where she had been born and raised, but in the mid-1870s they had established themselves in Jacob’s earlier stomping grounds, where his parents had remained. The timing of that relocation means Arthur never spent any interval residing in the region where his pioneer grandparents Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader had put down their roots. In this, he is unique among that couple’s grandchildren. (Unique, that is, if one does not count his brother Adrian, who perished in early infancy the year before Arthur was born, and who spent the whole of his short life in Delavan.) In fact, as time went on Arthur’s life circumstances made it difficult to maintain any sort of sustained contact with his maternal kin.

When Arthur was a toddler, his mother was institutionalized at Mendota State Hospital in Madison, Dane County, WI. Jennie’s case was one of several instances of diagnosed insanity within the Martin clan. Her father had also been housed at Mendota, and later her sister Juliette would be committed to a state hospital in Bangor, ME. While there is no question the water and the fish of the Pecatonica River were contaminated with metals from upstream mining during the time the Martins lived on the banks of that waterway, it is probable the psychological instability of certain family members was inherited. Happily, with such “elastic” brains comes great potential for an upside rather than a downside. In many of the group that upside manifested in such forms as musical talent, insight, intelligence, and general creativity. Arthur was one of those who was blessed with the ability to channel his genius in positive ways. His mother, alas, was not so fortunate. Jennie dipped further into depression at the hospital and died during her residence there. She drowned in Lake Mendota in late February, 1882, a demise that appears to have been the result of suicide, though this aspect of the incident was genteelly covered up at the time.

During Jennie’s incarceration, which lasted from two to four years, Jacob Hodge was left with the responsiblity of caring for his three surviving children, Nathaniel, Agnes, and little Arthur. He sought the assistance of his relatives. The 1880 census shows him as a lodger in the home of his sister Mary Jane and brother-in-law Oscar Hathaway and their children in Beetown, Grant County, WI. Arthur, then a toddler, is also shown as an occupant. Oddly, the two older children are not listed. Chances are high they were somewhere nearby boarding with another family member, but they seem not to have been included in the 1880 census, perhaps because that relative considered their presence temporary and did not mention them when the enumerator asked for the names of the residents. Jacob is listed as a farmer in 1880, but this was not to be his career. In the early 1880s he pursued a medical degree from Hahnemann Homeopathic Medical College of Chicago, and worked as a doctor throughout the remaining years of his life. At this point it is not clear if he maintained physical custody of his children while he was a student. It seems likely they were left with the kinfolk. Arthur, when grown, would give his son the middle name of Oscar; this seems likely to have been in honor of his uncle Oscar Hathaway, and an acknowledgment of the paternal role the latter individual played in Arthur’s early life.

With his M.D. in hand, Jacob’s big decision was where to set up his practice. He did so momentarily in Lancaster, Grant County, WI. He was residing there when he married his second wife, Josephine Florence Nye, also a graduate of Hahnemann, in September of 1882. (The wedding itself took place in Fitchburg, Dane County, WI, near Madison, where the bride’s family had spent the previous several years.) This development provided Arthur with a stepmother who would go on to help nurture him through his gradeschool years and into high school, until she suffered her own untimely demise. Jacob, Josephine, and the three youngsters moved on at some point between the summer of 1883 and the end of 1884 to Oskaloosa, Mahaska County, IA. Their sojourn there was also temporary. Soon they became part of the large exodus of denizens from the upper Midwest to California. New regions of the latter state were opening up as Southern Pacific Railroad penetrated into territory that had previously been inconvenient to get to. The Hodges journeyed west in June, 1887, choosing to put down roots in Pasadena. They arrived to find a small, rustic town of dirt streets, through which coyotes ran at night. The first settlers had been farmers from Indiana, and had only arrived in 1874, occupying a section of what had once been the land grant of the San Gabriel mission. Pasadena was still mostly a place of potential rather than presence. However, by the mid-1890s the oil-extraction industry boom would soon transform many parts of Los Angeles County, erasing their backwater aspect.

Also coming to Pasadena in 1887 was a group of four families from Sioux City, Woodbury County, IA. They came in August, just two months after the Hodges, travelling in a chartered boxcar. One of the children in one of those families was Jennie Esther Atwood, daughter of George W. Atwood, who had just passed away that June, and Mary Ann Hall. Born 29 July 1878 in Sioux City, Jennie was just barely nine years old at the time of the big trip -- a tender age at which to have lost a father. Her older brother William Amos Atwood was filling in as the family’s new patriarch. Pasadena’s existing housing was not adequate to deal with the influx. The immigrants had planned for this, bringing tents and kerosene stoves with them and setting up camps until they could build permanent homes. Jennie and Arthur are likely to have met during this rustic early phase of settlement. If not, then they soon encountered each other at school. Only a year apart in age, they grew up together, the beginnings of a familiarity that would ultimately last over seventy years. (Jennie is pictured at right, as a bride.)

Jacob Hodge became a pillar of society in Pasadena. He quickly set up his medical practice in the family residence at 851 N. Raymond Avenue. This large house would serve as Arthur’s home for the remainder of his childhood. Soon Jacob purchased a hilltop in Linda Vista, where he built a windmill to pump water he bottled and sold under the brand name Liviti, marketing it as a superior water sure to promote health, his own version of a homeopathic health elixir much in keeping with the “patent medicines” that were so popular in that phase of the Victorian Era. It is to be hoped he did not add unnecessary elements. Many patent medicines of the day were little more than mixtures of water, flavorings, and a high proportion of grain alcohol. Some were even tainted with ingredients that were actually toxic. However, if Liviti was what it seems to have been, it would actually been good for its drinkers. It seems to have consisted merely of the unsullied artesian water drawn up from the aquifers beneath what came to be called Hodge’s Peak. In an article on Arthur’s life published in a company newsletter on the occasion of his retirement, Arthur is given credit for being a coinventor of Liviti, along with his father and brother Nathaniel. This likely means that the boys assisted their father as youngsters in the production of the remedy. This could well have been Arthur’s introduction into the merchantile world.

As the son of a prominent and well-to-do man, Arthur was well-positioned for a great deal more formal educational opportunities than his forebears had received. His father served in 1891 on the board of incorporation of Throop University. This haven of learning would over time evolve into the world-famous California Institute of Technology -- Cal Tech. Arthur would be among the university’s first decade’s worth of graduates, back when the headmaster was Father Amos G. Throop himself. He studied drafting, mechanical engineering, physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, forging and foundry, and other practical, industrially-oriented subjects.

An 1895 Pasadena city directory lists Arthur as still residing the big house on North Raymond, his occupation still student. In fact, at that point the whole family was still ensconced, still holding on as a unit for the final fragment of a decade. Nathaniel, listed as a bookkeeper in the directory, and his bride Grace Weingarth had not quite set themselves up in their own residence. Agnes Leona Hodge was not quite married. Things would rapidly change over the next handful of years.

Arthur’s brightness and ambitiousness began to be increasingly apparent. In 1896, while still in college, he organized a corporation known as Inventors Manufacturing Company. His brother Nathaniel came on board as a bookkeeper and partner. Arthur was the main creative force. This enterprise would go on in various guises for nineteen years, under different names and with different investors/officers as partners. (Nathaniel left in 1906.) This was the beginning of a career during which Arthur and his employees would invent and manufacture such machinery as fruit sizing equipment (chiefly for oranges, the main crop of southern California in those days), bookbinding apparatuses, a cutter to cut huge wheels of cheese down to the various sizes and shapes needed for retail sale, and box-making equipment.

By the late 1890s Arthur’s siblings were out of the house and his father had married third wife Cora Wilkins. The time had come for Arthur to assert his independence. This did not mean making a new home somewhere far away, as his parents had done in the early 1870s. He was happy with southern California. However, for the moment he was also young and hale and full of curiosity, and ready to have get at least one “great adventure” under his belt before settling down. The Klondike Gold Rush had caught the world’s attention in 1898. In 1900 came the word of the discovery of gold even farther north on the Seward Peninsula. Arthur was instrumental in assembling a group of local young men to try for a bonanza. They sailed on the ship Tacoma, arriving in Nome 21 June 1900 -- the summer solstice. Given how close Nome was to the Arctic Circle, the sun hid itself only a brief time at midnight and the sky remained blue. It is a safe bet Arthur managed little or no sleep that night.

Despite the round-the-clock sunshine, the streams of the inland areas of the peninsula were still too frozen for placer mining, and the arrivals were forced to bide their time on the coast. Like many, they realized the beach itself contained gold that had rinsed downstream over the centuries. Being an inventor, Arthur knew how to capitalize on the knowledge.

Getting gold from the beach sand required a type of miners’ sluice box known in the trade as a “rocker,” designed to slosh back and forth until the water and light sediment tipped out and only the heavy gold remained. Inasmuch as Arthur had never been a miner before, he surely grasped how to design his own rocker by observing the more experienced hands around him. As fate would have it, one of those veterans of the profession was a man named Alvin Thorpe Branson, who had come to Nome with a group of miners from Mariposa County, CA. Alvin, the son of a 49er, had spent his entire working life digging for gold. It is impossible to say at this juncture whether Arthur encountered Alvin, but Alvin is known to have built a rocker at Nome that summer and used it to harvest gold while waiting for the inland streams to thaw. Arthur could literally have learned the trick by watching the man. The possibility is mentioned here because in 1911, by coincidence, Alvin’s niece Grace Mildred Branson would marry Arthur’s first cousin Albert Frederick Warner in Fresno County, CA.

Arthur and companions left Nome 13 September 1900 as the ice and snow were reclaiming the region. The expedition was a success, the gold they brought back of such purity it assayed at the then-admirable rate of $22.00 an ounce. All his life Arthur could point to the trip as one of his many noteworthy accomplishments. Who knows, he might even have been tempted to repeat the undertaking the following season despite its arduous nature, but any afterglow and enthusiasm he was feeling was quickly dashed by the health of his father, which had turned bad toward the end of his time away from home. Jacob went downhill quickly and passed away in late October. Over the next twelve months, Arthur directed himself to things more lasting and practical than colorful quests in the Far North.

First, he decided to make Jennie Hodge his bride. The couple were married 20 June 1901 at the Atwood home on Franklin Avenue, Pasadena, in a ceremony conducted by Reverend William MacCormack of the All Saints Episcopal Church. The event, the merging of two prominent Pasadena families, was a society event covered at length by the Pasadena Evening Star. The occasion marked the beginning of a union that would last more than sixty years -- the rest of Arthur’s life.

Second, Arthur and his brother Nathaniel transformed Inventors Manufacturing Company into Hodge Brothers Company, expanding into a two-story, 11,700 square foot building at Union Street and DeLacy in Pasadena with a full range of machine shop services, including a foundry in the back of the building, and a staff of dozens of workers. (Arthur was the vice president, Nathaniel the secretary, two of five officers of the corporation.) The structure allowed the owners to pursue the new specialty of vehicle maintenance and various related services. The automobile was such a new-fangled aspect of American society that the items were not yet viewed as something individuals would own for strictly personal use -- rather they were for the use of doctors, policemen, and/or executives on company business, and of course they were used commercially for transporting goods and passengers. Homes generally did not yet have garages -- the term garage had not even come into common use. Therefore a large portion of the space inside the Hodge Brothers Co. building was devoted to storing vehicles for clients. The firm’s early advertisements boasted of their “auto stables.” It was an accurate label, in that the storage was not passive. Cars were treated with as much care and attention as horses. They were washed, refueled, and given maintenance inspections more or less as a nightly procedure. And inasmuch as many early 20th Century automobiles were electric-powered, Hodge Bros. made battery charging one of its offerings, its facility capable of accommodating thirty cars at a time. Cars were also on hand for rental. (The corporation president, John Gibbs Lovell, was an agent for the Peerless car, which he sold from his office in the Hodge Bros. building.) As for the original core of the business, Arthur and team continued to tackle whatever sort of machining or mechanical engineering or custom manufacturing gigs came their way. Among the more exotic items they were hired to build was a glider that Charles Lawson commissioned in 1903. A surviving photograph shows a flying apparatus that looks a great deal like what the Wright Brothers were experimenting with at Kitty Hawk that year, except that Lawson’s version did not possess a motor.

The Hodge Brothers Company building in 1903, shortly after it opened. This version of the photo comes from a profile of Arthur in a 1940s company newsletter (also the source of the photo of him with the bookbinding rig). To see a scan of the original photo, go to the biography of his brother, Nathaniel M. Hodge. Click here to go straight there.

Nathaniel Hodge left the business partnership in 1906 in favor of a job with John Wigmore and Sons Company in Los Angeles, a wholesale hardware supplier. Arthur phased out Hodge Brothers Company -- whose name no longer made sense -- the following year, founding a new corporation with new partners, keeping the machine shop and custom manufacturing aspects but reducing the focus on automobiles. The new firm was called the Reliance Gas Regulator and Machine Company. One of its core purposes was the exploitation of one of Arthur’s inventions, a gas regulator of such effectiveness and elegance it was still being made by the company (which later became Reliance Gas Regulator Corporation of Alhambra) forty years later when Arthur, by then long employed elsewhere, retired from professional life.

One of the reasons Arthur could dare to be bold in his entrepreneurial ventures is that he was not obliged to keep a roof over the heads of his family. He and Jennie shared the home of her mother, Mary Ann Hall Atwood. This remained the case until all the children had been born. The eldest pair of those kids arrived in the early years of the marriage, Esther Louise Hodge in 1903 and Arthur Oscar Atwood Hodge at the beginning of 1905. In 1913 the family would be completed by the arrival of twin girls Marian Agnes Hodge and Alice Elizabeth Hodge.

The Hodge and Atwood clan taking a cruise together in approximately 1912. The party consisted of Arthur and Jennie, their kids Esther and Artie, and Jennie's mom Mary Ann Hall Atwood, plus a contingent of their San Francisco-based kinfolk consisting of Agnes Leona Hodge and her husband Henry Adams Wood, plus Jennie’s siblings William Amos Atwood and Mary Nellie Atwood Smith and their spouses, along with Mary Nellie’s daughter and her mother-in-law. This photo was undoubtedly taken by Harry Wood, who does not appear in it. Feel free to compare this image with the one featured on Agnes Leona Hodge’s biography page, taken during the same voyage of the same group, but which shows Harry Wood and omits Arthur, who was no doubt taking his turn as cameraman. Back row, left to right: Agnes Leona Hodge, Arthur Judson Hodge, Jennie Esther Atwood Hodge, Eleanor E. Smith Griswold (Mary Nellie’s daughter, born 1890, and therefore already a grown woman), William Amos Atwood. Front row, left to right: Mary Nellie Atwood Smith, Mary Ann Hall Atwood, Esther Louise Hodge, Elizabeth N. Warner Atwood, Arthur Oscar Atwood Hodge, and Ellsworth Clinton Smith.

In 1915, for reasons that are no longer completely clear, Arthur left Reliance. He had been successful enough that this change probably means he sold his interest in the company in favor of a less stressful occupation that would give him more time for his young family. Along with the job change came a move of the family home from Pasadena to Long Beach -- i.e. to cooler air and easy access to the shoreline. Arthur began working for a kelp producer. During this interval, the family lived aboard a boat in San Pedro Harbor. In 1916 the household moved again, this time to Torrance. In October of that year, Arthur settled into his longest-term employment situation. Certain now of a steady means of income, Arthur and Jennie purchased three acres along Pacific Coast Highway in Lomita and moved there in 1917.

The property already had a good house suitable for a family of their size. This went on to be Arthur and Jennie’s home for the rest of their lives. The parcel undoubtedly had other developed features, but nothing like what it would come to possess during the tenure of the Hodges. The family transformed their demense into a kind of personal paradise. Much of the open land became a mini-farm, with orchards, vegetable patches, corn fields, banana trees, and animal pens for turkeys, chickens, and pigs. In addition to the main house there were a number of other structures, including a tractor shed and a windmill, as well as “urban” amenities such as a tennis court. Eventually a botanical garden, wading pool, and ornamental pool would be added. The Hodge estate became a popular place for friends and neighbors to drop by on evenings and weekends, to lounge in the wading pool, play tennis, and enjoy the beautiful surroundings. And of course, the fact that the beach was so near was also a big attraction. There was even, in later years, a bomb shelter.

The employer that made the Lomita estate possible was Union Tool of Torrance, which was later to become National Supply Company. The firm engaged in much of the same sort of manufacturing and machining type endeavors that Arthur and his partners had done over the previous twenty years, but on a larger scale, particularly with the build-up in the industry that was occurring because of the war effort. Arthur was initially hired as a common employee, starting as a drill press operator. His bosses quickly realized what a treasure of experience and ability they had on their hands. On his second day he was asked to set up the milling machines for spirals. He was so adept at that task that the next day he was told by the president of Union Tool that he was promoted to foreman. He held that position for three months, then was asked to take charge as superintendent of the tractor division for the manufacture of the Sure Grip tractor. He was also in charge of the manufacturing of barrels of shipping oil and gasoline to foreign countries -- a job that meant sometimes he was processing orders for as many as 20,000 barrels.

Arthur’s superindendent hitch, which more or less coincided with the period that the United States was directly involved in World War I (1917-1918) required him to do a great deal of parts manufacturing estimating, a key aspect of the business. He did this not only for tractor parts but for propellers and other components needed at the military shipyards. After eighteen months, his skill in this area was recognized as so vital that he assumed the duties of Chief Estimator. He continued in this key position, in charge of all estimating and setting of prices of equipment at National’s Torrance plant, until his retirement in 1948. This span, from the late 1910s to the late 1940s, was a solid, settled prime of life for Arthur and Jennie.

One of Jennie’s great interests as the Lomita property was embellished was garden ornaments and pottery. As the Great Depression arrived and Arthur became concerned he might be seen as too old and too highly paid at National Supply to be retained as an employee, he hit upon the idea of turning Jennie’s hobby into a business. Esther and Artie were now grown, and the twins nearly so, and Jennie was available to oversee the day-to-day needs of a retail operation. So Arthur and Jennie constructed a pottery shop along a streetfront edge of their property, and opened it to customers as Lomita Ornamental Products Company. (Shown at right.) Arthur helped out on evenings and weekends, the idea being that if he were laid off, he had something to fall back on while searching for another breadwinning gig. Meanwhile, Jennie took the lead role, with the active assistance of the twins, who contributed original designs to the inventory. Alice and Marian even spoke of making sculpture their professions, and studied at the Edna Kelly School of Sculpture in Long Beach in their early twenties. However, both girls went on to other things.

At the end of the 1930s, no longer worried about finances or the possiblity of losing the job at National Supply, Arthur and Jennie sold the pottery shop and the land beneath it to a couple who made the site into their private home (i.e. the shop ceased to exist). In 1948, another part of the original acreage was sub-divided off; this piece was purchased by daughter Marian and her husband Harold Carpenter, who built their home upon it, becoming Arthur and Jennie’s neighbors. In the early 1950s, the garden area, often used to grow corn, was sold to a man who used the lot to sell house trailers.

All of Arthur and Jennie’s children would marry, beginning with the wedding of Esther in the late 1920s and wrapping up with that of Alice in the early 1940s. All four produced children of their own. On a personal basis, Arthur is recalled as a somewhat emotionally distant old grandpa with not much to say to the many young ones underfoot -- in contrast to his warm, ebullient wife -- but it is safe to say he did not take for granted the blessing of having a clan around him. In becoming a grandfather, Arthur was unique among the children of Jennie Edith Martin. His brother Nathaniel’s two daughters never had offspring, and his sister Agnes lost her only child as a small infant. Today the count of descendants of Arthur Judson Hodge exceeds fifty. With certain exceptions the clan stayed local to southern California during the mid-20th Century, and many can be found there now. Son Arthur Oscar Atwood Hodge and son-in-law Harold Hiram Carpenter worked at National Supply during the latter part of Arthur’s tenure.

Arthur and Jennie were still ensconced in their Lomita residence when Arthur reached the end of his days. The death itself occurred in Torrance, Los Angeles County, CA 23 March 1965. His grave lies in the Hodge family section at Mountain View Cemetery, Altadena, L.A. County, CA. Jennie survived him, passing away 3 November 1972 in Torrance. Her remains were interred with those of Arthur.

Children of Arthur Judson Hodge with Jennie Esther Atwood

Esther Louise Hodge

Arthur Oscar Atwood Hodge

Marian Agnes Hodge

Alice Elizabeth Hodge

For genealogical details, click on each of the names.