Home of the Week: Manor Del Mar on Pasadena's Millionaires Row
Immense 1908 Arts and Craft Estate In Pasadena Asks 4.25 Million
Immense 1908 Arts and Craft Estate In Pasadena Asks 4.25 Million
Manor Del Mar on the Pasadena campus is for sale again. This time it has been fully restored to its former glory. For many decades it was the men's dorm on the Pasadena campus. Since it was the farthest away from the library and Mayfair it always housed men. The college chopped and remodeled it into a dorm eliminating the kitchen and adding huge bathrooms. Those that slept on the third floor called it "The Cattle Car."
Manor Del Mar was built by the son of Hulett C Merritt, the owner of the house the church bought and renamed Ambassador Hall.
Given how Gerald Flurry and Davie Passover Pack have no brain cells of originality in coming up with new ideas, will we see one of these two buffons buy it and ship it to Edmund, OK or Wadsworth, OH? Both are just daft enough to do it!
I will be making a FULL PRICE OFFER! of the asking price of $4.25 Million.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I will ask for the terms to be my own choosing....
One Dollar Down, and One Dollar a month for 4.25 million months!
I got to stay there during one summer, and really appreciated it as compared to "360-B", Olcott Place, or 80 S. Grand. Probably the "Big Daddy" of the mens' dorms of that era. Iirc, it was another dorm with an old, relic safe, and I never succeeded in cracking it.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, during that summer, I realized that the sword of Damocles was about to descend upon me, as I'd gotten away with being one of very few non-conformists for far too long. Each night, I'd lie awake in my bunk, earplug from my FM radio in my right ear, listening to underground station KPPC, which actually broadcast from the basement of the Pasadena Presbyterian Church at that time. As I listened to Traffic's "Dear Mr. Fantasy", or Big Brother and the Holding Company's "Piece of My Heart", I wondered what direction my life was about to take. The draft and the Viet Nam war were very serious factors to ponder, as well as obtaining a more lucrative job skill than the landscaping or gardening trade I had partially learned over the past few years on campus. I also thought of scrambling around to try to get another college to accept my worthless AC credits, as a friend had done. Worse yet, I still believed in 1972-75, and worried that being asked to leave AC would probably mean that I was Laodicean.
Bottom line is, these things have a way of working themselves out. And, they did. Worst case scenario is often preached, but almost never happens. Actually, in proper perspective, my worries that summer in Manor Del Mar turned out not to have even been the worst worries of my life. Any successful person is by nature a risk taker, and worries are a perfectly natural constant part of the risk-taking experience.
BB
Byker Bob said, "Worse yet, I still believed in 1972-75, and worried that being asked to leave AC would probably mean that I was Laodicean".
ReplyDeleteMY COMMENT - Your entire comment is well stated, but this portion of your comment I can relate with personally. Being an Ambassador College reject and with people in Church making me feel "what good am I?", I felt very bad upon not being accepted to AC. One girl in Church who was accepted to AC upon hearing that I had been rejected promptly informed me that she wanted to go to AC because "that is where the best guys are" - Thanks a lot. I really needed that put down.
Forty years later, I wear being "an Ambassador College reject" like a badge of honor - and you should too!
After leaving the Church in 1976 and being alienated from my family over it, I went on to get an MBA from Drake University. There is no Ambassador College today, but there is still 130+ year old Drake University doing very well. Coincidently, I remember Herbert Armstrong writing something disparaging about Drake (in Des Moines, Iowa where Herbert Armstrong spent time in his earlier life)in one of his PT Personals comparing it negatively to an Ambassador College education. Well, Like everything else Herbert Armstrong related, in the long run nothing could have been farther from the truth. I am thankful that I was never accepted to Ambassador. And to think, there are some who post on this site who think there is no God?
Richard
Richard, I count myself fortunate, and It sounds as if you are one of the fortunate ones, as well. Seems like we took away some different lessons from our WCG experience than many of the people we attended with, actually learning the important lessons early on.
ReplyDeleteWhen I wrote that little bit about Del Mar, in a way, I was thinking about some of the people in the splinters who are even now going through some mental turmoil of their own. At least in the 1960s and '70s things were stable/crazy. The things we are hearing today about leaders taking on delusional titles, virtually commandeering members' financial resources, and cruelly spitting members out without any sense of fairness or due process are extremely disturbing. Enforcement and expectations that were difficult or borderline in the old WCG under HWA have worsened, exacerbating on a logarithmic scale.
I hope splinter people who are beginning to understand that something may be wrong realize that the package of doctrines and prophecies we were all taught are not as iron-clad or immutable as we were led to believe. Maybe it's time for folks to restudy everything, only this time not restricting the study to Armstrong-insider materials. It is so easy to do research with the internet! Clearly, leaving or rejecting Armstronigism is not the same as rejecting or giving up God. Much critical information gets carefully ignored or downplayed in the Armstrong cherry-picking process.
BB
"listening to underground station KPPC"
ReplyDeleteBB: What Pop record blew you away the most when you first heard it?
Minimalist, that depends on how you define "pop". The album oriented rock that was played on KPPC was not always what you would classify as "commercial", which I use as a synonym for the word "pop". As an example, they would often play in those days a Ravi Shankar sitar raga, which, while it had novelty value, after about the first 3 minutes, would bore me to death. Rather than listen to that, I usually switched stations, even to listen to Top 40 "pop" songs like the Electric Prunes' "Too much to Dream", or Mitch Ryder's "Devil in the Blue Dress" (that one mostly for John Badanjek's drumming).
ReplyDeleteThere have been so many mind-blowing songs throughout the history of rock n roll that it is difficult to isolate and choose the most mind blowing. During my two years at AC, probably either "Dear Mr. Fantasy" by Traffic, or "Toad" by Cream (for the extended Ginger Baker drum solo). However, for the entire history of rock, #1 for me has always been "Freebird" by The Lynyrd Skynyrd Band. That is also the band that I've seen most frequently in concert, and thank God that I was out of Armstrongism in time to see the original band before the plane crash!
BB
I see that the Merrit mansion is also for sale, the one that used to have the Science Hall and Arts Classroom building and the Italian sunken gardens. Asking price, $11 million.
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