Frederick Arthur Usher Jr.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Fred Usher could sense the flow of line and correctness of form in the world he loved to roam. He was able to translate this awareness of the nature of things into graphic art and the design of “machines that did what they were supposed to do.” Sharing his pleasure in subtle shadows cast by a palm tree upon a textured wall, Fred was not only a natural designer, but an unforgettable companion, blessed with a challenging intellect and a puckish sense of humor.
Fred’s mother, artist Ruby Walker Usher, moved herself and her two children from New Jersey to an artists’ colony in Laguna Beach in 1935. When he was a teenager, the movie moguls’ cars parked along Hollywood Boulevard captured Fred’s attention. He started making regular rounds of car dealerships and hot-rod shops. A Kodak Brownie box camera was his constant companion, and the resultant photos were the beginning of a formidable automotive archive collected throughout his lifetime.
Fred enlisted in the Navy during WWII and was able to indulge one of his other major interests, aviation. He was first assigned to an auxiliary Lighter Than Air Base in Lompoc, from which a lone Blimp flew coastal patrol. Then he was transferred to Johnston Island. The singular distinction of this miniscule dot in the Pacific was one tree. When Fred and his crew were not dredging up an airfield from the ocean bottom, or servicing transport planes and bombers, he built a series of small boats from old fuel tanks and explored the reefs around the island.
Frederick Arthur Usher Jr.
Fred entered the University of Southern California’s School of Industrial Design after the war. He said, “It looked for a time as though I would end up behind a drafting table for years before I ever had a chance to do any original work.” But in the post-war period, the Pasadena Art Center’s more intimate and challenging climate was attracting an avant garde element. Fred was accepted there in 1947. He studied under Austrian émigré Alvin Lustig, an advocate of the Bauhaus movement. Lustig was one of the century’s foremost graphic designers, and his influence was obvious in Fred’s work.
Fred, known for his hands-on approach to design, was called upon to help solve some of the development problems associated with a new furniture concept put forward by Charles Eames in the early 1950s. In later years, one of the famous formed-laminate and leather Eames chairs, which he helped to prototype, was Fred’s favorite perch during long nights in his extensive, and always expanding, library.
A quick scan of his library shelves revealed the scope and depth of Fred’s enthusiasms. Equally intense interests in anthropology, art, music, and fine cars made it difficult at times to separate his vocations from his avocations, and made Fred a sought-after expert in all of these fields, writing articles and collaborating on books. He was an avid buff of unusual music and amassed a vast collection of rare 78 rpm records. He continually added to his latest collection of works on oceanic art.
Fred married Alma Ferrera in 1952 and traveled with her through her native Mexico, sometimes on foot, to backcountry villages that rarely saw visitors of any kind, taking in cultures and searching for petroglyphs. One expedition led Fred to Doña María Sabina in the Oaxacan village of Huautla de Jiménez, before it became the destination of psychedelic experience seekers from all over the world. This legendary curandera (healer) used the behavior-altering qualities of the teonanácatl mushroom in a velada (vigil) ceremony that traditionally showed the way to achieve healing or the solutions to serious problems. (Sabina ultimately regretted that people came in ever increasing numbers for the narcotic thrill rather than the healing aspects of the velada.) Through several conversations during other visits, Sabina shared her experiences with Fred, who later designed and illustrated a book called Castaneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory, by Richard deMille, that commented on Castaneda’s alleged experiences with the magic mushroom.
As the ’60s began, Fred opened a design firm with John Follis. Usher-Follis designed, among other things, the innovative Junior Laboratory of Science at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. The deal was clinched in the Oval Office with a handshake from President Kennedy—Fred was always so proud of that. Work, and the arrival of daughter Xochitl, kept Fred’s roamings close to home: Takoma Records released an LP in 1964 that used Fred’s recordings of two Los Angeles street musicians, inspired singer/harmonica player Edward Hazleton and Eddie “One String” Jones. If you were to Google Fred’s name today, you would find more references to this one LP than to all his other design and literary accomplishments. Fred continued his explorations in Mexico, expanding his collection of Mexican artifacts to include indigenous musical instruments.
Alma died in 1959. When Fred married Tamara Cerio in 1966, Xochitl and her step-sister, Alma’s daughter Sonia, instantly acquired an extended family of four more small children: two girls, Giselle and Marina, and two boys, Kinka and Alexis. To this mix was added Frederick III, born in 1969.
The family moved to downtown Santa Barbara in 1970. Tamara became the artistic director of Santa Barbara Ballet. Fred continued his design career, notably as the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s chief exhibit designer. He also designed the aquarium’s now world-famous logo. He served on the City of Santa Barbara’s Architectural Board of Review. Fred always shared his discoveries and enthusiasms with the children, and they grew up in a creative, lively household. Dancers, choreographers, musicians, designers, architects, artists, philosophers, and writers were frequent visitors to the family home.
Fred’s interest in people, his conversation, and companionable temperament garnered him many devoted friends. Toward the end of his life, he was the central figure of a diverse group who gathered at his table at the Buenos Aires Café, where he went to hear the live tango music on Wednesday nights. Fred also unfailingly observed his Friday ritual of taking a long lunch with regular pals at El Paseo Restaurant.
Here is a poem that one of Fred’s friends wrote for him shortly before his death:
Nothing
remains to be done
in the gentled waves
of the ending. You told me once
of a village in Mexico
where a muddy river
flowing out of a jungle
entered the tranquil sea.
There you stand on the sand
looking west to a sunset
at the end of a day long ago.
Shall I ask what you see?
But each of us knows, the cells open like hands,
what rises, bright, out of the flesh:
the world in its glory, all
we have loved, the friends
who, gone into death, are waiting.
No more. In the green forest
the spider monkeys climb
the leafy pillars of heaven.
-Peter Marin
Fred’s passing on April 11 was as he would have wished it, peaceful and surrounded by his loving children at his home. In addition to all of his children, he is survived by grandsons Roman Mazur and Roman Usher, and brother Roderick Usher.
A celebration of Fred’s life will be held in the gardens of the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum on Sunday, August 9, at 3 p.m. Please RSVP to especialnumero1@gmail.com if you plan to attend.