Added to the National Register of Historic Places on February 3, 2015

Mention that this La Cañada Flintridge home was once owned by Frank Thomas, and you’ll probably get a confused question about how a Chicago White Sox legend ended up in a leafy Los Angeles suburb. Much respect to the Big Hurt, but he’s not the Frank Thomas we’re talking about here. Our Frank Thomas was one of the greatest animators in movie history, one of Disney’s elite “Nine Old Men” who animated or supervised pretty much all of the classic Disney features, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) through The Fox and the Hound (1981). 

Frank Thomas was admired for his unique way of animating complex emotions – Looney Tunes mastermind Chuck Jones once called him “the Laurence Olivier of animation.” He gave mournful heft to the seven dwarves as they crowded around a comatose Snow White, captured the curiosity and joy of Bambi and Thumper’s romp on the ice, lent pathos to Mowgli and Baloo in The Jungle Book. Maybe he could never boast a .301 lifetime batting average or 500+ career homers, like the other Frank Thomas. But can that Frank Thomas claim responsibility for the spaghetti scene from Lady and the Tramp? Yeah, I thought not. 

When Franklin Rosborough “Frank” Thomas moved into his new house in 1949, he was in a transitional phase of his life and career. Just a few years prior he had directed and animated training films for the US Army Air Force, as part of the First Motion Picture Unit during WWII. 

Now back at Disney, he was promoted to directing animator. His first feature in the new role was The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad from 1949 – a classic two-fer, combining Disney’s adaptations of The Wind in the Willows and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. In the early ‘50s, he animated and supervised an unforgettable series of villains: the wicked stepmother from Cinderella, the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland and Captain Hook from Peter Pan. 

Thomas’s family was growing at the time, too. He had married a Stanford-educated teacher named Jeanette just after his military discharge in 1946, and they moved into their new digs with a couple small kids, Ann and Gregg. Two more boys, Theodore and Doug, would come later. Fun fact about Jeanette: she was a docent at the Gamble House for 22 years, and wrote the 1989 book Images of the Gamble House, with photos by her son Theodore Thomas and daughter-in-law Kuniko Okubo.

The Thomases’ new home was designed by Ted Criley, Jr., a prolific, under-appreciated architect based out of Claremont for the bulk of his career. Like Thomas, Criley had graduated from Stanford, and practiced his trade for the military during WWII, designing housing at naval bases under the supervision of Paul Revere Williams and Adrian Wilson. Also like Thomas, he had a sassy streak – check out his criticism of the film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead in 1949: 

Some scare-easies have wondered whether or not Architecture can survive the release of the ‘Fountainhead.’ Personally, I would venture that Architecture’s chances are a great deal better than those of the Motion Picture Industry.

-Ted Criley, Journal of the American Institute of Architects, July 1949

In 1957 Criley started a firm with Fred McDowell in Claremont. They were well known for churches, libraries, institutes of higher learning (including the master plans for Pitzer College and Claremont Graduate University) and civic buildings, including many in the east San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys. Architectural historian Barbara Lamprecht characterizes Criley’s institutional work from this era as “quite formal, strongly rectilinear, often symmetrical and axially oriented, and rendered in taut concrete and glass.”

What we see in the Frank Thomas House is something very different: a unique interpretation of the modernism that was blossoming in late ‘40s and ‘50s SoCal architecture. The home is built on an asymmetrical footprint, with a broad and horizontal profile, a low-pitched roof, several walls built entirely of floor-to-ceiling windows, and an open plan that connects the central shared spaces. There’s little decoration to be found on the walls. The home asserts itself instead through varying textures and the comfortable flow from room to room. 

While this is a quintessential mid-century modern home, the Frank Thomas House is warmer than what a lot of Criley’s contemporaries and fellow USC alumni were designing at the time, for example in the influential Case Study House program. Where, say, Pierre Koenig crafted homes dominated by industrial steel, glass and corrugated iron, the Frank Thomas House is defined by wood. The whole house is framed in wood, and there’s a ton of high-quality wood throughout the entire home, from the redwood cladding and inlay on the patio, to the varnished oak squares above the living room fireplace. 

Criley’s work here feels like a love note to the California craftsman movement, which hit its apex in early 1900s Pasadena, just a couple miles away. There’s built-in wood cabinetry and furniture throughout the house. Thomas himself supposedly designed the drafting table in the studio, where he could do his thing right next to a large window looking out at the mountains and trees right outside. 

According to their son Theodore Thomas, Frank and Jeanette gave Ted Criley a five-page “manifesto” of notes about what they wanted out of their new house, titled “Infinite Riches in a Small Space.” Jeanette wanted a utility sink large enough to bathe the family dog. One of Frank’s demands was that the studio be able to accommodate a baby grand piano. 

In his free time, Thomas tickled the ivories for the Firehouse Five Plus Two, a Dixieland-style jazz band composed entirely of employees from the Disney animation department. They had a good run, appearing on radio with Bing Crosby, performing at the opening day of Disneyland, and getting a featured spot in the 1950 Disney TV special, One Hour in Wonderland.

Just as essential as the design of the house itself are its siting and landscaping. Initially, Frank and Jeanette hoped to build on the hillside at the northern part of the property. But when that proved too costly, they opted for the more conventionally-graded land further down the hill. What they lost in elevation, they gained in a sense of unity and embeddedness with the site. Pretty much every room in this house looks out on either a well-planted hillside or a gorgeous view of trees and foliage. The indoor-outdoor divide is nearly non-existent here at the Frank Thomas House. 

Some early landscaping schemes were made by Garrett Eckbo, a visionary designer inspired as much by painting as by plants, and considered the father of modern landscape architecture. While Eckbo’s plans weren’t carried out, they did inspire the lush woodland that the property would become. Intermingled with the mature trees and other plantings are a series of interconnected paths, partly laid by Frank Thomas himself. 

As the Thomas family grew, so did their home. In 1962, with a fourth child on the way, the Thomases brought in another architect, Curtis Chambers, to transform the garage into a fourth bedroom and create a carport out of part of the backyard. They added and then removed solar panels in the 1980s, re-poured the patio in the mid-’80s, and replaced their pea gravel roof with a composition roof around the same time.  

Frank Thomas passed away in 2004, and Jeanette followed in 2012. In 2017 the house was sold for just under $3 million. Pasadena Heritage holds (or at least held) an easement protecting the original furniture, floorings and entire house, excepting the 1962 carport.

My favorite part of researching a home’s history is finding those scraps of stories that suggest what life in the home was like. There’s a small 1955 notice in the Pasadena Independent about a meeting of the Stephens College Alumnae Club, hosted at the Thomas House (a rep from the local Sheriff’s Office gave a talk about narcotics). Four years later, Jeanette Thomas opened her doors to a dessert held by the La Cañada Junior High School PTA. 

Speaking of the cast of characters that flowed through the Frank Thomas Home over the years: I’d be remiss if I left out Ollie Johnston, Frank’s dear friend and colleague for 70+ years, and another one of Disney’s Nine Old Men. The pair went to art school at Stanford together and both later attended the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles; they got jobs in the Disney animation department around the same time, and worked together on innumerable projects, including four Disney-related books after they retired in the 1970s. Frank and Ollie had their first kids within a week of each other. And when it came time to find their forever homes, they built houses literally next door to each other on Flintridge Avenue. Ollie commissioned one from the great Cliff May at 748 Flintridge Avenue, with a 1″ scale railroad in the backyard that inspired Walt Disney to build his own mini railroad. Sadly, Ollie Johnston’s home was demolished after he died in 2008. Otherwise this post might very well have been a two-fer about the side-by-side homes of these inseparable animation icons. 

I highly recommend you watch the charming documentary Frank & Ollie, made by Frank’s son Theodore. You get to see how Frank, his family and the dogs made use of their house. And even better, watching these two elderly dudes kibitz with each other like 10-year-olds is pure joy.

Thanks to Cameron Carothers for approving the use of his photographs, and to Kelly Makepeace of Crosby Doe for connecting me with him.

Resources & Recommend Reading

+ Arrant, Chris: “Jeannette Thomas, Widow Of Legendary Disney Animator Frank Thomas, and Gamble House Historian/Author, Dies At Age 91” (CartoonBrew.com, October 3, 2012)

+ Cardine, Sara: “Heritage tour makes a stop at Walt Disney animator’s mid-century home” (Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2017)

+ “Disney Family Album | Frank Thomas | Disney Animation | Disney Legend | Walt’s Nine Old Men” (1985) (VIDEO – @SamsDisneyDiary on YouTube, uploaded Feb 28, 2018)

+ “Disney Legends: Frank Thomas” (d23.com)

+ “The Fountainhead” (Journal of the American Institute of Architects, July, 1949 – via USModernist.org)

+ Frank and Ollie website

+ “Garrett Eckbo” (LAConservancy.org)

+ Lamprecht, Barbara: “Hugh MacNeil House: City of Glendora Landmark Application” (2012)

+ Lazzaretto, Christine and Molly Iker, Historic Resources Group: Frank Thomas House’s NRHP nomination form

+ Mapstone, Bobbi: “Our Story Through Their Eyes: Jeanette Thomas Picturing a Legacy That Put The Gamble House in a New Light” (gamblehouse.org)

+ Mullen, Chris: “Frank Thomas: The Key-Playing Key Animator” (WaltDisney.org, April 24, 2017)

+ Neiuber, John: “Building Claremont: the mid-century years” (Claremont Courier, February 1, 2019)

+ “Pasadena Area PTA’s to Award Life Memberships” (Pasadena Independent, February 13, 1959 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Smith, Dan: “When Ya Wish upon a House” (EichlerNetwork.com)

+ Solomon, Charles: “Frank Thomas, 92; One of Disney’s ‘Nine Old Men’” (Los Angeles Times, September 10, 2004 – via ProQuest)

+ Solomon, Charles: “Last of Disney’s ‘Nine Old Men’ dies” (Los Angeles Times, April 16, 2008 – via ProQuest)

+ Tavres, Dave: “Ollie Johnston’s home” (findingwalt.com, September 30, 2018)

+ “Theodore Criley, Architect: The Animator’s House” (CrosbyDoe.com listing, 2017)

+ Thomas, Theodore, director: Frank & Ollie (MOVIE – Walt Disney Pictures / Theodore Thomas Productions, 1995)

+ “To Convene” (Pasadena Independent, January 16, 1955 – via Newspapers.com)