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| Cover / Louis J. Treviso (1917) |
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There is an additional curious aspect of this same issue of The Graphic, a periodical that typically reported on the activities and achievements of notable citizens in Southern California society. There is in this issue a column titled “This Week in Society,” which includes a detailed account of an elborate “camouflage-themed” wedding celebration for a prominent couple in San Diego, in which Lapham Loomis Brundred married Jean Miller.
In December 1917, the US had only just entered World War I, and had only begun to recruit artists, designers and architects to serve as camouflage artists, also known as camoufleurs. Among civilian society groups, it soon became common to encourage support of the war, increase enlistments, and engage in fundraising through "camouflage-themed" costume balls, rallies, and other public and private events. The article excerpted here provides a description of an early example of those events in 1917 at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego—
Among the many artistic affairs given at the famous watering place [Hotel del Coronado] was the unique dinner Friday evening with which Mr. John J. Hernan entertained, honoring Miss Jean Miller and her fiance Captain Lapham Loomis Brundred, whose wedding in St Paul’s Church, San Diego, was one of the brilliant military and social events in the seaside city. The settings for the affair were all “camouflage,” from the entrance into the communicating trench, where boughs of trees lined the walls. An immense airplane of crimson roses and foliage was suspended overhead, and great baskets and vases of pink rosebuds and foliage added a touch. The first line trench, marked by an immense sign, led into the fortifications (in the green banquet room). Here the entire room was transformed into a wooded valley, the immense fort “camouflaged” with canvas, and strewn with leaves and branches of eucalyptus, tiny electric lights glowing through the foliage. As the party emerged through the connecting door, the “immense guns” boomed forth a welcome, followed by tiny machine guns, and the orchestra, also camouflaged behind banks of trees, played “Over There.” When the immense white “camouflaged canvas” was removed, the table represented a miniature scene of the valley, hills, mountains and desert, at one end Balboa Park camp and at the other “Brundredville,” the sign posts reading “Some City Somewhere in America.” In the center of the plain rose the Rocky Mountains with cactus and rocks, the desert stretch of country reaching to “Brundredville.” On the other side was sunny California, with its wealth of roses and flowers, while around the whole ran the bridal train of its steel tracks bearing the bridal couple to their destination in “Brundredville.” Pink rosebuds and foliage ordered the tracks, and telegraph poles with their slender lines carried messages of congratulation, while tiny electric globes on tall posts lighted the way to happiness. The menu was especially camouflage, from the soup hidden beneath tin cans, butter pats under immense green bell peppers; crab Ravigotti, in Hearts of Lettuce; salted almonds in walnuts; olives in tomatoes; tenderloin of beef under crab shells; sherbet in rosy apples; Mallard duck beneath cabbage leaves; celery salad in carrot shells; creams in oranges, cakes in bread rolls and the demi-tasse in cocoanut shells. The hand-painted sketches of Coronado scenes marked covers for thirty guests. The whole affair was one of the most artistic ever given at the famous watering place. In the child’s vernacular “Everything was what it wasn’t,” being a clever explanation of the menu and entire effect.
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