Carol Lindemulder Recalls SOHO’s Unforgettable Start
By Ann Jarmusch
From SOHO News
“Save This House.”
Robert Miles Parker put up that now legendary sign with his phone number in front of the 1887 Victorian Sherman-Gilbert house on Fir Street in San Diego on January 1, 1969. The artist and teacher got enough calls to hold a meeting in his own Victorian home. That’s the extraordinary story of how Save Our Heritage Organisation was born 50 years ago.
Miles later credited Carol Lindemulder as “the woman behind the man” who started SOHO, and for good reason.
Carol didn’t see his sign. Her friend Sue Macnofsky, who knew Miles, urged her to attend the meeting to get her mind off the recent loss of her father. There, a small group sat on the floor around Miles in his “thronelike chair,” as Carol put it. If they didn’t do something, the house would be demolished for a hospital parking lot.
To her best recollection, Carol, now 82, named the people at the first meeting in a recent phone interview from her home in Borrego Springs. In addition to Sue, who soon became co-chairman with Miles and Bernie Sosna, Denise and Courtney Gonzales were there, as were Merika Gopaul, Bruce Hay and his then-wife Carolyn Hay, and Tom and Peggy Shepley.
Surprisingly, Carol, a vivacious and articulate woman who was then in her early 30s and working on a Master of Fine Arts degree at San Diego State, listened to Miles without comment.
“I grew up [in Mission Hills] above Old Town, which I loved,” Carol said. “I was interested in San Diego history, but nothing specific.”
That was about to change drastically.
She recalled how Miles authoritatively warned that “the City of San Diego was tearing down Victorian houses and destroying his neighborhood near downtown. “He was very familiar with Victoriana from drawing historic houses” in pen and ink, “but we weren’t,” Carol said. Miles’ knowledge was also intimate, as he lived in an endangered Victorian on Front Street.
Miles described the Stick Eastlake style house, designed by the prominent architects Comstock & Trotsche, and talked about the resident sisters, Bess and Gertrude Gilbert, who were hosts to many artists and musicians from 1892 to 1965. They include the African American opera star Marian Anderson, when she was refused a room at the U.S. Grant Hotel.
“He said he thought the house should be saved,” Carol recalled. “Then, at the end of his lecture, he said, ‘People can’t save anything. The government won’t let you.’
“Those two sentences hit me. I will never believe that people can’t ever win. It bothered me that he said that to a bunch of young people… I thought about it all night. I didn’t sleep. The next morning, I went around the corner to buy donuts and two coffees. I waited as long as I could stand it. I knocked on his door around 8am; I think I woke him. I said, ‘You can’t believe that people can’t save anything. This is America. That’s not how it works. You have to organize.'”
Sleepy or not, Miles’ reaction was swift. “He said I should not say he should organize to save the house. We should organize.
“He got me.”
For the next two years, SOHO members focused on raising $500 to buy the Sherman-Gilbert House from the developer owner and more funds to move it if they could find a new site. SOHO worked with County Supervisors and the San Diego City Council. In 1971, it was moved in two pieces to a newly created Victorian preserve called Heritage Park on land purchased by San Diego County Parks. SOHO’s offices were in and out of the park for over two decades. Read the full story of this achievement HERE.
A beehive of activity, SOHO seemingly was in perpetual motion and making strides, thanks to the early, energetic volunteers inspired by Miles and others. If members weren’t in meetings with public officials, developers, or lawyers, they were organizing one enticing event after another, such as a tour of 100 historic buildings in three hours and a Victorian home tour that brought visitors to four houses in a double-decker English bus.
“I delegated like mad,” Miles said in 2009, when SOHO honored him and Carol each with a Lifetime Achievement Award. “There were Carol Lindemulder [the group’s first treasurer] and Nick Fintzelberg [an early co-chairman], who understood money and land, all the things that never interested me. All I had to do was be outrageous, which is my nature, so I didn’t have to do anything! Except, of course, I really believed in what was happening. It became more than saving the Sherman-Gilbert House, it became about saving the city.”
Carol credits Miles with strong powers of persuasion. “Miles was a pistol. He would get out there” and pitch saving a Victorian mansion to politicians and citizens alike. “He just needed some guidance. He was certainly a charismatic person,” she said of her long-time friend, who died in 2012.
Having grown up in San Diego, Carol had a wide circle of friends to call on. She was the group’s natural liaison to members of the San Diego Historical Society (now the San Diego History Center), such as Nick Fintzelberg, Sally Johns, and Barry Worthington, all of whom soon joined SOHO’s board. “San Diego was a big small town. Everybody knew everybody. I’d been friends with Nick since high school.”
In addition to being immersed in SOHO, Carol worked in customer service at an electronics supplier frequented by aerospace engineers in Little Italy. “My office was in the shipping room. One day in 1969, a co-worker said, ‘Someone from Washington, D.C. is on the phone for you.’
“It was James Massey, Director of the Historic American Buildings Survey! We arranged to bring him out. We didn’t know anything about surveys. A lot of architects were involved with SOHO then, and John Henderson was among those who gave him tours of San Diego.”
Massey told SOHO about creating HABS photographs and drawings, which could lead to historic designations, and encouraged them to apply for federal funds for preservation groups.
“To me,” Carol said, “a giant door had opened!”
Not only Miles, but Carol also knew how to capture newspaper, television, and public attention. During her first term as SOHO president in 1973, she met with a top San Diego Union editor and went before TV cameras with apparent ease. She now says she was shaking at times, but “I knew I had to speak and I was so moved by what I had to say. I believed very much in publicity.”
SOHO had already cultivated the support of San Diego citizens and leaders with novel train trips and historic building tours, silent movie screenings, and Queen Victoria’s birthday celebrations in the Sherman-Gilbert House, all of which helped build its treasury and public support little by little.
As president, Carol orchestrated an even bigger social splash in the soon-to-be-demolished Land Title Building on Broadway. Nick Finzelberg briefly got the lights back on and running water restored so fundraising revelry could be staged on multiple floors. For one glamorous night, live jazz and rock music, an antiques auction and fashion show, gambling casino and cocktail bars tended by football players, bankers, and lawyers (many of them Carol’s friends) aided the cause. “The whole thing was totally wild,” she recalled.
That event seized mega media attention, while also building momentum and credibility with donors and decisionmakers.
Several years later, reflecting on SOHO’s 10th anniversary and preservation activism in January 1979, Carol told a Union reporter, “I guess we were all a little crazy then—still are. We just do (this) because we love it. It’s certainly not for the money or the popularity.”
Now that the 50th anniversary is here, Carol said she is proud of SOHO’s sweeping and sustained accomplishments over decades. A long-time supporter even after she moved from San Diego to Fallbrook and then Borrego Springs, Carol mentioned the ongoing battles to preserve Balboa Park and the Hotel del Coronado, and SOHO’s purchase, restoration, and operation of the 1884 Santa Ysabel Store as recent outstanding preservation priorities.
She’s concerned about the condition of the Oak Grove Butterfield Stage Station and the barn at Warner-Carrillo Ranch. She’d like to see more of the region’s young people and minorities embrace historic preservation, which she thinks will happen in time if SOHO continues to “keep the broadest representation of the community on the board and staff.”
Carol’s 50th anniversary wish for SOHO? “That the greater San Diego community would see the magic that SOHO has brought in preserving their history.”
