Streeter Blair was born at Cadmus, a small farming village in eastern Kansas, on July 16, 1888. He was the son of Edward Blair, a former schoolteacher turned manager of the Cadmus Grange store, and Lulu Hiatt Blair. Streeter's boyhood was molded by eastern Kansas farm life at the end of the last century: tending to the family animals; plowing and harvesting for neighboring farms; working in the Cadmus Grange Store on Saturday mornings; going to picnics and community socials; and playing in the Cadmus Grange band, in which Streeter was snare drummer at the age of fourteen.
About 1903 the Blair family moved to Kansas City, Kansas, where Streeter's father had accepted a job as a bank teller. However, banker's hours and city life did not sit well with the family, and the Blairs soon moved again, this time to Spring Hill, a town of seven hundred, thirty miles south of Kansas City. There Ed Blair was once again manager of the local grange store, and Streeter attended high school, graduating as valedictorian of the Spring Hill High School. Streeter attended the University of Kansas, where he majored in the classics, in addition to being steward of the La Sorella Club, a member of the University of Kansas band, and trap drummer in a small dance and theater orchestra.
After graduating from the University of Kansas, he began the first of his varied careers as a Latin teacher-cum-football coach for the high school in Sabetha, Kansas. During his two years in Sabetha he met his future wife, Camille Hook, then a high school student. Around 1914 he accepted a position as principal of the high school in Junction City, Kansas, where he moved with his bride, Camille. He quickly became disillusioned with his job in Junction City and decided to leave education and make a new start in the clothing business.
Following a bad venture with a clothing store in Junction City, he moved to Fort Scott, Kansas, where he opened a larger, more successful store. A key to his success in Fort Scott lay in his use of newspaper advertising, a medium almost completely neglected by the town's established clothiers. Gradually he became more and more interested in advertising, until he finally sold his clothing store and devoted all his energies to the advertising business.
He was hired by Woolf Brothers, a large and famous retail firm in Kansas City, to manage their mail-order operations and direct their advertising. In this capacity he developed a classified mailing system which identified customers by various common traits — a fore-runner of modern computerized advertising methods. He also published a boys' magazine, supposedly written by a young boy named Tim, which was distributed nationally through retailers licensed by Blair. These efforts became so successful that he left Woolf Brothers to operate independently.
Shortly after the stock market crash of 1929, Streeter, Camille, and daughters Sazette and Betsy Lynette moved to Southern California, which became the new base of operations for the advertising business. However, he was unable to spend a great deal of time in Los Angeles, where they had rented a house, because of the need to service advertising accounts all over the United States.
During these business trips, he came into contact with and developed an interest in American antiques. While in the East he would buy furniture and other items at country auctions and then ship them to California to furnish the house they were building in West Los Angeles. But when a neighbor bought up the first shipment almost immediately--at double the price--Streeter began to think of antiques as a possible business. Buying and selling antiques took more and more of his time, until by the late thirties he was out of the advertising business entirely, and the Blairs were in the antiques business, with a shop on a ranch near El Cajon.
As the antiques business grew, the Blair s moved to a larger and better location in Leucadia, more accessible to the Los Angeles markets About this time, Streeter became interested in two hobbies, bread making and painting, which were to fill the last eighteen years of his life and bring him national and international fame. The two hobbies were interrelated, as painting occupied his time while waiting for bread to rise and bake, and perhaps the physical effort of bread making helped provide a relief between stretches of painting.
Soon after he began to paint, a customer in the antique shop bought one of his paintings. Realizing that people wore willing to pay money for his works, he pursued his hobby with even greater zeal, sharpening his technical skills, but avoiding any formal training or even contact with professional artists.
His first public recognition came in jury art shows; to his surprise, his works were accepted in twelve of the first thirteen shows to which he applied. His first one-man show was at the Carlbach Gallery in New York City in 1951. Later one-man shows were at the Galerie St. Etienne, the University of Kansas, the Ferus Gallery, the Robles Gallery, and the Sari Heller Gallery. The Smithsonian Institution chose six of his paintings for a sixty-painting exhibition which traveled throughout Europe in 1958. Through Vincent Price and Sears-Roebuck, a collection of fourteen of his paintings was on tour for a year in the United States.
His first paintings, and the paintings for which he was roost famous, were those in which he chronicled American life, principally farm life, in the period before the widespread use of motor power. He felt he had a duty to record this era in his paintings so that a visual record would remain for future generations. But unlike many primitive artists, Blair continued to paint after he had finished his autobiographical paintings about turn-of -the-century farm life in eastern Kansas. He experimented with new subjects, doing landscapes and still lifes in addition to historicals, and in his later works used a sophisticated palette. When he died November 3, 1966, he had completed more than five hundred and thirty major paintings.
In the pages which follow, Streeter Blair recounts in his own rich, idiomatic, and homely style his childhood experiences in eastern Kansas, his education, and his four careers as teacher, clothier and advertiser, antique dealer, and artist. These recollections are part of the Fine Arts series of the UCLA Oral History Program. Records relating to this interview are located in the program's office. Selden S. Deemer, Los Angeles, California, August 1973