Desert Dreamers 12: The Illustrators

In the middle decades of the last century, a group of  illustrators captured the ethos of  Palm Springs so effectively that their work continues to resonate — and circulate — today. Beyond the pen, they were fine artists and cartoonists, sculptors and muralists, businesspeople and raconteurs, iconoclasts and pillars of the community.

Earl Cordrey, O.E.L. “Bud” Graves, Margo Gerke, and Alice Rovinsky represent a larger group of pioneering artists who called the Coachella Valley home. While their compatriots painted landscapes and desert fauna, this foursome braved editorial deadlines and captured the essence of what it felt like to be a local. Their illustrations appeared from the 1940s to the 1970s in Palm Springs Life, founded in 1958, and its predecessor, Palm Springs Villager (also known as The Villager), established in 1947.

Collectively, their imaginative work invokes  Greater Palm Springs with a single glance. They not only documented the day but influenced those ahead. These are their stories.

The Editorialist

Earl Cordrey (1902–1977)

Earl Cordrey knew at a young age that he wanted to be an artist and that he wanted to make a living at it. To that end, he sought out Sam Hyde Harris, a successful commercial artist with major clients. Cordrey moved to Santa Paula, California, to work with Harris, gaining experience and cutting his teeth in magazines.

Cordrey spent 15 years creating advertising and story illustrations for magazines such as Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and Women’s Home Companion and cover art for American Weekly. He also became a go-to for publishers of  romance novels who needed art of amorous couples. (One newspaper said Cordrey “began his career with drawings of cowboys and horses but discovered that pretty girls are much more in demand.”)

His impressive portfolio, and its national footprint, drew a lot of attention when he moved in 1942 to the quieter Southern California desert.

Initially, Cordrey focused on his art, especially landscapes, entering contests and occasionally mounting a solo show. He and his wife, Kay, were sought-after members of the cultural, and business, communities in Palm Springs. They teamed with another New York–based illustrator in 1948 in building a 10-unit compound of  artist studios. The expressed intent of the furnished units — Colony House, or The Colony — was to lure artists and East Coast editorial types.

Cordrey was an early partner in Palm Springs Life. He took an active role in its development, creating the original logo, serving as art director, and shaping the look of the newly reconfigured magazine. He designed the debut cover, dated March 20, 1958: a motion-sketch containing four images of a golfer swinging through a drive. Cordrey continued to produce covers into the mid-1960s.

Browse the Palm Springs Life and Palm Springs Villager archives, and shop cover posters, at shop.palmspringslife.com.

The Doodler

Margo Gerke  (1927–2014)

Margo Gerke landed a job as a reporter for the society department of Pasadena News shortly after graduating in 1950 from the University of California, Berkeley. It took about a year for her to realize the job wasn’t fulfilling, and she returned home to Sierra Madre. Before long, she saw an ad for an editorial assistant at Randall Henderson’s Desert Magazine.

Gerke seemed to be everywhere in the desert in those years, serving as publicist and board member of the Riverside County Fair & National Date Festival and the Orange County Fair; she also participated in local theater. A story toward the end of her time in Palm Springs notes she had resigned from the fair boards with several months’ notice. The effective date of her resignation coincided with a story in a Stockton newspaper about her betrothal to Urban Ernst. Gerke’s last cover, in April 1959, also coincided with the sale of  the Villager to Palm Springs Life.

“She was of  that era and kind of understood that she wouldn’t pursue her career,” her daughter Carla Ernst remembers. Gerke taught art class for her two daughters on the weekends, remained active in the art community, and later served as an art critic for the Stockton Record.

The Cowboy Artist

O.E.L. “Bud” Graves (1897–1971)

Bud Graves became a full member of the Tsuut’ina Nation as a young man, and he kept Indigenous communities as his muse for the rest of his life. Originally from Calgary, Canada, he was a skilled cowboy with strong enough rodeo skills to throw rope around a group of  horses and wow an audience.

By the mid-1930s, Graves worked at a studio in Vancouver, British Columbia. He also took side jobs, like designing window treatments, while creating intricate sculptures and pursuing work as a muralist. One newspaper publicized his ability to transform a bathroom into an underwater playground of sea wood and sunken treasure with paint. In the 1940s, a resort developer in western Canada commissioned Graves to decorate 10 individual cabins with “Indian carvings and sketches.”

He was invited to illustrate covers for Palm Springs Villager in the late 1940s, prompting him and his wife to relocate to the desert. From that point forward, he went by O.E.L. Graves for both social and professional purposes, though friends still called him Bud. Graves’ cover illustrations, first appearing in 1948, featured noteworthy places in Palm Springs, such as the newly constructed Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, and many sunbathers next to palm trees. He also diversified characters found in crowds beyond what had previously been represented on the magazine’s façade.

Graves continued to experiment with many mediums. As an artist, he grew in prominence with time, selling pieces to desert habitués such as Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Clark Gable and to institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He and his wife, Vie, were a frequent presence at social events, often alongside Earl and Kay Cordrey.

The Cartoonist

Alice Rovinsky (1903–1977)

Among the desert’s illustrators, Alice Rovinsky best fits the concept of the romantic artist, someone who ventured through life making art with little concern for convention, living as she chose. That isn’t unusual today, but it certainly was when Rovinsky was around. She is best known as creator of the single-panel cartoon Rovinsky’s Palm Springs. The series took hold quickly, becoming a regular feature in Palm Springs Life from the late 1960s into the ’70s and now collected in a book of  the same name.

Most of  Rovinsky’s income came from fashion illustrations for clothing stores like Bergdorf Goodman and Henri Bendell, according to Wyle’s daughter, artist Nancy Wyle Romero. Rovinsky took other freelance work, including illustrating a children’s book published in 1951 called Look at Me!.

Romero recalls Rovinsky visiting her family in the early 1950s when Romero was a young child. “Alice the Artist,” as they called her, left a big impression on the kids. “She had short hair and was very Bohemian,” Romero says, “heavy and weird and delightful.” She remembers Rovinsky’s arms jangled with bracelets.

After her time in the desert, the cartoonist lived in an apartment in Pasadena over a men’s gym. Romero once spent the day helping her paint a mural on the apartment wall. At some point, Rovinsky pointed out the men sunbathing at the gym’s pool. “She exuded fun,” Romero says. Still, Rovinsky was very private. While photos of  her seemingly do not exist, her clever comics still get laughs today.