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railed observation platform at the rear, the Lincoln land yacht slept
four people. Stanley McFarland, Billings’ longtime chauffeur, said Mr.
and Mrs. Edgar Stow of La Patera Ranch often made up the foursome
when they joined C.K.G. and Blanche on excursions to their desert
hideaway in La Quinta. “It was no uncommon sight,” he said, “to see
the big blue land yacht rolling down the highway with the Billingses
and Stows playing bridge in the parlor, oblivious to the passing scene,
with a white-jacketed steward supplying them with food and drink.”
Billings, who tired quickly of most of his possessions, sold the land
yacht in 1934.
The Party’s Over
Billings’ beloved Lou Dillon died in 1925 and Uhlan followed in
1935. For years, a brass plaque mounted on a boulder marked the graves
of the King and Queen of the Trotters. When the area was later developed
for housing, an observant neighbor had the stone moved to Earl Warren
Showgrounds.
On May 6, 1937, Cornelius Kingsley Garrison Billings succumbed
to pneumonia. Blanche followed 10 days later of the same ailment, and
their entire estate passed to their daughter, Mrs. William Halstead Vander
Poel. Today, Billings’ presence in New York seems largely forgotten. In a
recent article about the palatial Tryon Hall estate, David Vega-Barochowitz
wrote, “The massive gallery of Tryon Hall stands like a ruined citadel.
Copious weeds have risen to shield the twin stone [entrance] gates from
passing cars… Here where no one walks anymore, on a plateau high above
the Hudson, one can gaze upon the tombstone of excess, the last remnant
of C.K.G. Billings, the forgotten capitalist.” Time has dimmed his name
in Santa Barbara as well, but his memory lives on in the world he so loved,
that of harness racing and horses. Founded in 1981, the C.K.G. Billings
Amateur Driving Series, is a monument to his phenomenal achievements
in that field.
(Sources not mentioned in text: articles by Stella Haverland Rouse
and Walker Tompkins, contemporary news articles, obituaries, David
Myrick’s
Montecito and Santa Barbara
, internet topical sources, ancestry.
com, Who’s Who in California 1928-1929, letter from Elizabeth Howell
in 1959,
House Beautiful
for Oct. 1915)
(top left) C.K.G. Billings may have invented the modern Recreational Vehicle with his custom made “Land Yacht” that slept four
(top right) In 1924, when Billings’ new 240-foot yacht,
Vanadis
, arrived in Santa Barbara,
it was escorted into the bay by a flotilla of welcoming city dignitaries and fellow Yacht Club members. (Photos courtesy of Santa Barbara Historical Museum)
The seawall did not hold during the January 1940 storm and destroyed
the BIllings’ beach cottage (see in background) at Sandyland
(Photo courtesy Santa Barbara Historical Museum)