James and Mary Jordan’s 2nd eldest daughter was named Ethel. Ethel Jordan married Fremont Stackpole and they had a son named Ralph (b. May 1, 1885 – d. December 13, 1973).
Sculptor Ralph Stackpole Ralph was an enterprising youth and decided he was going to take a trip to Arizona. He never made it to Arizona. Ralph stepped into a different world when he left Oregon for San Francisco. Ralph enrolled in an SF. Art School in 1903, and would earn fame as sculptor. While in school, his first girlfriend was Helen Arnstein Salz who goes on to earn fame as a NY abstract artist. Ralph and Helen both go New York where they studied under Robert Henri.
Following the SF earthquake and fire, Ralph traveled to Paris in 1906, to attend the École des Beaux-Arts and Atelier Merces in 1906–1908, exhibiting at the Salon in 1910. While there, he meet a young couple named Diego Rivera and Frida Kahalo. Ralph befriended Diego and Freda Rivera the famous muralist and artist, and eventually convinced them both to visit and stay him in San Francisco in 1930. At this the same time, James Jordan (his cousin and my father came to live with him in San Francisco)
Ralph was best known for integrating monumental paintings and sculpture representing the working class, along with architectural elements, his works can still be seen at the San Francisco Stock Exchange, the City Club of San Francisco, the Coit Tower, and the proscenium arch (the arch that separates the stage from the auditorium) in the Paramount Theater on Oakland, CA. In the 1930′s he was part of a Depression Era program dubbed the Federal Arts Project for the Works Progress Administration. He was also one of the early instructors at the Calif. School of Fine Arts. It was during this decade that Stackpole worked on many projects with famed San Francisco architect Timothy L. Pflueger, most notably the San Francisco Stock Exchange Building. Ralph Stackpole was always concerned about social realist causes, especially during the Depression era of the 1930s and was able convince Pflueger to commission Diego Rivera for an interior mural. This would be a controversial selection considering the Rivera's well documented leftist communist beliefs, a contradiction to the Stock Exchange's capitalist foundation. As a gesture of gratitude, Rivera painted a figure of Stackpole and his son Peter into the mural.
During his stay, Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo lived and worked at the studio, becoming in the process lifelong friends with Stackpole and Ginette (Ralph's wife). They met tennis champion Helen Wills Moody, an avid painter-hobbyist, who soon agreed to model for Rivera at the studio. Neighbor Maynard Dixon saw the attention, and the American money being given to Rivera, and with etcher Frank Van Sloun organized a short-lived protest against the Marxst artist. However, both Dixon and Van Sloun quickly realized that the San Francisco art world “oligarchy” who were obviously smitten with Rivera, including Stackpole’s well-connected patrons, were the same group that they themselves would need to support their own art aspirations.[ Ralph Stackpole was a popular artist of stature who had special status in pre-war San Francisco. He stood at the center of its artistic circles. “He knew everybody in town from top to bottom”, Kenneth Rexroth (regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco “Beats” Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement) remembered Stackpole in 1929, “and he took us everywhere”. At a very young age Ralph worked as an unskilled worker to help support his mother after his father died as a millwright when he fell into a circular saw. At 16, he studied at the Mark Hopkins Institute under Arthur Pullman, sculptor and Gottardo Piazzoni, muralist, supporting himself as a handyman in a local dance hall and a stock boy at the Emporium department store. When the earthquake and fire destroyed much of San Francisco in April 1906, the New York art world created a burse for dislocated San Francisco artists. Stackpole spent $200 to follow Putnam and Piazzoni to Paris, where he served as Putnam’s apprentice while taking courses at the Ecole de Beaux Arts and living in Putnam’s garret. He returen to SF in 1908, but left again to study for a year under Robert Henri in New York. In 1928 Architect Timothy Pflueger commissioned from Stacpole two heroic pieces, Mother Earth and Man & His Invention, for the front of the SF Stock Exchange. At the time, the sculptures two of the most ambitious granite sculptures undertaken in the U.S. in those years – carved between 1928 and 1931. Stackpole was considered bourgeois in his attitudes and lifestyle even though he was very connected to the Bohemian Circle of Artists. His studio was popularly call the the “Bohemian Block”. Ralph's sizable San Francisco studio at 716 Montgomery Street, served as a social center for San Francisco's artist community and the Bohemian Club. Photographer Dorothea Lange rented upstairs studio space there in 1926, and Helen Clark and Otis Oldfield, both artists, married there the same year. Lange's husband Maynard Dixon had his studio next door, and the Stackpole and Dixon families were very close—both men were members of the Bohemian Club. The Bohemian Club is a private gentlemen's club. Founded in 1872 from a regular meeting of journalists, artists and musicians. One of it’s members was Jack London who is best remembered as the author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang. London was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers. Other noted members of the Bohemian Club during this time included Ambrose Bierce, John Muir, Gelett Burgess, and Frank Norris. The group quickly relaxed its rules for membership to permit some people to join who had little artistic talent, but enjoyed the arts and had greater financial resources. Eventually, the original "bohemian" members were in the minority and the wealthy and powerful controlled the club. During the 40's, it soon began to accept businessmen and entrepreneurs as permanent members, as well as offering temporary membership to university presidents and military commanders who were serving in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Bohemian Club has since been reported to have become the “behind-the-curtain” power-brokers club of the rich and famous, hand picking past California Governors and US Presidents, and has been visited by numerous U.S. Presidents dating back to Teddy Roosevelt up to Bill Clinton and G.W. Bush. Pflueger had Ralph design and construct Pacifica, which was photographed for the cover of Life Magazine and became the iconic symbol of the 1939-40 World’s Fair. Pacifica was a statue created by Ralph Stackpole for the 1939–1940 Golden Gate International Exposition held on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. Stackpole's largest sculpture, it towered 81 feet (25 m) over the entrance to the Cavalcade of the Golden West in the Court of Pacifica. Ironically, the United States Navy purchased the island as a naval base in 1941, and Pacifica was demolished along with most other exposition structures.