Crete Cage

Lucretia Harvey Cage (September 4, 1881 – December 22, 1968), known as Crete Cage, was an American journalist and clubwoman who worked at the Los Angeles Times. Her son was composer John Cage.

Crete Cage
The face of a white woman with short dark hair.
Crete Cage, from a 1931 newspaper.
Born
Lucretia Harvey

September 4, 1881
Iowa, U.S.
DiedDecember 22, 1968(1968-12-22) (aged 87)
Upper Montclair, New Jersey, U.S.
OccupationJournalist
ChildrenJohn Cage

Early life

Lucretia Harvey was born in Iowa, the daughter of James Cary Harvey and Minnie Puriton Harvey.[1] (Some sources give 1885 as her birth year.)[2][3]

Career

Crete Cage played piano at a Protestant church in Colorado as a young woman.[4] She was a "professional club woman" in the 1920s, state chair of press and publicity for the California Federation of Women's Clubs, until 1931, when she retired to become president of the Hostess Presidents' Club.[5] In 1935 she was named to the executive committee of the Women's Civic Conference.[6] She was heard on radio, giving reports on women's club activities in Southern California.[7][8] She was part of a group of women who started an "arts and crafts" cooperative shop in downtown Los Angeles, to help unemployed craftsmen sell their work during the Depression.[9] She was also active in leadership at the Ebell Club, and founder of the Lincoln Study Club chapters in Detroit and Los Angeles.[5][10]

Cage worked at the Los Angeles Times from 1934 to 1939, as a society page editor, covering women's clubs.[11][12][13] With her Times colleague, music critic Isabel Morse Jones, she worked for a new concert hall for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.[14]

Her son John Cage wrote a composition for solo piano titled "Crete" (1944 or 1945), named for her.[15]

Personal life

Lucretia Harvey was married twice before she married John Milton Cage in 1908. They had a son, composer John Cage, born in 1912 in Los Angeles.[16] They lived in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles in a home they shared with her parents and sometimes with her sisters Margaret, Josephine, and Phoebe.[9] She died in Upper Montclair, New Jersey in 1968, aged 87 years. Her scrapbooks documenting her son's life from 1916 to 1954 are archived in the special collections library at Northwestern University.[17]

References
  1. "Minnie Puriton Harvey (death notice)". The Los Angeles Times. 1946-11-18. p. 20. Retrieved 2020-04-26 – via Newspapers.com.
  2. Cage, John (2016-03-15). The Selected Letters of John Cage. Wesleyan University Press. pp. 15, note 14. ISBN 978-0-8195-7592-0.
  3. "Lucretia Cage in Social Security Death Index". Fold3. Retrieved 2020-04-26.
  4. Liu, Gerald C. (2017-11-16). Music and the Generosity of God. Springer. pp. 18, note 8. ISBN 978-3-319-69493-1.
  5. "Mrs. Cage Lauded for Club Work". Los Angeles Evening Express. 1931-06-02. p. 12. Retrieved 2020-04-26 – via Newspapers.com.
  6. "Mrs. Thayer to Advise Civic Group". The Los Angeles Times. 1938-02-20. p. 63. Retrieved 2020-04-26 – via Newspapers.com.
  7. "The Dial". The Los Angeles Times. 1935-06-04. p. 12. Retrieved 2020-04-26 – via Newspapers.com.
  8. "Crete Cage Takes Air Waves Today". The Los Angeles Times. 1935-07-22. p. 29. Retrieved 2020-04-26 – via Newspapers.com.
  9. Perloff, Professor Marjorie; Perloff, Marjorie; Junkerman, Charles (1994). John Cage: Composed in America. University of Chicago Press. pp. 67–72, 86. ISBN 978-0-226-66057-8.
  10. "The Lincoln Study Club". The Los Angeles Times. 1924-03-18. p. 27. Retrieved 2020-04-26 – via Newspapers.com.
  11. Swed, Mark (2012-09-01). "John Cage's genius an L.A. story". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2020-04-25.
  12. "Club Editor of Times at Confab". The Los Angeles Times. 1935-05-12. p. 46. Retrieved 2020-04-26 – via Newspapers.com.
  13. Cage, Crete (1938-02-20). "Clubs Plan Ousting of Radicals". The Los Angeles Times. p. 63. Retrieved 2020-04-26 – via Newspapers.com.
  14. Swed, Mark (2014-12-21). "City Leaders, Then and Now". The Los Angeles Times. p. 56. Retrieved 2020-04-26 – via Newspapers.com.
  15. "John Cage Complete Works". John Cage Trust. Retrieved 2020-04-25.
  16. Kuhn, Laura (1999). "Cage, John (1912-1992), composer and philosopher". American National Biography (online ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1803326. Retrieved 2020-04-25. (subscription required)
  17. "Cage, Lucretia, 1881-1968 | Archival and Manuscript Collections". Library, Northwestern University. Retrieved 2020-04-25.
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