Frank Bogert was a known horseman, but photography?
Like everyone else in town on Dec. 7, 1941, Frank Bogert was attending the fancy Dog Show on the Mashie Golf Course behind the Desert Inn. He was there with his trusty camera to take publicity photos to send out to the world highlighting the sunny weather and gracious lifestyle of the desert in wintertime.
When the news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor spread through the crowd, there was disbelief. It was incomprehensible that the war had come to the United States.
By that time, Bogert had been in Palm Springs for more than a decade. He’d come to Palm Springs seeking good weather and the tourist trade. He had been working at a stable in Wrightwood from the age of 16. When the owner died, Bogert and his friend Rod Abbott inherited the horses.
Bogert knew Palm Springs had fine weather all winter. There had been talk of the area becoming a national park. The season in Wrightwood ended with the summer, and rather than pay $3 each to set the horses out to pasture, in the fall of 1927 they drove 60 horses from Wrightwood to Palm Springs. It took three days on the trail.
Riding into Palm Springs that first time, they didn’t bother to stop in town, just rode straight through to the canyons.
They set up a concession to take dudes on pleasure rides into Andreas Canyon, Murray Canyon and Palm Canyon. Horseback was the only way to really see those natural wonders. Abbott ran things during the week and Bogert would come on the weekends from college to work.
At UCLA, Bogert fancied he would study to become a doctor. His class in entomological parasitologist changed all that. He couldn’t remember any of skeins of information that were required memorization. He cast about trying geology, and then zoology.
Working at a fraternity as the house manager in exchange for room and board, on some weekends he would also tramp through Beverly Hills offering to fix cracks in the sidewalk or smooth uneven pavement lifted by tree roots. Breaking up the bad sections of cement with a sledgehammer, he would take out the rubble, haul it away, and repour the sidewalk. The average charge was about $9.
Bogert was spending more and more time in Palm Springs working. He’d taken every zoology course offered but was still short a few credits from graduating when he moved permanently to the desert.
He’d seen a lot of potential places to live in the southwest. At age 18 started rodeo-ing, riding bareback horses and bucking bulls. He won enough money to go from town to town, on to the next competition. In Utah, he was thrown by a bareback horse which bucked sideways into a barbed-wired fence and almost crushed him on the fall. He got out of riding after that and started announcing instead.
He announced rodeos in countless small towns and in San Francisco, in Phoenix, in Reno, in Salt Lake and in Los Angeles. The rodeo in Los Angeles had 100,000 spectators and was held at the Coliseum.
He also traveled to Mexico for rodeos. Bogert loved Mexico. A kid in the fraternity told him tales of the great country, and Bogert began driving hundreds of miles from Los Angeles to explore, becoming fluent in Spanish. (He would travel to Mexico for the next 50 years, visiting every state except Quintanaroo.)
Antonio Aguilera, the “John Wayne of Mexico” offered Bogert a job announcing his rodeo show in Spanish and English. The show traveled all over the United States and Puerto Rico. Bogert spent the better part of two years on the road with Aguilera. Finally in Pueblo, Colorado he found a replacement announcer and headed back to the California desert.
After all those travels, Palm Springs was home. On his arrival in 1927 the town had only around 5,000 people and was not yet incorporated as a city. In the 1930s that discussion and ensuing battle began. Nellie Coffman of the Desert Inn led the charge to incorporate. Others were skeptical. Bogert would recall years later the issue bitterly divided the residents. The city finally incorporated in 1938.
By 1938 Bogert was working at the Racquet Club. He’d sold 30 horses in the late 1920s to buy a Speed Graphic camera and started in the publicity business for the El Mirador Hotel, making lifelong friends with Lawrence Crossley and Tony Prieto who were also working there.
Bogert’s life had already been marked by having one thing lead to another in that way. It would continue.
His successful work at El Mirador led to a job managing the Racquet Club. There, the movie stars congregated and Bogert was in the center of that whirlwind. Hundreds of movie stars were regular visitors and starlets regularly paraded around the pool hoping to be discovered. Bogert would take publicity photos and send them back to the frigid Midwest and East Coast to lure visitors to the desert in hopes of seeing stars.
Janice Bibo, whom Bogert would describe as “the prettiest girl in town” and every bit as attractive as any movie star caught his eye. Every year they would practically be the only people left in town when the summer came, so they got married and were soon raising a family.
Her mother had a successful store on Palm Canyon and would make regular sojourns to Mexico to buy artifacts and interesting Indian and Mestizo curios for sale to tourists visiting the desert.
The Racquet Club gig eventually led to spending summers managing the Menlo Circus Club in Atherton. The Menlo Circus Club started with a group of young girls riding their ponies in 1920 and putting on a circus show for their parents to benefit a local charity. It grew to be a sprawling equestrian, athletic facility and social club. Bogert’s horsemanship made him the man for the job. Starting in 1938, he would go north to Atherton each summer and return to the desert in the fall.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed Dec. 7, 1941, Bogert was almost 32 years old, past the age of conscription. He was married and had two daughters. Despite the protestations of his terrified young family, he figured he needed to serve his country.
Because of his horseman skills, he was offered a position in the 11th Cavalry headed to North Africa. But one of his patrons at the Circus Club knew about his photographic skills and Bogert also got orders from the Navy. As unlikely as it seemed, the well-traveled cowboy would go to war with his camera in the Pacific.