George the Fourth
George Renfro, a fourth generation El Segundo native, hopes to keep his hometown true to itself through art and orneriness
George Renfro Sr. arrived in El Segundo sometime in the 1910’s, not long after Standard Oil purchased 840 acres of the former Rancho Sausal Redondo and around the time the city incorporated in 1916. Its name, meaning “the second,” referred to El Segundo being home to the company’s second West Coast refinery.
The place Renfro arrived to was as much a work camp as a town. Homes were just being built, replacing what had been a tent city. More than 400 mules and muleskinners worked to level sites for the new refinery, along with a fleet of “Fresno scrapers,” a horse-drawn machine used for making ditches.
It was thirsty work. Renfro, who’d arrived from Colorado, was an enterprising man. He started out working for Standard Oil, where he acquired the nickname “Squeak,” because the acid used to clean tanks at the refinery made his voice high-pitched. Renfro subsequently opened up one of the city’s first bars, which not only served workers beer but also cashed their refinery paychecks. His brothers, who were bricklayers, helped construct the Old Town Music Hall.
Grandpa “Squeak Jr.” operated a gas station at the corner of Imperial and Main. Photo courtesy of the Renfro family
George Renfro II was born in 1920 and would become one of the most popular men in town. He wasn’t political, but he knew everyone, and everyone knew him; he inherited nickname “Squeak Jr.” even though he was 6-foot-4 and hardly squeaky. Perhaps the name fit because he had a tendency to make people smile. He sold real estate and operated a gas station at the corner of Imperial and Main. Even by the standards of a town that prided itself for its working class friendliness, Squeak Jr. operated with a remarkable ease and warmth.
“People still walk up to me on the street to say their family bought their house from my grandpa,” said George Renfro IV. “One said he just threw us the keys and said ‘Hey, go check it out, if you like it, you can come back and we’ll work out a deal.’ Or if they had a house they were trying to sell, he would sell them the new house and if the old house didn’t sell in a month, he’d just buy it from them. He was old school like that.”
George Renfro III was born in 1949. He left El Segundo after high school, first to serve in the Army in Vietnam, and later to live near the mountains, in Placerville, California, where he worked as a builder. His father lured him back home with work.
“My father was getting older and wanted some help,” George III said. “He was going to start selling his properties unless I came back. I said, ‘I don’t know know if if I want to be back in that rat race.’ But it was slower than hell up there and he offered me again, otherwise he’d start selling to someone else. I thought, ‘Shit, I got to go.’”
It was a decision he’d never regret. He often thinks about something his father, Squeak Jr., said when talking about his hometown. “He always said, ‘I hit this town at a good time,’” George III said. “But the way it looks now, it would always be a good time to hit El Segundo.”
George IV was born in 1987. Like his father and his grandfather, he grew long and tall. Especially like his grandfather, he inherited a natural ease with people.
“I love my fellow man; it’s people I can’t stand,” George III said. “But George loves everybody; I don’t like anybody. I think it skipped a generation.”
When the youngest George graduated from El Segundo High in 2005, he left town for what he thought would be a long time — not for a lack of love for his hometown so much as a yearning to see the world.
“I knew how special it was as a kid, because of the family element of it,” Renfro said. “I could walk around town as soon as was 11 or 12 and feel safe, and have Rec Park a couple blocks from home. That doesn’t exist many places, a kid’s wonderland, but the small town aspect of it drove me nuts as soon as I was 16. I wanted to get away — I wanted to see big cities, I wanted to see more culture.”
He attended San Diego State University without a clear idea of what he’d study. One day, slightly stoned, he was attending a general education class on the history of religion in a big lecture hall with 300 other students when he happened to notice the girl next to him had her laptop open but wasn’t taking notes. She was zoomed in on something he’d later realize was a vector graphic but at the time looked like a game.
“What is that?” he asked. “What are you doing?”
“I’m doing my homework,” she said.
“No, you are not. You are farting around on a video game or something.”
“No,” she said. “I’m a fourth year graphic design major. This is what I study.”
Renfro left the class immediately and switched his major. SDSU, as it happened, had a well regarded graphic design program; it had never before occurred to Renfro that such a profession existed. He’d not only found his passion, but also his ticket to the world. Graphic design was something he could do anywhere. El Segundo drifted a little further off his radar.
The call of El Segundo
In 2008, Renfro studied abroad at the prestigious Central Saint Martins, part of the University of Arts London. Whereas SDSU focused intensely on the craft of design work, CSM was about the bigger picture.
“I got to London and it was just all ideas,” he recalled. “Like, ‘I don’t care how you execute, I just want your ideas to be interesting.’”
Renfro was also able to travel around Western Europe and partake in a different way of living, one centered around public squares and cafes and people sharing food, drink, art and ideas together. He didn’t know it at the time, but these were ideas for living he’d one day bring back home.
When he graduated in 2010, his sights were set on New York City, which was not only the design capital of the world but also was home to a burgeoning hipster scene in Brooklyn — which, when you think about it, from the clothing to the attention to craft, was largely about better design for living.
“I wanted to take on the Big Apple,” Renfro said. “I wanted to get away from home.”
After graduating in 2010, he returned to El Segundo for what he thought would be a short stint, a chance to get his bearings. He got a tryout for a big design firm in downtown LA whose work he admired.
“They had an opening for a position that required a few more years of experience than I had, so they told me to come in for a day to see if I could hack it,” Renfro said. “I guess I did okay because the founder called me that night to tell me I got the position.”
But something about what he’d seen on that day sort of stuck in Renfro’s craw. He’d watched the founder work, making bigger decisions for clients and for the firm, and realized that was the job he wanted. He told the man as much on the phone that night as he was turning down the job.
George Renfro III and George Renfro IV. Photo by Dani Brubaker
“I want to steer my own ship like you do,” Renfro told him.
The founder was slightly taken aback; he wasn’t used to young designers turning down job offers at his firm. “That’s a tough thing to do,” he told Renfro. “But good luck.”
That one day was the extent of Renfro’s corporate career. He’d be on his own thereafter. It was a decision in keeping with the streak of independence that runs through El Segundo.
“The bigger idea is freedom,” he said. “I would just be the most horrible employee. My dad was a general contractor and a biker and hates ‘the Man’ and does things on his own. Grandpa was the same way. It’s just in the blood.”
Despite the conviction he’d made the right choice, there were a few humbling days that followed. He found himself back in his hometown, living with his parents.
“It was a shot to my pride,” he said. “It was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to be one of those kids who lives at home.’ Back then I was one of the first of my generation to do it. Now a lot of kids come home — you can’t just graduate and pay for a $2,000 apartment.”
Renfro set up shop in the same tiny little one room building on the corner of Maple and Main where his grandfather had once sold real estate. His parents, who were happy to have their son back in El Segundo and also knew everyone in town, helped him find his first clients.
“My parents were like my publicists,” Renfro said. “Three months later I was slammed with work.”
He was also starting to see his hometown with new eyes.
“I didn’t see El Segundo’s quirkiness until I came back from school, and then I kind of embraced it a little bit more,” he said.
Renfro had a realization about his vision of going to New York: even if he were successful in building a design career for himself there, he’d still just be another cog in the wheel, just another a follower. The same went for Venice or Santa Monica or Hollywood. Like the generations before him, in El Segundo he could set his own course. But more than that, he could bring some what he’d seen in his travels to the place he’d grown up.
“That idea of the European town square, that central place where everyone hangs out, and seeing different art and architecture — it influenced my idea of what El Segundo could be,” he recalled.
Instead of seeking what he wanted in life from another place, he could take responsibility for some small part of his hometown’s future.
“My perspective changed both on El Segundo and what my role could be when I got back here,” Renfro said. “It was more, ‘I’m going to use my design and my creativity to influence it and build it.’ I started to appreciate the town more and more, and I wanted to give back for what this town had given me.”
He also saw that the town was on the cusp of major change. The aerospace industry had downsized, and new kinds of businesses — the so-called “New Creatives,” particularly small technology companies — had begun moving into the small warehouses in the Smoky Hollow district. Silicon Beach, which had formerly remade places like Santa Monica, Venice, and Culver City, was coming for El Segundo.
It wasn’t exactly barbarians at the gates, but Renfro knew his hometown would be under a sort of siege.
“I notice that neighborhoods like Venice, which I call the ‘hipster mothership,’ become found out by more commercial brands. Sometimes this affects the soul or originality of the area. At the same time, I’m a fan of gentrification in a lot of ways. It’s a blessing and a curse. Partly because I’ve accepted it’s by forces outside of my control — Silicon Beach and rising real estate prices — partly because it benefits the economy, and partly because I like the great restaurants it brings. What I don’t like about gentrification is the effect it has on authenticity. El Segundo has always been its own thing…. El Segundo has its own voice.”
The trick would be, then, to figure out help keep El Segundo true to its roots.
The Art Walk
A curious and unexpected thing happened in early 2013. An art museum opened on Main Street in El Segundo.
The El Segundo Museum of Art (ESMoA) was envisioned as an “art laboratory” by its founders Brian and Eva Sweeney, and its curator Bernhard Zuenkeler (Eva’s brother, who, like her, comes from Berlin). The Sweeneys originally were just looking for a place to house their own art collection — she is the founder of an architectural firm in LA and he’s a highly successful developer — but were convinced by former El Segundo mayor Eric Busch to make it a public museum.
In that first year, ESMoA had four shows that put it on the map, not only locally, but regionally as an ambitious and very different kind of art museum. “Anti-Ark,” featured four shipping containers not even in the museum, but washed up on the beach below Vista del Mar and Grand. The show was about climate change; the likeness of a dead polar bear rested atop one container and a siren atop another. Another show, “Fame,” featured 60 artists, many of worldwide fame, such as Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as an accompanying music show at the Old Town Music Hall starring a dozen Elvis impersonators.
“We live in Manhattan Beach and we were looking for space for our art collection and this just developed,” Eva Sweeney said. “It wasn’t planned; it just happened. I think it was a good choice because it seemed like there was not a lot of art in the South Bay — there were some small institutions and the Torrance Art Museum… So we were trying to create more momentum. What is cool about El Segundo, what helps us, is it’s a genuine community, and you have the chance to talk to the city.”
The idea of what El Segundo could contain was expanding. Down the street, a few doors down from where a former aerospace engineer, Rob Croxall, had launched the El Segundo Brewing Company, artist Holly Socrates opened a little art gallery. A half block east a firm called MotoArt had arrived which made high end furniture out of airplane parts.
Socrates, who like the Sweeneys lived in Manhattan Beach, was shocked at El Segundo’s friendliess — folks from neighboring businesses kept stopping by to welcome her to town.
“As I met more and more business owners, I realized everybody had some really interesting things they were doing,” she recalled. It occurred to her that El Segundo would be perfect for an art walk. She reached out, via email, to a dozen other businesses, pitching the idea.
“I figured if the response was lukewarm I’d just run off with my tail between my legs,” she said.
The response was wildly enthusiastic. In early 2015, everyone met to further vet the idea. Two people walked up to her after that meeting to offer further help. One was George Renfro IV.
Renfro was flourishing as a designer and excited by the broadening possibilities his hometown was suddenly presenting. He’d done work for ESMoA and several local businesses. He worked particularly closely with a renowned photographer named Dani Brubaker, who’d taken over an old warehouse on Penn Street and refashioned it into Smoky Hollow Studios, a stunningly beautiful photo studio and event space. Renfro helped her with branding and created her logo.
Renfro, Brubaker, and others involved had the same response when Socrates pitched the idea of an art walk. As interior designer Josette Murphy said, “Holly is not from here,” Murphy said. “It’s funny, it took an outsider to say, ‘There is nothing missing here. You have everything. Let’s ride the wave.”
Part Two: the Art Walk and the future of El Segundo.