Named after John Smith Cravens (1871-1946), who helped finance his friend Sidney Torrance‘s namesake city in 1911-1912. Son of a wealthy Kansas City attorney, Cravens graduated from Yale in 1893 and married Mildred Mary Myers (1871-1943) in St. Louis later that year. Mildred was even richer than he was: her dad cofounded the Liggett & Myers Tobacco Co. Although Cravens would work for his father-in-law, it appears he and Mildred spent most of the 1890s on vacation, including several trips to Pasadena. But Cravens must have had some business acumen, as he was elected president of the Edison Electric Co. – forerunner to SoCal Edison – in 1899, the year he and Mildred settled in Pasadena for good. He resigned in 1901 to establish the Southwestern National Bank and would henceforth be identified as a banker. He and Torrance knew each other as early as 1897, when they helped incorporate the now-defunct Pasadena Country Club. Both men would later be directors of the Barlow Sanitorium (W. Jarvis Barlow was a pal) and the Southwest Museum. In 1906, the childfree Cravenses purchased a 14 acre estate on Pasadena’s posh Orange Grove Blvd. and spent the rest of their lives there.
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