Woodlawn Cemetery Has Long, Colorful History

Carolanne Sudderth

Mirror Staff Writer 

   Time has brushed the stone monuments with acid fingers, erasing names, obliterating dates, obfuscating history.
   Cemeteries just aren’t what they used to be. Except in Santa Monica.
   Woodlawn is all a cemetery should be with tall, gothic headstones dating back to the 1800s casting long eerie shadows over shadows beneath long waving branches of century-old weeping cypress.
   Urns, and crosses and obelisks, weathered statues of sad-faced females, angels, some of them missing heads, or arms, or wings make manifest the artistry of a previous century. 

   Marble that was once glossy and smooth is now pitted and dull. No one knows when the first body was interred at Woodlawn To date, 45,000 people have been buried there. No one knows when the first burial took place there, or who it was. 
   It may have been the family graveyard for the Rancho Boca de Santa Monica. when it belonged to the Machados. There are over fifty members of that family buried there. The first Machado accompanied Junipero Serra on his mission-founding tour of Alta California in 1769. After his retirement, he petitioned the crown for a pension and, in 1872, was deeded “the place called Santa Monica,” which included the land from Santa Monica Canyon to Topanga Canyon on the north and approximately as far east as Fernwood. 
   Machado sold the land to the Marquez family. A street in the Palisades still bears the family name, but once, all of Sunset Boulevard was called Marquez. 
Scions of the Marquez family still live in the Palisades on bits of the original estancio and hold title to the little Canyon Service Station in Santa Monica Canyon.
   Abbott Kinney is buried in Woodlawn, under a big rectangular block of tannish stone simply emblazoned “Kinney” surrounded by smaller stones with the names of his many children.
   The lanky, hollow-cheeked Kinney was a product of the Sorbonne and of the Little Corporal tobacco fortune. Ironically, he died of lung cancer. Red-haired and bull-headed, his personality was flamboyantly eccentric as his hair color. His major accomplishment was carving Venice out of the Ballona swamps. 
   Prior to that, he and his partner, Francis Ryan, founded the little town of Ocean Park on the sandy wastes just south of Santa Monica. By 1901, that stretch of sand boasted 200 cottages, a post office, a pleasure pier, a casino, and a racetrack. Ryan died unexpectedly at the age of 43. , The widow’s new husband sold his share to four men with whom Kinney clashed. They decided to end the partnership, dividing their real assets literally straight down the middle. The property’s northern edge began a mile and a half south of Pico to it ended near present day Mildred Street in Venice..
   They flipped a coin. The winner got his choice of either the northern developed half, or the swampy dunes to the south. Kinney won the toss and surprised everyone by turning his back on the fashionable little resort and opting instead for the apparently worthless land to the south. He set about building a resort unlike in America at the time, modeling it after his favorite European city. He called it Venice-By-The-Sea.
   It may be fortunate that the Peasgood family plot is on the other side of Woodlawn. James Peasgood, Jr. absconded with funds that might have kept Venice afloat until it found a way to dam the riptide influence of the city of Los Angeles, which had evidenced a desire to incorporate the smaller municipality.
   Peasgood’s family moved to Venice when he was a small boy. In 1914, he was elected city treasurer. In 1918, he was re-elected to the post. In 1920, the city suddenly lost its revenue base when the Venice pier burned to the ground. In 1922, Peasgood took a sudden, prolonged vacation. With him, went the contents of the city treasury. His mother learned of it when she picked up a copy of the Venice Vanguard and discovered that little Jimmy was being indicted for embezzlement. Determined to do the right thing, she immediately cancelled her subscription to the paper.
   Authorities found the money (approx. $20,000) at the Windward Circle branch of the Bank of America—in Peasgood’s safe deposit box. Three weeks later, Jimmy announced that he was coming home. Peasgood spent the next nine years “vacationing” in San Quentin. Upon his release, he departed for foreign shores and vanished. His parents never heard from him again.
   Of course, Woodlawn has its share of celebrities. Most of the artists' ashes are contained in crypts in the marble halls of the mausoleum.
   Composer Vernon Duke, wrote popular tunes like “April in Paris,” “I Can’t Get Started” and composed the score to “Cabin in the Sky,” which opened on Broadway in 1940 with blues great Ethel Waters. He penned more serious works under his real name, Vladimir Alexanderovich Dukelsky. It was George Gershwin’s suggestion that he use a simpler name for his lighter works.
   A number of silent film actors are buried at Woodlawn. In the 20s, black-haired William Haines was a handsome devil with a twinkle in his eye and a smart mouth. The subject of a recently-published biography, Haines fell into an acting career which found him starring in films with Marion Davies and Mary Pickford. He fell out of it when stories of his homosexuality made it into the trade papers and into Louis B. Mayer’s office. The “morals clause” that appeared in every contract allowed studios to dump stars who misbehaved in public and his last two pictures hadn’t done too well at the box office. His contract was not renewed. Never the type to be dismayed, Haines marketed his gift for interior design, and quickly became one of the top decorators in the country.
   E. C. Segar is known to comic enthusiasts as the man who created The Thimble Theatre with the pint-size Castor Oyl, his father, Cole Oyl, and of course, his older sister, Olive Oyl. The strip took off when Segar added a squinty-eyed sailor named Popeye to the strip in 1929. Segar died at 44. 
   In the middle of the Depression, Merle Norman (1887-92) created cold creams and powder bases on top of her gas range in a 2-gallon coffee pot stirred with a broom handle. In 1931, she opened her art deco studio on the corner of Ocean and Main Street. From that kitchen, her company has grown to 2000 franchised studios.