Stepping UP to Heaven: the Beautiful Dead of Los Angeles

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 516

DEAD, adj.

Done with the work of breathing; done
With all the world; the mad race run
Though to the end; the golden goal
Attained and found to be a hole!
      —Squatol Johnes (Amrbose Bierce in his Devil's Dictionary.)

A first step up toward Heaven? What was Mr. Barton thinking, outside, perhaps, of filling up pages with words so that he could collect 10-cents apiece for them?  His pen was so filled with sugar (I'm sure that I got a case of The Diabetes just from reading the words) and his exaltations of being in the cemetery were so gloriously and morbidly obese that one could only but fling oneself under the next trolley to Burbank  to get to the luscious dirtnap promised for the departed at Forest Lawn. I mean, dirt never tasted sooo good.  This pamphlet, published in 1935, was basically a sales brochure for tourists--the sales number made for prospective departeds would have to had been something far more enticing--at least it would have had to cost a lot more to print.  But what I think the Forest Lawn people were doing was trying to control a little bit of public attention and sympathy to generate ever more interest in the

sales of cemetery privileges and internment bric-a-brac for the noticables who could afford it.  It was still very expensive to sleep with the worms at Forest Lawn, even in the Depression--it seems as though the price of admission at the lowest end was in the order of a few thousand dollars, which was a lot in those days. But if a lot is what is cost to be dead in an expensive place, well, then so be it.  The place was decorated with casts of Renaissance statues and other High Art exuda that it was, well, perfectly awful.  (Or  in the words of Darren McGavin, who plays/was the wonderful father from A Christmas Story, when gazing for the first time on a spectacularly ugly table lamp made of a resin model of a woman's (provocative) leg, gasps (just as you're thinking he's about to retch into his own hands): "Its...indescribably beautiful!".).  Forest Lawn is just so.  I guess that it must be, because there's a quarter of a million people buried in there, and a million people visit them a year.  What with sections called Eventide, Babyland (for infants, shaped like a heart), Graceland, Inspiration Slope, Slumberland (for children and adolescents), Sweet Memories, Vesperland, Borderland (on the edge of the cemetery), and Dawn of Tomorrow, how could this place not be indescribably beautiful?  Listen:  it is beautiful enough for people to get married there.  Ronald Reagan did.  Case closed. 

Comments

[Betsy]

And it only seems appropriate after this post to wish you a very Happy Birthday!