Midcentury Matinee

Today’s mild temperature and ocean-scented Southern California breeze compelled me to take a ride into the heart of Los Angeles. So I headed straight up Western Avenue, which is purported to be one of the longest north-south streets in the entire county. Originating not far from my house, Western passes through a number of distinct neighborhoods, including Koreatown, Little Armenia, South Central LA, Hollywood, and others. What especially caught my eye were several structures that clearly date back to the early postwar period. A prime example is the Sandy Vitale Dance Studio in Gardena. Surely that rusted and weatherbeaten sign exhibits scars acquired while witnessing some seventy-plus years of traffic going by.

It appears that a dance studio is still operating on the upper floor. But I was unable to find out much about the business or the building online. It’s a very solid and well-preserved structure.

The old building must have put me in a mid-century frame of mind, for without really thinking about it, I eventually found myself near the Toluca Lake neighbhorhood where my mother-in-law and father-in-law met and dated in the 1950s. Toluca Lake is near the movie studios of the San Fernando Valley, and adjoins North Hollywood. I was not especially interested in fighting the crowds and congestion of Hollywood, so I took refuge in a nice, leafy area that turned out to be a place called Valhalla Memorial Park. It’s a cemetery that was originally constructed in 1923 and was considered a beautiful and stately setting at the time. Unfortunately, the owners had a habit of selling the same cemetery plots to multiple individuals — in some cases, to sixteen different parties. They were convicted of fraud and the State of California took over the cemetery for some years. Today it is again privately owned, and it still receives new “residents.”

It turns out that, perhaps due to its proximity to the movie industry, Valhalla is the final resting place for a number of celebrities. Now, these aren’t the huge names like Errol Flynn or Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant. But a few of them you may have heard of. Or surely your parents did. Let me focus on three of them:

First up is Curly-Joe DeRita. As noted on his grave marker, Curly-Joe was the last of the Three Stooges.

Moe and Larry were joined at various points by Curly, Shemp, and Joe and the third Stooge, until Joe quit the act in 1958. So a new fellow named Curly-Joe was hired to round out the threesome, just as the advent of television was making the Three Stooges bigger than ever. Curly-Joe rode this wave until Larry and Moe both died in 1975. Curly-Joe lasted another 18 years — hence, “The Last Stooge.”

Buried not far from Curly Joe are the sizable remains of Oliver Hardy.

You know him from the Laurel and Hardy films (over one hundred of them!) that were made between the 1920s and the 1950s.

You might even be one of the seventeen people that saw the 2018 biopic about them, “Stan and Ollie.” (I do recommend that movie, by the way.) But in the meantime, check out their famous “Way Out West” number:

And now, we move on to someone more obscure, and yet more fascinating: The Amazing Criswell. Born Jeron Criswell Konig in 1907, Criswell fashioned himself as a psychic, making outlandish and unfailingly incorrect predictions about culture, fashion, technology, and almost everything else.

I learned of Criswell when I watched the 1994 Tim Burton film about Ed Wood, entitled, “Ed Wood.” It turns out Criswell was a friend of schlock director Ed Wood, and appeared in a couple of his movies. Criswell wrote books and a weekly newspaper column, appeared on television programs, released a record, and often appeared at Hollywood parties. It’s unclear to me whether Criswell was knowingly putting on a camp act, or whether he considered himself to be a serious psychic. Either way, he’s quite entertaining, predicting that “education memory pills” will be given to schoolchildren in the 1970s, that the entire American population will become overwhelmed with an unquenchable lusty desire for sex in the late 1980s, and that the world will end on August 18, 1999. Of course, only one of these predictions came true.

Criswell has a small niche in a columbarium at Valhalla. It’s not fancy by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe he figured it would be a waste of money to spurge on anything fancier, given that the entire world was scheduled to end 18 years after his death.

So there you have it: Three midcentury personalities, all spending the rest of eternity together at Valhalla Memorial Park. For me, they give rise to questions about mortality and purpose and legacy. Each of these three, of course, have long and complex back stories, and they’ve all had their time in the public spotlight. Sure, you don’t really think about these particular men very much, if at all. And yet, they’ve each made an imprint on our culture. I think we’re all a little bit richer for that.