Necropolis

A 3.5 mile bike ride from Munson’s place can get you to Colma, a Bay Area city with 1.5 million underground residents.  When property values began to rise in the early 1900s, the City of San Francisco passed a series of ordinances that first prohibited any future cemetery from being built within the city limits, and later forced the eviction of all but two existing cemeteries.  When there’s money to be made, never underestimate the ability of your democratically elected officials to find a way.  The project wasn’t completed until 1942 when finally every corpse, headstone, coffin, grave marker, crypt and vault had been uprooted, shipped to Colma and re-interred. 

Usually while visiting Munson I’m up early and looking for something to do until 11:30 a.m. when Munson will climb out of bed to begin preparations for the first race at Santa Anita.  One good option is a fifteen minute walk down to the BART station at Balboa Park and traveling two stops to Colma.  The city of Colma has an area of two square miles, 73% of which is taken up by cemeteries.

Photo from landsat.com

Known as the “City of the Dead,” Colma has 1,500 residents living above the remains of 1,000 times as many folks who’ve passed on.  There are 31 niche cemeteries listed whose customers are either Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Serbian, Catholic, Jewish, Eastern Orthodox, non-sectarian or pets.  Everyone that was unearthed and transferred to Colma appears to have come through none the worse for wear except H.J.Hartnagle who died in 1875.  He was exhumed from the Odd Fellows Cemetery in San Francisco and somehow became separated from his headstone during the trip down to Colma.  His headstone turned up some seventy years later during a tunnel excavation at the Southern Pacific right-of-way along side the Holy Cross Cemetery but no one can recall where they buried him.  His headstone now rests in front of the Colma Historical Museum.

There is a seemingly endless cast of characters for whom to pay your respects.  A large black headstone marks where Wyatt Earp's ashes are interred in the Jewish section of the Hills of Eternity Memorial Park.  After the gunfight at the O.K.Corral, Wyatt and several other members of the Earp clan relocated to San Francisco.  He and his third wife Josephine were married in 1882 aboard Lucky Baldwin’s yacht off the coast of California.  Santa Anita Race Track was owned and operated by Baldwin on his ranch in what is now Arcadia and where Wyatt, an inveterate horse player, stopped by when he was in Los Angeles.  Wyatt passed away in 1929 and at his funeral in Los Angeles, Hollywood western stars William S. Hart (below far left) and Tom Mix who wept openly (below far right) served as pall bearers.  As for the fellow in the middle, I think he had the lead in The Creature From the Black Lagoon. 

Photo from stargazemercantile.com

A short walk takes you to Holy Cross Cemetery where you’ll find a large block of granite whose front is often strewn with baseball equipment.  This is Joe DiMaggio’s mausoleum and the bats, balls, mitts, caps and all have presumably been dropped off by fans and admirers.  DiMaggio played thirteen years exclusively for the Yankees on the opposite coast but his youth was spent in San Francisco.  His family moved there from Martinez when he was one-year-old and his father made a living as a fisherman in and around the Bay Area.

Photo by brokensphere

Not far from DiMaggio is a grave marker for George Moscone who while Mayor of San Francisco was shot dead in his office in 1978 by Dan White, a former member of the board of supervisors.  White also shot and killed Harvey Milk who was the city’s most popular public figure and the first openly gay supervisor in the history of San Francisco.  White had resigned as supervisor to operate a baked potato stand at Pier 39 on Fisherman’s Wharf.  When the idea turned out to be half-baked, White begged Moscone to re-instate him as supervisor but was turned down.  White was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to seven years in prison.  His attorney enabled him to avoid a first degree murder conviction by citing diminished capacity brought on by binging on junk food; a tactic that was subsequently labeled the “Twinkie Defense.”

Photo from cemeteryguide.com

 The jurors for White’s trial made O.J.’s Simpson jurors all seem like Oliver Wendell Holmes.  The outcome of the trial so outraged the public that the State of California took steps to ban diminished capacity as a defense.  White served five years and announced his intention to return to San Francisco.  Dianne Feinstein was Mayor of San Francisco at the time and issued a formal statement beseeching him not to do so.  Two years later White was found in his garage seated in his car dead with a garden hose that ran from the exhaust pipe.  In the 2008 film Milk, Josh Brolin was nominated for an academy award for his portrayal of White, and Sean Penn won best actor for his portrayal of Harvey Milk.

For some real heavy hitters you need to move on to the Cypress lawn Cemetery.  William Randolph Hearst’s modest little memorial is easy to spot.

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William Hearst’s father George was a U.S. Senator during the latter part of the 1800s and was close friends with Mexico’s dictator Porfirio Diaz.  This led to the Hearst family acquiring over a million acres south of the border for a song.  William aged 23, visited the family’s Mexico spread in 1886 and wrote the following to his mother:

I really don’t see what is to prevent us from owning

all Mexico and running it to suit ourselves.

What William was unable to see at the time that prevented Mexico from becoming the Hearst Republic was Pancho Villa. 

Interestingly, there was another revolutionary group who many decades later had a run-in with the Hearst family.  In 1974 the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnapped William Randolph Hearst’s nineteen-year-old granddaughter Patty.  To release her the SLA demanded that the Hearst family distribute $70 worth of food to all Californians in need.  It was estimated that such a deed would have a price tag of $400 million.  Patty’s father countered by donating two million dollars of food to low income areas in Oakland.  The distribution operation was a disaster and the SLA refused to release her.

 Patty remained with the SLA eventually taking the name “Tania” as an SLA sister.  Tania was filmed by security cameras with an automatic weapon during two separate robberies, and when finally arrested stated her occupation as “urban guerilla.”  Patty was convicted of bank robbery and instead of the 35 years called for, received a sentence of seven years.  Her sentence was commuted by President Carter after 22 months and all her rights were restored twenty years later when President Bill Clinton issued her a full pardon on his last day in office.  The Hearst Corporation’s campaign contributions have always been a matter of public record.

Phineas B. Gage’s grave is also at Cypress Lawn Cemetery.  Phineas is described as a medical curiosity.  He was the fellow that survived having a thirteen-pound, three-and-a-half-foot long iron bar pass through his skull.  Working as a blast foreman on a railroad construction project, Phineas was using the iron bar to tamp a charge into a hole drilled into a rock ledge.  The charge exploded sending the bar into the lower left side of his face, then up behind his eye, exiting out the top of his skull and landing eighty feet away.  Phineas was on his feet within minutes, speaking and walking under his own power and rode an oxcart three quarters of a mile to town to be checked out by a doctor Harlow.  Gage initially donated the iron bar to the Harvard Medical School but once he fully recovered a year after the accident he retrieved the bar and made it his constant companion for the rest of his life.

Photo from yourfascinatinmind.com

Phineas spent the last eight years of his life as a stage coach driver in Chile before he returned to California and passed away in 1860.  When Dr. Harlow heard of Gage’s death a year later, he convinced the family to have Phineas’ skull exhumed and returned to Harvard Medical School along with the bar where they sit to this day in the Warren Anatomical Museum.  Phineas’ headless corpse was exhumed in 1940 and transferred to its final resting place in Colma.

There’s one last stop at the Woodlawn Cemetery that’s a must before heading back north to Munsons’.  There’s an odd shaped light-brown headstone for Joshua Abraham Norton the most unforgettable San Franciscan of all.  He arrived in San Francisco in 1849 and promptly lost a massive inheritance via bad investments.  He became disillusioned by the powers that be and sent letters to the city’s newspaper editors proclaiming himself to be the Emperor of the United States.  The papers printed his proclamation along with numerous decrees that followed ordering a bridge across the Golden Gate Strait, a tunnel under the bay, and the establishment of an international league of nations.

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He took to wearing a bold blue uniform with gold epaulettes, inspecting the condition of sidewalks and cable cars, and delivering philosophical rants on street corners.  Although judged to be partially demented he was loved and respected by everyone in the city.  Police officers saluted him, his meals were free at even the most expensive restaurants, business owners hung plaques in their establishments to call attention to him as a customer, and all theatrical and musical productions always set aside balcony seats for him.  Norton shared his free meals with two dogs he befriended and named Bummer and Lazarus.  When Lazarus passed away Norton went to the funeral dressed as the Pope and 10,000 residents attended.  When Norton died in 1880, 30,000 people came to the funeral.  In 1934 his remains were transferred to Colma where his headstone reads “Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.