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Blog Entry 53 of 80 Grave Concerns: Inside Grand View Memorial Park

News you can use regarding Grand View Memorial Park, Glendale, CA's oldest cemetery, which has been closed for regular business since June 13, 2006, due to legal and financial problems. Lisa Burks also runs the website GrandViewMemorialPark.info.

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Grand View gates remain locked on Memorial Day

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Contributed by: Lisa Burks on 5/25/2007

For the first time in its recorded 122-year-history, this year the public was locked out of Grand View Memorial Park on a Memorial Day weekend, ironically, the nation's holiday specifically dedicated to remembering its dead.

While legal and financial red tape continue to keep the iron gates of Glendale's oldest cemetery padlocked, the city of Glendale has been sponsoring limited visitation hours as a community service since last August. Since January, the schedule has been to open the park on the first and third Sunday of each month, which naturally excluded Memorial Day.

Earlier this month, the Glendale City Council voted unanimously to allocate an additional $900 in resources to open the cemetery a third day, Sunday, May 10, in honor of Mother's Day, at the request of numerous park patrons.

Noting the exclusion of Memorial Day on the schedule which it approved last fall, the council acknowledged the problem that not opening Grand View for the holiday would pose for those members of the public wishing to observe the holiday, but found itself between a rock and a hard place due to financial and personnel resources already allocated to other celebrations scheduled throughout Glendale.

Grand View was last opened for limited visitation on Sunday, May 20, and will again be opened a week from this Sunday, on June 3, between the hours of noon and 4 p.m.

The current operating schedule runs through Sunday, June 17. The Glendale City Council is tentatively planning to revisit scheduling more dates at its next meeting on Tuesday, May 29, according to Zizette Ayad with the city manager's office.

The earliest records of Memorial Day ceremonies held at Grand View that I've found date back to the 1920s, in old news clippings from The Glendale Evening News housed at the Glendale Central Public Library's special collections room.

In 1924, when Grand View was advertised as an American Legion Cemetery and several months before construction began on the West Mausoleum, 75 Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) Civil War veterans' graves were decorated on Memorial Day morning under the direction of two men from the GAR Gen. N. P. Banks' post: Past Commander T. M. Barrett and Comrade R. N. Taylor, post officer of the day.

Graves of 112 heroes from all wars, including the Spanish-American War, were decorated on Memorial Day in 1926 with "California's most beautiful flowers" during "impressive services" sponsored by both the GAR's Banks' post and the Burbank American Legion, with the Banks post's chaplain, Rev. Charles R. Norton, officiating the "ritualistic service."

It was reported that people from cities throughout the San Fernando Valley attended the elaborate event to assist decorating the graves with garlands of flowers in addition to the floral arrangements placed by the Memorial Day committee.

These ceremonies of days gone by are a far cry from the quiet that will echo through Grand View on Memorial Day 2007.

In the meantime, loved ones of those buried at Grand View continue to take advantage of the Sundays that the cemetery is open. I met one lovely couple on May 20, Ned and Judy Powell of Springfield, Ore. who came to visit Ned's parents' spot in the Garden of Prayer urn garden.

The Powells were in California to attend Ned's 50th class reunion at the University of Redlands. They had already visited Judy's parents' graves at other area cemeteries and by contrast to those parks called Grand View's current conditions "unsettling."

Like a lot of people who make their first visit to Grand View in many years, the Powells, former Glendale area residents, were going by memory of where the gravesite was and by the limited information available in the record book at the front gate.

They told me that they were aware of the park's closure before arriving and had called the city to get the visitation hours schedule. "I wanted to find them, and to get a photo for our daughters," Ned said.

Assisted by Park Ranger Eric Grossman and myself, the graves of the senior Powells ( Milton, who died in 1975, and DeEtta, who died in 1991) were eventually located under overgrown grass and piles of dried leaves. Their marker was in excellent condition.

"It's a relief to find them and a joy to know they're here [in the spot where they are supposed to be]," remarked Judy, who along with Ned, was grateful for the efforts Eric and I had made to ensure that Ned got his picture and some peace of mind before returning home to Oregon. "Ranger Eric just would not give up until we found our family, he is so dedicated."

They also noted, as does most every visitor I talk to these days, the extremely dry conditions at Grand View, in particular the dead grass and dying trees, and wondered, as so many people have of late, why the city doesn't make working with the cemetery owners to get some water pumping in to the grounds a top priority.

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