Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Forest Lawn Memorial Park

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

Forest Lawn is no ordinary cemetery. Why? Listen in and find out.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and guess who's here? It's J-E-R-I. Jerry. Our producer. And this is short stuff. I'm glad he spelled that. Because no one ever spells it right.

I, my brain wanted so bad to go to J-E-L-L-O. Oh yeah. And I had to stop myself. I think if you go back and listen there's a half of a pause there and that's me stopping myself from spelling J-L-L-O instead. I sensed that. I'll bet you did. We know each other so well.

Can we talk about Forest Lawn Cemetery? Oh yeah. Well, well you've probably never been there. I have not. Have you? I have. I used to live not too far from there in Eagle Rock. It is a, it's called Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale.

Kind of situated between Pasadena and downtown LA. Which ended up being a good thing back when it was first, what do you do? Install it? Yeah. They installed the cemetery. Yeah. I guess you build things.

Yeah. And you plant things. Established. Yeah. Established. That's the word. But it was established by Dr. Hubert Eaton. About 300 acres worth in 1917.

A big thanks to Kate Morgan of Howstuff Works for this one. But Hubert Eaton was a bit of a visionary. And that he was just sort of known as, and is still known as the builder. This very revered figure for doing something quite different with his cemetery. Yeah. He was like one part Gomez Adams and one part Walt Disney. Ooh. That's what I'm going to put him as.

But there's a plaque there called with the title, The Builder's Dream and the Builder's Creed. And he says that he, this is supposed to be a great park devoid of misshapen monuments and other signs of earthly death. But filled with towering trees, sweeping lawns, splashing fountains, beautiful statuary and memorial architecture. And it signed the builder. And apparently still today that's what they refer to Dr. Eaton as at the cemetery.

But he achieved his vision. This was all established at a time, Chuck, when, you know, people have been making cemeteries in the United States for hundreds of years by this time. And there was like a certain way that you made them. And Dr. Hubert Eaton happened to be at this place in Southern California at a time where it was starting to come alive. And it was a place where you could reinvent yourself. And he used that opportunity to reinvent cemeteries with Forest Law and Memorial Park.

Yeah. And it was a time in Southern California in Los Angeles where, well, a couple of things on that. He wanted it to be a place where people could go and see art and feel like they've sort of had a culturally enriching experience. Because at the time, you know, doing what they called the Grand Tour, if you had a lot of money and a lot of time, you could fly to Europe and go see all the art of the world.

But for people that didn't have a lot of time and money, and this was, again, 1917, he wanted to give people a little bit of taste of that in Southern Cali. And the place where he ended up getting this land, like I said, between Pasadena and downtown, it was not a booming metropolis at the time, but it ended up being in a very great spot in Glendale. Because, you know, it's L.A. in the Southland.

A lot of people ended up living right there. Yeah. So, yeah. And he really nailed what he was trying to do, which was make a place where you didn't come to mourn death. You came to celebrate life. Yeah. You tracked people to come and, you know, be among the graves in this memorial,

but be thinking about how great it is to be alive. And what better way to do that than with replicas of Michelangelo's art? That's right. Should we take a break and come back and talk a little bit more about the art and such? Yes. That's right. 2023 is already well underway, everybody, so don't wait any longer to level up your small business.

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There are certainly replicas of art there. There's also a lot of original art. There's a full-on museum. The largest religious painting in the United States and the largest painting in the western United States period is called The Crucifixion from Jan Steica. Yeah, he was a Polish artist and get this. He created this painting, got it over to the U.S. for some exposition

or another and it was too big. They didn't have a place to put it and he didn't have the money to ship it back home. So he had to leave it behind and the United States went back and died in Poland in 1925. Never saw his painting again. Yeah, 195 feet wide by 45 feet tall and it very simply depicts the, I guess, the precrucifixion

when it looks like Jesus' cross is still on the ground. The other ones are in the ground and things are just getting started. Yeah, and it's a huge landscape. There's all sorts of stuff going on. But Forest Lawn acquired it and gave it the proper respect. It actually built a building around it to house it specifically. That's what you got to do. No one's got a loft that big. Definitely not. That's a giant painting.

I saw a picture of it and there's a couple of people standing in front of it and they just look like ants. Yeah, it's very large. I guess we should talk a little bit because it is LA and there are some very famous Angelinos buried there. And I would like to follow this up with the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. It's another sort of, LA has two great cemeteries and that's the other one. But they do fun stuff like movie nights.

Yeah, I saw that in Beneath the Silver Lake. Oh, I think I saw that. That's featured in that. Beneath the Silver Lake, was that what it was called? I'm pretty sure. The one with Andrew Garfield. Yeah, underneath the Silver Lake. I think it's beneath the Silver Lake. On top of the Silver Lake.

A few of the notable people buried there are no less than Elizabeth Taylor. Clark Gable. Sure, who else? How about Bogey and Bacall, both? Oh, hit me with another. How about that old sweet crooner, Nat King Cole? Oh, you got any other crooners up your sleeve? It wasn't a crooner. Michael Jackson is there, I think.

He crooned. Did he croon? Yeah, I want to rock with you. That's crooning. Okay, I'll buy that. But here's the deal, apparently if you go to Forest Lawn, and I have been there, but I didn't spend a lot of time there. I think I was on a job shooting a stupid TV commercial or something.

But you have to, and of course these days with the internet, you can find out where everyone is buried, but it's not one of those places where you show up and do a ghost tour, or they say, here's your brochure, where you can go see all the famous folks that are buried here. Which is, that's good. That's tasteful. That's not the point of it. Yeah, agreed.

So I mentioned how Hubert Eaton was half Walt Disney, and he's very frequently compared to Walt Disney because of some of the design of Forest Lawn. There's a lot of tutor architecture. There's little different burial sections that have their own name and kind of like vibe going on. Inspiration slope, whispering pines, dawn of tomorrow. There's one called Babyland for infant burials.

There's one called Slumberland for children and adolescents. Oh my gosh. Yeah, and then I guess the rest of it is just called you shouldn't feel as bad about these graves. Yeah, these ones are fine. We have a cemetery very close to our house where we walk through a lot on our walks. And I love just sort of reading the headstones as I walk by.

And you know, you'll come across a grave that's two feet long and you're just like, oh God, you can't even look at that one. It'll just say infant sometimes, not even a name. Yeah, I mean, this one had a name, but I don't know. It's always interesting. The women always outlive the men. It seems like quite a few like World War II veterans out there. But I enjoy cemeteries, but I've never like, you know,

romped and partied in cemeteries like some people do in college, you know. Sick of it. Yeah, I always like to read the headstones and get a little bit of a story sometimes. I saw some writers say, I don't remember who it was, but they advised if you want to come up with names, go to a cemetery. Oh, yeah. Because you'll end up coming up with like Kirkwood McGillicuddy

if you just try to use your imagination. But if you go to a cemetery, you're going to find like actual people's names that you can use, you know. Yeah, especially these days when everyone's like, I want my baby to sound like they're from the 18 dens. It's so weird. So Eaton, going back to the Disney thing, Walt Disney is buried there, in fact.

And you mentioned all of the sort of similarities with Disney. And there are people out there that said it's like the Disney world or Disneyland of cemeteries and Forest Lawn is very quick to point out. No, no, no, we were here first. And we like to say that Disneyland is the amusement park of the Forest Lawns. Yeah. It's great. They really turn it on its head.

It's a good line. There's something, one more thing about Michelangelo's work. There was like, I think a 17 foot reproduction of David, a very famous statue. And it has actually toppled several times over the years and they've had to remake it every time. Most recently, it toppled under its own weight in 2020. I'm not sure if they've replaced it yet or not.

So someone's standing there and then just a giant three foot penis comes at them? Yeah. Clocked them, knocked them right out. Wow. And it made like this sound that went dong. All right, I think we've desecrated this episode. Wait, hold on. There's one more thing.

Ronald Reagan married his first wife, Jane Wyman at Forest Lawn Cemetery. It's true. People do get married there. There's like a legit church. Yeah. 60,000 people have been married there. One fifth of the number of people who are interred there have been married there. I got married there.

Did you really? No, you didn't. I got married at the pool house of my brother's neighborhood. That's what I thought. Yeah. Okay. You almost got me there for a second though. No, I'm going to start telling people that.

Okay. Why not? You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right.