Green Hills Memorial Park
The men and women interred at Green Hills Memorial Park in Ranchos Palos Verdes, Los Angeles, California.
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Charles Bukowski, the American poet, short-story writer, and novelist, was born Heinrich Karl Bukowski, Jr. in Andernach, Germany on August 1920. He was the son of Henry Bukowski, a US soldier who was part of the post-World War I occupation force, and Katharina Fett, a German woman. His father, his wife and young "Henry Charles" returned to the United States in 1922, settling in Los Angeles, California, the setting of much of "Hank" Bukowski's oeuvre. With Raymond Chandler, Bukowski is the great chronicler of the City of Angels, and after John Steinbeck and Robinson Jeffers, who influenced Bukowski's poetry, he arguably is the most important and certainly one of the most influential writers produced by the Golden state.
Bukowski's childhood was marred by a violent father, who regularly beat him with a razor strop until his teen years, and then by the Great Depression. When Bukowski went through adolescence, he developed an awful case of acne vulgaris which disfigured his face and made him feel like an outsider. His father frequently was out of work during the Depression, and he took out his pain and anxiety on his son. The younger Bukowski took to drink at a young age, and became a rather listless underachiever as a means of rebellion against not only his father, but against society in general, the society his father wanted him to become a productive member of. The young Bukowski could care less.
During his school years, Bukowski read widely, and he entered Los Angeles City College after graduating from high school to study journalism and literature with the idea of becoming a writer. He left home after his father read some of his stories and went berserk, destroying his output and throwing his possessions out onto the lawn, a lawn that the young Bukowski had to mow weekly and would be beaten for if the grass wasn't perfectly cut. Bukowski left City College after a year and went on the bum, traveling to Atlanta, where he lived in a shack and subsisted on candy bars. He would continue to return to his parents' house when he was busted flat and had nowhere else to go.
At City College, Bukwoski briefly flirted with a pathetic, ad hoc, pro-fascist student group. Proud of being a German, he did not feel inclined to go to war against Hitler's Germany. When America entered World War II, Bukowski resisted entreaties from his friends and father to join the service. He began living the life of a wandering hobo and a bum, frequently living on skid row as he worked his way through a meaningless series of jobs in L.A. and other cities across the U.S. He wound up in New York City during the war after his short story, 'Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip,' was accepted by "Story" magazine. He disliked New York and soon decamped for more hospitable climes. He was content to go to public libraries and read -- he discovered the L.A. writer John Fante, whom heavily influenced his own work and whom he would champion when he became famous -- and loaf.
The story, published in "Story" in 1944, was the highlight of the first part of his writing career. He returned to Los Angeles and became a Bottle Baby in his mid-twenties, forsaking the typewriter for John Barleycorn and Janet Cooney Baker, an alcoholic ten years his senior who became his lover, off and on, for the the next decade. They would shack up in a series of skid row rooms until the money and the booze would run out, and Jane would hurt the turf. She was a tortured soul who could match Bukowski drink for drink, and she was the love of his life. They would drift apart in the mid-1950s until coming together again at the beginning of a new decade, before she drank herself to death in 1962.
Bukowski got a temporary Christmas job at the Post Office in 1952, and stuck with his job as a mail carrier for three years. In 1955, he was hospitalized in a charity ward with a bleeding ulcer that nearly killed him. He was told never to drink again, but he fell off the water wagon the day he got out of the hospital and never regretted it.
After recovering from his brush with death -- he would have died if an idealistic doctor hadn't demanded from the nurses that had left Bukowski to die that they give him a massive blood transfusion -- he began to write again: poetry. Bukowski developed into one of the most original and influential poets of the post-War era, though he was never anthologized in the United States (though those that were influenced by him were). Bukwoski, who chronicled the low-life that he lived, never gained any critical respect in America, either in the journals or in academia.
Barbara Frye, a woman born to wealth who published the small poetry magazine "Harlequin," began to publish Bukowski. She sent a letter to him saying she feared no one would marry her because of a congenital conformity essentially leaving her with no neck. Bukowski, who had never met her, wrote back that he would marry her, and he did. The marriage lasted two years. In 1958, he went back to work for the Post Office, this time as a mail sorting clerk, a job he would hold for almost a dozen hellish years.
His first collection of poetry, "Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail" was published as a chapbook in 1959 in a run of 200 copies. The influence of Jeffers is very strong in the early work. One can also detect W.H. Auden, although Bukowski never mentioned him, and he was phlegmatic whereas Auden was dry. But that same sense of an outsider looking in critically at his society was there.
Bukowski's poetry, like all his writing, was essentially autobiographical and rooted in clinical detail rather than metaphor. The poems detailed the desperate lives of men on the verge -- of suicide, madness, a mental breakdown, an economic bust-out, another broken relationship -- whose saving grace was endurance. The relationship between male and female was something out of Thomas Hobbes, and while Bukowski's life certainly wasn't short, one will find in the poetry and prose much that is brutish.
Jon Edgar Webb, a former swindler who became a littérateur with his "The Outsider" magazine, became enamored of Bukowski's work in the early 1960s. Webb, who had published the work of Lawrence Ferlenghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, and William Burroughs, published Bukowski, then dedicated an issue of his magazine to Buk was "Outsider of the Year," and eventually decided to publish, with his own bespoke hand press, a collection of Bukowski's poetry.
Bukowski began to establish a reputation in the small magazines that proliferated with the "mimeograph revolution" of the late 1960s, micro-circulation "magazines" run off on mimeograph and Gestetner machines. Bukowski began moving away from a more traditional, introspection poetry to more expressionistic, free-form "verse," and began dabbling in the short story, a form he became a master of. He also began a weekly column for an underground Los Angeles newspaper, "Open City," called "Notes of a Dirty Old Man." The texts of his column were collected in a collection of the same title published by Ferlenghetti's City Lights press in 1969. (City Lights also would publish his first book of short stories, entitled "Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness," in 1972).
In the column, Bukowski would introduce ideas, vignettes and stories, many of which would be further developed into the short stories that helped make his reputation. The Bukowski of the mid- to late- 1960s and 1970s became one of the greatest short story writers that America has produced, and his reputation grew steadily in Europe. (Though a literary lion on the West Coast, Buk never was much appreciated in the New York City that he had spurned which was, after all, the arbiter of culture. Since he didn't exist in their ken, he didn't exist at all, with the surprising result for Europeans that the most popular American writer in Europe was little known by Americans.)
There was envy as Bukowski became increasingly popular. Aside from the master of kitsch Rod McKuen, Bukowski was probably the best selling poet America produced after World War II. By the end of the 1970s, he was the most popular American writer in Germany and also had a huge reputation in France and other parts of Europe. Yet, he remained virtually unknown in the United States, except among the core of the Bukowski cult who faithfully bought his books.
Bukowski's success as a writer in the 1970s can be attributed to the patronage of John Martin, a book collector and chap book publisher who offered to subsidize Bukowski to the tune of $100 a month for life. Bukowski took him up on the offer, quit his job at the Post Office in 1969, and set out to be a writer who made his living by the typewriter alone (and an occasional poetry reading). Martin established his Black Sparrow Press to print Bukowski, and Bukowski proceeded to begin his first novel while continuing to write poetry and short stories. The first novel, "Post Office," was published by Black Sparrow in 1971. The Bukowski phenomenon began to gain momentum.
Around the time he quit the Post Office, Bukowski took up with the poet and sculptress Linda King, who was 20 years his junior. They began a tumultuous relationship juiced in equal parts with sadism and masochism that extended into the mid-1970s. In his 1978 autobiographical novel "Women," Bukowski writes about how his alter ego, "Henry Chinaski," had not had a woman in four years. Now, as Bukowski became a literary phenomenon in the small/alternative press world, he became a literary if not literal Don Juan, bedding down his legions of women fans who flocked to his apartment on DeLongre Avenue in the sleaziest part of Hollywood. (It was at this time that Bukowski was friends with a dirty book store manager who was the father of Leonardo DiCaprio.)
Bukowski's alter ego in his novels, Chinaski (who significantly shares Bukowski's real first name, the name he went by; he used his middle name "Charles" for his poetry as it seemed more literary, and possibly to deny his father, who shared the same Christian name), shares an affinity with with the underground denizens of Feodor Dostoyevsky's work and the protagonists of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's novels "Journey to the End of Night" and "Death on the Installment Plan." Celine arguably is the largest influence on Bukowski's prose, aside from Hemingway (who influenced Bukowski's entire generation) and Fante. Like Celine, in World War II, Bukowski flirted with fascism (though Bukowski never descended into the anti-semitism of Celine or any other type of racism in his work); like Celine, he despised America and the brand of capitalism once known as "Fordism," assembly line industrialism and the petty consumer society Bukowski found abominable and which he tried to escape.
Chinaski is a hard-drinking, would-be womanizer who is ready to duke it out with the bums, crooks and assorted low-lives he lives and drinks amongst, though occasionally he visits high society through the ministrations of a woman. Like Bukowski himself, he will accept company but prefers to be alone to drink and listen to classical music on the radio: Beethoven, Mozart, and Mahler among others.
Chinaski was introduced in the autobiographical short-story "Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beats," his first published short story, printed in chap book form in 1965. Chinaski's life is chronicled in Bukowski's novels "Post Office" (1971), "Factotum" (1975), "Women" (1978), and "Ham on Rye" (1982). Bukowski is not naturally gifted as a novelist, and while "Women" is superb and the very short "Post Office" is highly readable, "Factotum" and "Ham on Rye" are not up to the standards of Bukowski's short stories.
As his social situation evolved, Bukowski's works broadened from tales of low-lives and bums and losers; he added to his repertoire meditative and sarcastic accounts of his new life. A constant in his work became poems and short stories about the race track, to which he had been introduced by Jane back in the 1950s. The race track as metaphor suited Bukowski as it represented something more than luck or chance. A horse player had to work at it to be any good and beat the odds, and the odds were definitely stacked against the crowd as the track took its vig right off the top, when it wasn't outright and forthrightly fixing the race.
Going with the crowd was to be avoided in order to improve one's odds, and the track, the establishment, was out to f--- the bettor, but spiritual kin to Camus' Sissyphus, the bettor on nags had to have the wit to at least get the stone to the crown of the hill and avoid getting crushed as it courses its way back. The bettor was hip to the fact that the rock always fell back and would always fall back, but a good living or at least survival could be had by beating the track, beating the establishment, if the bettor knew how to play the horses. It was all a matter of developing his own system, and standing aloof from the crowd, whose dumb, manipulated enthusiasms skewed the odds. And knowing when to change to a new system, to keep ahead of the track, and the crowd. Bukowski was the antithesis of Carl Sandburg and Sandburg's "The People."
Bukowski was and would remain a literary outsider. In 1973, Taylor Hackford presented Bukowski to a wider audience via an award-winning documentary for Los Angeles public television station KCET. "Bukowski" won the San Francisco Film Festival's Silver Reel Award after being voted the best cultural film on public TV. After his relationship with Linda King petered out, Bukowski met Linda Lee Beighle, a health food restaurateur twenty-five years his junior in 1976. They became a couple and Bukowski's life became more balanced. With a stable relationship and steady royalties in the low six-figure range, Bukowski became a home owner, albeit in a middle class neighborhood in San Pedro. He now had a swimming pool, a hot tub, and drove a black BMW he paid cash for to the track. He palled around with Sean Penn and U2 dedicated a song to him at a Los Angeles concert.
The Muse, whom Buk bet on as faithfully as he did the ponies, left him when it came to the short story sometime in the 1980s. The poetry always ran through his head and down into his fingers, but it became less artful, though the powerful voice remained. Buk wrote a screenplay for Barbet Schroeder, which was made into the movie Barfly (1987), and Bukowski became known in the United States at last. He refused to appear on The Tonight Show (1962) with Johnny Carson, but let "People" magazine interview him as in his reasoning, it would be read by normal people at the supermarket checkout lines. It was the "Crowd" he despised but honored in his own way by refusing to be part of the "better" part of society that kept them down.
Always immensely prolific when it came to his poetry, and aided by a personal computer in the 1980s, Bukowski generated so much material that originals are still being published 10 years after his death. He finished his last novel, an L.A./Chandler/private detective/noir spoof called "Pulp" shortly before he lost his battle with leukemia; it, like the final poetry collection published in his lifetime, "The Last Night of the Earth Poems," is full of intimations of mortality, and of course, his mordant humor.
On March 9, 1994, in his native Los Angeles, the man Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre called America's "greatest poet" died. In his short story collection "Hot Water Music," Bukwoski wrote, "There are so many," she said, "who go by the name of poet. But they have no training, no feeling for their craft. The savages have taken over the castle. There's no workmanship, no care, simply a demand to be accepted." The remarkable endurance of the man who never asked for acceptance, the endurance that took him nearly forty years beyond the near-death his drinking and despair had brought him in 1955, finally gave out, and not to the booze and the carousing and anomie, but to a cancer. Many of his fans thought it was remarkable that the "Dirty Old Man" had made it to 74, but it was a brave front: they greatly mourned the passing of their favorite writer, a man that could be read by anyone of any class or educational background.
His friend, Sean Penn, dedicated his film The Crossing Guard (1995) to Bukowski, with the words felt by many who had loved him: "Hank, I still miss you."
We still do.Plot: Ocean View #875- The man who would eventually become known as Yokozuna was born in San Francisco on October 22, 1966. He came from a wrestling family, as his uncles were Afa Anoai and Sika Anoai. He was trained by his uncles and Sam Fatu as a teenager and wrestled in Alabama and the USWA under the name Kokina Anoai. He already weighed 400 pounds.
In Japan, he would work in main events against Big Van Vader (Leon White), and there he met a contingent of sumo wrestlers, which led to the gimmick which would get him the most over, the character Yokozuna, or sumo grand champion. Vince McMahon brought him into the WWF and gave him a monster push in 1992. He wasn't even knocked off his feet for months, until finally Jim Duggan finally pulled it off, and he still won the match. He later won the Royal Rumble (1993), which allowed him to challenge for the WWF Title at WrestleMania IX (1993) against Bret Hart. Anoai won the match and the title, but immediately lost it at the same event to Hulk Hogan. Anoai won the title back at the King of the Ring (1993) and kept it for over 10 months, an incredible amount of time for a 'heel' wrestler. He lost it back to Hart at WrestleMania X (1994).
His weight was becoming a huge issue, and multiple attempts to get Anoai to lose it were failures. The WWF kept him off TV for awhile, then brought him back in as a tag team partner for Owen Hart, with whom he won the Tag Team Championship at WrestleMania XI (1995). His weight gain continued, and at his final appearance in the WWF, during the _Survivor Series (1996) (V)_, he weighed almost 800 pounds. This would make him the heaviest pro wrestler in history, but he was never officially weighed.
He wrestled in the main event of the Heroes of Wrestling pay per view in 1999 and went on a European tour in October 2000. It was during this tour that he died of a heart attack in his hotel room in Liverpool, England. He was only 34. - Music Department
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D. Boon created the legendary punk rock band, Minutemen, with George Hurley and Mike Watt in 1980. The trio went on to release 11 albums in less than six years and toured maniacally until Boon's tragic death in late December of 1985 caused the group's abrupt demise.Plot: Lakeview Lawn, Plot #365. Look for the numbers painted on the curb on the north side of Lake View Drive, until you find #360, D.'s grave is five rows up the hill, walking north.- Actor
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John W. Bubbles was born on 19 February 1902 in Louisville, Kentucky, USA. He was an actor and writer, known for A Song Is Born (1948), Mantan Messes Up (1946) and Varsity Show (1937). He was married to Ruth R. Campbell, Mabel Cordelia (Atwell) Roane, Viola Jones and Wanda Michael. He died on 18 May 1986 in Los Angeles, California, USA.Plot: Parkview, Crypt 111, C- George Allen was born on 29 April 1918 in Detroit, Michigan, USA. He was an actor, known for Coach (1989), The NFL on CBS (1956) and NFL Monday Night Football (1970). He was married to Etty Allen. He died on 31 December 1990 in Palos Verdes Estates, California, USA.
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- Paul Conrad, along with his identical twin James, was born in Cedar Rapids in 1924, son of a railroad worker and amateur artist. After serving with the US Army Corps of Engineers in the Pacific theatre during World War II Conrad attended the University of Iowa where he majored in art and drew cartoons for the college paper the Daily Iowan.
After graduating with a B.A. in Art in 1950, Conrad joined the staff of the Denver Post where he worked for 14 years before decamping for Los Angeles where he joined the staff of the Los Angeles Times where he was the chief editorial cartoonist from 1964 to 1993. During his tenure as a political cartoonist, Conrad won three Pulitzer Prizes (1964, 1971 and 1984). His work angered every President from Truman to George W. Bush. One of the highlights of career was appearing on the infamous Nixon's Enemies List where he kept company with the likes of Paul Newman and CBS's Daniel Schorr. Upon Nixon's resignation, Conrad drew a cartoon that depicted Nixon's helicopter leaving the White House. The caption read "One flew over the cuckoo's nest."
Conrad married Kay King, the former society writer for the Denver Post. They had 4 children, two sons and two daughters.
Paul Conrad was the author of six books which include: "When In The Course Of Human Events With Malcolm Boyd" (1973), "The King And Us" (1974), "Pro And Conrad" (1979), "Drawn And Quartered" (1985), "CONartist" (1993), and "Drawing The Line" (1999).
In addition to his three Pulitzers, his other honors include seven Distinguished Service Awards for Editorial Cartooning from the Society of Professional Journalists/Sigma Delta Chi [SDX] (1963, 1968, 1970, 1980, 1981, 1986 and 1987); two Overseas Press Club awards (1970 and 1981); four Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards for Editorial Cartooning (1985, 1990, 1992 and 1993); the University of Southern California Journalism Award (1972); the Los Angeles Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, Print Journalist of the Year Award (1992); and the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award for Print Journalism (1990).
Conrad in his later years was acclaimed for his limited-edition bronze sculptures of political leaders ranging for Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.Plot: Park View Terrace, Lawn Crypt 204 B - Actor
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Kentucky-born Bob Custer was an actual cowboy who left the range to perform in rodeo shows. Like many other rodeo performers, he found out that appearing in western films paid quite a bit more (and was much less dangerous) than bull-riding and steer-roping, and he began to gain popularity as a western star in a series of medium-budget films in the early and mid-'20s. Unlike many other cowboy stars, however, Custer branched out into other genres, using his real name of Raymond Glenn. He returned to making westerns in the late 1920s but the advent of talkies posed a huge problem for Custer: he choked when reading lines. This mike fright was compounded by the fact that he was working at the bottom of the food chain in Hollywood, in micro-budgeted oaters by cheapjack producers like Harry S. Webb and J.P. McGowan; the shoddy productions only served to magnify Custer's limitations as an actor. Consequently, he never regained the measure of popularity he had in the 1920s. He appeared in his last film in 1936.Plot: Faith and Hope section, Grave #420 A- Adelle Davis was born on 25 February 1904 in Lizton, Indiana, USA. She died on 31 May 1974 in Palos Verdes Estates, California, USA.Plot: Sanatuary of the cross, North wall, 259, Depth B.
- Born in Los Angeles to Abraham & Grace (Penrod) Green. Was A child Star with Hal Roche's Little Racals. In 1922 played a small part in the movie Red Mill. From there Kenneth Green worked for Warner Bros, then known as National Pictures. in transportation. Stated in the Warner 7arts magazine after his death, Kenneth was considered one of the best heavy equipment operators in the business. It was at his work during a short dull in operations is when he passed away--Per Warner7Arts April 1969
- Dennis Wayne Johnson (September 18, 1954 - February 22, 2007), nicknamed "DJ", was an American professional basketball player for the National Basketball Association's (NBA) Seattle SuperSonics, Phoenix Suns and Boston Celtics and coach of the Los Angeles Clippers. He was an alumnus of Dominguez High School, Los Angeles Harbor College and Pepperdine University.
- John Logan was born on 7 February 1924 in San Francisco, California, USA. He was an actor, known for Spittin' Image (1982), Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) and Dante (1960). He died on 7 December 1972 in San Pedro, California, USA.Plot: Sanatuary of the cross, North wall, 259, Depth B.
- Tom Morgan was born on 20 May 1930 in El Monte, California, USA. He was an actor, known for Born Yesterday (1956), 1956 World Series (1956) and 1955 World Series (1955). He died on 13 January 1987 in Anaheim, California, USA.
- Louis Mucciolo was born on 10 February 1971 in San Pedro, California, USA. He was an actor, known for WCW Monday Nitro (1995), Eastern Championship Wrestling (1993) and WCW Thunder (1998). He died on 15 February 1998 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
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Best remembered by many cliffhanger fans of the 30s and 40s as staunch, gung-ho hero Don Winslow, athlete-turned-actor Don Terry identified quite well with his alter-ego. An adventurer at heart, he was born and christened Donald Prescott Loker on August 8, 1902. His parents were of Old English background. He enlisted in the Marines as a teenager but honorably discharged less than a year later due to a disability.
Don attended Harvard and played freshman football, basketball and baseball, working in coal yards to pay his tuition. Joining the Reading Keys in the International Baseball League, he later played pro football in Boston and Providence as part of the Steamrollers team. Along the way he fought under the name of "Bobbie Dinsmore" in the boxing arena and circled the globe on cargo ships.
Somehow the wanderlust Don Loker managed to migrate to Hollywood and there found a curiosity in movie-making. He gave himself the stage name of Don Terry and started in movie bits. Occasionally finding virile leads in action dramas, he slowly built up a stalwart reputation in this area. His first serial was as a hard-nosed reporter in The Secret of Treasure Island (1938). Universal Studios showed interest in his work and signed him up in 1941, becoming one of their more popular serial players in the early 40s. Don Winslow of the Navy (1942) became his signature role. Terry played the grim, tenacious Winslow with a set determination and gritty sense of purpose that thrilled war-time audiences at the time. In the story the Winslow character is assigned to Navy intelligence to battle the unscrupulous Scorpion organization.
More staunch heroics would come his way with the sequel Don Winslow of the Coast Guard (1943). After that role Terry himself enlisted in the Naval Reserve and was made Lieutenant Commander in the Pacific. He was awarded the Purple Heart in 1944. By the time he left the service in 1946, he left movies as well and turned to business ventures. Married twice, he became a noted philanthropist in later years. Don Terry (aka Don Winslow) died in 1988 in Oceanside, California.Plot: Cypress, Crypt 58, Tier C- Actor
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Chester Charles Bennington was born in Phoenix, Arizona, to Susan Elaine (Johnson), a nurse, and Lee Russell Bennington, a police detective. His parents divorced when he was 11 years old. He has two half sisters and a half brother. He attended Centennial High School at the beginning of his freshman year. Then he went to Greenway High School where he started his first band, Grey Daze. He graduated from Washington High School in 1994.- William Dean Naulls (October 7, 1934 - November 22, 2018) was an American professional basketball player for 10 years in the National Basketball Association (NBA). He was a four-time NBA All-Star with the New York Knicks and won three NBA championships with the Boston Celtics. In December 1964, he was part of a Celtics unit that became the first all-black starting lineup in NBA history.
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Charlotte Harris was born on 29 April 1931 in River Forest, Illinois, USA. She is known for The Lawrence Welk Show (1955) and Lawrence Welk: Milestones & Memories - A Musical Family Reunion (2001). She died on 20 December 2019 in Palos Verdes Peninsula, California, USA.