Arriving in San Francisco in July 1850 after a six month sea journey from Massachusetts, twenty-five year old auctioneer Henry Mayo Newhall made a beeline for the Sierra Nevada foothills in California. He was a little late. All the promising gold mining sites had already been claimed. Dejected, he returned to San Francisco to begin […]

    Charles Howard perched in the driver’s seat of a 1906 Buick in San Francisco   Upon his discharge from the Army in 1903, Charles Howard boards a train for San Francisco, arriving there with 21 cents in his pocket, or so he famously claimed. He becomes a self-made millionaire but first he had to un-make himself. Although his father was […]

  “It hard to imagine the admiration that that followed Beachey everywhere. He was Lindbergh at his prime, DiMaggio, all the stars of stage and screen combined, with Superman thrown in.”  ~ Frank Marrero, author of Lincoln Beachey: The Man Who Ruled The Skies. Lincoln Beachey is the most famous person you never heard of. […]

  Part 1 looked at how San Francisco faced the great health crisis of 1918-1919. Link: https://www.cypresslawnheritagefoundation.org/blog/1918-pandemic-san-francisco-masked-man/   It is an “only in San Francisco” story. In no other city is the face mask more embraced by government officials during the Pandemic. Nowhere is the compliance more accepted. And nowhere is the compliance more conspicuously flaunted. Here […]

High noon. November 21, 1918. A blaring whistle heard throughout the city announces the Great Unmasking. Thousands of citizens flood outdoors for the occasion, and the masks fly off in unison. To shed them before noon is to break the law requiring everyone to wear facial coverings in public to stop the so-called Spanish flu – and the police […]

    The Invasion As World War I war rages on, Philadelphia throws a spectacular parade to promote the latest “Liberty Loan” bonds. Some 200,000 patriotic citizens jam the downtown sidewalks – “packed in like sardines,” one commentator says – to  cheer two miles of marching bands, floats, and waves of uniformed troops. Within 72 hours of […]

By Terry Hamburg, Director of the Cypress Lawn Heritage Foundation Cypress Lawn has purchased Olivet Memorial Park, which includes a crematory and a funeral home. This acquisition will improve our delivery systems for services, cremations, and receptions; reduce annual irrigation costs;  and open up access to 8 additional acres of land for cemetery sales. Situated […]

James Clair Flood 1939-2020. A Tribute.     A member of the Cypress Lawn Cemetery Board of Directors for 31 years, “Jim” Flood passed away on February 22, 2020. He died as he lived. The avid outdoorsman suffered a heart attack after a day of downhill skiing near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. His passionate pursuit of duck hunting, […]

  2020 is the centennial of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that granted voting rights to women. “Suffragists” is not a misspelling. People are more likely to use the word “suffragettes” for those women (and men) who were advocates of female voting. The battle for woman’s suffrage was in full force in both Britain […]

  Called “Hallidie’s Folly,” Andrew Hallidie certainly had the last laugh…all the way up the hill and to the bank. San Francisco is built on a terrain of steep hills. In its early days the only way for people and materials to conquer those inclines was by horse. This kept many prominent locations sparsely inhabited […]