The Plots Thicken

Even in Southern California, it seemed a bit bizarre. In the West Covina suburb of Los Angeles county last week, housewives with binoculars kept day-long vigil from ranch-house picture windows, while at night the husbands took over. One manned a spotlight on the entrance to a road running through a 1,100-acre tract of West Covina wilderness. Others, on horseback, patrolled the tract's borders, looking for signs of surreptitious spadework. What West Covina's residents were trying to do was prevent the expansion into their split-level suburb of Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, the chain of cemeteries dedicated to Builder Hubert Eaton's proposition that the dead should not only rest in peace but also in culture.

For Forest Lawn, the West Covina vigilantes were a painful affront. Forest Lawn likes to think of itself as a kind of necro-politan neighborhood improvement society. The verdant lawns and artfully sunlit edifices of the first Forest Lawn in Glendale contain, advertises Eaton, the largest collection of statuary in the U.S., as well as 200,000 "loved ones." The cemetery draws 1,000,000 tourists a year, has net assets of more than $16 million, and last year grossed -- tax-exempt -- $2,300,000. It has also planted two little Forest Lawns in Hollywood Hills and Cypress, Calif.

Swift Spadework. Forest Lawn ran into homeowner opposition in both places but quelled it by a slick trick. Since "six or more bodies being buried in any one place constitute a cemetery" under California law. Forest Lawn shoved the bodies of six indigents underground overnight when it won preliminary cemetery permits in both towns. The residents thus had no chance to appeal. To head off Covina opposition, Forest Lawn bought the land last May un der an individual's name, filed the deed in its name last November, the same day that it filed rezoning requests with the Los Angeles Regional Planning Commission.

West Covina property owners quickly organized, raised $10,000 within four min utes to fight the cemetery. In the battle so far, Forest Lawn has stayed one step ahead. When the homeowners began to circulate petitions, they discovered affable Forest Lawn petition gatherers had already covered the same houses. At the first com mission hearing, some 200 West Covinians showed up promptly at 9 a.m. -- only to find all the seats taken by Forest Lawn employees who had arrived at 7:15 a.m.

24-Hour Watch. But at the next hearing the aroused West Covinians scored. They arrived in funereal black Cadillacs, carried placards reading "Land of the Free or Home of the Grave?", "Drop Dead Elsewhere," "Happy Sites, Not Sad Rites" and "Don't Let the Plots Thicken."

Though the commission has yet to rule on Forest Lawn's rezoning permit, the West Covinians expect the decision to go against them, plan to appeal. Until then, with their 24-hour watch on Forest Lawn's West Covina land, they intend to make sure that Forest Lawn will pull no fast burials on them and thus have the area irrevocably classified as a cemetery.

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