Culver City

Culver City is the site of Paul West Sr.’s burial and of a belated family return to his grave. In Lindy West’s account, the cemetery holds the consequences of a dispute over funeral rites and the distance that followed, until West and her sister located the grave more than half a century later.

Burial and Family Dispute

Paul West Sr. died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1953, aged forty-four, two days before his son Paul West Jr.’s high school graduation. A disagreement followed over where and how to bury him: his deeply Catholic Rechenmacher relatives in southern Illinois wanted a Catholic funeral, while Paul West Jr.’s lapsed Hollywood branch of the family did not. Paul West Sr. was ultimately buried in a Catholic cemetery in Culver City.

A Grave Left Unvisited

The conflict left a lasting silence around the grave. Lingering animosity meant that nobody visited Paul West Sr. there for the next fifty-five years. Lindy West says she had never met relatives from her father’s side of the family, making the grave a rare point of contact with that otherwise unfamiliar branch of her family history.

Return and Recognition

On a whim, Lindy West and her sister tracked down the grave in Culver City. They called Paul West Jr. to tell him where they were; his response, “Golly,” came in a rough voice. The brief exchange marks the location’s significance in the account: a place shaped by an old family dispute becomes the destination of a belated act of recognition, connecting the sisters to a grandfather they had not known and bringing news of his resting place to their father.