Paul West Sr.

Paul West Sr. was Lindy West’s paternal grandfather, a man she never met whose history reaches her through a changed family name, a disputed burial, and a grave left unvisited for fifty-five years. His story links the West family’s public identity to a loss that remained consequential long after his death.

Identity and the West Name

In the 1940s, Paul West Sr.’s father took a job at CBS as a radio producer, with credits including The Burns and Allen Show and Lucky Strike Hit Parade. Someone suggested that he replace the surname Rechenmacher, considered unwieldy and perhaps uncomfortably Austrian at the time, with the more radio-friendly West. The change made Paul West Sr. Paul West Jr.; in turn, Lindy West inherited the name. She notes that people sometimes assume her own name is a pseudonym, a guess that is not entirely wrong given its history.

Death and Burial

Paul West Sr. died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1953, aged forty-four, two days before Paul West Jr.’s high-school graduation. His burial became a point of dispute between the deeply Catholic Rechenmachers in southern Illinois, who wanted a Catholic funeral, and the lapsed Hollywood branch of the family, who did not. He was ultimately buried in a Catholic cemetery in Culver City.

The disagreement left a long silence around the grave. For fifty-five years, nobody visited Paul West Sr. Lindy and her sister eventually tracked it down on a whim and called their father with the location. His rough-voiced response conveyed the weight of learning where his father had been buried after so long.

Family Memory and Significance

Lindy never met Paul West Sr. or any other relative on her father’s side, so he appears not through personal recollection but as an absence preserved in family history. The altered surname is one inheritance; the unvisited grave is another. Finding it gave the family a belated point of contact with a grandfather whose death had come just before a major threshold in his son’s life, and whose burial had remained unresolved in practice for more than half a century.