Photo by Jim Coit

The castle house. Each Burlingame house is different; many are unique.

Very few neighborhoods can claim to have a song written about them. San Diego's Burlingame is one of those few, and even though the song is, well, corny, it evokes a distinctive feeling, one that covers the neighborhood like old varnish.

Benbough block. Percy Benbough, a generous man. moved his whole clan into the houses, including family and friends.

Photo by Jim Coit

That feeling is Burlingame's signature, the distilled essence of sixty-six years of affluent life in America on a small plot of ground in a border town, and it doesn't lend itself easily to description in prose. Written in 1934, the song is set to the melody of “Maryland, My Maryland."

The first verse:

• In San Diego by the sea
• Our Burlingame you'll find to be,
• A lovely spot most beautiful
• Of cozy homes most suitable
• For neighborly folks whose hearts are true,
• Faithful and loyal whate'er they do.
• 0, Burlingame, our Burlingame,
• Our love for you we'll always claim.

Legler Benbough says the family lived in two different houses on the block, though he doesn’t recall the addresses.

Photo by Jim Coit

The song was composed by the late resident Anna M. Marshall, who was a member of the Burlingame Women’s Club, which still meets and claims it is the oldest such neighborhood civic organization in the city. That’s probably true. The club and the neighborhood grew up together. starting in 1913, when the first few houses were built there. At that time the area was considered to be way out in the country, lying east of Balboa Park on the northern edge of Golden Hill and on the southern lip of what later was to become North Park.

The Goodmans commenced to clean the Morgue house up and repair it, replacing tile, refinishing woodwork, substituting chandeliers from Portugal for the original ones.

Photo by Jim Coit

There was nothing out there then but sage brush and the few unpaved streets that would eventually lace together the 208 houses, give or take a couple, that exist there now — streets such as Pamo and Maple. Laurel, Kalmia. and Burlingame Drive. The district was bounded by Thirtieth and Thirty-second streets running north and south, and San Marcos and Kalmia streets running roughly cast and west. But just in case anyone should forget these boundaries, the planners of the neighborhood demarcated it with rose-colored sidewalks, the only area in the city to be so outlined. The unique walkways led the residents to think they lived in a very special place. And they did. The second verse of the Burlingame song:

At the comer of Laurel and Capitan the Morgue house dominates the whole area.

Photo by Jim Coit

• Blue azure skies, sunshine supreme.
• In Burlingame is always seen
• Our lofty mountain’s grandeur show
• With fertile valleys stretched below
• Balboa Park within our sight.
• The bay and ocean our delight.
• O, Burlingame, our Burlingame.
• Our love for you is not in vain.

Photo by Jim Coit

To appreciate more fully the song and the neighborhood that spawned it, one should take a walk through Burlingame. Each house is different; many are unique, both architecturally and historically. Start at the confluence of Kalmia and Thirty-second Street and follow the red sidewalk. On the south side of Kalmia is a row of nine houses, which were among the first to be built in the neighborhood.

Laurel and San Marcos

Photo by Jim Coit

The year was 1913 and Percy Benbough, who was then a city councilman and the city fire commissioner. wanted to move his family out of their house at Sixth and Upas. That area, which is now called Pill Hill because of the many doctors’ offices there, was bustling with people and street cars and horseless carriages, and many of the residents were dreaming about getting back to the country and away from all the noise and dust. Benbough, noted for doing things in a big way, heard about an investor who was building houses in Burlingame and who had fallen on hard times. So he swapped a piece of land he had in the Imperial Valley for all the houses on the south side of Kalmia — the entire block up to Thirty-first Street, which had not then been cut.

Neighborhood lore has it that Benbough lived in the house at 3155 Kalmia. but there is some doubt about that. According to Legler Benbough, Percy’s son. who is now seventy and was in kindergarten when the family moved into Burlingame, they lived in a house that had a third floor “tower." The house next door, 3147, docs in fact have a third floor room, while 3155 does not. Legler also says the family lived in two different houses on the block, though he doesn’t recall the addresses, and this may account for the confusion.

Percy Benbough, a generous man, moved his whole clan into the houses, including family and friends. His two sisters and their husbands inhabited houses, as did his brother Harry, who ran a furniture store on the southeast corner of Fourth and B downtown. Percy’s partner in a clothing store, John Gillons, lived in one of the houses, and close friends lived in the others. Legler Benbough says, “It was like getting your ten closest friends together and saying, ‘I’ve got all these houses over here, why don’t you all just move in?’ ’’ He says he thinks some of them worked out rental agreements with his father and others eventually bought the houses. For young Legler there were plenty of cousins and pals around. “It was a wonderful thing for the family because we were all friends,” he recalls. Last verse of the Burlingame song:

• While nature's rich reward we view.
• It is the folks both old and new.
• Who make our district quite renown.
• Through our two clubs well known in town.
• Club ‘number one and club number two.
• Sweet memories linger long with you.
• O, Burlingame, our Burlingame,
• Our love for you we’ll ever claim.

All the Benbough houses but the second from the corner are still standing and are in generally good shape: some of them are immaculate. (Most have had four owners or less.) The second house from the corner burned down a couple of years back and four people died in it.

A few doors down and more than sixty years ago, fire bells rang often. Percy Benbough had a bell in his house which would sound whenever there was a fire in the city. Though his job as fire commissioner did not require him to attend every fire, he did so anyway “because that was his life,” according to his son Legler. One resident of the area at the time, Jim Reading, who is now eighty-one but was about fifteen when he lived around the corner on Juniper Street, recollects hearing the bell go off regularly, sometimes in the wee hours of the morning. Reading says he’d just about be back to sleep when Percy roared off in his roadster, clanging the bell on it by pulling a rope. When a fire was reported. Benbough was among the first to know where it was because he had a ticker-tape machine installed next to his bed which would denote the location of the tripped fire box. His boots and fire outfit were always waiting by the bed, along with a map of the city which showed where each fire box stood. Benbough stayed in Burlingame until 1918, when he moved his immediate family to Point Loma.

Of course, most people associate the name Benbough with the mortuary business Percy started while living in Burlingame. It eventually became an empire of mortuaries run by his son Legler. But the senior Benbough is also well known because he served as chief of police for three months in 1931, and was elected mayor in 1935. He died of cancer in 1942, while still in office.

Soon after Benbough moved into Burlingame several of the wives in the area decided they wanted to start a reading club. In the fall of 1913 a group of women from the neighborhood met in Percy's house and began to read aloud the first chapter of a new book entitled Inside the Cup. It was written by Winston Churchill, an American cousin of the famous Englishman, and it contained passages such as this: “Sometimes I think women have no morals. At any rate, this modern notion of giving them their freedom is sheer folly. Look what they have done with it! Instead of remaining at home, where they belong, they are going out into the world and turning it topsy-turvy, and if a man doesn’t let them have a free hand, they get a divorce and marry some idiot who will!” This was the beginning of the Burlingame Women’s Club, and according to propagated legend, all the women who were present that first meeting got so interested in the book they felt they couldn't wait two weeks to hear the second chapter at the next meeting. So they went out and bought it and read it themselves.

However, one woman, Mrs. Hazel Wells, who was brought up in Burlingame and who still lives there, says her mother went to that first meeting and told a different story about it. “She said the book wasn't interesting and they mispronounced so many words that she never went back.” At any rate, the women's club was begun in the fall of 1913, and the reading club idea was dropped either because that first book was too interesting or too dull. Though the club members decided to think of their group as a civic organization, and though they took it upon themselves to beautify the neighborhood and to “protect” it from sloppy yards and black people (all restrictions were contained in covenants attached to the deeds of the houses; the ethnic requirement has long since been legally banned), the club, which got so big it split into two clubs in 1925, was primarily a social organization. It met Thursday afternoons at two o’clock and sometimes sponsored theme parties, wherein everyone would dress up in costumes from Martha Washington’s time, or as characters from nursery rhymes, or as children. Each club was limited to thirty members, and there was a waiting list to get into both clubs. The pledge of allegiance was recited at the beginning of each meeting, and in later years, the Burlingame song was sung.

The club invited many speakers to give lectures. One of the guests was Kate Sessions. who spoke to the women in 1929. Sessions suggested that the club might make the neighborhood even more distinctive by systematic plantings of colored flowers along the curbs, a different color for each street. Though this was never accomplished, the club did supervise the planting of palm trees along the streets.

The club had a sizable philanthropic streak running through it, and though residents of Burlingame rarely needed assistance, there were plenty of other people in the city who received help from the women. In the early years, gifts of money or, more often, needed equipment were given to hospitals, orphanages, and the like; but later the club started to lay its helping hands on individuals. Yearly, the club would find some poor family and supply it with milk for twelve months. During the holidays, derelicts were likely to be visited on the street by club members bearing groceries. During both world wars, the club sewed garments and other things for the boys overseas.

But the Women’s Club put away its charity when it came to irregularities in the neighborhood. It could get pesky, and one of the earliest episodes is supposed to have occurred soon after the formation of the club. Legend has it that Dr. Harry M. Wegeforth, founder of the San Diego Zoo, lived over on Laurel Street in 1913 or 1914. He liked the location because of its proximity to Switzer Canyon, where he could keep some of the animals he was obsessed with. Of course, the Women’s Club didn't care for all the beastly chatter and they hounded poor Wegeforth until he moved out. To get to Wegeforth’s fbrmer abode, amble down Kalmia to San Marcos and turn right. But before you turn, take a look at the brick-and-shingle house at 3055 Kalmia. The owners think it may have been designed by Irving Gill. After making the turn onto San Marcos, make your first left onto Laurel. On the corner is a house referred to in the neighborhood as the castle, for obvious reasons. One door down, at 3016, is a house owned by Dick Barnes, city editor of the local edition of the L.A. Times. Skip a house and you’ll come to 3004. a now-weathered but proud house where Wegeforth is thought to have lived.

Now come back down Laurel to San Marcos and turn left. A few short steps will take you to 2521, where a “fraternity house’’ was located in the early 1930s. (The term is ambiguous. There were no colleges in the neighborhood.) When the Women’s Club caught wind of the communal arrangement, the secretary was ordered to send a letter to the First National Bank, which held the mortgage, and notify it that the owners had violated restrictions in the neighborhood. The letter also demanded that the bank repossess the property if the fraternity wasn’t given the boot. It moved shortly thereafter. Similar pressures were put on homeowners in the area who displayed even tiny signs in their windows offering music lessons (such signs were against the covenants). The city council was the object of lobbying by the club, especially when the council tried unsuccessfully on several occasions over the years to “upzone”the area to allow for the addition of apartments among the spacious houses. This watchdog aspect of the club was later taken over by an organization peopled mostly by male homeowners in the area. In the early 1940s, the Burlingame Protective Association went so far as to have a deputy sheriff come out and tell a resident on Laurel Street to get an old water heater and other junk off his own driveway in twenty-four hours or go to jail. A neighbor of the man says that the next day the usually messy exterior was “neat as a pin. ” While the protective association was in its heyday, new residents were paid a visit shortly after moving in and were presented with a copy of the restrictions: no planting of shrubs closer than two feet from the sidewalk; no hedges higher than four feet; no fences in front yards; and no parking of large vehicles on the street for more than twenty-four hours.

At the comer of Laurel and Capitan is a huge house which dominates the whole area. In the past it was known to the neighborhood as the morgue house, for reasons which had nothing to do with its chunky, prairie-school architecture. Though it is a two-story house, the entire top floor, about 800 square feet, is only accessible by climbing a ladder and crawling through a window — there is no staircase leading up to it. This bizarre design lent an air of mystery to the house and was incorporated into one version of how the home came to be called the morgue.

That version, diligently handed down over the years.goes like this: A rabbi and his concert-pianist wife moved down here from San Francisco in 1924 and had the house built in Burlingame. But before it was completed the woman and her son were in a train accident. The son was killed and the mother’s face disfigured. The upstairs was to be the boy’s, but now that he was dead the woman had her husband seal it off so no one could ever enter it. The woman became a recluse.

That’s one version. But the present owners of the house, Jim and Paula Goodman, heard what is perhaps a more accurate account from their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Elizabeth Ancker, who died recently at the age of 101. Mrs. Ancker watched the house being built in 1924, and she knew the rabbi and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Schuster. Mrs. Schuster was indeed a concert pianist and very sociable. She went out a lot and received guests every Thursday. But a few years after they moved in, Mrs. Schuster and her son were involved in a train accident and the nine-year-old boy was killed. As far as Mrs. Ancker knew, the upstairs portion of the house was intentionally left empty and inaccessible when the house was completed, and at that time the boy was alive. At this point both stories coincide. Mrs. Schuster was disfigured and hardly ever went out again after the accident, and when she did, she always had her face covered. When she shooed children off her lawn, it was always from behind a screen next to the front door, and no one could see her through it. Mrs. Ancker could occasionally hear Mrs. Schuster playing the piano alone in the house.

When the Goodmans bought the house in 1960, it had been empty for a long time. The interior was such a shambles that Jim Goodman talked the owner down to a price just under $20,000. Then he commenced to clean it up and repair it, replacing tile, refinishing woodwork, substituting chandeliers from Portugal for the original ones (which are stored on the second level). He invested nearly $10,000 in fixing it up and two years ago it was assessed at about $170,000. There are 2200 square feet in the eleven rooms on the ground floor, which includes three bedrooms, kitchen, breakfast room, study, and music room, most with cathedral ceilings. Tiger oak and Southern gum were used in the double folding French doors (with beveled glass), closet doors, trim, and built-in, finely crafted chests. There are fourteen stained-glass windows, installed when the house was built. A skylight filters the sun right down through the middle of the house into the kitchen.

From the early 1920s until the early 1930s a man named Eugene Normile lived down the street from the morgue house, at 2454 Capitan. Normile may truly have been the last of the big spenders. Though he never made it past the third grade, he was an expert telegrapher at thirteen, and he was working the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for E.F. Hutton when he was sixteen. But horse racing became his passion, and while he lived in Burlingame he was manager of the Tijuana Jockey Club and was pricemaker at the old Tijuana race track. He was a friend of writers, actors, sports figures, and financiers. A beloved and trusted friend of Jack Dempsey’s, Normile took over the job as the champ’s business manager in 1926, just in time to help set up the ‘Battle of the Century,” the first Gene Tunney/Jack Dempsey fight, in which 120,000 people saw Dempsey lose the title. Dempsey had been quarreling with his previous manager, Doc Kearns, and Kearns had been harassing Dempsey with lawsuits. Dempsey needed money and he needed a manager who didn't really need him. He found both of these in Normile, who fronted Dempsey $300,000. ‘‘My new business manager was Gene Normile,” wrote the champ in his autobiography. ‘‘He was shrewd and he had dough of his own, so I felt I could trust him.”

Normile was known as a high roller. During the Depression he'd hold lavish parties with two orchestras, and he'd go around stuffing fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills into the pockets of his guests. He'd call his wife Lillian in Burlingame while he was at parties in New York, and he’d have the orchestra play a number for her over the phone. He lost $10,000 one night at the Caliente casino. He lost more than $100,000 and Dempsey lost about $80,000 in building the La Playa Hotel and casino down in Ensenada, a group venture in which Normile was the principal investor. According to his daughter, Madeline McDowell Normile, who now lives in Oregon, everything that was going into the hotel had to be paid for before it crossed the border. The project swallowed huge infusions of money from Normile's syndicate, and the entire enterprise lasted less than a year. Mrs. McDowell spent part of her honeymoon down at the hotel in 1930, and one night her father asked her how she liked the music, which was supplied by the Xavier Cugat orchestra. She said the music was good, and her father huffed, “It oughta be, I'm paying a thousand dollars a week for it.” But when the governorship of Baja changed, so did the climate for gambling, and eventually the luxurious hotel was taken over by members of the Mexican Army and their families. The operation was also hobbled by the crash of 1929, and early in 1930 Normile and Dempsey and the other investors had to scrap plans for a steamship company, the Liberty Line, which was to float passengers from Los Angeles and San Diego down to Ensenada. Shortly thereafter they abandoned the hotel and casino, which has laid in ruins until just this year. (The Mexican government is rebuilding it as a tourist attraction.)

At about the same time the La Playa Hotel was being built, the new race track, casino, and spa was going up at Agua Caliente in Tijuana. Normile was heavily involved, though not as an owner. But soon after President Lazardo Cardenas banned gambling in Mexico in July, 1935, shutting down the track and casino, Normile started putting together another syndicate to buy it. After his group purchased Agua Caliente for $132,000 and spent another $60,000 to upgrade it, the banner headline in the March 15, 1937 San Diego Union read, “NORMILE PROMISES CALIENTE RACING. ” He was president of the Caliente Turf Club for two years, until the track was closed again due to financial difficulties. Normile’s luck had started to turn on him and he went into a long period of decline. He spent the last few years of his life an alcoholic, living in dingy hotel rooms and nursing homes in San Diego and elsewhere. He died in June, 1963.

On the north side of San Marcos Avenue, just two doors west of the intersection with Thirty-second Street, sits a beautiful two-story Spanish colonial structure, reputed to have served as a brothel during World War II. Mildred Woody, who is seventy-six-years old and lives a few houses down the street, still giggles impishly when she recalls what she saw there. “It just kinda wasn’t mentioned,” she says. “It wasn’t too obvious. We were young then and we went out lots of times and we’d come home late and we’d see these cabs driving up full of sailors. ” She pauses for a good laugh and a drag on her herb cigarette. “It was never out in the open. It was more or less gossip, but you can just see those things; you could tell it wasn’t a nice little old family living there.”

Mrs. Woody remembers a lot about the old days in Burlingame. She recalls the partying and the fun especially, but she also remembers the sadness when a good neighbor (who she prefers should remain anonymous), who had a distillery down in Tijuana during prohibition, had to serve some time in jail because of it. She herself admits to traveling to Tijuana with her friend Madge (McDowell) Normile and smuggling back a bottle or two from a place called Johnson’s distillery. She even took in a couple of raunchy shows when Tijuana was infamous for them.

Mrs. Woody and her husband paid $8000 for their house in 1930. Back then that was considered an enormous price.

“Everybody was pretty much up in the bucks, a lot had a servant or two, and a lot of us poor ones had somebody to clean the house once a week or so,” she explains. “Most people had Buicks or Cadillacs. It was supposed to be very elegant.” Mrs. Woody and her friend Hazel Wells, who now lives across the street on San Marcos, dated the same fellow for a while. He lived on the west side of Thirtieth Street, on which a street car ran. She says they used to laugh that he came from the wrong side of the tracks.

Neither Mildred Woody nor Hazel Wells can recall the name of the man who was murdered in Burlingame; the exact year seems elusive as well, but many people know in which house the crime occurred. It’s right on the corner of San Marcos and Burlingame Drive, at 2537 San Marcos. With neither the name nor the year, the case could not be traced through police records, but several elderly people who never knew each other offer similar accounts of what happened. Apparently, between 1925 and 1930, a man who had killed somebody on the East Coast rented the house. What better place to hide out? But two enterprising Chicago gangsters traced him to San Diego and telephoned the house one night. No one answered. The hired thugs drove to Burlingame and parked on the street and waited for him to come home. When he arrived, they simply went in and shot him. It remains unclear whether one, neither, or both of the gangsters were ever apprehended.

Further down San Marcos, past the murder house, as it’s known in the neighborhood, past more beautiful homes, most with interesting lineages, you reach a point where the street curves. On the north side are three of the most unusual houses in Burlingame, if not the city. The redwood-sided, two-story houses are laid out in a horseshoe pattern, with their fronts opening onto a central lawn and their rears planted on the rim of Switzer Canyon. They were built simultaneously in 1913 and are an interpretation of an East Coast style of the day, utilizing California materials. Huge redwood beams support the upper floor of each house, but all three have different floor plans. Brass handles and latches are used instead of doorknobs, and each house is appointed with a couple of sets of French doors. With steep, gabled roofs and numerous windows, the houses have the appearance of Swiss chalets.

Last June the local historical site board designated the three homes as historical sites. Jerilyn Jones, who lives in the house on the western edge of the horseshoe, did most of the historical research on the structures. She found that Mary W. Fulford, who was a cousin of George Marston’s, bought the three lots in 1912. George Marston served as president of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, and Marston and Fulford lived close to each other, so it has been surmised that Fulford had the three homes built as show houses open to the public during the exposition. She hired Carleton Monroe Winslow as a designer. Winslow was an associate of Bertram Goodhue, the chief architect for the exposition, and he had been sent by Goodhue to San Diego from New York in 1911 to do preliminary work. Winslow eventually designed the Electric Building (which burned down last year), the Foreign Arts Building, the Indian Arts Building, the botanical garden, and the lily pond in Balboa Park for the exposition. He also designed the San Diego city seal, which is in use today.

Jerilyn Jones, who has lived in Burlingame for about four years, is the Burlingame Women’s Club historian, which means she is the possessor of two priceless scrapbooks of club mementos and more than sixty years of minutes from meetings of the club. Though there are only about a dozen active members in the club now, Jones and Virginia Taylor, who lives in the redwood house on the east side of the three and who has been a club member since the early Sixties, are trying to shake some life back into the organization. Taylor has been active in politics for years, having run for mayor in 1971 and for state senate in 1972. Recently, she was head of the county noise control board. Taylor and Jones plan to hold meetings of the club at night, since one of the main reasons for the club’s decline has been the traditional afternoon meeting times, when most women in the neighborhood work. It’s going to be re-named the Burlingame Association, and in Taylor’s terms, “It will provide a basis for more civic action.” Men will not be excluded. One item that has already been discussed informally and will surely be an issue with the association is whether or not to attempt having the whole neighborhood designated a historic site on the national register. (This has been done with a small settlement in Los Angeles that isn’t even as old as Burlingame.) Among other things, historical site status would help insure that the unique architectural character of the area is preserved. It would allow assistance in the form of tax incentives for those who wish to restore their homes. Who knows? Perhaps the Burlingame song will soon be heard again.