Remembering the Loved Ones Lost : Mourners Pay Last Respects to the 3 Who Died in Baldwin Hills Fire

As mourners gathered Tuesday outside the chapel for a memorial service for Marie Gladden, a Los Angeles Fire Department engine glided silently up the street.

Fire trucks are not usually left unattended, but this was a special occasion, so the men of Station 82 parked it beside the chapel and filed inside.

Mrs. Gladden was the mother of firefighter Robert Gladden, assigned to Company 82, and the widow of a city firefighter, who died on duty in 1968.

She died in the Baldwin Hills fire last week because she spent too much time trying to warn other people of the impending danger, and then couldn’t escape herself, family and friends said.

While services for Mrs. Gladden, 62, were held at the Pierce Brothers Cathedral Chapel near downtown Los Angeles, a joint funeral attended by more than 300 was held for Mary Street, 77, and Robert L. Allen, 55, at the Berean Seventh-day Adventist Church in the Crenshaw District.

Their widely photographed bodies had been a chilling sight last week, lying in the street as firefighters fought the flames, houses burned and people ran for their lives.

Mrs. Street was Allen’s mother-in-law, and she lived with Allen and his wife, Bertha, on Don Carlos Drive.

In a tragic twist of fate, the Allens’ 30th wedding anniversary was July 2, the day he died in the fire.

At the service for Mrs. Street and Allen, large color portraits of the two flanked the flower-bedecked coffins.

They were eulogized by Cmdr. Herman Kibble, a Navy chaplain.

“Mary and Bob are good people who had bad things happen to them,” he said. “When we cry out ‘why me?’ we can remember that God gave us Mary and Bob. He lent them to us for many years, and they have left footprints in the sands of time, and handprints in your lives.”

The services for Mrs. Gladden were attended by more than 200 family members, friends, fire officials, including Chief Donald O. Manning, about 30 firefighters and some of Mrs. Gladden’s neighbors on Don Carlos Drive.

Robert Gladden had been among those who helped to battle the flames that destroyed 48 homes, damaged many others and left 300 homeless.

Asked Tuesday if he would someday be a fireman too, Marie Gladden’s 14-year-old grandson, Robert Gladden III, stared at his feet and shook his head “no.”

Mrs. Gladden’s body was not discovered until about 24 hours after the arson-caused fire was brought under control. She was found fully clothed in the bathtub of a house next door to her own. Her sister-in-law, Vivienne Gladden Green of Compton, theorized Tuesday that “she went next door, I think, because that house had a rock roof and she probably felt she would be safer.”

‘Free Spirit’

A retired psychiatric worker at Metropolitan State Hospital known to her friends as “Lockie,” Mrs. Gladden was eulogized by her sister, Eleanor Gaudin of Northridge, as a “happy person . . . a free spirit” who “was always willing to give as much as she could.”

Among those whose homes she had tried to save were Dorothy and Nathaniel Lindsey, who attended the service.

“She was trying to save everybody else and gave her own life,” Nathaniel Lindsey said.

Besides Robert Gladden, she is survived by a daughter, Laura Waiters, two grandchildren and her mother, Marietta Burns of Los Angeles.

Allen and Mrs. Street were remembered Tuesday as the kind of people who always made their now-razed house available to friends and relatives who needed a temporary home, said Gary Jones, a USC graduate student who was living with the family at the time of the fire.

“They made me feel like a member of the family,” said Jones at Inglewood Park Cemetery, where Mrs. Street and her son-in-law were buried after the service. “Mary Street was an active, kind woman, and Bob had an encyclopedic mind--he taught me and everyone who knew him wisdom. He told me last month that he would have been a teacher if he hadn’t gone into avionics, and I want him to know that he was.”

Served in Air Force

Allen served in the Air Force for seven years, acquiring the rank of corporal. He worked as an avionics technician for Western Airlines before retiring in 1984 due to illness.

One of the pallbearers, who asked to remain anonymous, broke into sobs as he recalled his friendship with the family.

“I was to have dinner with Bob and Bertha Saturday night,” he said. “I heard about the fire, but I didn’t know it was them until Bertha called me.”

Bertha Allen said that she and her husband hadn’t planned any big anniversary celebration for last Tuesday. “We were very quiet and just enjoyed being together,” she said.