From Cotton Fields to Holmby Hills : Sharecropper’s Daughter to Be Honored at City Hall Reception
I’ve been poor, poor, poor--with the tubs catching water (from the roof) on the stove. So I know both sides. So I want to seriously repeat to you, it’s better to live like I’m living now . . . . I deal with a man called Jesus and I know he owns it all. I’m not afraid to go anywhere except for where the Ku Klux Klan people are.” --Philanthropist Eula McClaney
As rags-to-riches stories go, it’s hard to find one with richer highs or raggier lows than 72-year-old Eula McClaney’s.
This small black woman has only a sixth-grade education. She grew up in the cotton fields of Alabama in an old sharecropper’s shack, the kind that lets “you see the sun shining through the roof.”
McClaney’s back door neighbor is now entertainer Neil Diamond. Just around the corner is Hugh Hefner’s place. And her own Holmby Hills estate includes a 22-room, French provincial mansion--complete with gates, servants, a big driveway, the works.
Not that any of this is a true indication of her wealth. Apparently, she could easily trade up. Having made her fortune in real estate, she can certainly shuffle and deal properties with the best of them.
Millions to Charity
Instead, she has decided to donate much of her money to charity. In fact on Friday, McClaney and her daughter, La-Doris McClaney, will be honored at City Hall for what one official described as “a multimillion-dollar gift” the two recently made to 11 charities.
(La-Doris, a high-spirited woman who has managed McClaney’s estate for the last 20 years, 19 of them with her late sister, describes her business relationship with her mother in basic terms: “She built the empire, retired and dropped it on us.”)
The family’s most recent charitable contribution was a fairly simple decision. As McClaney explained, a few days ago at her home, “I promised God that if he helped and blessed me, I would bless someone else.”
Though the lavish nature of those blessings was obvious in the rooms filled with ornate antiques, it’s not been the best of times lately for McClaney. Her elder daughter, Burnie McClaney, died a year ago last August; according to La-Doris, McClaney’s only other child, Burnie was diagnosed as having lung cancer and died rather suddenly three days later. (The 11-charity gift was made in Burnie’s name and one of the recipients is the American Lung Assn.)
McClaney’s health similarly has not been good in recent months. She’s been hospitalized for hypertension several times in the last year, and had only been home from the hospital for three weeks when she was interviewed.
“I don’t know why I should have waited to get it until now,” she declared, her voice strong, but somewhat hoarse. “Seems like I should have gotten it way before.”
But McClaney loves sharing her life story, and felt well enough to do so. (One of her few regrets is that thus far, she’s been unable to get her autobiography, “God, I Listened,” published.)
As she took a break to pose for pictures, however, it became apparent just how seriously her hypertension affects her. La-Doris, dressed in fine ivory silk and matching wool gabardine, adjusted her mother’s more matronly attire, smoothed her hair and applied lipstick to her mother’s otherwise makeup-free face.
After a few photographs indoors, there were more outside. But the short walk so exhausted McClaney that she could barely talk. Observing this, Lil Neville, the family’s public relations woman of 14 years, suggested McClaney use a wheelchair when she and La-Doris are honored by Mayor Tom Bradley and others at City Hall.
How do you get from the cotton fields of Orion, Ala., to being celebrated by a big city mayor?
Once she caught her breath, McClaney summed it up in two words: “prayer” and “sacrifice.”
The worst part of her life wasn’t living in a shack or working the cotton fields at age 7, she insisted. Or even having to stop her formal education at the sixth grade because that’s all the schooling there was available. (She repeated the sixth grade, however, because she didn’t want to leave school. And though she never went back to school, there’s now a Los Angeles elementary school named for her, the Eula McClaney Christian School.)
‘Happy Children’
“We grew up as happy children because everyone around us was poor,” McClaney recalled, adding that she was the third of five offspring.
At 19, she married up. As she characterized Burnish McClaney, “He was handsome and he was from a more affluent family than I was. The truth is, I was reaching for a little bit higher spot than where I was.”
But her husband didn’t have the business drive that his father did, McClaney remembered, and by the time her two daughters were born, they were still living in relative poverty on land rented from her father-in-law.
“I soon realized I didn’t want this kind of life for my children,” she continued. “I talked to my husband about leaving the South. I wanted to go anywhere above the Mason-Dixon line.”
They moved to a small apartment in Pittsburgh, where her husband got a construction job and later worked for U.S. Steel. McClaney figured she’d landed in heaven. But not for long. Soon she started talking to her husband, saying, “Let’s get into something extra, maybe open a hot dog stand.” But, “the more I talked about doing something else, the more he was against it.”
This struggle, she said, was the most difficult of her life.
“I guess the worst time in my life was trying to live with and please my husband and above all, trying to understand . . . That’s when I started praying to God, to let my husband see what I was talking about. One morning, a voice spoke to me clear as I’m talking now and said ‘Save every penny you get and go into real estate. You do it yourself. This is your dream.’
“This voice just kept telling me the same thing. When I finally realized this was the answer to my prayer, it didn’t come to me no more.”
Saved and Sacrificed
McClaney saved and sacrificed like crazy. She sold sweet potato pies at 10 cents a slice (“school children were my best clients”). She took the street car instead of buying a car. She sold Sunday dinners. She took as many as three foster children at a time into her home (and also looked after her sister-in-law’s baby).
In 1944, she bought a three-story fixer-upper, repaired it, moved her family in and rented out the top floor to pay the mortgage.
“When I first started buying property, I only had enough money to buy shacks in the black neighborhood,” McClaney said.
In nine years, she owned 33 housing units and she and her family had moved into an estate once owned by Ira Lewis, publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier. But even when purchases took her out of the black community, McClaney claimed she encountered no prejudice.
As La-Doris, a divorcee who holds a master’s degree in public administration from Pepperdine University, explained, “If you have the proper down payment, excellent credit and an excellent broker, you have no problem.”
(According to Richard Baum, a broker with De Wald Baum & Co. who has sold the McClaney’s “about 10 properties” in the West Los Angeles area in the last 15 years and is in charge of selling properties for their charitable gifts, La-Doris and her mother have had no trouble buying properties. “If someone were going to discriminate against them, they’d hear from me,” he said. “They are a pleasure to do business with.”)
That opinion appears to be rather commonplace. “Everyone who knows Eula McClaney speaks very highly of her. She’s a very inspiring story,” said Linda Johnson Rice, vice president and assistant to the publisher, Johnson Publishing (publishers of Ebony and Jet magazines.)
Cookie man Wally “Famous” Amos thinks of McClaney as “a role model for me and so many other people. She and her daughter lead a very spiritual life and they prove that spiritual principles can work in your business life as well as your personal life.”
But what inspired McClaney to achieve even more success than she did in Pittsburgh?
In the mid-’50s, McClaney traveled to Southern California for a church convention and loved it. In 1957, she brought her daughters to Los Angeles for a month’s vacation. They stayed in a motel owned by a black family and, once again, she was powerfully impressed. “I could see how they got clients. It wasn’t a prejudice thing,” she said.
On this trip, McClaney checked out two memorable properties: the home of Jack Benny’s sidekick, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, which was not for sale, and a motel at Washington Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, which was.
“Before I left, I bought the motel,” McClaney said. “That trip was the only other time that the voice came back to me. It kept saying to me at night, ‘Get it (the motel). Get it.’ ”
The motel business proved a winner. McClaney, Burnie and La-Doris made the motel their first L.A. home and have since turned it into Flagstone Guest Haven, a residential care facility for the developmentally disabled. Flagstone now includes a church--McClaney thought that church should come to the disabled--and it’s known for its Monday-night “prayer band.” Celebrities who are friends of the family, such as singer Freida Payne, prosperity preacher Rev. Ike, gospel singer Linda Hopkins and Wally Amos, have been known to show up at the Monday night services.
But Burnish McClaney wanted nothing to do with the motel. He remained in Pittsburgh and he and his wife eventually were divorced.
Soon after she purchased the motel, McClaney began buying additional property in South Central L.A., starting with six single-family dwellings.
Asked to describe their present holdings, La-Doris responded, “I like to say we now have more than 20 locations: single-family dwellings, commercial properties, the residential care facility serving the developmentally disabled. Some of these are now a part of the gift to the 11 charities. “Ninety-five percent of our tenants are non-black because of the locations. For years, they didn’t know the property was black owned.”
Not knowing that the McClaneys’ Holmby Hills residence is black-owned is a mistake some strangers also make, an error that McClaney and La-Doris have accepted with both humor and grace. La-Doris, who lives at the mansion along with McClaney’s mother, 97-year-old Joanna Hendricks, enjoys telling how riders on the tour buses that travel through the neighborhood sometimes mistake her family members for hired help.
As both McClaney and La-Doris see it, such misperceptions are inconsequential compared to other drawbacks of being well-off.
“There’s a tremendous amount of jealousy,” sighed La-Doris, “but you look at it and smile and realize they’re just motivating you to go on and do what you have to do. It comes with the territory.”
What could they possibly want now? “Just to keep on buying and to continue giving away properties,” said La-Doris. Added McClaney, “I just want to go on helping somebody else and get my book published.” Her daughter agreed. “We want to leave this world, not in terms of how much we accumulated in dollars and cents, but in how much we helped other people. The whole goal is to help somebody else. A lot of people would wonder why would you give a multi-million dollar gift to someone instead of your family, your cousins, those people. Those family members who are extremely close to us are financially OK. This will encompass a lot more people.”
(The charities which will benefit from the trust established by the McClaneys are: American Heart Assn., American Diabetes Assn., King Drew School of Medicine, South Central Los Angeles Regional Center for the Developmentally Disabled, United Negro College Fund, Bethune Cookman College, Trinity Broadcasting Network, Christian Broadcasting Network, World Vision International, Sickle Cell Research Foundation and the American Lung Assn.)
But before the McClaneys give all their money away, you can be sure they will be enjoying at least some of their riches.
As La-Doris put it, “The God Eula and I serve owns it all. I would drive four Rolls Royces down the street if I had four legs to put in them.”