Departed Pets to Rest in Peace : Bereaved Animal Lovers Join Ranks to Save Historic Cemetery

For the 26th time, Elinor Peterson placed a bright red Christmas plant on the grave of a friend last week.

It’s an annual ritual for an unusual friend--Bridget, a pet Scottish terrier that Peterson buried on a Calabasas hillside in 1960.

This year, however, the gesture had special significance.

Peterson is one of 700 pet owners who joined two months ago to purchase the historic Los Angeles Memorial Pet Park to protect their buried pets from developers’ bulldozers for “eternity.”

To do it, the animal lovers out-maneuvered a pair of land developers who were trying to purchase the 58-year-old pet cemetery. Then they staged such things as garage sales to raise $100,000 to buy it.

And then came the hard part. The loose coalition of pet owners that called itself SOPHIE--for Save Our Pets’ History In Eternity--set out to convince cynics that it could live up to its name.

“Buying the pet cemetery is something to be proud of,” said Peterson, who has buried five other pets there since her terrier. “The group has worked hard.”

Members Work Hard

And its effort continues.

Heidi Laubscher carried a watering can with her Dec. 21 when she drove from her North Hollywood home to visit the grave of her dachshund, Yogi, who died in 1982 at age 16.

She watered the flowers at his grave, then watered Christmas floral arrangements on other graves.

“This belongs to us now, so we have to try and take care of it,” Laubscher said. “It’s not a big deal to help out.”

Such devotion is typical of pet owners who have spent up to $500 on burial expenses to honor animals that had become their best friends, according to SOPHIE leaders.

“I’m sure it sounds crazy to some people. But the pet park is a place you can go out and visit. My dog was like my child,” said Spencer Henderson, a Los Angeles man who buried his 16-year-old poodle there in June.

“It’s difficult for some people to understand,” Peterson said. “They think you’re some kind of kook to come here to visit every week.”

The pet owners’ campaign to save the Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park grew from just such a visit.

Woodland Hills lawyer Dennis Polen and his wife, Nancy, were visiting the grave of Duffy, their silky terrier, in mid-1983 when another visitor mentioned that developers were trying to buy the memorial park.

The cemetery was owned at the time by the Los Angeles chapter of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which had received it as a gift from the park’s founders.

Despite its fame as the resting place for 40,000 animals, including Hopalong Cassidy’s horse and the Little Rascals’ dog Spot, the cemetery was a financial drain on the SPCA.

Because the society’s expertise and interest was in live animals, it decided to sell the cemetery to save operating costs. Subdividers planning a nearby housing project offered to buy the 10-acre cemetery to use part of its undeveloped six acres as an entryway to their proposed tract.

Comes as Jarring News

That news was jarring to Polen and other pet lovers. They feared that the whole park could eventually fall victim to development because it lacked the legal protection of a human cemetery.

“We were all saddled with fears and concerns,” Polen recalls now. “A lot of rumors were floating around about the future of the place. The next weekend we had a meeting and formed our grass-roots organization.”

The animal lovers’ goal at first was simply to stall the cemetery sale until they could win guarantees that the developers would not disturb their pets’ graves. The idea to buy it came later, when the group took steps to widen the state law dealing with cemeteries to include pet cemeteries.

Polen became point man in the skirmishing that came after that and lasted for three years.

A fund-raising campaign by the group managed by late 1984 to raise the $94,000 asking price for the cemetery. But it took longer to convince the SPCA that the animal lovers were the right people to sell it to.

“Because we’d never run a pet cemetery before, there was legitimate concern on how SOPHIE would do,” Polen said.

Management Plan Given

A detailed management plan that set up a budget covering the $240,000-a-year operating expenses, including the salaries of seven employees, and a permanent endowment program for long-range maintenance did the trick.

The SPCA also was given a position on the pet cemetery’s advisory board for 10 years.

“We’re very pleased with the way it worked out,” said Edward Cubrda, assistant director of the SPCA’s Los Angeles chapter.

As its last act before giving up the cemetery, the SPCA registered it with the state to dedicate the land “in perpetuity” for pet cemetery purposes. The dedication was the first in California under the state Health and Safety Code amendment secured by SOPHIE.

Pet lovers said they plan their own symbolic dedication in January for the cemetery. All that remains after that is to resolve some leftover litigation between the developers, the SPCA and SOPHIE, Polen said. But SOPHIE members do not believe the litigation will jeopardize their ownership.

In the meantime, pet lovers have begun refurbishing the cemetery and making plans to eventually expand it beyond its 3.7-acre boundaries.

Range of Fees Told

In their first two months of running the cemetery, the pet lovers have buried or cremated 137 dogs and cats. Burial prices range from $299 to $599, depending on the size of the animal. Fifty dollars of that fee is channeled into the endowment fund, said Mary Bayer, cemetery manager.

Polen said the cemetery, which is open to the public, is operating in the black after two months.

Its grounds were festooned last week with colorful Christmas ornaments.

“This is the first Christmas in the past three or four that people are able to rest assured it’s a pet park for eternity,” he said. “It’s in the hands of a very responsible organization, and the future looks good.”

There could not be a better holiday gift, said Tom Spencer, a Sepulveda resident who visited the graves of his three cats on Christmas Eve with his wife, Cathy.

“This has been our hope and prayer,” Spencer said. “Thank God it’s come to pass.”