Animal Lover Leaves $700,000 to Oceanside Humane Society

For more than 50 years, furry cats, scraggly dogs and an assortment of abandoned, four-legged creatures have found an abundant supply of tender loving care at the Oceanside Humane Society.

And now, a $700,000 gift from the estate of a Hollywood housekeeper will make sure the care gets even better at the society, which intends to use the gift to build a new shelter for the growing number of strays in North County.

The gift comes from proceeds from the sale of a Beverly Hills cottage that belonged to Eileen Lamb, a lifelong animal lover. The cottage sold for $1.5 million nearly two years ago, but the money remained frozen until recently, when Humane Society officials in Oceanside and Los Angeles settled a legal skirmish over the bequest.

“The community has been very generous in the past, but I don’t think we’ve gotten anything like this before,” said Carl Morrison, a spokesman for the Oceanside society.

Plans for New Shelter

“We’ve had long-range plans to build a new shelter for quite some time, but we could never do it because we didn’t have the money,” Morrison said.

The $700,000 gift found its way to Oceanside Humane Society as a result of a fund-raising campaign two years ago. Letters appealing for revenue were sent to community residents and, luckily, one of the letters was delivered to William V. Berry, an Oceanside real estate agent and a friend of Lamb.

Lamb worked as housekeeper for the late stage star Elsie Janis, who was known as the “sweetheart of the American Expeditionary Forces” as an entertainer of U. S. troops in France during World War I. Janis left her 1,800-square-foot cottage to Lamb when she died in 1956.

In her will, Lamb said the house should be sold and the proceeds donated to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals upon her death. She died June 24, 1987.

Since Lamb’s will did not name a particular branch of the SPCA, Berry--who was in charge of selling the house--thought the money go to the Oceanside Humane Society, which is recognized as a chapter of the SPCA.

“She (Lamb) had been to the Oceanside Humane Society and had seen how clean and nice the facility was. She commented about how happy the dogs looked. They were wagging their tails, and they didn’t look like they were in jail.

“I remembered getting the letter from the Humane Society and that brought my attention to the needs of the facility,” Berry said. “Since she liked the facility so much, I thought it would be nice to get some money for it. That’s when I contacted the executor of the will.”

L.A. Branch Wanted Money

But Los Angeles SPCA officials thought the money should be theirs.

“The will was an ambiguous one that left the sale of the house to the SPCA,” said Richard Marsh, the attorney who represented the Los Angeles organization. “It was our feeling that Eileen Lamb intended the money to go to the L.A. SPCA. The Oceanside Humane Society felt differently.”

For nearly two years, the two groups squabbled over which organization should receive the $1.5 million raised through the sale of the house. Finally, earlier this month, the two parties reached a settlement, deciding to split the sum.

The Oceanside Humane Society is looking for a site for the shelter, Morrison said. When completed, it will be named after Lamb.

“We’re hoping that someone will donate the land,” Morrison said. “We’ll probably need about 3 to 5 acres. It could be in Oceanside, or we might build it somewhere else in North County.”

Meanwhile, the society, which advocates humane treatment of animals and provides an adoption service for strays, is undergoing a $200,000 expansion of its existing facility.

“We were able to do this expansion with the money we have received from the people in the community,” Morrison said.