COLUMN ONE : A Town More Dead Than Alive : Life can be odd in Colma, a Bay Area suburb where the deceased outnumber the living up to 3,000 to 1. This city of cemeteries is host to an eclectic ‘Who Was Who.’ It also is a discount shopper’s dream.

Tina Turner’s dead dog, wrapped in one of the singer’s fur coats, is among the million or so human and animal souls resting eternally in the 15 1/2 cemeteries of this tiny town. So is newspaperman William Randolph Hearst, locked inside an expensive, unmarked tomb with a half-empty bottle of Evian.

Nearby are dead clowns, Alcatraz inmates, a potato-chip king and lawman Wyatt Earp.

Finding a resident who’s alive is a little trickier. In Colma, depending on who does the counting, the deceased outnumber the living 1,000, 2,000 or maybe 3,000 to 1.

It’s the modern equivalent of an Egyptian necropolis.

Except this city of the dead has a Toys R Us that usually outsells every store in the chain, a mysterious swarm of grave-guarding bees and a defunct funeral-car trolley line now being replaced by a subway. It also just legalized gambling.

Colma (living population: 1,100) is an American oddity, says historian Michael Svanevik,who is co-writing a book about the city: “Hillsborough (another San Francisco suburb) was created to protect the rights of the rich. This town was created to protect the rights of the dead.”

Svanevik, a bespectacled professor who drives a 1970 Volkswagen Beetle, is standing inside the Catacombs of Cypress Lawn, bathed in the eerie glow from some 4 1/2 acres of stained-glass ceilings.

Surrounded by crypts and urns numbering in the thousands, he steps back in time. It’s 1937 and land-starved San Francisco is undertaking the unthinkable: digging up every grave in the city and sending the remains 10 miles south.

By then, more than a dozen cemeteries had set up shop in Colma, a hog-ranching mecca that once was America’s cabbage capital. A few owners, anticipating San Francisco’s move, had come here in the 1880s, even arranging train and trolley service--complete with plush funeral parlor cars--directly to their graveyards.

San Francisco’s burial grounds, meanwhile, had become a shambles. Vandals carted off statues and skeletons, vagrants moved into mausoleums, and students played soccer with human skulls, according to “Pillars of the Past,” a historical guidebook written by Svanevik and cemetery scholar Shirley Burgett.

With the underground eviction, the scene turned even more gruesome. Tens of thousands of corpses--in various stages of decay--were exhumed for reinterment in mass graves out of town. “It was perhaps the greatest body removal in history,” the authors report.

The result is an extensive--and sometimes strange--roll call of the dead. From sugar tycoons to Hell’s Angels, Svanevik says, “there’s a whole history of Northern California here.”

At Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, the Beverly Hills of Cemetery Central, extravagant tombs are marked with names such as Hearst (the mystery Evian bottle visible through the front door), Crocker, Spreckels and Blue Bell potato-chip mogul Herman Nager.

The most recent addition to the neighborhood--a $5-million estate outfitted with four blue armchairs--belongs to Polish-born beer meister Paul Kalmanovitz, who died in 1987 and owned Pabst, Lucky Lager and part of the Westminster Mall. Allegedly the hilltop monument also contains--illegally, says Svanevik--Kalmanovitz’s dead cat and two German shepherds.

In a less-exclusive section, bees have inexplicably taken up residence in the statue of San Francisco Chronicle co-founder Charles de Young, who--in an unusual display of journalistic objectivity--once shot a mayoral candidate.

Cypress also holds a murdered Hell’s Angel--buried with his Harley--and a daredevil aviator, Lincoln Beachey, whose fatal plunge into San Francisco Bay was witnessed by 50,000 spectators in 1915. “He was demonstrating a suicide dive,” Svanevik reports, “and he did it very realistically.”

Elsewhere at the graveyard: a crematory disguised as a chapel, a flag that never flies full-staff (owners promise to raise it if they ever go 30 days without a burial) and a band of rogue ducks that repeatedly tried to invade the cemetery’s glitzy 100th anniversary bash last year.

Leaving Cypress, the list of luminaries thins rapidly. Levi Strauss is entombed at Home of Peace, one of four Jewish cemeteries. Ishi, “the last wild Indian of North America,” is at Olivet Memorial Park, in an urn he reportedly made in captivity.

San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, gunned down in office 15 years ago, rests in Holy Cross, Colma’s oldest and largest cemetery and home to 400,000 Catholics. Locals remember Moscone’s 1,000-car funeral procession as the longest in city history.

And then, at Woodlawn Memorial Park, there’s Emperor Norton, a crazy rice broker who wore a feathered beaver cap and sword, and took out a newspaper ad in 1854 proclaiming himself “Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.”

Not surprisingly, the presence of so much death creates some unusual side effects for the living--from creepy lover’s lanes and weird crimes to the complete absence of churches, schools and grocery stores in town. Even more curiously, there are no mortuaries.

But living among the dead does have advantages. The city is so rich that it buys blocks of season tickets to every San Francisco Giants and 49ers game--plus seats at several plays--and gives them away to its above-ground residents. It also treats the town to a $50,000 dinner, dancing, and--until recently--drinking extravaganza at the Hyatt hotel in downtown San Francisco for Christmas.

Even so, millions go unspent.

The reason: 50,000 to 70,000 San Franciscans invading the city daily to shop at a Toys R Us that was No. 1 in the nation until last year, a Home Depot so busy it plans to open a second store next to its first and a bustling auto-dealer row.

There’s also Drug Barn, Nordstrom Rack and a movie theater advertising “Fatal Instinct.”

“It’s a weird mix,” says Police Chief Art Dollosso. “You’ve got people going into K mart for blue-light specials at the same time Auntie Em is attending a funeral.”

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Poker is next. City officials--despite a $2-million annual budget surplus--insist they don’t have much choice: The state is threatening to siphon away sales tax money, and the cemeteries--which own 80% of Colma’s 2.2-square-mile domain--are mostly nonprofit and tax-exempt.

Voters agreed and approved the betting measure in February, which leaves the decorum-conscious cemeteries a little uneasy.

“What’s next?” asks Pet’s Rest manager Julane Speccia. “Legalized prostitution?”

That and tourism are about the only things Colma has yet to cash in on. Save for a stack of “It’s Great to Be Alive in Colma” bumper stickers at City Hall, no one seems keen on exploiting the obvious.

There are no Zombie cocktails at the town’s turn-of-the-century watering hole, Historical Old Molloy’s; no discount headstones at K mart (although the store did make an ill-fated stab at cemetery wreaths), and no “I Brake for Funerals” stickers at Target.

It’s not that such ideas haven’t occurred to people. They just consider it tacky. Ted Kirschner, a city councilman and two-time mayor, says Colma has even tried to chase tour bus companies out of town.

But attitudes may be shifting. The city is paying for Svanevik and Burgett’s new book and plans to distribute copies to visitors.

“I think they’re kind of awakening to the fact they have a tourist attraction here,” Svanevik says.

Unfortunately for police, the concentration of cemeteries attracts more than tourists: Vandals topple monuments, teen-agers make out in empty crypts and--according to some residents--corpses occasionally disappear.

Police Chief Dollosso insists that many of the reports are exaggerated. The only case of grave robbing, he says, happened in 1975, when a San Francisco man who claimed a dead baby was “calling him” was arrested for disinterring an infant coffin.

Graveyard vandalism--including 40 headstones knocked over at a Jewish cemetery three Halloweens ago--is a bigger problem. But he says it’s sporadic, apparently the work of teen-age pranksters.

As for people breaking into mausoleums to party or unleash their libidos, burglar alarms and cemetery security patrols seem an effective deterrent.

Basically, he says, the only crime in Colma nowadays is shoplifting at the town’s discount retail centers.

Even Earp’s grave seems safe. The marker for the Tombstone, Ariz., marshal--buried in a Jewish cemetery because his wife was Jewish--once was stolen regularly. But after it turned up at a San Jose flea market, it was embedded in concrete flush to the ground.

By most estimates, dead residents number about a million--2 million at most. But Svanevik suspects a much higher total.

At Cypress Lawn, he stumbled across a storage room overflowing with copper canisters holding unclaimed, cremated ashes. “There were thousands of them,” he says. Add up stuff like that at other cemeteries, figure in a few missing records, and the subterranean population swells to maybe 3 million.

And that doesn’t include the neighboring dead. In addition to Colma’s 15 1/2 graveyards (the half, Svanevik says, is a Chinese cemetery under construction), three other burial grounds abut the town in next-door Daly City.

Colma’s weirdest cemetery has to be Pet’s Rest, which holds the remains of iguanas, cheetahs, goldfish, monkeys, a poodle with solid-gold false teeth and one horse.

It also has a chapel (nondenominational, the manager says), a staff Rottweiler named Bullet and a crematory.

Out back, past a faded sign that advises “Cans of food must remain closed,” are the graves: Hodgepodge rows of stone monuments, wood markers in the shape of dog bones, and one hand-painted rock that says, simply, “Coco.”

The cemetery attracts a strange crowd, manager Speccia concedes, including one man who said he didn’t think his dog’s soul had left its body, so he kept it in his house for two years--inside a doggie casket with a window--before calling Pet’s Rest to pick it up.

“We’ve also had some black Masses here with people wearing dark robes and burning red incense,” she says.

Speccia is one of few locals interviewed who admits believing spirits haunt the city. Her father, former Colma policeman Phil C’de Baca, agrees. He claims ghosts roam Cypress Lawn’s community mausoleum for stillborns and infants: “I’ve been in there at night and I’ve heard babies crying, and it makes your hair stand on end.”

Other residents dismiss the spooky stories. Says Councilman Kirschner: “When you live here and you’re familiar with it, the mystique leaves.”

Besides, he says, there’s more to Colma than expired pets and afterlife styles of the rich and famous.

The Italian Cemetery, for example, has few celebrities (olive oil king G. B. Levaggi), but is considered a work of art.

“You have a sense of a city,” says photographer Camilo Vergara, who shot burial grounds around the nation for the book, “Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery.”

“Instead of grass, it’s all pavement and tiles.”

Narrow roads stretch past lines of weather-beaten mausoleums (with addresses on the curbs) and crumbling statues. Footpaths lead through rows of faded tombstones, some embedded with glass cases containing religious icons and long-wilted flowers.

And, in one section, a host of baby angels alight on the graves of dozens of children.

Burial areas for youngsters are perhaps the most haunting features of Colma cemeteries. At Woodlawn, in particular, it’s hard not to be affected by the sight of a rain-soaked teddy bear sitting alone atop a toddler’s grave. Or by the carefully wrapped gifts placed over another headstone with a note that pleads: “Do not take please. It’s her first birthday.”

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Adults have special sections too: A monument depicting a clown, Ferris wheel and carousel set off a carnival workers’ plot--and other areas are reserved for bartenders, nuns, bridge builders, the Salvation Army and longshoremen.

“It’s like a neighborhood,” Svanevik says. “They live together, play together and die together.”

But some worry about the neighborhood’s future. The BART subway line being built through town along the old funeral train right-of-way, they argue, borders on the sacrilegious. It will run underground part of the route, city officials say, then barrel through open concrete trenches--topped with barbed-wire fence--as it passes a Holocaust memorial and several graveyards.

Even without BART, Colma’s cemetery conglomerate faces problems. One is the popularity of cremation, which isn’t as profitable as in-ground or crypt burial.

But the real snag, says local monument maker Jim Silacci, is that “people just aren’t into death the way they used to be.” Nobody builds mausoleums anymore, nobody buys fancy tombstones. The new grave markers--usually pre-cut slabs from India--are mostly done by computer.

Even Memorial Day has become just another three-day weekend, he says: “There used to be kids on every street corner selling flowers.” Now, the big crowds are gone.

“Everybody’s busy,” sighs councilman Kirschner, a 33-year resident. “Instead of going to the cemetery, (they) go to the Russian River. And it’s a shame, because how long does it take to come around and pay your respects? You’re dead and you’re forgotten. Of course, that’s not all bad. I also remember seeing people laying down on graves crying over someone who had been dead 10 years.”

Silacci agrees: “Maybe it’s better this way. Maybe we were wrong.”