A Priest’s Stamping Grounds

My search for Father Bucci--the bootlegging priest of Burbank who made huge religious murals out of postage stamps--began on a Sunday evening when I was half-asleep on my living room sofa.

The television was tuned to an all-movies cable channel that was filling time with a 1940s newsreel called, “Unusual Occupations.”

In my woozy state--no doubt enhanced by a take-out anchovy and jalapeno pizza--I saw the brief filmed tour of the father’s Burbank bungalow, with its walls and even ceilings covered with his murals. There was a depiction of St. Anthony and Christ child, a giant American flag and a tribute to the ancient Druids, all made entirely of postage stamps.

“More than a quarter of a century and 200,000 stamps,” said the authoritative narrator, “have been spent in covering his living and dining rooms with these intricate designs in the matched stamps of the world.”

There were numerous shots of the kindly looking, bespectacled priest scurrying around the house, pasting stamps to the walls and planning new murals. I drifted off, only to awake about an hour later with a start and several questions.

“Was it a dream?”

“Who would spend 25 years making murals out of stamps?”

“Was he really a priest?”

“Should I have skipped the jalapenos?”

Most important of all: “Is the house still standing in Burbank, and do any of the murals survive?”

It should not be too hard to find out, I thought. After all, the guy’s murals were well-known enough to attract the attention of a newsreel outfit. But no one at the Burbank Historical Society had ever heard of the stamp artist priest--who I thought was named “Gucci,” as in handbag. Nor had Msgr. Francis Weber, chief archivist for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

A call to the American Movie Classics cable channel, which showed the short, led me to Mark Punswick, who owns the rights to “Unusual Occupations” and several other novelty series produced by Jerry Fairbanks in the 1930s and 1940s, the heyday of Hollywood short subjects. Punswick first heard of Fairbanks’ work when he was a researcher in the mid-1980s at the UCLA film archive.

“I had to meet this guy,” Punswick said. He found him living in retirement in Santa Barbara. They became friends and shortly before Fairbanks died, Punswick bought the rights to several of his series.

Punswick sent me a video of the “Unusual Occupations” short and checked the files to find that the correct name of the priest was Bucci. Armed with this new information, I called Msgr. Weber.

“Good Lord, he was a grand character!” Weber declared at the mention of the name. “Got himself arrested during Prohibition.”

Weber had never met Bucci, who died in 1959, but he was able to provide information from the diocese’s files.

Alexander Bucci was ordained in his native Italy in 1899 and came to the U.S. in 1905. After short stints in New York and Salt Lake City, he was assigned to serve the local Italian community in Los Angeles and in 1918 he became the priest of a church in Tres Pinos, a small town 36 miles east of Salinas--then a part of the Los Angeles Archdiocese.

Two years later, Prohibition became the law of the land. Priests were given permission to make wine for religious purposes, but Bucci took the exemption a bit far. “He installed a distillery in the sacristy of the church,” Weber said, adding there were indications that one of his relatives “was a gangster.”

There was some sympathy for Father Bucci’s situation in Tres Pinos. “There was practically nothing up there back then,” said Brother John, who is the current archivist at the Monterey Archdiocese, which now covers Tres Pinos. “Maybe Father Bucci just needed a drink.”

Bucci was arrested in 1922, but authorities dropped the case to allow Los Angeles Bishop John Cantwell to deal with the errant father.

Cantwell ordered Bucci to return to Italy, but the priest refused and instead moved to the Los Angeles area. The bishop took the unusual step of publishing a notice in a local Catholic newspaper that the priest “does not enjoy the faculties of the Diocese.” Bucci, although technically still a priest, was no longer authorized to perform priestly functions.

That didn’t stop him.

Setting up a chapel in his sister’s Burbank house, Bucci became a priest for hire, officiating at baptisms, weddings and funerals. According to a newspaper account, he officiated in 1935 at Forest Lawn--a cemetery Cantwell had declared off limits to priests--at the funeral of Junior Durkin, a teenage actor (he played Huckleberry Finn in the 1930 film “Tom Sawyer”) killed in an automobile accident.

Bucci remained at odds with Catholic officials until 1959, when on his deathbed a local priest reconciled him to the Church. He was buried in the priest’s plot at the San Fernando Mission.

But what of the stamps?

There was no mention of them in the files kept by Weber. Nor was there a Burbank address listed.

A clerk at the cemetery provided the final address for the priest. She gave me a map and directed me to section A, row 13, where I found the plain grave marker for “Rev. Alexander Bucci 1875-1959.”

Back at the office, I reran the “Unusual Occupations” video several times, looking in vain for any clues as to where the house was located. There was a shot of its exterior, but neither street signs nor known landmarks were visible.

It seemed a dead end, until researcher Scott Wilson in The Times library unearthed a 1935 clipping of an article with the headline, “Retired Priest Transforms Old Mail Into Religious Art Work.” The short article said that Father Bucci had spent 15 years on “a large picture of St. Anthony of Padua, made entirely of stamps.” The piece was going to be displayed at the 1936 San Francisco Golden Gate Exhibition.

In the second paragraph was his address: 9925 Cohasset St.

But there no longer is a 9900 block to that street. As near as I could tell, it lies under a runway at Burbank Airport.

A few days later, on a suggestion from Mary Jane Strickland, founder of the Burbank Historical Society, I called Father Bill O’Connor, senior priest at St. Francis Xavier church in Burbank. “I think he was here in the 1950s,” she said.

And indeed he had been.

“It’s just a vague memory, but I know I met Father Bucci once,” said O’Connor, now 76. “His walls were plastered with stamps.”

Finally, an eyewitness.

“In fact, I think I found an excuse to go visit him just so I could see the place,” O’Connor said.

And what did it look like?

“Well,” he said after a pause, “that was a long time ago. I don’t remember much about it, except I remember thinking to myself, ‘This is really ugly.’ ”

Rest in peace, Father Bucci.