Banning Garrett; Realtor Helped Integrate Wilshire District
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Banning Garrett, 85, longtime Los Angeles Realtor who helped develop Wilshire Boulevard in the 1960s and 1970s. Garrett owned a cattle ranch and car dealership in San Luis Obispo during the years after World War II. He later moved to San Marino and ran Barrett Realty, a commercial real estate development company that helped integrate the Wilshire Boulevard business district in the early 1960s when Garrett negotiated a lease for a black attorney who wanted a Wilshire Boulevard address. Garrett’s first wife, Lou Ann, who was a contributing writer for The Times, died in 1972. He is survived by his second wife, Evelyn. Also surviving him are daughters Linda, of Cornelia, Ga., and Laurie, a Pulitzer Prize-winning medical and science writer for Newsday in New York; a son, Banning, of Virginia; three grandchildren; and a sister, Bernice Silber, of Atherton, Calif. Garrett, a fourth-generation Los Angeles native, most recently was a resident of Palm Desert. On June 13 in Palm Desert after a long illness.
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