Trove Surrenders Treasure of Insight

It was with a mixture of both curiosity and trepidation that Dan Hawley pulled the old wooden barrels and boxes out of their storage bin Friday at a Santa Fe Springs warehouse.

For the more than 60 years that his mother had stored the containers, their contents had remained a mystery. Jane Hawley would make vague references to the cache she had secreted away. Hawley and his two older brothers never put much stock in it.

But then the 84-year-old Napa woman fell ill and had to move into a nursing home. When Hawley stepped in to handle her financial affairs, he discovered that it was true: His mother was paying about $40 a month to carefully keep something hidden away.

And it had to be something important. “Sometimes she wouldn’t remember to pay the PG&E; utility bill,” Hawley said. “But she always paid the storage bill every month.”

Hawley and his brothers speculated that the hidden treasure had something to do with someone they had never met but had heard rumors about all their lives: their grandmother.

In the 1930s, Grace Dartt was a stylish beauty living in Spokane, Wash. A struggling artist, she was married to a man who Hawley and his brothers came to realize was a bootlegger.

“It wasn’t the most stable of families,” Hawley recounted Friday. “My mother’s stepfather was abusive and not the most responsible person. There has been family speculation that there might have been other illegal activities going on -- like prostitution. The speculation was my grandmother might have been a madam.”

So as Percy Shelton, a 40-year warehouseman for the Beltmann Group’s North American Van Lines, helped pry open the sealed wooden kegs, Hawley waited to see whether bootlegged liquor, bags of Prohibition-era rum-runner cash or brothel customer records would come tumbling out.

They didn’t. Instead, there was a flurry of shredded and wadded-up newspapers from the late 1930s and early ‘40s. And cradled lovingly deep inside the barrels were carefully wrapped china cups and plates, Depression-era crystal, glass vases and numerous ornate ashtrays.

Protected by padding in the boxes were oil paintings of family members done by Dartt before her death in 1938, shortly after Jane Hawley turned 16. A charcoal sketch done by an unknown artist depicting a vivacious Dartt was carefully stored in the center of the framed works.

Another packet contained Jane Hawley’s elementary school report cards, valentines, school photos and pictures of her and her late husband, James. He died in 2003 at 84.

“This is like Al Capone’s safe -- except this time there’s something inside,” joked Karen Bean, a friend from Anaheim Hills who showed up to help Hawley sort through the hundreds of items.

“This is an extraordinary lot, time-wise,” warehouse general manager Dave Lamb marveled as he pulled out a dog-eared folder containing typed, carbon-copied records that traced the history of the woman’s stored treasures.

They showed that she hid them away for $3 a month at a former Republic Van Lines warehouse on Alameda Street near downtown Los Angeles on May 11, 1946. The boxed-up barrels and cardboard containers were moved to different warehouse sites six times as storage companies merged and newer warehouses were opened. They ended up in Santa Fe Springs eight months ago.

The file included handwritten letters that Jane Hawley had sent over the years, apologizing for her occasionally tardy monthly payments.

“In one 1957 letter she says things are tough, that my father was out of work, but promises that she’ll pay next month,” Dan Hawley said.

Hawley, a 56-year-old financial planner who lives in Hayward in the Bay Area, said his father was an Army Air Forces pilot who flew “The Hump,” ferrying supplies over the Himalayas in the China-Burma-India theater during World War II.

After the war, he got a job as a commercial pilot in Ecuador. Jane Hawley put the goods in storage when they moved from Hollywood to South America, where they spent about three years before relocating to Florida in 1950. They settled in California in 1963.

Soon after opening the cache of personal items, Hawley called his mother to say that her property had been retrieved and that he would bring some things to her in a few days.

“She’s deeply thrilled,” Hawley reported. “She said she dreamed of her mother last night.”

So there was no gold, no bootlegged hooch, no bags of illicit cash, no red-light district artifacts.

But Jane Hawley’s barrels contained answers for her son and his two brothers: Bay Area physicist Jim Hawley and computer expert Jeff Hawley.

“This shows that our mother was deeply conflicted about her own mother -- because she [died] when she was so young and because her stepfather was not the most stable person to be left with,” Hawley said.

She didn’t want to throw away her mother’s possessions. But she didn’t want to constantly look at them either.

After the 60-year-old cache was repackaged in bubble wrap for delivery to Hayward, Hawley slipped out of the warehouse. This time perhaps with a mixture of disappointment -- and relief.