By Brandon Hill on June 24, 2014 • ( Leave a comment )

2013: James Dean

We knew that Luca was a big fan of James Dean even before he arrived, so we knew that we would have to make a stop at James Dean’s birthplace and grave site – both of which are not too far from our house.

I must apologize for the picture being out of focus – I didn’t realize that it was out of focus until just now – and now the scrapbook is in Germany :(.

On the left hand page are pictures of Luca at James Dean’s Birthplace. It is now a parking lot as the building was in very bad shape. Here is what Wikipedia says about James Dean’s birthplace and early life:

“Dean was born at the Seven Gables apartment house at the corner of 4th Street and McClure Street in Marion, Indiana,^[5] the son of Winton Dean (January 17, 1907 – February 21, 1995) and Mildred Wilson (September 15, 1910 – July 14, 1940). Six years after his father had left farming to become a dental technician, Dean and his family moved to Santa Monica, California. He was enrolled at Brentwood Public School in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, but transferred soon afterward to the McKinley Elementary school.^[6] The family spent several years there, and by all accounts, young Dean was very close to his mother. According to Michael DeAngelis, she was “the only person capable of understanding him”.^[7] In 1938, she was suddenly struck with acute stomach pains and began to lose weight quickly. She died of uterine cancer when Dean was nine years old.^[6]Unable to care for his son, Dean’s father sent him to live with his sister Ortense and her husband Marcus Winslow on a farm in Fairmount, Indiana,^[8] where he was raised in a Quaker household”

The right hand page has pictures from the Fairmount Historical Museum which houses the James Dean Museum, as well as a picture of James Dean’s grave. Visiting the grave site is an interesting experience compared to visiting the Rose Hill Cemetary in California where many famous actors are buried. In Fairmount you almost drive over the grave as you are looking for it, and the way to find it is to look for a gravestone that has lipstick lip impressions on it and cigarettes left on it. People still leave James cigarettes and the ladies like to kiss the stone!