FAMOUS GRAVE TOUR: Frank & Barbara Sinatra, William Powell & Others At Desert Park Memorial

hi friends how is everybody today I'm here on a very sunny beautiful day this is a Memorial Day weekend and I'm here at the desert Memorial Park Cemetery as you can see turn around so you can see this is actually the front most the time you enter through the side gate on Deval which is this tree right here and then if you look down this way here this is Roman Road and if you follow Ramon Road all the way to the end you'll end up in downtown Palm Springs it's around five ten minutes from the cemetery so today I thought I would share a very personal story about my grandparents my grandfather was a military man and since this is Memorial weekend Memorial Day weekend I thought it would be appropriate to share it now so I'm gonna go in I'm gonna show you their grave sites I'm also going to show you the grave sites of quite a few famous people that are buried here I'm gonna try to find a little bit shady or spot here to tell you the story back in the 1960s when I was 10 years old my grandmother took me and my brothers to Hawaii to Honolulu Hawaii and that was my first trip in a plane it's my first plane ride that's the cemetery this is the entrance to the cemetery behind me here and she took us to the punch ball which is an extinct volcano on hollow the island of Honolulu and it's a cemetery it's called the I believe it's the National Cemetery National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific and it's a military cemetery so you have to be part of the Armed Forces to be buried there or I think you're a family certain family members can also be buried there and so that was my very first trip to a cemetery it's it's a tourist attraction as well as the cemetery it was a really fun vacation but really the only real thing I remember about the the trip was the cemetery she also took us to the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor which is also the final resting places of hundreds of military personnel who were killed during the attack the attack on Pearl Harbor so that was my first visit to a cemetery that was around fifty years ago and I've been visiting cemeteries ever since now I don't think we even took any photos certainly didn't take any videos we didn't have a video camera and I really even though I've been visiting cemeteries all over the world my entire life I never really thought to to take pictures of every now and then I would take a picture or two but I didn't have a video camera and this was mostly before cell phones we had a video camera on your cell phone so unfortunately I don't have video almost any one of the cemeteries that visited around the world which looking back now you know it's such a shame that trip is where I started my love of visiting cemeteries all those years ago and I owe that all to my grandmother so while my grandmother was the one who introduced me to cemeteries my grandfather was a real inspiration in different ways he was a military man when he I believe he was 18 when he first enlisted in the service his father had also been a military man he would at the age of 18 it would have been right in the very middle I believe of World War one so he started his military career during World War one probably 1900 and 15 or 16 I believe and then he spent his entire career as a military officer until he retired his son my uncle Ted was in the Navy in the 1950s and my brother erbil was in the Navy in the 1980s they both died in the last few years and both of them were cremated and not interred in cemeteries so here's my grandmother's grave site and I was also just realizing that she died 40 years ago in May so she died in fact just uh she died a few days ago and 40 years ago in May this is my grandfather you can see he was born in 1898 so he would have been around 16 or 18 during World War one which I believe started in 1914 and lasted until 1918 and so if he joined it 17 or 18 it would been right in the middle of World War one now those red flowers right there that's Frank Sinatra's grave and so I also have another interesting story about that me well firstly pan around let's just let me show you where this is located where they're located this is the entrance where I was just a minute ago you see Forest Lawn is across the street where's la marcha re Forest Lawn mortuary so the interesting story here about my grandparents and Frank Sinatra not only are they dis buried a number of rows away from Frank Sinatra but their best friends were Hugh and Maureen young well Hugh and Maureen purchased Frank Sinatra's home from him when he sold it to move to Rancho Mirage back in the nineteen I believe is in late 1950s and they lived there for forty years until they died in the 1990s so they they are the only other people who have lived in Frank Sinatra's first Palm Springs home because after they died it was purchased by a company that now uses it as a rental so it's a vacation rental and so no one else has ever lived in that house except Frank Sinatra and my grandparents good friends Hugh and Maureen young since then it's only been used as a rental a vacation rental a very high-end vacation rental we have a lot of celebrity homes here in Palm Springs and many of them are used as now used as celebrity rentals so now this is the first time I've been back since Barbara Sinatra died and while I was here right after she died before she had her gravestone but now she has her headstone as well now straight ahead there toward the venetie's those are the niches that where I'm gonna be where my final resting place will be someday hopefully not anytime soon yeah but right in front just a few rows this way from venetie's is the gravesite of William Powell and then I'm gonna walk over here there's actually quite a few other people here in this section famous people and so just a short distance from Frank Sinatra's grave is Mary Mead Maddock famous photographer and not far from her grave let's you ever leave this up here it's been a while since I've been here okay so William Powell's grave and back here let's see if I can find it again it's been a while since I've searched for all the graves here okay Frederick Loewe Frederick Loewe and alan jay lerner created some of the most successful and most popular Broadway musicals of all time and they were later turned into movies which became classics and there's another famous composer just a few rows away James Van Heusen along with Sammy Kahn created some of the biggest hits of all time and many of them were written for Frank Sinatra it looks like they've cleaned up the grave since the last time I was here which is nice you can actually read it a little bit better some of these as I mentioned are a little difficult to read so you may remember that really great song if you're my age or older actually swinging on a star he had some huge huge hits and so and wrote many of the songs for Frank Sinatra they worked together for a number of years and here they are one two three graves apart from each other so obviously they were friends and look at that the title of one of his most popular songs is one of the best epitaphs in the cemetery and this is a cemetery full of very creative epitaphs I believe it was the next row over is Mac MacDonald who was the co-founder of McDonald's okay so here's Joe Lee Gabor Ava and Josh's mother Magda de Bourgh's mother and then I believe it's either in that row or maybe this row is Mac McDonald as you can see over the years his headstone has really faded it's really sad that one of the founders of the world's most recognizable companies has a gravestone that's almost unrecognizable the calcium in minerals in our water here really do a number on these gravestones and of course his Frank's good friend Julie Rizzo and then there's Andrea Leeds she's just one row over from Frank Sinatra's grave and these are just some of the graves in this one small section where my grandparents are buried there are dozens of other famous people buried throughout this cemetery and I'll visit them in future videos like many other cemeteries Desert Memorial Park occasionally offers special events here's a few moments from a Memorial Day celebration I attended a couple of years ago here the free concert was given by the Palm Springs High School band [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so do you remember the first cemetery that you ever visited if so please leave a comment down below and if you liked this video please give it a thumbs up share with a friend and don't forget to subscribe if you'd like to be notified when I upload future videos like this one so as always thanks for joining me today and I'll hope to see you next time

Channel: Visiting Gravesites With Steve

Views: 71,408

Rating: 4.8249159 out of 5

Keywords: maurice mac mcdonald grave, frank sinatra grave, barbara sinatra grave, william powell grave, james van heusen grave, andrea leeds grave, desert memorial park cathedral city, punchbowl cemetery, national memorial cemetery of the pacific, military graves, soldier graves, army, navy, marines, air force, veterans graves, famous graves, cemetery travel guide, graveyards, cemetery tours, famous grave tours, historic tours, self guided tours, walking tours, california tours

Id: huDj5G5dnN8

Length: 15min 6sec (906 seconds)

Published: Mon May 28 2018