A Family Business (4 page)

PART TWO

The Family…
the Business

3

When news of what had been found at Oscar’s Ceramics was splashed on the front page of the Pasadena newspaper two days later under the headline
CREMATORIUM OWNER INVESTIGATED
, it had about the same effect on its readers as if the weatherman had forecast rain for the Rose Bowl parade: Surprise and incredulity.

The newspaper was quick to underscore the involvement of Pasadena’s David Sconce, whose family was well-known. For four generations his family had been associated with one of the city’s more respected businesses: Lamb Funeral Home. Indeed, the East Orange Grove Boulevard address that David had given to officials in Hesperia when he applied for the assorted permits was that of the Spanish-style mortuary.

In its first report the Pasadena
Star-News
seemed as interested in the family connection as it was in what had transpired in Hesperia. The initial dispatch listed several names, besides David’s, that were considered significant. For example, Laurieanne Lamb Sconce was named. That was David’s mother and owner of Lamb Funeral Home. Her husband and David’s father, Jerry Sconce, also was mentioned. But the name that long-time city residents had no trouble at all recognizing was that of Lawrence Lamb, Laurieanne’s father and David’s maternal grandfather, who was a distinguished, well-known figure in Pasadena.

The full implications of the search at Oscar’s—the web of criminal activity and deceit to which it ultimately would lead—would not be known for quite some time. But at the moment it was sufficient that at least one prominent resident seemed to be involved, although he would later prove not to be, in a highly suspect operation. Up until then the Lambs and Sconces had not been viewed in any way except as pillars of the community. And thus it had been for sixty-five years.

In 1921, the year the University of California trounced Ohio State 28-0 in what later would become known as the Rose Bowl Football Classic, a fifty-four-year-old midwesterner named Charles F. Lamb first visited Pasadena. Following their thrashing, the Buckeyes went home suitably impressed with the city. For different reasons, so did Charles Lamb.

When he visited California, Lamb was living in Ottawa, Kansas, where he was the owner and operator of an establishment named the Lamb Funeral Home. His fortune and family were in Kansas and, until he saw Pasadena, which was then a sleepy, flower-bedecked haven outside smog-ridden Los Angeles, he never intended to leave. But the trip to Southern California left him smitten with the region. Anxious perhaps to escape Kansas’ bitter winters and scorching summers, Lamb made a difficult decision: he turned the Kansas business over to his eldest son, Harold, then packed up his wife and six other children and headed west.

Soon after he arrived in Pasadena, Lamb bought two already-established businesses, the Reynolds and Van Nuys Funeral Homes, and merged them into a single organization which he called the C. F. Lamb Funeral Home. In a separate deal, he also bought the Pasadena Crematorium, a small, double-oven facility which dated to 1895 and was mildly famous as the oldest crematorium west of the Mississippi River. It, too, was absorbed into the new operation, although the whitewashed, chapel-like building in which it was housed was located on a leased plot of land in the middle of Mountain View Cemetery several miles away in the town of Altadena.

In Kansas, Lamb had been active in civic affairs, serving as treasurer of the town of Ottawa for several years and as treasurer of Ottawa University for eight years. He also won local recognition for reorganizing one of the city’s main financial institutions, the Bank of Ottawa. As a reward, he was appointed a vice-president of the bank, and held the post for five years before moving to California. Other pet projects of his ranged from the First Baptist Church to fraternal organizations, including the Knights of Pythias and Knights of the Roundtable.

After moving to Pasadena, he continued his interest in civic affairs, although on a reduced basis. Five years after he relocated, he was elected president of the Southern California Funeral Directors Association, and the year after that he was chosen president of the state association. He and his family lived in style in an elegant mansion less than a block from the Tournament of Roses House, and they dined frequently at the University Club, hobnobbing with the city’s rich and powerful.

Satisfied that he had made the right decision in leaving Kansas, Lamb elected to enjoy his new surroundings. As soon as his Pasadena businesses were established, he retired. He gave up the modest empire he had built to spend his time cultivating roses, playing golf, and whiling away sunny Southern California afternoons on lawn bowling.

Since his oldest son was still running the funeral home in Kansas, Lamb turned the Pasadena business over to two other sons, Lawrence and John. Not many years later, John retired and the business fell to Lawrence, a handsome, strong-jawed, strong-willed man, who had inherited not only his father’s business sense but his desire to serve.

In 1949, when he was forty-three years old, Lawrence Lamb was elected to the first of two consecutive terms as president of the Pasadena School Board. According to newspaper clippings of the day, he also was president of the Pasadena Hi Twelve Club International, chairman of the building committee at Tremont Baptist Church, a member of the Tournament of Roses Association, and a fellow of the Baptist University of Redlands. Lawrence and his wife, the former Lucille Jeffries, had four children, two sons and two daughters.

Although the Lamb Funeral Home was then going into its third generation in Pasadena, both of Lawrence’s sons sought careers elsewhere. That left Lawrence in a dilemma. With his two sons gone, who would keep the family business going? Of his two daughters, Laurieanne and Linda Elaine, only Laurieanne, the elder by two years, seemed interested.

As her brothers had done, Linda went off on her own. She helped create a successful public relations firm where she worked for a decade, building a reputation as a shrewd and clever businesswoman. By then, for all practical purposes, Pasadena had been engulfed by Los Angeles, with all its attendant environmental problems, and Linda left the city. She moved to Watsonville, a small town in central California, where she bought an apple orchard and became a determined environmental activist as well as a leader in the fight against drug and alcohol abuse. Then tragedy struck. In 1977, in the middle of a long overdue vacation, the thirty-nine-year-old Linda was killed in the collision of two jumbo jets in the Canary Islands, an accident that claimed 575 other lives. That ended forever any chance that Linda would return to Pasadena and take an active part in the operation of Lamb Funeral Home.

But by then, even if Linda had lived and had decided to come back, she would have been out in the cold. By 1977, Laurieanne, at age forty-one, had become indispensable to her father and his business. Lawrence, then seventy-one, was anxious to retire, and the death of his younger daughter propelled him further in that direction. If the business was going to continue, he thought, it would be up to Laurieanne. And why not?

In her youth Laurieanne had been a vivacious, handsome woman, comely enough to be described later by one breathless admirer as a potential beauty queen. But her interests lay in other, less worldly, directions. Along with her good looks she also had a soft, soothing voice and a rare way with people. No matter how distraught survivors might be over the death of a loved one, it was always Laurieanne who could calm them down, whispering words of encouragement and hope that never failed to provide the strength to help them get through the desperate days between death and burial. Some of those she helped claimed to regard her as a living angel, and it was not a description with which Laurieanne herself would find fault. Many years later she told a reporter that one of the happiest times of her life had been when she was involved in day-to-day work at the funeral home, the days when her favorite task had been preparing women’s bodies for prefuneral display. “I would do the cosmetics and hair,” she said nostalgically. “I had a God-given talent. I had so many people say, ‘She never looked so good.’”

In an era before it was fashionable to be Born Again, Laurieanne was a very assertive Christian, liberally sprinkling her conversations with quotes from the bible and exclamations like “Sweet Jesus” while proclaiming the depth of her faith and her desire to convert others. The mortuary was not her workplace, she said. It was her “ministry.” She spent much of her spare time writing hymns, and she played the organ at the Loraine Avenue Baptist Church as well as at the funeral home. She even founded a gospel trio called the Chapelbelles, which achieved considerable local fame.

After she graduated from high school, Laurieanne enrolled in Pasadena City College, where she matriculated for two years before switching to the University of the Redlands, a Baptist school where her father had served as a Fellow. However, she left Redlands after one year, shy of her degree, to marry a dashing young man named Jerry Sconce, whom she had met at Sunday school.

Jerry, a native of Oregon, had come south to attend the University of California at Santa Barbara. A striking-looking six-foot 200-pounder with blond wavy hair and blue eyes (physical traits that he would pass on to his older son), Jerry swept Laurieanne off her feet. An irrepressible extrovert, Jerry never met a stranger or a man he wouldn’t try to charm. Brash, boisterous, unrestrainable, Jerry had a slap-’em-on-the-back, hand-crunching, glad-to-meet-you personality that completely overwhelmed the shy daughter of the Pasadena funeral home owner.

The two married almost as soon as Jerry was graduated from UCSB. At the time, Laurieanne was still in her teens. Even when their first child, David, was born in 1956, Jerry was only twenty-two and Laurieanne was three weeks shy of twenty. A couple of years later they had a second child, another son, whom they named Gary.

As they grew older, they promoted an All-American family image. Laurieanne was known as “Mom” by her children’s friends, and the convivial Jerry was widely called “Coach,” because that’s what he did for a living for more than two decades. Their home was a gathering spot for neighborhood children, and Laurieanne’s kitchen was always open. They were so successful at promoting their clean-cut personas that one day, when the boys were young, the four of them posed for a magazine ad for Maytag. In the foreground of the portrait the four of them huddled over a washing machine, while in the background Jerry’s team’s jerseys flapped in the California breeze.

Despite her innate reticence, Laurieanne realized early on that if the family business was going to continue, it would be up to her. Her brother Bruce, despite being a licensed embalmer, had abandoned the business in 1961, when Laurieanne was twenty-five, for a career in the Marine Corps. Eleven years later Laurieanne’s other brother, Kirk, quit the funeral home to be a real estate broker. A year after that, when it looked as though Laurieanne, at thirty-seven, was going to inherit the business by default if for no other reason, she and her parents incorporated and Laurieanne was named secretary-treasurer.

After Laurieanne’s sister Linda was killed, Lawrence began talking more often about retiring. Gradually, in preparation for that day, he gave Laurieanne more responsibility. This, however, did not sit well with Bruce and Kirk, even though they had forfeited their positions at the funeral home for careers of their own. As the brothers watched from a distance, Jerry and David, who had turned into a handsome teenage copy of his father, became more involved in the business. That made the Lamb brothers increasingly uneasy because they feared the business would slip out of the family hands into those of Jerry and David. As time went by, those fears moved closer toward reality.

In 1985, when she was forty-nine and already older by several years than her father had been when he took over the business, Laurieanne formed her own company, which she called Little Black Sheep Inc. The intention was to formally take over Lamb Funeral Home. With $65,000 down and a promise to pay an additional $100,000 over the next fifteen years—at nine percent interest—Laurieanne agreed to buy the business from her father.

Not surprisingly, considering their fears, Bruce and Kirk opposed the sale. The reason they gave was concern for Laurieanne’s welfare. They said their father already was breathing heavily down Laurieanne’s neck and it was making her very nervous. If she bought the funeral home, the parental pressure would only grow worse and they were worried about her health—whether she could continue under the stress not only of running the business, but of keeping Lawrence out of the office. Perhaps the real reason they opposed the sale, however, was because Bruce and Kirk feared that the business, once sold, would slip completely away from Lamb control. It would become a Sconce business, not a Lamb business.

Despite his sons’ objections, Lawrence went through with the sale.

In retrospect, it was a fateful decision on Lawrence’s part. But at age seventy-nine and anxious to step out the door, it may have seemed like the only reasonable step he could take. Turning the family business over to someone who was still a Lamb, even if non-Lambs were wielding considerable power, may have appeared a more desirable option than selling it to a total stranger and watching his life’s work disappear entirely.

But judging by what was to happen later, and what had already happened that he did not know about, Lawrence had, by passing the reins to his daughter, simply ensured that his last days would be spent in apparent pain and turmoil. Not even in his worst nightmares could he have imagined the strife that was to test his family’s strength.