Sunday, January 25, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

FAMOUS GRAVE SITES: Home for Eternity

Many celebrities choose Las Vegas Valley as a final resting place

Photos by Cariño Casas. Bo Belinsky's headstone at Paradise Memorial Gardens features the date of his no-hitter and, on a recent afternoon, pennies left behind by fans. The grave site of comedian Redd Foxx at Palm Valley View Memorial Park is popular enough to merit a note on a printed cemetery map. Boxer Sonny Liston's headstone features the enigmatic epitaph, "A Man." Bandleader Harry James has a niche at Bunker Eden Vale Memorial Park. Casino pioneer Benny Binion has a niche at Bunker Eden Vale Memorial Park. Blues great Albert Collins is buried in the Garden of Prayer at Paradise Memorial Gardens, not far from the grave sites of ballplayer Bo Belinsky and boxer Sonny Liston.

Plenty of famous people come to Las Vegas.

Ben Affleck stops by a lot. So does Britney Spears. So do numerous B-level celebs who visit Las Vegas often enough to make their comings and goings regular fodder for entertainment columns.

But they are merely transients. If, on the other hand, you're looking for celebrities who come to Las Vegas with the intention of hanging around a while -- a really, really, long while -- look no further than Sonny Liston, Bo Belinsky and Harry James.

The boxer, the baseball player and the bandleader are just a few of the famous people who've chosen to repose for all eternity in Southern Nevada's cemeteries and mausoleums.

Jim Tipton has been charting the locations of celebrity and noncelebrity grave sites for years at findagrave.com, a Web site devoted to the final resting places of the famous, nonfamous, infamous or just generally notable.

Why do people visit celebrity grave sites? Part of it, Tipton says, is simply a "kind of the thrill-of-the-hunt sort of thing."

"A lot of people are motivated by the genealogical aspect of it," he continues. "There are a lot of people out there literally walking cemeteries, recording the names and entering them, and they love it when someone else writes in and says, `I'm so glad you posted my grandmother.' "

But, Tipton says, "I think the single biggest motivation is the same reason you'd visit a grave in real-life. As cliched as it sounds, it's to pay your respects to the person.

"When you go out there, you're not thinking of (their) grisly death or something. You think about the person's life. When I visit (the grave site of) Lucille Ball, I think about her life and work."

Candice Vo, assistant administrator at Paradise Memorial Gardens, 6200 S. Eastern Ave., agrees.

Most people who visit the grave site of somebody famous do so "because they're fans and just want to come out and pay their respects," she says.

However, Ned Phillips, vice president of Palm Mortuaries & Cemeteries, says it doesn't happen as often here as it might in, say, celebrity-rich Southern California.

"When people come here to Las Vegas as tourists, they don't come to a cemetery to look for the space of a notable person," he says.

Nonetheless, Redd Foxx's grave site at Palm Valley View Memorial Park, 7600 S. Eastern Ave., is popular enough to be indicated on a map visitors can obtain from the cemetery office.

Foxx's headstone, like those of most of Las Vegas' other deceased notables, is a simple one. It's found just off of the cemetery's main entrance and features his stage name, not his real name of -- no fooling -- John Elroy Sanford.

Also inscribed on the headstone is the face of a red fox and the touching inscription "You are my (red heart) always."

Palm Valley View also is the final home of actor Peter Lind Hayes, a TV and film star from the '50s and '60s whose work included "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T," a surrealistic 1953 children's film written by Dr. Seuss.

Hayes' headstone also is a simple one, set flush into the ground and next to the grave site of Grace Hayes, "beloved mother."

Sports fans will find it worthwhile to check out the grave site of boxer Charles "Sonny" Liston at Paradise Memorial Gardens, 6200 S. Eastern Ave.

The former heavyweight champion's stone features Liston's name, the dates of his birth and death, and the enigmatic epitaph, "A Man."

Not far from Liston, in the same section of the cemetery, you'll find the grave site of Robert "Bo" Belinsky, who was as well-known for his busy social life -- Ann-Margret, Tina Louise and Mamie Van Doren were a few of the Hollywood starlets he reportedly dated -- as his baseball prowess.

Belinsky's stone contains the image of a baseball and the notation "No Hitter" along with the date -- May 5, 1962 -- Belinsky, then with the Los Angeles Angels, pitched that no-hitter against the Baltimore Orioles.

On a recent afternoon, Belinsky's grave site also held a few loose pennies left behind, apparently, by a fan.

Walk around the hedges behind Liston's and Belinsky's grave sites and you'll see the grave of Grammy-winning blues guitarist Albert Collins.

While some moviegoers may remember Collins' witty turn playing himself in the 1987 comedy "Adventures in Babysitting," his headstone offers a more fitting epitaph: "Master of the Telecaster."

At Bunker Eden Vale Memorial Park, 1216 Las Vegas Blvd. North, in the Chapel of Eternal Peace, you'll find the niche of big-band trumpeter and bandleader Harry James, who gave his last performance in Las Vegas before dying from cancer in 1983.

In the same building, right off the entrance, you'll see the niches of casino pioneer Benny Binion and Binion heir Ted Binion, whose murder soon will be revisited via the retrial of Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish.

Findagrave.com's Tipton concedes that finding celebrity graves can be tricky even if you know the deceased's row, section and plot number.

There are no standard ways of laying out cemeteries, he notes, and cemeteries often don't have well-marked signs to delineate sections and rows.

Also, Tipton says, "every cemetery has these weird names, like `Serenity Plot,' and it's confusing. I've spent hours of my life literally walking every row, thinking, (writer) `Isaac Asimov should be here somewhere.' "

Not every lead pans out, either. For example, Findagrave.com lists a reader's submission that Col. Tom Parker, Elvis Presley's manager, is buried at a Las Vegas Palm property. However, Palm's Phillips says he could find no record of that.