Another great Hoosier

[hoosier]

(I drove past his memorial gallery today)

A LASTING TRIBUTE

James Dean
Gone for 50 years
James Dean industry thrives in Dean's hometown

Cholame, San Luis Obispo County -- There's no stoplight in this Central California town, or even a sign along the highway telling people to slow down. Most of the cars and trucks pass by considerably faster than the 55 mph speed limit -- without stopping at the Jack Ranch Cafe, seemingly the only structure here that isn't a weather-beaten house, garage or barn.

James Dean would have been just another passing motorist on Sept. 30, 1955, anxious to complete his road trip from Los Angeles to an automobile race at the Salinas airport. But he never made it to the tiny ranch town, instead plowing his Porsche Spyder into another car near the intersection of Highway 41 and Highway 46, a few hundred yards up the road.

After that tragedy, Cholame received worldwide notoriety. And it has stayed on the map, in large part because of the unlikely collaboration between a local postmaster and a multimillionaire Japanese businessman.

Almost every day since the James Dean Memorial was erected here in 1977, about 25 miles east of Paso Robles, dozens of fans have stopped at the infinity-shaped statue, which looks like the shiny offspring of that cube-shaped fountain at Justin Herman Plaza. Some take pictures, some quietly smoke a few cigarettes and some weep for hours.

Mathew Grant says his grandmother Lilly Grant would have been one of the people who just kept driving, if she didn't work in a small post office about a hundred feet from the monument.

"As she liked to put it, 'I'm not a James Dean fan. My favorite actors are Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn,' " the 23-year-old recalls. "She liked the older generation. Fairbanks, Flynn, Clark Gable and Sinatra."

Not long after Lilly Grant started the job in 1975, she received a visit from Seita Onishi, a hotel owner in Japan who has been called the world's No. 1 James Dean fan. After attempts to build a memorial at the crash site failed, he found an appropriate second choice in front of the cafe, spending tens of thousands of dollars to wrap his modern-looking mirrored sculpture around an ailanthus tree -- also known as the Tree of Heaven.

"JAMES DEAN 1931 Feb. 8-1955 Sept. 30 p.m. 5:59," the tribute reads, followed by an infinity symbol.

Almost immediately after it was completed in late 1977, fans started visiting in droves.

"They've left empty and half-full bottles of beer. They've left crushed cigarettes. They've left money ..." Grant says. "On the night of Sept. 29, 1986 ... somebody left a license plate here on the monument that had written on it 'To: James Dean. From: Elvis.' "

Fans also wanted postmarks from the site, sending Lilly Grant letters, pictures of Dean and even books to thank her for her time. Reporters came to interview her, and many sent their newspaper clippings.

"She started out with one scrapbook, and the collection (has been) growing ever since," Mathew Grant says.

The grandson spreads almost a dozen scrapbooks on the hood of his big white truck. Inside are postcards, flyers from car clubs, photos and heartfelt letters from across the country and around the world. One young man says he came all the way from France, hitchhiking the last few hundred miles.

"It has been quite some time now since I visited you in December last," wrote another long-distance traveler, Jim Scholten, president of the James Dean Memory Club Holland. "But the memories of your warm welcome have been and always will be in my heart."

As Mathew Grant flips through the scrapbook, there are numerous thankful letters to Grant from Onishi, carefully flattened and mounted so they look as if they were written last week. As the years go by, the English in the businessman's letters gets better.

Onishi, now in his early 70s, hasn't visited the site in years, but hopes to come out soon, his San Francisco lawyer Yuji Mitano says. He recently paid to give the monument a brushed-steel look, which he hopes will be harder to vandalize -- a shotgun blast knocked off some of the letters a few years ago.

Onishi avoids interviews about Dean but is generous with his collection, and is planning new exhibitions for the photos of Sanford Roth, the photographer who was with Dean just before the crash. He's also setting up a Web site, OscarforJimmy.com, which will include a catalog of more than 1,000 photos.

Mitano says Onishi has started talking more openly about his admiration for Dean recently, as the 50th anniversary of the actor's death approached.

"He said he's not a movie buff or anything. But he's always loved America and thought highly of Americans," Mitano says, pointing out that Onishi was particularly drawn to Dean's ability to use acting to express the relationships between fathers and sons. "In Japan, that is traditionally a very important relationship. ... (Onishi) was very impressed that Americans would express these feelings."

Lilly Grant retired a few years ago, and died Sept. 5. She still wasn't the world's biggest James Dean fan, but her grandson says the scrapbooks were among her most cherished possessions until the end.

"She basically felt kind of an obligation. She was always the kind of person to help people. She'd never let anybody go without help if she could help them," Mathew Grant says. "She knew that a lot of people were James Dean fans and she figured the least she could do is provide them a place to come for information."