Before Crippen Mortuary

It seems Crippen Mortuary has always been part of our community. Since 1928 it has provided service to the Crescenta Valley from its original building (now enlarged) at 2900 Honolulu Ave. Family-owned for its entire existence, it is like a familiar friend in a time of grief. It provides a warm, friendly alternative to the huge impersonal mega-mortuaries, and generations of Valley residents have been to memorial services in its classic chapel, either as mourners or as the ones being memorialized.

But although Crippen seems like it has been here forever, it wasn’t always Crippen. It started out as Hill & Hill Funeral Directors. In October 1925, Hill & Hill, husband and wife funeral directors, moved their business from south Los Angeles to a new facility that they had specially built in Verdugo City. The idea that there was a funeral home specifically for the Crescenta Valley was a big deal to the Valley boosters who were promoting the growth of the community.
The new building was gorgeous, done in the then-fashionable Mission Revival style with a tiled roof and arched windows and doors. It featured a chapel decked out in blue and gold. There were side rooms for the family to sit in private during the memorial services, and a music room. A full basement made room for storage and a casket display area. (That original portion of the building is now the Crippen chapel. The original arched windows and door are still visible on the eastern half of the building.)

A feature Hill & Hill advertised was its slumber rooms “where loved ones may rest under all the conditions of a bedroom in a private home.” This harked back to the old practice of placing the deceased on a bed or couch in the family parlor for visitation and services prior to being placed in a casket and transported to the cemetery. The “slumber room” was furnished like a bedroom in a home. (Interestingly this practice is being revived in some funeral homes today.)

Another feature Hill & Hill offered was a bed for mourners who wished to stay overnight with the body of a loved one in the slumber room. The term they used was “to keep watch over the dead.”

A prominent feature advertised by the husband and wife team of Hill & Hill was that Mrs. Hill was a licensed embalmer. It was even part of their sign: “Hill & Hill Funeral Directors – Licensed Lady Embalmer.” Their advertising about Mrs. Hill read: “She is not merely a lady attendant but takes full charge of all children and women.” Although we don’t think of that aspect today, it would have been a comfort to families back then. Female embalmers were a relatively new thing in the funeral industry at that time. Traditionally women had through the ages prepared bodies for burial. But when the practice of embalming took hold in the 19th century, it became a male dominated field. That was an uncomfortably intimate situation for women with Victorian sensibilities. Just after the turn of the century, women finally broke into the field, so by the 1920s a female embalmer was a big plus. (Today the field of mortuary science actually has more women than men.)

Hill & Hill had already been in business in Montrose for several months while its building was being constructed. It was operating out of a storefront among the other stores in the business district on Honolulu. (I don’t know which store it operated out of, but it’s an interesting thing to think about when shopping in Montrose.)

Hill & Hill only lasted three years in the Crescenta Valley before moving on to East Los Angeles. In 1928 they sold the business and the building to William Crippen, an undertaker from Iowa, and his family. And after many years successful years William and Ethel passed the business to their daughter Margaret, who ran it for decades.

CV has been fortunate to have active community members like the Crippen family in business here for 92 years. And it’s interesting to learn what was here before Crippen Mortuary.