Susie Keef Smith grave marker
Donation protected
Help me to create a memorial marker for Susie Keef Smith's unmarked grave at Eternal Hills Memorial Park in Oceanside, Calif. Susie was a pioneering photographer in the California desert in the 1920s and 30s. My grandmother, Lula Mae Graves, accompanied her on expeditions in the wilderness east of the Salton Sea. I went to visit Susie’s grave in Oceanside recently and was dismayed to find there was no marker. Let’s honor this heroic chronicler of the early desert with a fitting headstone. You can read more about Susie and Lula in the book Postcards From Mecca: The California Desert Photographs of Susie Keef Smith and Lula Mae Graves, 1916-1936.
About Susie-
A small town on the north edge of the Salton Sea, Mecca claims the lowest-elevation post office in the United States. Susie Keef Smith took a job as postmaster here in the 1920s. Living at 180 feet below sea level on the fringe of the unexplored desert, she began taking photographs to sell as postcards on the post office spinner rack. With her cousin and fellow photographer, Tennessee transplant Lula Mae Graves, Susie roamed the strange, vast, desert from Mecca to Blythe.
But just a few years earlier it looked unlikely Susie would be roaming anywhere. Born in Los Angeles in 1900, she was afflicted by polio in the sixth grade and endured four years of operations and hospital stays. Doctors told her she'd never walk again. When her family moved to the shore of the Salton Sea to grow dates and citrus on a 160-acre homestead, a friend gave her a Graflex camera--her ticket to freedom.
Wearing a full leg brace, Susie traveled by burro, foot and Ford through sandy washes and roadless canyons with a large format camera and a .38 revolver by her side. She and Lula photographed drillers, blasters and surveyors on the All-American Canal and the Colorado River Aqueduct, one of the greatest engineering feats in U.S. history. They photographed legendary prospectors, burro teams heading into the mining camps, the Bradshaw Road (a stagecoach route to the Arizona goldfields) as well as a newborn Salton Sea and the Orocopia, Chocolate, Cottonwood and Chuckwalla Mountains.
The photographers found transformation in a wilderness so formidable that it discourages seasoned explorers even today. Along the way, they wound up creating the most comprehensive portrait existing of this little-known wedge of desert. While well-known photographers such as Burton Frasher and Stephen Willard touched down in Susie's desert, only the postmaster and her cousin captured the region so thoroughly and intimately.
The photographs were nearly lost to history. Upon Susie's death in 1988, a county administrator assigned to handle her estate tossed most of her belongings--including five black-bound photo albums--into the trash. Thanks to a last-minute dumpster dive by an alert archaeologist, the photos were saved and are now in the holdings of the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association (MDHCA) in Goffs, California.
About Susie-
A small town on the north edge of the Salton Sea, Mecca claims the lowest-elevation post office in the United States. Susie Keef Smith took a job as postmaster here in the 1920s. Living at 180 feet below sea level on the fringe of the unexplored desert, she began taking photographs to sell as postcards on the post office spinner rack. With her cousin and fellow photographer, Tennessee transplant Lula Mae Graves, Susie roamed the strange, vast, desert from Mecca to Blythe.
But just a few years earlier it looked unlikely Susie would be roaming anywhere. Born in Los Angeles in 1900, she was afflicted by polio in the sixth grade and endured four years of operations and hospital stays. Doctors told her she'd never walk again. When her family moved to the shore of the Salton Sea to grow dates and citrus on a 160-acre homestead, a friend gave her a Graflex camera--her ticket to freedom.
Wearing a full leg brace, Susie traveled by burro, foot and Ford through sandy washes and roadless canyons with a large format camera and a .38 revolver by her side. She and Lula photographed drillers, blasters and surveyors on the All-American Canal and the Colorado River Aqueduct, one of the greatest engineering feats in U.S. history. They photographed legendary prospectors, burro teams heading into the mining camps, the Bradshaw Road (a stagecoach route to the Arizona goldfields) as well as a newborn Salton Sea and the Orocopia, Chocolate, Cottonwood and Chuckwalla Mountains.
The photographers found transformation in a wilderness so formidable that it discourages seasoned explorers even today. Along the way, they wound up creating the most comprehensive portrait existing of this little-known wedge of desert. While well-known photographers such as Burton Frasher and Stephen Willard touched down in Susie's desert, only the postmaster and her cousin captured the region so thoroughly and intimately.
The photographs were nearly lost to history. Upon Susie's death in 1988, a county administrator assigned to handle her estate tossed most of her belongings--including five black-bound photo albums--into the trash. Thanks to a last-minute dumpster dive by an alert archaeologist, the photos were saved and are now in the holdings of the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association (MDHCA) in Goffs, California.
Organizer
Warner Graves
Organizer
Cathedral City, CA
