Of Mexican Presidents, Old Testament Heroes and me. Gail Heriot

Question:  What do two Mexican Presidents, King David of Israel and I have in common?

Answer:  We have all owned homes in the same neighborhood in San Diego.  Really.

I live in Kensington.  It’s a little neighborhood built mostly in the 1920s–making it an old neighborhood by San Diego standards.  Each house is different, many of them in the Spanish Revival style so popular during that period–lots of Spanish tile roofs, stucco, and bougainvillea.  Most are smallish (like most houses in Southern California); a few are on the large side.  And many of the streets are lined with palms trees.  It’s sort of … uh … cute, but perhaps a bit more suburban looking than I would have preferred. 

When I first moved here from Capital Hill in Washington, D.C., I was unhappy that the neighborhood didn’t have much of a history.  I was wrong.  The neighborhood is very historic in its own rather quirky way.  You just have to know something about it.

All the talk about the Mexican elections made me decide to talk a walk.  (Years ago, Kensington residents could go down to the ostrich ranch down the road and go ostrich riding for exercise; these days we just walk.) Just a block away is 4321 Alder Drive, whose most famous owner was Gen. Pascual Ortiz Rubio, the 33rd President of Mexico.  Ortiz Rubio evidently never liked being president.  The day he took office, February 5, 1930, somebody tried to kill him, and it was downhill from there.  He resigned halfway through his term and came to live in an attractive Spanish Revival home here in Kensington, where nobody was interested in trying to kill him, except perhaps his wife Josephine now and then.  They eventually moved back to Mexico when the political climate cooled down a bit.  Maybe they got bored by the perfect weather here.  Or maybe the ostrich ranch closed down.

Ortiz Rubio must have had good things to say about the neighborhood, because a few blocks from his home is 4379 North Talmadge Drive–the former home of Gen. Abelardo Rodriguez, the 34rd President of Mexico.  I’ve often wondered if there’s a neighborhood as small as Kensington with the homes of two former Presidents that close together in either country.  It’s very odd.  Unlike the 33rd President of Mexico, the 34th President died here in San Diego.

But the oddity of an American neighborhood being home to two Mexican presidents is nothing compared to the oddity of the house at 4440 Braeburn Drive.  Once lived in by Joseph Franklin Rutherford, the second head of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (the Jehovah’s Witnesses), the twenty-room house is called “the Watchtower House” by some (since it has a watchtower).  Rutherford himself called it “Beth Sarim” (or “House of the Princes”). 

Rutherford moved there from New York for health reasons.  According to Kensington’s amateur historian Dr. Thomas H. Baumann (D.D.S.),  “Judge Rutherford had a severe case of pneumonia in 1919 resulting in the loss of one lung.  This occurred while he was serving a twenty-year sentence in Atlanta Federal Prison for resisting military service.  He was released after nine months.  Doctors advised him that he should live in a warmer climate ….”

An admirer sought to give him the palatial Braeburn Road house as a gift, but he refused.  At length, however, he agreed to hold the property in trust  … pending the Second Coming.  The deed therefore names Rutherford as legal owner,  but the beneficial owners were the men who would be returning to govern the world.  Specifically, the deed named,  “David, who was once King of Israel; and Gideon, and Barak, and Sampson, and Jepthae, and Joseph, formerly ruler of Egypt, and Samuel the prophet, and all other faithful men who were named with approval in the Bible  at Hebrews the 11th chapter.”  When Rutherford died in 1941, a newspaper columnist wondered if King David would have trouble with the gear shift on the Lincoln in the garage or if he would know what to do with the garbage disposal.

There’s one more thing that King David might have had some trouble with.  I’m told that back in those days, Kensington, like many Southern California neighborhoods, was “highly restricted”:  No Jews allowed.  Maybe the neighbors would have been willing to make an exception for an ancient Hebrew king. Or maybe not.  They didn’t go out of their way for Rutherford himself.  Why should they go out of their way for the benficiaries of the trust?  After Rutherford’s death, his widow sought permission from the authorities to bury her husband in the canyon outside the house. As a result of protests from the neighbors, permission was denied.  Officially, therefore, Rutherford is buried in New York.  But there are rumors of a nighttime burial away from the neighbors’ view in the canyon.  I hope it’s true.