Chapter 48

The Tower of Wooden Pallets

Daniel Van Meter—Sherman Oaks

Lifelong bachelor and eccentric Daniel Van Meter was born in San Francisco on March 3, 1913. His mother, Esther, was the great-granddaughter of President John Quincy Adams. His father was chemist James Van Meter, who invented the extremely toxic chemical compound cyanogen chloride, which was used effectively in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I. James was friends with the major scientists of the era: Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Luther Burbank, and Guglielmo Marconi. Nobody knows if James brought cyanogen chloride home with him or if it had permeated his clothes and hair, but owing to his son’s eccentricity, the odds are close to fifty-fifty.

During the 1930s, Daniel and his brothers, James and Baron, ran a chicken and goat farm at 2180 West Adams Boulevard in Los Angeles. The Van Meter brothers dabbled in offbeat, right-wing political associations and attended meetings of the pro-Nazi organization Friends of Progress. During World War II, Daniel, along with two of his four brothers, served time in San Quentin on charges of sedition under the Subversive Organizations Registration Act. They had not informed the government of their political affiliation. The conviction was reversed in a District Court of Appeals and the brothers were released without compensation.

The brothers eked out a living by working odd jobs and raising chickens, rabbits, and goats on a small ranch they bought at 15357 Magnolia Boulevard in Sherman Oaks in 1947. The area was fairly undeveloped at the time, and they combed alleys looking for recyclables and treasures. Eventually, their property was home to a junked city bus, ancient gasoline pumps, car parts, and a gun turret from a navy ship.

Brother Baron seemed to have a more stable life than Daniel. He became a square dancer and attended the National Square Dance Convention for fifty-one years in a row. Baron also collected beer cans and had one of the most important beer can collections in America.

An unabashed racist, Daniel had extreme right-wing political views. He believed that a war was being waged against Christianity, that the United Nations was a communist plot, and that California students were not being taught to think for themselves. Anyone who disagreed with him was a communist.

In 1951, Daniel heard that the Schlitz Brewing Company’s Los Angeles plant had thousands of used 36" x 36" x 6" pallets they wanted to get rid of. He called the plant and asked to have as many brought to his ranch as possible. Five truckloads showed up, carrying a total of two thousand pallets.

Daniel stacked the pallets in a concentric circle over the grave of a three-year-old boy who had been buried on the ranch in 1869, creating a beehive-like structure, with stairways along the edges. On top of the wooden wonder, twenty feet tall and twenty-two feet in diameter, was an opening thirteen feet wide, in which Daniel and Baron hung out, drank beer, and watched the stars. Somehow the Tower of Wooden Pallets, as it became known, was classified as a fence by a building inspector.

The Watts Towers

Between 1921 to 1954, Italian immigrant Simon Rodia built seventeen interconnected sculptures—including two that are almost a hundred feet tall—made of porcelain, glass bottles, rebar, scrap metal, and metal mesh covered in mortar. In 1955 Rodia got tired of the constant vandalism to his sculpture by local teenagers and gave away the property. Actor Nicholas King and film editor William Cartwright bought the property in 1959 for $3,000 in order to preserve it. In 1975, the city of Los Angeles received the property and in 1979 it was deeded to the State of California. It is now known as Watts Towers of Simon Rodia State Historical Park and is on the National Register of Historical Places and in 1990 was designated a National Historical Landmark.

The relatively country-like lifestyle the Van Meter brothers enjoyed was severely disrupted in the early 1960s when I-405 and US 101, also known as the San Diego and Ventura freeways, were connected with an interchange built near their property. Equipped with patio furniture and other comforts, the sculpture was still a place in which Daniel could find solace. The sounds of the vehicles on the freeways, two hundred feet away, turned into a soothing, surf-like sound.

In 1978, civilization started to close in upon the ranch. City fire inspectors declared that the tower was “an illegally stacked lumber pile.” Van Meter was not a man to be fooled with. He approached the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission and persuaded its council to designate the Tower of Wooden Pallets a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument (HCM #184). The monument could stay until Van Meter moved or died.

Van Meter relished the publicity his folk art brought him. It gave him an audience for his outlandishly racist views. Many news crews and journalists who had thought they were going to interview a grandfatherly eccentric were shocked by Van Meter’s vile philosophy. Many editors killed articles on the Tower of Wooden Pallets because Van Meter’s views were so repulsive. Television producers would save the day’s work by creatively editing anything repugnant that Van Meter uttered.

The Hubcap Ranch

Italian immigrant Emanuel “Litto” Damonte retired from his job as cement contractor in 1942 and moved from San Francisco to rural Pope Valley, south of Middletown in Napa County. The primitive road that ran in front of his spread jolted hubcaps off passing vehicles, so the father of ten children started to hang the orphaned hubcaps on his fence, in case the owner came back to claim it. Before long Damonte had hundreds and then thousands of hubcaps, thanks to donations by his friends and neighbors. After two miles of fence was covered, he started covering his home, garage, trees, and outbuildings. Damonte, evidently bored with hubcaps, started mounting scrap metal, chains, tires, cans, and anything else that was bright and shiny. In 1987, two years after Damonte’s death at age 85, the State of California deemed the Hubcap Ranch as a State Historical Landmark. The private residence is currently maintained by Litto’s grandson Mike Damonte. The Hubcap Ranch is located at 6654 Pope Valley Road, Pope Valley, Napa County, California.

Van Meter enjoyed being able to spew his whacked-out beliefs up until he died, in June 2000, at the age of eighty-seven. The Tower by then had collapsed and pancaked into a pile of rotting wood and rusty nails, and the land around it became condos and professional buildings. Until the historical designation was removed it was untouchable by land speculators.

Van Meter’s heirs, who were often on bad terms with their uncle, were encumbered with not only the physical debris he left behind, but also a giant legal mess. The Tower of Wooden Pallets, rocked by earthquakes and ravaged by the hot southern California sun for fifty years, eventually stood only five feet tall. Yet because of the public art designation, permits had to be filed, and public meetings and detailed reports on the cultural value of the pile of broken pallets had to pass through the bureaucratic process before the Tower finally lost its landmark designation in 2006.

Van Meter’s descendants received four-and-a-half million dollars for the property, and a ninety-eight unit condominium was built. There was no word whether the construction workers found the one hundred and thirty-seven-year-old skeleton of the three-year-old boy.