Why A Mortuary Is Hosting One Of Fullerton’s Most Unusual Cultural Events
- Joel Beers
- 6 minutes ago
- 9 min read
Denied her mother’s story for decades, Jill Lloyd returns to Fullerton for a special May 3 music and movie event that honors others’ stories.
Jill Lloyd spent much of her childhood waiting for her mother to come home.
Since the night of March 19, 1962, when the Fullerton kindergartner was told by her father that her mother had left and was never returning, Lloyd spent many days on the porch of the family’s home, posting a lonely vigil watching for her mother to walk down the sidewalk or step out of a car.
But it wasn’t just that her mother was gone. Every trace of her – clothes, shoes, perfume, photos, even her pink powder puff that was Lloyd’s favorite – had vanished. No one talked about her. In fact, Lloyd’s father, a taciturn military man, forbade any mention of her.
Still, Lloyd kept waiting. She never stopped asking questions of her older siblings, grandparents, aunts and cousins, but those questions went unanswered. As the days stretched into weeks, months and years, all she had were memories growing fainter.
It would be eight years before Lloyd learned that her mother had died of breast cancer. It would take several more years of scouring graveyards and cemeteries in Los Angeles and Orange counties before she found proof that her mother had ever existed. It took nearly 40 years before she began piecing together her mother’s story.
By then, Lloyd was in the business of telling stories herself, first as a journalist, then as media relations director for the OC Fair, a special events promoter for the OC Market Place and other venues throughout the county and now as a celebrant, someone who interviews the family members, friends and others who knew the decedent and then shapes their life stories into narrative.
Those strands of Lloyd’s professional and personal life come together May 3 with “Fullerton Remembers,” a program blending music, movies and memories built around historical aspects of the city, including people with ties to the Fox Fullerton Theatre.
The event will feature the Dixiedelics, a local Dixieland jazz band and members of the Cal State Fullerton jazz ensemble, each performing classic film songs accompanied by vocalists. Additionally, memories of those who grew up watching films or working at the Fox Fullerton Theatre will be shared, surrounded by photos of the venerable theater, which is in the midst of being restored.
The most unusual thing about the event is its location: McAulay and Wallace Mortuary in Fullerton.
Mortuary as Entertainment Venue
Though it might seem bizarre to hold an event at a business where a dead body is usually the center of attention, to Lloyd it makes perfect sense.
“To me a mortuary is very much where memories are honored and people are celebrated,” Lloyd says. “And things and places are part of our memories and in Fullerton you hear all the time about people who grew up going to or working at the Fox. And then music is always part of it, part of the era they grew up in. So, it all ties in together.”
To Lloyd, a mortuary isn’t an odd setting for an evening built on memory – it’s the most natural one imaginable. It’s where lives are distilled into stories, where the details that endure aren’t possessions but moments: first dates, favorite songs, the places people met and fell in love. In that sense, the space isn’t about death so much as what survives it.
It’s about rescuing lives, moments and histories from the quiet erasure Lloyd knows too well and giving them, however briefly, a stage again.
Seeking Answers
Lloyd’s parents were both Christian Scientists, the sect founded by Mary Baker Eddy in the 19th century, where death was softened if not sidestepped by a focus on spiritual life alongside a continued reliance on prayer over medicine. In Lloyd’s family, many eschewed medical treatments for illness, believing that sickness if not death itself was a product of the mind.
Couple that with a strict military father who was suddenly thrust into the role of primary caregiver. But Lloyd’s frustration continued, even after her father remarried when Lloyd was 8.
On Lloyd’s 13th birthday, her grandfather took her to Shakey’s Pizza and asked her what she wanted for her birthday.
She wanted answers.
That’s when he told her that her mother had died of breast cancer. But he had few other details to share and did not even know where she was buried.
So, accompanied by an older friend, Gayle Cory, who had a driver’s license, Lloyd, who had already embraced journalism in junior high, began an investigation to find her mother’s grave.
“I trusted my grandfather, but I just needed some proof,” she says. “That launched a Nancy Drew-like search to locate my mother’s grave. Alternating between Los Angeles and Orange counties, we would scour the Yellow Pages and select random cemeteries to visit,” often doing so on weekends.
Making her own kind of music
One of those excursions led her to an unforgettable memory at a cemetery in Hollywood. When Lloyd and Cory, dressed in “early 1970s hippie-like garb,” according to Lloyd, introduced themselves at the front desk, the mortuary director mistakenly thought they were looking for a funeral taking place.
They were led into a pew and observed the funeral service for Cass Elliot aka Mama Cass of the Mamas and the Papas, sitting among mourners like Carol Burnett, Peter Lawford, Sonny Bono and many others.
For Lloyd, the experience wasn’t limited to glimpsing stars.
“It occurred to me later it was not an accident at all,” she says. “I was looking for my mother and ended up at a Mama’s funeral, which I saw as the funeral my mother never had.”
“I’m thinking, ‘This is beautiful. I needed to be there,’” Lloyd told the Los Angeles Times in 2019. “It was the funeral I never had for my mom. It was powerful for me.”
A week later, Lloyd finally found her mother’s final resting place: a niche inside the mausoleum at Fairhaven Memorial Park and Mortuary in Santa Ana. Initially elated at the discovery, Lloyd still felt unfulfilled.
She remembers her disappointment that all that commemorated her mother was a small nameplate bearing her mother’s name, birth date and death date affixed to a memorial panel with other deceased folks’ nameplates.
“I stared at her name in the small engraving and thought to myself how insignificant this made her compared to the true importance she had in my life.”
The discovery of her mother’s gravesite only deepened her desire to know her mother’s story, but that would take a hiatus as her own story unfolded, one that would lead from entering livestock at the OC Fair to running the media relations department and ultimately to her current work.
Long OC Fair Connection
Along with journaling incessantly as a coping mechanism for the questions around her mother, Lloyd developed a passion for raising livestock as part of her local 4-H club. When she was 9, she entered some rabbits she had raised into the fair livestock show.
To her incredible surprise she won best in show. And for what she called one of the few times in her childhood, she felt recognized.
“I felt mostly invisible most of my childhood,” Lloyd says. “But to get that recognition at the fair, I felt so accomplished.”
She would remember that feeling long after her father, who returned from service abroad and was angry at how Lloyd’s rabbits did what rabbits do – breed at a frighteningly prolific rate – slaughtered them. Lloyd began working at the fair in 1974 in the livestock department, then as an intern in the PR department. This evolved into her taking the position of media and public relations director in 1984.
Her job was to promote the fair, which she did with considerable success and style, organizing the fair’s themes and working with local media. But she was always drawn to the people behind the personas she recruited to help promote the fair. From beekeepers who played clarinet while covered in thousands of bees to couples married atop a Ferris wheel to collectors and bakers entering contests, she loved giving recognition to people and moments that might not normally get recognized.
“Whether it was the bizarre collections that people entered or a dress they made or the large squash they grew, it was rewarding to me to help give them recognition for something they might not otherwise be recognized for. It was their moment of fame, right?”
Another death in the family
Around the same time, she joined the fair’s media relations department, Lloyd’s older sister died. By then, she had long abandoned Christian Science and was deeply grieving. One day while waiting for a dental appointment, she picked up a brochure about hospice care.
“I read they had bereavement services for families,” Lloyd says. “I decided to call the hospice and see if I could receive that kind of help even though my sister was already dead. I told the person I talked to my situation and she was able to get a volunteer to meet with me and she had lost a sister too. We met a couple times a month for a year. And I was so grateful to her because it was the first time I ever talked to anyone about the death of my mom and sister and how it impacted my life.”
Because of that experience, she decided to become a hospice volunteer and went through training at VNA Hospice in Orange County.
“It was the height of the AIDS epidemic and most of my first patients were AIDS patients,” she says. “They were dying so quickly that I barely had time to get to know them except one named Bob who lived much longer than expected. I got to know him well. Lots of anger because his parents alienated him and many of his friends and family. While the situation was different for me, I could relate to the anger.”
She remained active in hospice care and focused on supporting those who were actively dying and their families while getting to know their stories.
Discovering her mother and many kings
She was also getting closer to knowing her mother.
In the early 1990s Lloyd contracted with a professional genealogist and discovered a branch of her family in Oregon she had never known about. Details about her mother’s life began to surface and she started to feel a measure of comfort.
Lloyd left the fair in 1999 and began organizing and promoting special events at the OC Market Place and other OC venues, digging deep into local subcultures to find everything from accordion players and hearse enthusiasts to Elvis tribute artists.
Lloyd isn’t a big Elvis fan, but she was always drawn to the hullabaloo around Elvis because at its essence, the festivals and impersonators were honoring someone who had died. She began holding festivals at the Market Place, eventually moving it to Main Street in Garden Grove, where the iconic Elvis-themed Mexican restaurant Azteca is located. It was then that the pattern of serendipitous moments emerged again.
In 2016, her hospice work had led her to obtain her funeral service assistant certificate and she became a celebrant. She also began working part-time for Dignity Memorial, which owns funeral homes across the country including the one where Elvis’ funeral was held in 1977.
One day while reading a corporate newsletter, something jumped out from a profile on its newly named Fairhaven Mortuary and Memorial Park manager Rod Gomez.
“It was just announcing his hiring and was kind of a Q&A thing, but the final question was what would people be surprised by you,” Lloyd says. “He answered that he used to be an Elvis impersonator.”
“I was like bingo! I was looking for a sponsor for the Elvis fest.”
In addition to that sponsorship, their meeting began a relationship that has led her to create events at several local Dignity Memorial sites in the county, the largest in 2024 packing the historic mausoleum at Fairhaven: “Elvis in Harmony,” a celebration of Presley’s gospel music, featuring award-winning Elvis tribute artist Martin Anthony, the Yorba Linda-based Friendship Choir and jazz and soul singers Charlotte Pope and Tomi Wright.
Another relationship formed through her work at Dignity Memorial is at the mortuary in the city where Lloyd grew up: McAulay & Wallace Mortuary.
The May 3 event is her fourth collaboration at McAulay & Wallace. But Lloyd’s connection with the facility is deeper than mere logistics, though it is one she didn’t realize until years after it happened.
It is the same property that, more than 60 years ago, provided after death for a woman named Gloria Lloyd.
Her mother.
‘Fullerton Remembers: The Music, the Memories & the Stories we Carry’
When: Sunday, May 3, 1 p.m.-3 p.m.
Where: McAuley & Wallace Mortuary, 902 N. Harbor Blvd., Fullerton
Cost: Free
Info: (714) 525-4721
