Palmyra West Cemetery is the final resting place of a not-so-famous woman whose stepson was once known as the “King of Hollywood.”
Clark Gable, star of “Gone With the Wind,” “It Happened One Night” and more, regarded his stepmother Jennie Gable (nee Dunlap) so highly that he wanted her final resting place to be tended forever. That took money, which at the time Gable didn’t have.
“The story goes that when he made it big in Hollywood, he sent back $20,000 for perpetual care,” Palmyra Township Trustee Tom Grund said.
Frugal even back then, township leaders opted to invest the sum.
“It was an astronomical amount for its time. We’ve always just used the interest off that CD because once you start using it, it’s gone pretty quick,” said Della Evans, president of Palmyra Township’s recently created historical society.
Gable’s birth mother, Adeline Hershelman Gable, died when he was an infant, so his father, an itinerant oil field worker named William Henry Gable, left his young son to be raised by relatives. He married Jennie Dunlap in 1903, when Clark would have been about 2 years old. At some point the family moved to Yale, then a busy community centered where Yale Road and Alliance Road cross Route 14.
Exactly where the Gable house stood is a point of contention: Yale straddles Edinburg, Palmyra, Atwater and Deerfield townships. Evans said both Palmyra and Deerfield have claimed notoriety, but insists that no one really knows.
The plot thickens. Numerous websites note that the Gable family had a farm on Alliance Road by 1917, and that, in an age when every township had its own school system, Gable attended school in Edinburg.
“The fact that she’s buried in Palmyra makes me think that they had a Palmyra address,” Evans said. “Generally, if they lived in Deerfield, they would be buried in Deerfield. I tend to think they were part of Palmyra.”
Whatever township claimed him, Gable wasn’t about to stick around. Not cut out for farm work, he left home and school when he was 16 to work for Miller Rubber Co. in Akron. He returned to Yale when he learned his stepmother was seriously ill and stayed with her until her death on April 11, 1920.
Evans said she imagines Clark standing there “way before life happened to him, way before Hollywood, way before fame, movies, all of that happened, he stood in a little place in Palmyra, Ohio. It’s a bittersweet feeling.”
To the end of his life, Gable never forgot his Ohio roots. Numerous biographical websites have him describing himself as “just a lucky slob from Ohio who happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
Township leaders use Gable’s bequest, and funds they can draw from other sources, to beautify the entire cemetery. Since the sum won’t cover annuals, which have to be replaced every year, Evans said perennials were a logical choice. She learned that Petitti Garden Centers was willing to donate end-of-the-season perennials that hadn’t sold to the historical society and quickly got to work.
In October, she found herself at Petitti’s Boardman location, picking up more than 100 coneflowers, Russian sage, lavender, vanilla daisies and red hot poker spikes.
“They were beautiful plants. I believe most of them made it,” she said.
Anyone wishing to view Jennie Gable’s gravestone should head to Section 2 of Palmyra West Cemetery, located on Tallmadge Road between Wayland Road and Route 225. The marker has her husband’s name and birth year on it, but no year of death, as he was cremated and interred at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in California.
Wendy DiAlesandro is a former Record Publishing Co. reporter and contributing writer for The Portager.