The True Story of Caryl Chessman

The Golden State

In May of 1922, the Chessman family headed west in a 1918 Model-T Ford that Serl had managed to buy. Arriving in Los Angeles, they found a bustling, bright, sunshiny place full of promise for the future. Renting a little house at 3410 Greenswald Road, just south of the growing Glendale suburb, Hallie started getting them settled in, while Serl set out to find work.

Luck was with Serl from the very beginning. A fledgling motion picture company, calling itself United Artists, was getting ready to build the most elaborate and expensive movie set in the short history of that industry. For a Victorian melodrama called Orphans of the Storm, to star sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish, producer D. W. Griffith had ordered a fourteen-acre reproduction of Notre Dame cathedral, the Bastille, and the Palais Royale of Paris -- and a call went out for hundreds of workmen. 

Anyone who could hold a hammer and hit a nail was hired -- and among them was Serl Chessman.

Caryl and Hallie Chessman

With the little family's start in California quickly secured by Serl's immediate good employment, Hallie and her toddler became part of a quiet, working-class neighborhood where people were friendly, days were warm and pleasant, and life at last seemed truly good for them. Serl was handier with tools than even he had realized, and the set builders at United Artists kept him working six days a week. The Gish sisters picture was followed by another epic, Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood, the set of which included a gigantic castle with 90-foot walls, and became the newest "largest ever" in Hollywood. Five hundred workmen were required to build it, Serl among them. Later came The Thief of Bagdad, another Fairbanks film, which called for Moorish buildings with towering minarets and fairy-tale pools in lavish Arabian harems.

By 1926, Serl was a regular on the United Artists payroll, assigned to work on Son of the Sheik, the last picture the legendary Rudolph Valentino would make before his untimely death at the age of 31. By that time, young Carol was in kindergarten at Silver Lake Elementary. He was only there for one year, however, then Serl, making good, steady wages, moved them to a bigger house in a better location. The new house they rented, on Arwin Street in Pasadena, backed up to the Flintridge Hills and Devil's Gate Reservoir. By the time Carol was seven and in the second grade, he, like all the energetic youngsters in the neighborhood, were running the hills like the cowboys and Indians they saw at every Saturday matinee. 

Hallie and Serl were delighted to see their only child growing up active and healthy in this golden place they had chosen to live.

Coming to California, they were positive, was the smartest thing they had ever done.