Resurrecting a Forgotten Tribute

Whatever you do on this Easter Sunday, I can guarantee you won’t do what Alfred Hirschi had hoped.

If things had gone Hirschi’s way, you would be part of a hushed crowd at the memorial he dedicated to his dear wife, Irene, and the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri.

Easter Sunday was to be the one day each year the public could behold what lay within the 6-foot-high bronze monument, which bears the dates of Dante’s life (1265-1321) on one side and Irene’s (Jan. 15, 1883-Dec. 1, 1933) on the other.

Only on Easter Sunday would you get to watch the president of the Simi Valley Woman’s Club lift a key from a black silk purse, gingerly approach the cenotaph, and unlock a panel inscribed with the words: “The Divine Message.”

And what’s that?

Only the ultimate expression of Alfred’s love and the ultimate proof of Dante’s cosmic vision: small photos of Irene, Irene’s rock garden, an Austrian opera singer, and Barry, the family dog, along with lines from Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” all illuminated by a ring of light bulbs and magnified by a lens.

On the outside, the monument, which now stands in Simi Valley’s Strathearn Historical Park, is a weathered green. Three iron chains anchor it to the ground. The number of links in each is somehow connected to Dante’s work, though nobody seems to know just how. The number 3 is inscribed in the bronze--an apparent reference to the “tertiary” geological era of Irene’s rocks. The small interior space built into it is guarded by a lock so rusty that caretakers won’t dare try to open it.

Sixty-three years have passed and there will be no crowds today. Nor were there crowds last Easter, or on dozens of Easter Sundays before that. In fact, it’s unclear whether anyone has paid tribute to Irene and Dante since the monument was dedicated on Easter Sunday 1936. The “Divine Message” panel has been unlocked just twice in the last 28 years, and that was by curious museum staff.

“We don’t have anyone that’s interested in it,” said Patricia Havens, director of Simi Valley’s Strathearn Historical Park and Museum, the monument’s final resting place. “It’s just thought of as a little side issue out there.”

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To Hirschi, it was the only issue.

Grieving for his departed wife, Shah Jahan raised the Taj Mahal. Alfred Hirschi raised the Dante-Irene Monument.

An oil geologist, Hirschi started prospecting in the Simi hills around 1920. He and Irene settled on a ranch, and, while reserved, were friendly to the small collection of folks in the valley at the time.

When Irene died, Hirschi changed from reserved to reclusive. Studying his wife’s rock garden the way early man must have studied the stars, he had many revelations: Irene and Dante, it turned out, were on the same wavelength. In her arrangements of the rocks she had gathered with Barry the dog, he could see the suffering of man, the wandering through Purgatory, the circles of hell, the promise of paradise.

Today, Hirschi would be trussed in a net of diagnoses and offered medication. But at the time he either hid his odd notions or his neighbors shrugged them off. In any event, the woman’s club--to which he and Irene had generously contributed--was delighted with his offer to build a special something for its garden. A birdbath? A fountain? Hirschi wouldn’t say.

The unveiling took place on Easter Sunday in 1936.

The program urged “Silence in and over the Valley!” It said the rocks of Irene’s garden proved “that the harmony of the universe is mathematical and divine.” It also asserted that “it is God’s will that Herbert Hoover, former president of the United States, should witness the ceremony.”

Hoover sent his regrets, but 72 neighbors and club members showed up. Through a loudspeaker, Hirschi called the monument “God’s merciful warning.”

“It is his call of guidance to the human race at the time of deepest affliction,” he said. “What a joy now to know for certain that a beautiful abode, where divine love reigns supreme, awaits all those who have not deserted the good of the intellect.”

Afflicted by the Depression and guided by common sense, the good people of the valley could only have nodded and raised an eyebrow or two.

Hirschi lived 11 more years. He published a number of impenetrable little books, including “The Coincidence,” which links Simi Valley to Simi, a tiny Italian island which, he claimed, was known to Dante and shared the same unusual rocks.

Coincidence?

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Time did not treat the Irene-Dante Monument kindly. The woman’s club moved and its garden turned into a weedy lot. In 1971, it was moved to the Strathearn Ranch, where the home of a pioneering ranch family is preserved.

At first, the monument was plunked incongruously in the museum’s parking lot. It was a bit too weird, too morbid for the families and school groups that come to the park, Havens said.

Today, it’s behind a shed and within its original square of locked wrought-iron fencing, deliberately out of the way.

“People who want to see it have to make a little pilgrimage to it,” Havens said.

Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is [email protected].