This was part of the 1940 Westport Heights tract, subdivided by Silas Nowell Jr. (1900-1945), but I couldn’t find anyone named Naylor associated with him or his tract. Given that Westchester’s various developers seemed to agree on aviation- and/or armed forces-related street names, the only relevant Naylor I dug up was Walter Naylor, a British aerial gunner in WWI, but he’s so obscure that I wouldn’t bet on him. If you’re open to crackpot theories, Silas Nowell’s brothers LeRoy and Norman did work with him, so “Naylor” might have been a mix of letters from their first names. No? Then I’m out of ideas. But I can’t close without dishing the dirt on Nowell himself. A Salt Lake City boy, he relocated to Los Angeles in the 1920s and lived life in the literal fast lane: between 1930 and 1937, he received twenty traffic tickets – 17 of them for speeding – after which his driver’s license was revoked. It was restored in 1940, while Nowell was setting up Westport Heights, and within months he was arrested for reckless driving: going 85 mph while drunk. (He was Mormon, by the way.) This time he went to jail for a month and a half. Nowell’s wild side eventually got the best of him: he got into an altercation in a cafe barroom in Bell and wound up dead from stab wounds. Yet because none of the dozen witnesses saw any knife or any stabbing, his accused killer Gilbert Contreras was freed.
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