Named for a businessman whose grandson became one of Pasadena’s most notorious characters. Born and bred in Wabash, IN, Walter Hunter Whiteside (1861-1931) married Ohio’s Carrie Virginia Kendall (1859-1947) in 1887. The couple moved around the Midwest and East Coast as Whiteside presided over the now-defunct industrial companies Allis-Chalmers and Stevens-Duryea before gaining fame as an executive at Westinghouse. The Whitesides relocated to Pasadena in 1916 to be with their only child Ruth Virginia Parsons (1891-1952), who had recently divorced her philandering husband Marvel(!) and needed help raising her son Marvel Jr., a.k.a. John, a.k.a. Jack (1914-1952). Entire books have been written about Jack Whiteside Parsons, the rocket scientist who cofounded JPL, led the Agape Lodge sex cult, and died in an explosion. The news of his death shocked his mother so much that she immediately committed suicide. But back to Gramps: Walter H. Whiteside earned this street name in 1923 as VP of the Los Angeles Cotton Mills company, which was to build a plant on this site but never did. See Fowler Street for more on that.
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