Although the Sees were a prominent family in early Whittier, See Drive honors the unrelated Robert Thomas See (1867-1960), a Hollywood realty man who bought the 54 acre Ralph McNees walnut ranch in 1928 and had it subdivided as “McNees Park”. (While it did indeed give us the little park of that name, it did not give us McNees Avenue.) Robert T. See was a small-town Illinoisan who moved to Los Angeles c. 1888 and operated a cigar shop until turning to real estate in the 1900s. His first two marriages were rocky: wedding Carrie Glass in 1896, he divorced her in 1900 on grounds of cruelty, only to remarry her three months later. Six years after that, he divorced her again on grounds of desertion. Little is known about See’s next union with a woman named Martha except that they were married by 1909 and divorced in 1923. See then tied the knot in 1927 with Zilla Howell (née Collins, 1877-1955), a recent divorcée with two grown kids; her daughter Hazel was a silent movie actress of no great renown. P.S. One of McNees Park’s developers was Elmer Prather, who named a street for himself.
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