In a 1952 interview, Marshall Boyar, son of a Lakewood developer, claimed that Coke Avenue honored “that good old American drink”: Coca-Cola. But his Coke was a joke. This street was actually named on a 1922 tract owned by four sisters who shared the maiden name of, you guessed it, Coke. James (1840-1921) and Alice (1850-1917) Coke were Midwestern farmers who married in San Luis Obispo in 1869 and then relocated to Downey, where they raised ten children. The daughters’ tract may have been on inherited land: the unmarried Ethel Coke (1881-1930) had lived with James at the end of his life and served as attorney-in-fact for her sisters Mabel Cathcart, Ida Wood, and Nellie Greenleaf. (I don’t know why the six Coke brothers weren’t involved in this tract.) After working as a teacher, a florist, and a shopkeeper, Ethel finally tied the knot in 1925 – she married Frank Clink, the widower of her own aunt! – but divorced him within two years. She wound up in Oregon with a couple of her brothers while the rest of the Coke clan remained in CA.
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