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Last Rites for Mrs. B. Warner in Los Angeles

August 29, 1934
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Funeral services will be held Thursday for Mrs. Benjamin Warner, mother of the four Warner brothers, motion picture producers, who died here yesterday of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Mrs. Warner was 76. Only last Saturday she had celebrated with her husband the fifty-eighth anniversary of their wedding. A Polish Jewess, she came to the United States from Warsaw before the turn of the century.

In her home at Youngstown, Ohio, where she settled, the motion picture careers of her sons began at a family conference for which the boys had gathered from various parts of the country.

Albert, a soap salesman, became interested in the films at Pittsburgh. The brothers pooled their assets, the father pawned his watch—he had brought it with him from the old country—and the family bought a projection machine with which they exhibited “The Great Train Robbery.” From such a start, working together with steadfast loyalty, they eventually rose to the forefront of the industry.

In January, Mrs. Warner sat by a telephone amplifier with her husband and friends and listened to the wedding in New York of her granddaughter, Doris Warner, oldest daughter of Harry M. Warner, to Mervyn LeRoy, the company’s leading young director.

At the time the Warner brothers set out in the motion picture field there was a fifth brother, Sam. He died several years ago.

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