Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project.
Pat and Gunner, 6-year-old Irish setters who were left a $30,000 estate by their late master, Carleton R. Bainbridge, retired attorney, yesterday were disinherited by a jury of eight men and four women.
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
Oct. 11,1907
Los Angeles
Perhaps John Bryson’s early life was something out of Horatio Alger, but the death of the Los Angeles developer and self-made millionaire could have easily been taken from the pages of Charles Dickens.
Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project.
BEIRUT, Oct. 9 (U.P.)—The Lebanese and Syrian governments have ordered various units of their armies to mass along the Palestine borders for a possible invasion of the Holy Land, and the first units already have started marching, it was announced tonight.
Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, secretary general of the Arab League Council now meeting in nearby Alieh, announced the massing of troops along Palestine’s northern borders, and said the Egyptian government also is ordering strong contingents of its army to move to Palestine’s southern frontier.
This is an encore post from 2006.
Engine Co. 30 in 1947, top, and via Google Street View.
Oct. 9, 1947: The Sentinel reports on segregation in the Los Angeles Fire Department. Sentinel Publisher Leon H. Washington Jr. said that because of segregation, “there are a number of qualified Negro firemen on the list who must wait until one of the present firemen dies or retires before they will be appointed to jobs.”
Washington said the black community was mainly served by two “colored companies” at 14th and Central — now the African American Firefighter Museum — and at 34th and Central.
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
Oct. 9, 1907
Los Angeles
She was known as Trellis C. Harris or Trellis Blessing—or Edna Hall. But her method was always the same. She would commit some theft, then fake an epileptic fit, spitting up blood from a capsule hidden in her mouth.
This week’s mystery movie was the 1939 Hal Roach production “Zenobia,” with Oliver Hardy, Harry Langdon, Billie Burke, Alice Brady, James Ellison, Jean Parker, June Lang, Step’n Fetchit, Hattie McDaniels, Phillip Hurlic, the Hall Johnson Choir and “Miss Zenobia.” Directed by Gordon Douglas, screenplay by Corey Ford from an original story by Walter De Leon and Arnold Belgard. Photography by Karl Struss, photographic effects by Roy Seawright, art direction by Charles D. Hall, set decoration by W.L. Stevens, musical score by Marvin Hatley, gowns by Omar Kiam, wardrobe supervision by Harry Black, produced by A. Edward Sutherland.
Colleen Moore’s doll house in a frame grab from CBS “Sunday Morning.”
Note: This is an encore post from 2015.
From the beginning of time, people have been collectors. Objects as diverse as paintings, stamps, shells, rocks, postcards, photographs, baseballs, or even furniture have been compiled for the joy they brought to those acquiring them. Individuals such as J. P. Morgan, Henri Francis du Pont, Henry Huntington, and William Randolph Hearst created large assemblages of objects, which are now open for research and visits by the general public. Hearst’s “Enchanted Hill” on the Central Coast of California is now known as the stupendous Hearst Castle, filled with gorgeous and exquisite works of art from around the world, including whole magnificent rooms saved from mansions and castles in the process of being demolished.
Silent film actress Colleen Moore, the effervescent embodiment of the jazz-mad 1920s flapper, collected doll houses and small miniatures from the time she was a child. In the late 1920s, she began assembling what became her masterpiece, a luxurious doll’s house that reflected every young girl’s romantic dreams of what it meant to be a princess. Moore’s “Enchanted Castle,” a Lilliputian relative of Hearst’s “Enchanted Hill,” rivaled the newspaper magnate’s Hearst Castle for its unique works of art and outstanding craftsmanship.
Mary Mallory’s latest book, “Living With Grace: Life Lessons from America’s Princess,” is now on sale.
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
Oct. 8, 1907
Los Angeles
Health officials and a deputy district attorney have joined to urge the Board of Supervisors to ban fishing within a half-mile of the city’s Hyperion line that pours sewage into Santa Monica Bay.
Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project.
San Francisco has long claimed the first American performance of Puccini’s “La Boheme” in March 1898 and is given credit for that distinction in various works of reference, including the Victor Book of the Opera.
The recently discovered evidence, however, seems to prove conclusively that the honor goes to Los Angeles, the first North American performance having been given by the Del Conte Italian Grand Opera Company, which had been brought from Lima, Peru.
The performance took place in the New Los Angeles Theater Oct. 14, 1897. The treasurer’s statement showed a gross intake of $436.25 ($9,665.38 USD 2005).
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Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project. It was a response to Kim Cooper’s post on the stabbings of Lillian Dominguez and Barbara Jean Morse.
I’m really glad you picked this one, Kim, as it helps disprove the current myth—promoted by many aspiring sleuths—that serial attacks/killings were an unrecognized phenomenon until recently and that the local police (the LAPD in the Black Dahlia case and Santa Monica police in the Dominguez case) were incapable of connecting seemingly random murders into the “obvious” pattern.
Note: Here’s an entry I wrote in 2006 for the 1947project. I thought newer readers might enjoy it.
Oct. 5, 1907
Los Angeles
Hilliard Stricklin is a man with an urgent desire to do something for his fellow African Americans. He says that he came to Los Angeles from Chattanooga, Tenn., about 1895 with a few dollars in his pocket, worked hard and saved his money until he opened a grocery store at 2053 Santa Fe Ave.
What he wants most is to build a facility for the elderly and for orphaned children, naming it the Stricklin Memorial Home for the Aged in honor of his mother.
Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project.
The point here is the condition of police cars in 1947. Despite the image promoted by films that the LAPD used gleaming new black-and-whites in the 1940s, most of the cars were prewar vintage and had been driven hard. Retired officers say “we drove whatever we could get.” While some crime authors write with uninformed assurance about the black-and-whites at the Black Dahlia crime scene, there isn’t a single marked police car in any of the pictures. In fact, the lack of marked cars is one reason
Caryl Chessman was able to pull people over in 1948 with nothing more than a red light.
Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project.
Reddest face in town yesterday belonged to Charles Bennett, writer of screen mysteries in which the brilliant detective always catches the crook.
Seems that he had a few friends in for a card game Wednesday night and sometime during the session a burglar crawled through the window of a bedroom next to the den where the five-card entertainment was going on and stole his wife’s purse containing $300 cash and a pair of earrings.
What’s more, the dog barked at the burglar but the Bennetts paid no heed to his warning.
Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project.
Sister Ollie died happy, according to her mother, Sister Sibbie, the superintendent at Sunshine Mission, 558 S. Wall St., a shelter for homeless women and children on skid row.
“Ollie died among people who really loved her and idealized her,” her mother said during the funeral, where a sunbeam lit a cross of red carnations in memory of the woman who died at the age of 40.
“They welcome her, the children especially, with glad cries of ‘Ollie!’ Whenever she enters,” The Times said the year before in a story about the shelter. “At the mission she keeps busy. Sometimes she poses in tableaus that illustrate sermons. At others you hear her voice on the mission telephone: ‘This is the Sunshine Mission and God bless you.’ You see her dressing some little ragged child or helping her mother.”
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
Oct. 2, 1907
Los Angeles
If you have back problems, you might try this method, used by “Dr.” Thomas H. Storey, an unlicensed chiropractor : Have the patient lie down with his head on one chair and his knees on another. Then get on the patient’s back so all your weight is resting on the spine. Next, put your knee in the small of the patient’s back. Then twist the patient’s neck.
And for good measure, you might put a drill between the vertebrae and whack it with a mallet a few times.
Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project.
Everybody’s parents or grandparents seem to have purchased this little red-bound book with the blue title on the spine. There was a time when you could find a copy in just about any secondhand store or used bookshop in the Southwest next to “Inside U.S.A.” or one of the WPA guides. And with good reason: It’s lighthearted and informative, in the Lee Shippey school of California writing. He talks about the market for wooden sabots among the Dutch dairy farmers living in Belvedere (now Bell Gardens), the tale of how Los Angeles was founded and briefly looks at various government reform movements and crackpot religions. And the movie stars.
It certainly doesn’t have the scope or grander aspirations of “Southern California: An Island on the Land.” It’s a beach book on L.A. history. Anybody can pick it up at random, read a little something and think they know more about Los Angeles. The whole book reads like this: “The only [traffic] signal I know with a personality is at the northeast corner of Adams and Hauser. As the GO sign drops into position, passersby may observe that someone has written in crayon on it TO HELL.”
Weinstock died of cancer in 1970, his obituary giving the newsman’s usual resume: The college paper (sports editor of the UCLA Daily Grizzly, yes that’s right) , reporter and then columnist for Manchester Boddy’s Los Angeles Daily News (he was managing editor and claimed he couldn’t find anyone to replace E.V. Durling, who was going to The Times, so he wrote it himself), then the Mirror and finally The Times. In addition to “My L.A.” Weinstock wrote “Muscatel at Noon.”
After Weinstock’s death, Jack Smith (it seems superfluous to describe him as Times columnist because 10 years after his last piece, he can still fill the room at the Huntington Library) wrote: “Matt Weinstock was Los Angeles in a sense that no other man has been. He lived in and observed and wrote about a Los Angeles that existed only through him….. Hundreds of thousands of nobody people, who could not find their likenesses in the newspapers or on television or in the other mass outpourings of the modern media, read Matt Weinstock and knew they were still alive.”
The day after he died, the marquee outside Chipper’s Nut House said: “WHAT WILL L.A. BE WITHOUT MATT WEINSTOCK?”
This week’s mystery movie was the 1982 film “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez,” with Edward James Olmos, James Gammon, Tom Bower, Bruce McGill, Brion James, Alan Vint, Timothy Scott, Pepe Serna, Michael McGuire, William Sanderson, Barry Corbin, Jack Kehoe and Rosana DeSoto. Music composed and adapted by W. Michael Lewis and Edward James Olmos, production design by Stuart Wurtzel, costume design by Hilary Rosenfeld, photography by Ray Villalobos, screenplay by Victor Villasenor, adapted by Robert M. Young, based on “With a Pistol in His Hand” by Americo Paredes. Produced by Moctesuma Esparza and Michael Husman. Directed by Robert M. Young.
“The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” has been reissued on DVD and Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection.
The Richfield Building in an undated postcard.
Note: This is an encore post from 2013.
After years of deprivation, darkness and worry during World War I and its aftermath, America was ready to look toward a shining future of prosperity and sunshine in the 1920s. Overnight, fashion, music and the arts embraced change, style and risk-taking. Much was modeled after the 1925 Exposition International des Arts Decoratifs et Industriel Modernes in Paris, which displayed bold conceptions of applied arts, reveling in eclectic, glorious design. The new style embraced technology and the machine age, reflecting a belief in a dynamic, energetic future.
Architecture celebrated the Moderne style as well. Color, geometric shapes and lavish ornamentation replaced monochromatic massing in buildings. Triangles, sunbursts and zigzags screamed progress in modern buildings as they stretched toward the sky. New York’s Chrysler Building exemplified the new look, bold, sleek and gorgeous. The American Radiator Building also embraced the modern by daring to wreath itself in gold and black colors, a glamorous and contemporary design.
Mary Mallory’s latest book, “Living With Grace: Life Lessons from America’s Princess,” is now on sale.
Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project.
Nailed up in the closet of an unoccupied house at 2318 Pontius Ave.., West Los Angeles, the body of Tomas Moreno, 43-year-old Japanese, was discovered yesterday by friends.
Belief that Moreno had been dead since last November was expressed to police by T. Izumi, last employer of the dead man, who found the badly decomposed corpse when he broke open the small closet.
ladailymirror.com 