Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
I always cut my roses on Jan. 15 as a memorial to Elizabeth Short, because I remember that on the night before the body was found a neighbor had a strange encounter at the crime scene when he went there to dump some rose clippings.
Frankly, it’s scary to chop my roses down to sticks but sure enough by Valentine’s Day they are coming back to life, especially now that they’ve gotten some 12-18-6.
Note: This is an encore post from 2007.
Feb. 14-15, 1907
Los Angeles
An 11:30 a.m. blast caused by an accumulation of gas shattered the Rawson building at 114 W. 2nd St. in an explosion blamed on a gas company employee who struck a match to check the meter. Four people were killed immediately while three more died of their injuries and 30 were hurt, some of them so badly that their crushed limbs were amputated.
The explosion killed two waitresses, La Von Meyers and Annie Crawford; retired farmer John W. Main; and tailor J.M.C. Fuentes. Charles G. Haggerdy, who worked in a tailor shop, died a few days later of his injuries, as did janitor Ferdinand Stephen.
Feb. 13, 1947: Dorothy Bradley becomes the first African American cashier hired at the Safeway grocery store in Watts. She was hired as the result of a campaign by the Watts Citizens Welfare committee protesting Safeway’s refusal to hired black people as cashiers or clerks.
Isabel Crocker in an archival photograph from the Los Angeles Times.
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
Page 16
In the Black Dahlia books, all roads lead to William Randolph Fowler and it would be interesting to see how a sociologist would make a graph of the incestuous literary kinship system.
Will talks to Mary Pacios, who collaborates with John Gilmore on “Severed.”
Will talks to Donald H. Wolfe (“Mogul,” footnotes Pages 361-362).
Note: This is an encore post from 2007.
Feb.13, 1907
Los Angeles
An enormous masked ball for the city’s elite was staged on Mardi Gras at Kramer’s Studio and Dancing Academy, 1500 S. Figueroa.
Continue reading
Carol Hughes as photographed by Schuyler Crail, with Hollywood and Cahuenga in the background, courtesy of Mary Mallory.
Note: This is an encore post from 2016.
One of the most important and busiest intersections in Hollywood has always been that of Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards. The location of Hollywood’s first hotels, the intersection also soon became the home of one of Hollywood’s first banks, the Hollywood National Bank. The location serves as witness to much of the city’s business and movie history, acting as a gateway to dreams.
In 1888, Horace D. Sackett constructed a simple two story hotel on the southwest corner of Prospect Avenue and Cahuenga Boulevard on three lots generously given him by town developer Harvey Wilcox, the heart of the speculator’s subdivision as well as a prime stage coach stop. The quaint inn, which he called the Sackett Hotel, consisted of eighteen rooms with one shared bathroom, while downstairs featured a general store, lobby, parlor, and kitchen. Just three years later in 1891, Sackett opened the city’s first post office in part of his general store, becoming a prime gathering spot for the growing community.
“Hollywood Celebrates the Holidays” by Karie Bible and Mary Mallory is available at Amazon and at local bookstores.
Feb. 13, 1947: Coming to the Shrine Auditorium – Esquire Award winners Lester Young, Woody Herman, Benny Goodman, Lucky Thompson, Benny Carter, Dodo Marmarosa, Barney Kessell and Vic Dickenson.
Feb. 13, 1947: Esquire magazine began an annual poll in 1943 to select the leading American jazz musicians. But in 1945, Arnold Gingrich, one of Esquire’s founders, left the magazine in a falling-out with Publisher David A. Smart.
In Gingrich’s place, the magazine hired Ernest Anderson, a publicist for Eddie Condon, to run the poll. An article on the magazine’s website by Alex Belth says Anderson “made a mockery of it by ostensibly turning it a press release for Condon, a white, middlebrow bandleader who had never previously been mentioned in Esquire’s jazz coverage. The panel of experts resigned en mass in protest and the jazz poll came to a halt.”
Note: The microfilmed copy of the Los Angeles Sentinel is missing the first section.
Note: This is an encore post from 2007.
Page 14
“Hansen studied the body and the ‘sacred setting’ for some time before he stood up and said to Finis, ‘We won’t know what we’re really dealing with here until we get a post mortem.’ He requested that the body be covered until Ray Pinker of the crime lab arrived.”
I could quit here and be a happy man. Wolfe has been given access to the district attorney’s files. He even reprints the first two pages of the LAPD summary on Pages 325-326 of “Mogul.” But clearly Wolfe hasn’t read his own book. If he had, he would know that Pinker beat Hansen and Brown to the crime scene.
Look what I found while watching the opening of “Some Like It Hot.” Why it’s signage for a 1950s Standard gas station. Hey isn’t that going to be in the shot? Naw, don’t worry about it.
This week’s mystery movie has been the 1954 Italian film “Voyage to Italy” or “Journey to Italy,” with George “Georges” Sanders and Ingrid Bergman. It was directed by Roberto Rossellini.
The film is available on DVD from the Criterion Collection.
Note: This is an encore post from 2007.
Feb. 12, 1907
Los Angeles
Imagine the surprise of Mrs. Robert Jackson, who was about to move into her new home on Vernon Avenue and discovered that the contractor had built it on someone else’s lot, next to the one that she owned. Fortunately, she was able to swap property with the owner, The Times notes. I suppose we should be thankful that builder didn’t go to medical school.
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
Pages 12-15
Here’s a riddle: Let’s suppose for a moment that you are writing a historical piece; nothing terribly esoteric for a scholarly journal but something for the average reader. You have a choice between a schlocky, sensational paperback and original documents that few people are allowed to see.
Wrong.
Note: This is an encore post from 2007.
Feb. 11, 1907
Los Angeles
The Eastside gets a new Baptist Church and 2nd Street and St. Louis.
Like Tom and Huck
A large pond 7 feet deep at Normandie and San Marino left by the runoff of recent rainstorms proved too tempting to the boys of the Forrester tract and so they launched a raft to play.
The raft tipped, The Times says, sending 8-year-old Clarence Rhodes of 1004 S. Jasmine tumbling into the water. Hearing the boys’ cries for help, M. Allen rushed from his home at 922 Normandie, plunged into the water and rescued Clarence.
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
Today is the anniversary of the Feb. 10, 1947, Jeanne French murder. Frequently linked to the Black Dahlia in the popular imagination and absurdly claimed as one of the umpteen victims of Dr. George “Evil Genius” Hodel in “Black Dahlia Avenger,” French was a tragic, broken-down alcoholic. Spending the last night of her life in a Westside cafe, she dumped the contents of her purse on the bar and picked through the debris in hopes of finding enough money for just one more drink. She had no paper money, nothing more than a few coins. Whoever killed her beat her with the handle of a socket wrench, pushed her out of his car into the street and stomped on her until a rib broke and punctured her heart. A bleak, terrible death.
Her son, David Wrather, told the coroner’s inquest: “She’s gone now and I’m sure she would want me to say the right thing—she made a lot of her own trouble.”
Note: This is an encore post from 2007.
Feb. 10, 1907
Los Angeles
The Times features a hillside home “near the ostrich farm” in Pasadena. Presumably that was the Cawston farm in South Pasadena. (What, South Pasadena, again?) Unfortunately, many of the homes photographed for The Times in 1907 have been torn down in the city of Los Angeles, replaced by parking lots, warehouses, etc. Not so in suburban South Pasadena.
 |
At left, a three-unit property at 3509 5th Ave., listed for sale in 1947 at $17,500. Above, the property sold for $600,000 in 2016, according to Zillow. |
Feb. 6, 1947: The Sentinel reports on a lawsuit filed by Alpha Johnson and her son, Sylvester Ray, of San Pedro. Johnson charged that she was thrown off a Greyhound bus in Tulare in the Central Valley en route from Tipton to Madera for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman.
When Johnson boarded the bus, it was crowded and she had to stand. As passengers got off the bus, however, Johnson was able to take a seat and refused to give it up when a white woman boarded.
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
I was at a signing at Book Soup last night for Kim Cooper’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” (important note: there’s parking behind the store, otherwise you have to contend with West Hollywood’s insane parking situation. Those people aren’t cruising Sunset Boulevard, they’re just looking for a parking place). The attendant at the lot two blocks away ($7) asked me if I was headed for the Roxy, which made me laugh all night. Yeah, that’s me, Mr. Viper Room.
A common question at the signing: C’mon, Harnisch, are you really going to blog the entire Wolfe book?
Note: This is an encore post from 2007.
Feb. 9, 1907
Los Angeles
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
Page 8
In those days Leimert Park was a nice, middle-class neighborhood on the fringe of the more fashionable Adams District west of downtown Los Angeles.
Here, in a few words, “Mogul” demonstrates its lack of familiarity with two historic Los Angeles areas that are nearly three miles apart, a definition of “West Adams adjacent” that even the lowest real estate agent would find excessive. Wolfe’s psychological map of Los Angeles (an exercise wonderfully described in “Shotgun Freeway”) is a little distorted. (Here’s a clip of the movie).
Sunrise was at 6:53 a.m. on Wednesday, January 15, 1947.
Note: This is an encore from 2007.
Feb. 8, 1907
Los Angeles
About 1903, Charles E. Donnatin, former Pacific Electric Railway superintendent, apparently said something about the young woman across the street at the Stewart home, Savoy Street and Buena Vista (now 1301 N. Broadway).
The woman’s mother was furious and soon a 5-gallon oil can appeared in the Stewart’s yard saying “C.E.D. has been” with the implication that Donnatin had been “canned” from his job.
ladailymirror.com 