This week’s “unsuitable” mystery movie was the 1934 Paramount film Search for Beauty, with Larry “Buster” Crabbe, Ida Lupino, Robert Armstrong, James Gleason, Toby Wing, Gertrude Michael, Bradley Page, Frank McGlynn Sr., Nora Cecil, Virginia Hammond, Eddie Gribbon and “Pop” Kenton. Continue reading
October 5, 1959: Matt Weinstock on UFOs, downtown bars and the greatest invention of all time.
Elmer Clarence “Mox” Meukel told his story to a couple of hobos in a shack on Scott Island in the Truckee River near Reno.
Most people wrote him off as a crackpot dreamer. After all, he was a sometime songwriter and self-taught inventor, but these men listened to his story.
Mox said he and some co-workers at Bendix Corp. had been designing a motion detector that would sound an alarm when a child got near a swimming pool.
On Feb. 1, 1958, the day he was laid off at Bendix, two military planes collided over Norwalk, killing 48 people. Mox said he realized that his motion detector could
be turned into a device that would prevent such midair crashes.
Without a job, he began working on the device in the garage of the home at 7716 Bonner Ave., Sun Valley, that he shared with his wife, Jean, and three children.
“Mox sold his engineering books, my jewelry, cameras, a rifle, tools–just about everything we owned to finance this thing,” his wife said. Continue reading
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.
October 5, 1909: Richard Johnson Proctor, a penniless old character in Santa Ana, dies on a cot in a filthy room. Investigators discover he was wealthy man with a fortune in gold.
Note: Here’s an entry I wrote in 2006 for the 1947project. I thought newer readers might enjoy it.
October 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.
October 4, 1957
Los Angeles
October 4, 1957
Los Angeles
I’ve read any number of horrible stories in the old papers, but this is
one of the worst in terms of senseless tragedy. The facts, such as they
are, don’t even begin to explain what happened. But then how can anyone
explain absolute madness?
Allene Hall Durston, 58, was dying of bone cancer. Of all the people in
the world, the person she loved the most was her grandson Ronald
“Ronnie” Barrett White, who lived with his parents, Evelyn and Thomas, and a younger sister at 6836 Sylvia Ave., Reseda.
She had been living with the family until July 24, when she kidnapped
Ronnie and left a note for her daughter, Evelyn Durston White, saying that she
was “taking the boy for my own” and “going on a long trip.” Police
found Allene and her grandson in a taxi an hour later. She wasn’t charged, but her relatives told her to move out. First, she lived at 6410 Van Nuys Blvd., and then she moved to a motel on Ventura Boulevard. Continue reading
October 4, 1943: Tom Treanor, who will be killed in a Jeep accident in France, writes about the liberation of Naples.
“The Germans left Naples in a truly deplorable condition. In a huge hospital for incurables I myself saw 70 rotting corpses of men, women and children. They were killed in street fighting during the past week and authorities were unable to move their bodies because of the lack of transportation. Sprawled on stretchers, in coffins, on tables and on floors in a great dim-lighted chamber, their naked wounds showing, they made a ghoulish scene unparalleled by any on any battlefield I have seen.
The Los Angeles Public Library celebrates Newspaper Week with a display of historic papers, including a 1918 edition of The Times on the armistice ending World War I.
Kattie Brady, 75, dies after being badly beaten in an alley at 210 W. 5th St. on her way home from St. Vibiana’s.
Charlie Chaplin’s sound stage is being used for some scenes of Columbia’s “Curly,” the first time a company other than Chaplin’s has used its sound stage, Edwin Schallert writes.
October 3, 1959: Matt Weinstock writes of Steve Allen’s concerns about nuclear weapons and Edita Morris’ novel “The Flowers of Hiroshima.” Continue reading
October 3, 1959: Thelonious Monk leaves after playing two numbers at the Hollywood Bowl Jazz fest.
Paul Coates says Mike Wallace decides not to have Aldous Huxley on his TV show because Huxley wasn’t well known. Huxley asked: “Mike Wallace? Who’s Mike Wallace?”
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.
Oct. 3, 1944
Walter Winchell says: You probably have been frightened no little in the past two years by the many articles which threatened inflation … The following (from Fortune) was reprinted in The Reader’s Digest in 1934:
By next June our public debt will be approximately what it was in 1919. We have borne it before without staggering and can probably do so again. A lover of statistics has calculated that the United States could run a deficit of five billions a year for 132 years before becoming as insolvent as France was when she succumbed to her great postwar inflation.
Louella Parsons says: All of Fred Allen’s funniest jokes have been about Jack Benny, and vice versa. The feud between these two has gone on for years, beautiful insults hurled in every direction, so I wasn’t surprised when told Jack will play himself in Fred’s movie, “It’s in the Bag.” It’s a nice lineup, with Rudy Vallee playing the singing waiter and William Bendix in an important role.
Danton Walker says: Complaints of civilians who have had to wait while Nazi prisoners are fed in dining cars have resulted in a new ruling; hereafter the prisoners must remain in their guarded cars and eat out of waxed paper boxes.
LIBRA: Private interests may be disquieting in outlook. That’s just a matter of how you view tasks. Your talents used diplomatically and undauntedly can progress.
From the Philadelphia Inquirer via Fultonhistory.com.
Continue reading
October 3, 1907
Stanford University
Chester Silent was among the most promising young men of Delta Tau Delta at Stanford. The son of Judge Charles Silent and prominent in Los Angeles social circles, Silent, 22, had excelled in his studies and upon graduating with a law degree in the Class of 1907 had begun graduate work at Stanford and was expected to head to Harvard.
His fraternity brothers described him as being fairly quiet and reserved—at least among strangers. He didn’t drink or smoke and had little to do with women. His only health problem seemed to be his eyesight, which was so weak that his father wondered whether to let him return to Stanford. But after a summer of tramping around the family ranch in Glendora, Silent found that his vision was well enough that his father allowed him to go back.
A studious young man, Silent usually locked himself in his room to pore over his books and was always eager to help his fraternity brothers with their classes. At the same time, he could be boisterous and was the leader of the Deltas’ roughhousing.
Continue reading
October 2, 1959: “Thelonious Monk, who’ll be among those present at the Hollywood Bowl jazz festival tonight, is the composer of “Round About Midnight, in my opinion one of the finest mood pieces of recent years.” Continue reading
October 2, 1959: Paul Coates says of Caryl Chessman: “Justice tripped over her own skirts in her hurry to get rid of him when he asked for his day in court.”
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.”
October 2, 1944
Walter Winchell says: Joan Fontaine’s intimates suspect that if she weds again the groom will be producer D. Lewis … The postponed Edgar Bergen marriage is just a nice way of saying it is off for good… Deanna Durbin has that expression again because Life’s Robert Landry is back.
Louella Parsons says: Spencer Tracy’s back from Honolulu, where he spent three and a half weeks visiting our men in hospitals. “Entertain?” scoffs Spence. “What can I do? I can’t even whistle!”
Danton Walter says: Part of the campaign to eliminate Nazi influence in the postwar world is an order from Washington to commanding generals to destroy all films made in Germany since 1933.
LIBRA: Stimulating for industrial, mechanical and general business. Gains through sound investments. Don’t forget to lay something away for that rainy day.
From the Philadelphia Inquirer via Fultonhistory.com.
Continue reading
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
October 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.
October 1, 1959: A caller tries to tap Matt Weinstock for a few dollars. He’s not soft touch.
ladailymirror.com 