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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
October 1, 1959: And Paul Coates conducts a telephone survey on Caryl Chessman. The results reveal the common misconception that Chessman was a killer.
And Mickey Cohen plans to marry Beverly (Jean) Hills.
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?”
October 1, 1944
The always unpredictable and exciting Maria Montez never fails to come through with some unexpected and dramatic episode when I talk to her. Talking in story book fashion is second nature to Universal’s queen of exotic dramas. She cannot help giving out with some spectacular yarn any more than you or I can help breathing.
From the Philadelphia Inquirer via Fultonhistory.com.
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Courtesy of University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Special Collections.
October 1, 1910: The Times Building in flames, as seen from Broadway just south of First Street. Notice The Times Eagle outlined by the fire.
El Alisal, October 1, 1910:
This is a sad day for me and for every other man that loves Los Angeles.
At one this morning I was dictating to Brownie and heard a terrible roar in town and remarked that it sounded like dynamite and just casually thought it might be The Times.
October 1, 1909: A century ago, the Wright brothers hadn’t flown as high as the Eiffel Tower.
A property dispute near El Monte ends in a killing with racial overtones.
September 30, 1959: “The body of a San Bernardino Freeway crash victim was hurled into a tree where it hung unnoticed for five hours today” … W.C. Fields vs. Cecil B. De Mille … and Matt Weinstock on some friendly traffic officers.
September 30, 1959: Paul Coates on a young con man, and on the tragic tale of Barbara Burns, the daughter of Bob “Bazooka” Burns.
September 30, 1944
Danton Walker says: Government officials want 20th Century-Fox to release “Winged Victory” on Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor day, as a boost to the country’s morale. Lucille Ball, since her separation from Desi Arnaz, has gone to live in the Hollywood home of Jody and Renee (DeMarco) Hutchinson. At one time, Renee was reported engaged to marry Desi.
Louella Parsons says: Can you picture the beautiful Heddy Lamarr doing housework in blue jeans? Well, that’s exactly what she tells me she intends to do. She and John Loder are going to Big Bear, high up in the mountains, on Oct. 15 and have two weeks sans servants, sans telephone, sans company. John, she says, will do the cooking. She is doing “Experiment Perilous” at RKO “And,” she said, “I have never been so happy on any picture in my whole life.” She scoffed when I asked her about forming a company. She said there never was a word of truth in it. “Why should I take all the responsibility of making pictures?” Why should she, indeed.
LIBRA: Church, government and public issues, international interests lead favorites today. Individual recognition may be slow, but no worthy endeavor will go unrewarded.
From the Philadelphia Inquirer via Fultonhistory.com.
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Boxie and I will be doing a live “Ask Me Anything” on the Black Dahlia case Tuesday, October 7, 2025, at 10 a.m. Pacific time, on YouTube. I won’t be doing more streaming videos on Instagram because I don’t have enough subscribers.
Reminder: Do not dress up like the Black Dahlia for Halloween. Don’t do it. There are all sorts of alternatives (Harley Quinn? Mad Moxxi? Loona? Shadowheart?) besides cosplaying the victim of a gruesome murder. Just don’t.
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
September 30, 1907
Los Angeles
Who says research can’t be any fun? I wonder what the WCTU would say about five dozen liquor jugs.
Dr. J.Z. Quack? Not a reassuring name, is it?
Bonus factoid: In French, it’s “Voyez le brick geant que j’examine pres du wharf.”
ladailymirror.com 