Well? Any ideas?
This is the floor of the Bradbury Building. I took a picture of it during an art class given Saturday by Marion Eisenmann, known to Daily Mirror readers through the Artist’s Notebook. Marion asked me to make some brief remarks to her students on the history of the buildings they were sketching.
On Monday, Eve Golden will have her roundup of unusual obituaries in Queen of the Dead, and in Hollywood Heights, Mary Mallory will take a look at Photoplayers – mechanical instruments that smaller theaters used to accompany silent films.
Other posting will be iffy as the Daily Mirror HQ has lost its Internet connection until it is rewired early this week.
Photo: Stone chopping tool from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. Credit: “A History of the World in 100 Objects.”
Last year, BBC4 aired a program that tried to compress the history of the world into the stories of 100 artifacts from the British Museum. The series was so popular that it has been turned into a book titled “A History of the World in 100 Objects” that goes on sale in the U.S. on Monday. Carol Vogel of the New York Times takes a look at the objects that were used and the debates over which items to include.
The podcasts are here. This segment is on the Rosetta Stone. They are also on iTunes.
The National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas, is honoring former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. “The Cowgirl Who Became a Justice: Sandra Day O’Connor” is on display through March 25, 2012.
Susan Whitall of the Detroit News writes that Paul McCartney is paying for the restoration of an 1877 Steinway used by Motown musicians. McCartney was visiting the Motown Historical Museum when he discovered that the piano was unplayable offered to fund its restoration by Steinway.
The L.A. Daily Mirror and L.A. Crime Beat curated by the bots at paper.li
I recently received a shipment of several issues of Haldeman-Julius Monthly wrapped in some pages torn from an old Look magazine. (Young persons: Look was a competitor with Life and was one of those big weekly magazines we had around the house in the 1950s and ‘60s, along with the Saturday Evening Post.)
The first thing to catch my eye was, yes, a Norman Rockwell painting. This one is titled “Uneasy Christmas in the Birthplace of Peace” and has a timelessness that was surely never intended by the artist.
What also caught my eye were several pages from an essay by Look editor William B. Arthur (d. 1997) titled “Whatever Happened to Mankind’s Dream of Peace?” At the time, the U.S. was fighting in Vietnam and antiwar protests were on the rise.
Here’s the conclusion to Arthur’s Dec. 29, 1970, essay, courtesy of the OCR software on the DM scanner. Are they enduring words, or merely scrap paper good for nothing but padding in packages?
[Update 2: This is Charles Dingle (d. 1956). He appeared in the 1941 stage and film versions of Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes.”]
Here’s another photo, courtesy of Steven Bibb.
Oct. 28, 1941: Lee Shippey writes about Los Angeles’ congested streets (no, traffic is not a new problem – it’s a very old one that we are still trying to solve). Notice that Shippey says streetcars and automobiles do not play well together – something to consider for those who want to resurrect the streetcars:
Eastbound interurban traffic out of Los Angeles gets slower and slower and the Aliso Street viaduct will help very little. What is needed is a subway or elevated to get the cars as far as that viaduct.
Unless something is done soon, more and more business is going to bypass downtown Los Angeles. Both motorcar and streetcar traffic on Main and Los Angeles streets would be greatly speeded by a tunnel or El, as now the worst slow-ups are where the streetcars have to turn. They often have to wait for motorcars to get out of the way and always have to creep around those curves.
Did no one note the passing of the widow of once-famous star Harold Lockwood? She’d been working as a studio wardrobe woman, Jimmie Fidler says.
Here’s another mystery photo, courtesy of Steven Bibb.
[Update: After fifteen years, Esther Ralston, former Paramount star, stages a reunion with Adolph Zukor, chairman of the board of directors of Paramount Productions, the man who discovered her and put her in “Old Ironsides,” the epic production. She and 29 other silent stars and featured players have roles in “Hollywood Boulevard” (1936) story of the crisis in the life of a film star.
[Please congratulate Mary Mallory, Claire Lockhart in a rare Daily Mirror appearance (hurry back!) and Mike Hawks for identifying them and Nick Santa Maria (also making a rare appearance — hurry back!) Don Danard, Rick Scott and James Curtis for identifying Zukor.
[Most of all, the Daily Mirror thanks Steven Bibb for his continuing generosity in sharing his mystery photos. We couldn’t do it without him. (And Steven points out that Zukor was his relative). ]
The New York Daily Tribune of Nov. 11, 1871, also carried an account of the massacre.
Chinese Massacre Part 1 | Part 2| Part 3
Wong Chin, a merchant, was the first victim of the hanging. He was led through the streets by two lusty Irishmen, who were cheered on by a crowd of men and grownup boys, mostly of Irish and Mexican birth. Several times the unfortunate faltered or attempted to extricate himself from the two brutes who were leading him, at which a half-drunken Mexican in his immediate rear would plunge the point of a large dirk-knife into his back.
This 1969 news rack card from the Los Angeles Herald Examiner (d. 1989) has been listed on EBay. These cards were placed on vending machines to improve street sales. This card is a bit of a surprise, because the Herald’s later rack cards are horizontal (as are the ones for The Times). Bidding on this item starts at $19.99.
[Update: This is Lina Basquette]
Here’s a mystery gal with a mystery companion, courtesy of Steven Bibb.
A suitcase from J.W. Robinson’s has been listed on EBay and the vendor says it belonged to popular mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner (note the E.S.G. monogram). Bidding starts at $55.
The San Francisco Bulletin’s Oct. 26, 1871, account of the lynching was published in the New York Times.
Los Angeles, although boasting of being the City of the Queen of the Angels, is cursed with such another hotbed of crime and depravity, in its Negro Alley, as San Francisco has in its Barbary Coast and Chinatown.
A copy of Little Blue Book No. 752 has been listed on EBay. The Haldeman-Julius publication “Facts You Should Know About California” contains Louis Adamic’s “The Bright Side of Los Angeles” and “Paganism in Los Angeles,” plus Walter Watrous’ “Behind the Scenes in Los Angeles.”
As I noted in another post when the Daily Mirror was at latimes.com:
At his best, Adamic is a keen observer and in his essay “The Bright Side of Los Angeles,” he describes riding on horseback through the Hollywood Hills as a fire lookout.
“Every so often I rode on the night watch, which I preferred to the day shift. I used to like to ride or lead my horse to the crest of Mount Hollywood and from there watch the myriad lights below and listen to the remote rumble of traffic. There was, at that distance, something vaguely fascinating, beautiful almost, in that confusion of lights, in those flashing signs and advertisements, in those streams and rivulets of motor headlights on the boulevards; a rhythm in the distant roar of the city as it reached my ears; and down at San Pedro harbor the battleships had frequent searchlight drills, making the sky to the south gay and fantastic with long, slender shafts of white light. Toward midnight, the noise gradually subsided until there came to me but a faint murmur that remained unchanged for several hours, that at times I could not hear it at all. There was a charm to the city in the distance at night.”
Bidding on the booklet starts at $2.19 or Buy It Now for $5.99.
[Update: I’m tempted to give half credit to Cold in Phoenix, who guessed that this is Lupe Velez. It’s actually her sister Reina.]
Here’s today’s mystery lady, courtesy of Steven Bibb.
Most people know that newspapers have reduced the size of their pages (or what we used to mean when we talked about “the web”) to save newsprint, but unless you have a lot of old papers lying around the house (ahem), you may not realize how much has been cut.
Here’s the San Francisco Bulletin’s Oct. 25, 1871, coverage of the massacre, as republished in the Carroll (Iowa) Herald on Nov. 22, 1871. [This link works now but it may be broken eventually as Google tinkers with its newspaper archives]. Until these newspapers were digitized, it was almost impossible to read any coverage of the incident – all the average person had is what was written about it later in books.
A copy of Jim Richardson’s flawed autobiography “For the Life of Me” has been listed on EBay. Richardson was the notorious city editor of the Examiner who orchestrated its coverage of the Black Dahlia case. He was legendary for his demeaning abuse of reporters and was a reformed alcoholic who lectured everyone about drinking. His attitude in “For the Life of Me” can be summed up as: “I was a better reporter drunk than you are sober and don’t ever forget it.”
Even worse, Richardson relied on his liquor-clouded memory for many aspects of the book rather than checking his facts, so details of numerous famous incidents are scrambled.
Richardson’s problems with alcohol eventually became so bad that no paper would have him, and he briefly embarked on a career as a movie publicist, so there is a Hollywood aspect to the book as well. I have read that Richardson also had a small role as a newspaper editor in “Elmer Gantry,” but I have never had the patience to track it down.
I don’t recommend this as the first book to read about Los Angeles in the 1940s, but it’s worth a look if only for the attitude it reflects. Bidding on this copy starts at $7.99.
Photo: Tom Phelps scores for USC in a 1946 game against UCLA at Bovard Field. Credit: El Rodeo, 1946
Jane Leavy of the New York Times examines the search for historic baseball diamonds, including USC’s Bovard Field, where Mickey Mantle hit two legendary home runs during a 1951 exhibition game between the Trojans and the Yankees.
She writes:
For a baseball biographer, documenting the landscape is an essential part of holding myth accountable to history.
Too often, the places at the heart of the game go unmarked, unnoticed and untended.
“Baseball fans are concerned with who and how many,” said John Thorn, baseball’s official historian. “Place matters — that’s where our great ghosts come to life.”
Pedro Moura also revisited Mantle’s homers for ESPN.
History – at least to crossword puzzle fans – was made last week by Patrick Berry, who challenged New York Times readers with a series of six puzzles that had to be put in order to solve a final mystery. Deb Amlen has more in the New York Times’ Wordplay blog. (And yes, I’m proud to say I cracked the meta-challenge.)
The L.A. Daily Mirror and L.A. Crime Beat curated from only the finest Twitter feeds by the discerning bots at paper.li.
[Update: This is George Barbier (d. 1945). Please congratulate Eve Golden, Mary Mallory, Mike Hawks, Don Danard, “Maltese Falcon” fan Floyd Thursby, and Megan Lee and Thom for identifying him.
Here’s another mystery photo, courtesy of Steven Bibb.
Horse-drawn hearse for sale on EBay – listed as Buy It Now for $8,000.
Queen of the Dead—dateline October 24, 2011
• A 68-year-old literary scholar and media theorist died on Oct. 18, which is very sad, of course, but which is mostly notable for our column because the man was saddled with the remarkable and unfortunate name Friedrich Adolf Kittler. He was indeed born in Germany in 1943, which makes one raise an eyebrow, but he managed to overcome his name and work on numerous university media theory departments, write several books, and win several scholastic awards. Yet when you Google “Kittler,” you are directed to a fabulous website of Cats That Look Like Hitler. I like to think that a media theorist would be amused by this.
ladailymirror.com 