
Main and 8th via Google maps’ street view.
A postcard of the Hotel Huntington at Main and 8th streets has been listed on EBay. Bidding starts at $3.

Main and 8th via Google maps’ street view.
A postcard of the Hotel Huntington at Main and 8th streets has been listed on EBay. Bidding starts at $3.
Photo: 1937 Mercedes-Benz 540 K Spezial Roadster. Credit: RM Auctions via the New York Times.
SPOTLIGHT
The University of Virginia has posted audio clips of William Faulkner recorded in 1957-58. The home page is here. If you have never heard Faulkner’s voice you will be surprised.
Jonathan Schultz of the New York Times has a feature on the upcoming auction of a 1937 540 K Spezial Roadster, which is expected to set a price record. Rob Myers, founder of RM Auctions, says the rare auto may go for as much as $15 million.
EXHIBITS
“Woman With a Lute,” about 1662–63, Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, 1632–75). Oil on canvas.
Lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of Collis P. Huntington, 1900, via Los Angeles Times
Johannes Vermeer’s “Woman With a Lute” is on display at the Norton Simon through Sept. 26. Reviewed by Sharon Mizota in the Los Angeles Times’ Culture Monster.
The National Museum of American History is putting some of Phyllis Diller’s gag file (donated in 2003) on display, according to Jacqueline Trescott of the Washington Post. I can’t say I have ever found Diller particularly funny, but she does have a place in entertainment history. I recall her from an early appearance on “You Bet Your Life” in which Groucho Marx interviewed her — and her immortal husband, Fang.
NEWS
The Los Angeles Conservancy has issued an action alert on the impending demolition of Richard Neutra’s Kronish House, which was also reported by Martha Groves in the Los Angeles Times. Given Beverly Hills’ que pasa attitude about multimillion-dollar teardowns (it has no preservation laws), I’d say activists haven’t a chance, but I would love to be wrong. Everything is new in Beverly Hills – even the money.
Chad Bray, writing in the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog, has the story of a large seizure of illegally imported ivory.
FEATURES
Barb Valentine writes in the Chicago Tribune about programs that introduce children to genealogy.
And the Galesburg, Ill., library is closed on Sundays, but admits genealogists and then locks them in!
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This is Part 2 of James Curtis’ 1975 interview with Dick Lane. In this segment, Lane discusses his start in films in Los Angeles, making “Union Pacific” with Cecil B. De Mille, Howard Hughes’ takeover of RKO and making “Boom Town” with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy.
Part 1 is here.
Photo: Dick Lane, Adele Mara and George McKay in “Alias Boston Blackie,” listed on EBay for $10.

A hand-colored postcard published by M. Rieder of Los Angeles, based on a photograph by the studio of C.C. Pierce, has been listed on EBay. Pierce was an early photographer in Los Angeles who mostly specialized in buildings and atmospheric shots. I don’t recall seeing too many photos of people. The card is listed as Buy It Now for $7.95.

Photo: “Dear Friend Hitler.”
Tripti Lahiri writes in the Wall Street Journal about “Dear Friend Hitler.”
Based on the previews, the movie is “Gandhi” meets “Downfall“ meets “The Sound of Music,” in Hindi with an all-Indian cast. A less charitable view in the Hollywood Reporter is that Bollywood has unwittingly brought Mel Brooks’s play within a play, “Springtime for Hitler,” to the screen.
But will he rant about the iPad and Carmageddon?
John Markoff of the New York Times writes about an article by Steven M. Bellovin in Cryptologia on what may be the earliest description of an encryption technique known as the one-time pad, a method that is extremely secure because it is used once and discarded.
NEWS
Carol Vogel of the New York Times writes that attendance is the highest in 40 years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in part because of three blockbuster shows
Robert Samuels of the Washington Post says that George Washington University is building a 35,000-square-foot facility for the Textile Museum and a 20,000-square-foot center for storage and conservation.
OBITUARIES
Margaret Ramirez of the Chicago Tribune has a great obituary hat maker Raymond Hudd.
Reed Johnson of the Los Angeles Times has an obituary on artist Gilbert “Magú” Luján

Margaret Webb Pressler writes in the Washington Post’s Kids Post that Owney the Postal Service mascot is getting his own stamp.
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Photo: Owney the Postal Service dog. Credit: National Postal Museum

Cartoon: A troubling moment in “Mary Worth’s Family,” June 1, 1943. Credit: Los Angeles Times
June 1, 1943: It is impossible to accurately determine, so long after the fact, why a May 31, 1943, brawl between zoot-suiters and sailors wasn’t covered in The Times. But that’s only one mystery. The more immediate question is: who was Joe Dacy Coleman?
To recap: I decided to take a look at the historical background of the Zoot Suit Riots after seeing “Zoot Suit” in the Los Angeles Conservancy’s Last Remaining Seats series.
In Part 1, we saw that The Times initially treated the zoot suit as a youthful fad, but the attitude changed once zoot suits were outlawed by the War Production Board to conserve fabric.
In Part 2, Times columnist Timothy Turner provided some more sympathetic insight (zoot-suiters aren’t all criminals and delinquents) that was a surprising counterpoint to the mainstream opinion.
In Part 3, we looked at the events leading up to the Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943.
In Part 4, we found a “zoot zuit orgy” and other news accounts in The Times in early June 1943, until we hit a wall with Joe Dacy Coleman, which is where we pick up now.


This postcard showing the new building of Mullen & Bluett (d. 1969) which became Grodins (d. 1972) has been listed on EBay. And here’s the building as shown on Google map’s street view. Bidding on the postcard starts at 99 cents.

Stanford Avenue and 33rd Street via Google maps’ street view.
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Stanford Avenue and 33rd Street is one of those little pockets of old houses in Los Angeles that looks like it hasn’t changed much since 1934, when two men in their 20s calling themselves “the new Dillingers” killed LAPD Officer Russell A. Leidy in a shootout.
Harry Wilson and Paul McDonald began the evening of July 24, 1934, by holding up a cafe at 5800 S. Broadway. They got $5.
Their next job was a cafe at 3316 S. San Pedro St. They got some money from the cafe owner and backed out of the door, warning the owner and a restaurant patron not to start anything: “We’re the new Dillingers and we’re plenty tough.”
Image: Manhattan c. 1626. Credit: New England Historic Genealogical Society via the New York Times.
SPOTLIGHT
Alison Leigh Cowan takes a look at the history of the Van Dusen family in Sunday’s New York Times.
Andrew Van Dusen learned that he was a 12th-generation descendant of one of Manhattan’s first few hundred settlers, the operator of a windmill where the Dutch ground grain, and he has been collecting anecdotes and artifacts about his sprawling family ever since. Inside his town house on a historic cul-de-sac in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, ancestors gaze down from gilded frames: There is Andrew’s grandmother, Helen Campbell Van Dusen, along with the two men she married — consecutively — Bruce Buick Van Dusen and his older brother Theron. And there is Theron’s grandfather, Charles Theron Van Dusen, who faithfully kept a daily diary on the front lines of the Civil War.
William Yardley, writing in the New York Times, has a feature about Native Americans who renew their cultural traditions with an annual canoe trip.
For the 23rd summer in a row, a growing number of American Indians from tribes scattered across coastal regions of Washington State and British Columbia have climbed into traditionally designed cedar canoes and paddled as many as 40 miles a day, sometimes more, over two or three weeks, camping at a series of reservations until they converge at the home of a host tribe. There, several thousand people welcome them for a week of traditional dancing, singing and celebration.
Kyle Durrie brings her mobile printing presses to Redlands in the Moveable Type project. By Molly Davis in the Redlands Daily Facts.
Weird Al’s appearance tonight at the Grammy Museum is sold out.
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Photo: 1940 Ford Siebert hearse converted to a delivery sedan, $49,000 on Hemmings.com
Queen of the Dead—dateline July 25, 2011
• July 22 saw the death of the first Bond Girl, Linda Christian, 87. Her career was pretty unremarkable; movies like Tarzan and the Mermaids, The Happy Time, Slaves of Babylon, Athena, The VIPs, and Meet Peter Voss. But in 1954, she played Valerie Mathis in a TV adaptation of Casino Royale, making her the first Bond Girl (to Barry Nelson’s James Bond). Christian was married to actors Tyrone Power (from 1949-56) and Edmond Purdom (from 1962-63).
• No one was surprised by the death on July 23 of poor Amy Winehouse, who joined what Kurt Cobain’s mother called “that stupid club,” of rock stars who died at 27. To me, the saddest part of this was her dad, Mitch Winehouse, who was just restarting his own singing career, on his daughter’s coattails. After giving up the show business to raise his family, Mitch was just now cutting his first album, and was appearing at New York’s Blue Note café. He told the Timeslast week, “she said: ‘You know what, Dad? You have to make an album.’ I said, ‘Are you crazy?’ And she said, ‘No, you have a great voice, this is terrific.’ We were thinking about it, and, as is well documented, she went through a very bad period, and we put it on the back burner. Then she got better, and we decided to give it a go.”
• Borders, the 40-year-old book chain, announced on July 18 that it would be closing all 399 stores nationwide, putting 10,700 people out of work. Borders was always kind of the low-end K-Mart of bookstores, but any port in a storm. When I moved to New York 30 years ago, I had Scribner’s, Doubleday, the great Gotham Book Mart to choose from—all gone. Amazon, Barnes and Noble (itself with one foot in the grave) and now e-books have pretty much written the death certificate for bookstores.

OK, does anyone else wonder about the main picture in the Shalikashvili obituary in The Times?
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Photos: Josef Mengele’s notebooks. Credit: Alexander Autographs.
RECOMMENDED
Randy Kennedy of the New York Times catches up with famous/notorious graffiti artist/tagger TAKI 183 at a book signing for “The History of American Graffiti.”
Rex Huppke’s ‘I Just Work Here’ Column in the Chicago Tribune takes a look at the reaction to Chicago’s Marilyn Monroe statue.
ARCHITECTURE
Scott Timberg of the Los Angeles Times visits John Lautner’s Chemosphere home and talks to owner Benedikt Taschen.
Frank Escher, who was brought in as restoration architect, vividly remembers the place’s condition.”I have to give Benedikt credit for seeing past the disrepair and sad state the house had fallen into,” he says. “It looked like a rundown motel. It had been rented out for 10 to 12 years; it was like the ultimate party house.”
In fact, during much of that decade, the place had been on the market. “It was for sale for so long,” says Taschen, “that it was even in a ‘Simpsons’ episode: a house with a for-sale sign.”
BOOKS
David Hackett Fisher reviews Gordon S. Wood’s “The Idea of America” in the New York Times.
Wood’s latest book is a collection of 11 essays, along with an introduction and conclusion, that encompass his entire career. It reveals more of the author than any of his other work and creates the opportunity for an overall assessment of his achievement.
Wood introduces himself with a familiar line from the poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” He celebrates the foxes who flourish in his field, and adds in his modest way, “By contrast, as a historian I fear I am a simple hedgehog. . . . Nearly all of my publications have dealt with the American Revolution and its consequences.”
Writing in the New York Times, Sam Roberts takes a look at Peter Morton Coan’s “Toward a Better Life: America’s Immigrants in Their Own Words.”
NEWS
Alexander Autographs says it sold a collection of journals kept from 1960 to 1975 by Josef Mengele for $300,000. The material was sold to a anonymous Jewish buyer who is “building a private collection for a museum,” according to AP.
A sample of the Mengele material quoted by the auctioneer:
We cannot accept how our ‘natural, Germanic’ religion is being misrepresented. Our Germanic religion was directly connected to nature in which human beings feel logically at home…
The youth movement honored the traditions of our ancestors while remembering our primary cultural values. We had to remember our inner strength, and this was of utmost importance after World War I and the shameful peace that followed. This burden was designed to keep our people in a constant condition of decay. We had to find the deepest sources of German strength to make our restoration possible. We could not expect other people to help us, and we couldn’t rely on religion…What has the Catholic Church done to amend or get rid of the absurd Treaty of Versailles? They had a chance to influence the synods of the Protestant Churches, which make up two thirds of the German people. The new strength had to come from the Germans themselves, and this is exactly where it came from. The youth movement laid the spiritual foundation for the national uprising that was to follow World War I. Later on, the youth movement became part of the great political organization, the Hitlerjugend…We had to liberate Germanic history from Roman and Catholic influences.
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[Correction: An earlier version of this post credited the Mengele notebook photos to Alexander Auctions. The firm is Alexander Autographs.]
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orman Frederick Gagnon looks like an excellent suspect in the unsolved killing of two El Segundo police officers last year.
In an incident quite similar to the El Segundo case, Charles H. May and a female companion (The Times, fortunately, did not identify her) were kidnapped as they left a Lawndale restaurant at 2 a.m. on a Saturday. Gagnon drove them to Crystal Lake, where he pistol-whipped May and raped the woman while bragging that he had killed El Segundo Officers Richard Phillips and Milton Curtis. (Today, we know Gerald F. Mason was the killer). Gagnon was convicted under the Little Lindbergh law and in 1959 was sentenced to prison without the possibility of parole. The Social Security Death Index lists a Norman F. Gagnon, born in 1927, dying March 25, 1997, in Sacramento. Note: I originally wrote this post in 2008. I’m reposting it here. |

The 700 block of South Spring Street via Google maps’ street view.
For years, 743 S. Spring was the home of Levy’s Cafe, but sometime in the early 1920s the address became Hoffman’s. It’s not clear from The Times’ clips as to what occurred. This is what fine dining looked like in downtown Los Angeles c. 1921. This postcard has been listed on EBay. Bidding starts at $9.99.
Image: Levy’s Cafe, Aug. 25, 1915. Credit: Los Angeles Times
The Associated Press has filed a story on the Nixon Library and Museum’s release of more Nixon recordings. Of course, that’s not good enough for the Daily Mirror, so we tracked them down ourselves.
The library has released digital recordings of Dictabelts. If you’re too young to remember, the Dictabelt was a recording device that used a needle to transcribe audio signals into a revolving acetate belt. These were eventually replaced by cassettes and microcassettes.
The audio quality of the Nixon recordings varies from passable to ghastly. I’m not sure why the library hasn’t attempted to at least boost the volume, but it hasn’t.
The recordings are of memos and some phone conversations involving Nixon, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, John Erlichman and others. One tape caught our interest: Erlichman and journalist Robert Novak regarding L. Patrick Gray’s nomination to head the FBI. Unfortunately, the volume is quite low and it’s ultra low-fi, so it would take a lot of tweaking to make it intelligible.

July 22, 1957
Los Angeles
Note: This is a post from 2007.
We’re heading west on Rosecrans Avenue. It’s early Monday morning, a few moments after 1:30 a.m., and the streets are dark. There’s nobody out but a few drunks and some people heading home from the swing shift. It’s all quiet.
Maybe that’s what these two men on the graveyard shift thought.
Let’s pull over here, at Palm Avenue. North of us is the tank farm for the Standard Oil refinery and south of us are new homes. Up ahead is a police car, all lit up. I make it out to be 1957 Ford 300, four-door black and white. The only sound is the police radio. You can see the front passenger door is open. It says: “El Segundo Police.”
Before we get out, I need to say something: We’re going to find two dead–or dying–police officers up there. At home, there’s two widows who kissed their husbands goodbye and hoped they would see them in the morning. There are five kids who are going to grow up without their fathers. It’s a terrible tragedy and I don’t want to minimize that. But it would be another tragedy if one more police officer died because we didn’t learn a lesson from what happened here. These men can’t tell us, so we’ll never know exactly what went on. But let’s see what we can figure out about the shooting by picking it apart.
The officer in the driver’s seat is Milton Gus Curtis, 27. He’s fresh out of the academy in Riverside and has been on the El Segundo department for two months. Curtis has been shot in the upper right chest, right side and right forearm (or right wrist) with three .22-caliber short rounds. Continue reading
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I must say, the L.A. Daily Mirror readers are truly outstanding. My traffic indicates that they prefer old type fonts to nude photos by a slight margin. At left, the Selectric OCR font in all its glory. I think the Web approximation is way too clean and tidy.
Photo 1: Nudes by Witzel for sale on EBay. Credit: For sale on EBay.
Photo 2: IBM Selectric commemorative stamp. Credit: U.S. Postal Service.
Photo 3: IBM Selectric OCR font. Credit: Selectric.org

Photo: Jack Benny, forever 39.
e’re celebrating our 39th day at the L.A. Daily Mirror by taking time to thank the readers for their patience as we unpack boxes and get accustomed to the new place.
Our numbers are slowly coming back, but in many ways we are starting from scratch as far as Google and the other search engines are concerned. Curiously, Facebook has become our No. 1 source of Web traffic while Google was by far the Daily Mirror’s biggest source of traffic at latimes.com, followed by the rest of the search engine mafia and Wikipedia.
As you may have noticed, this incarnation of the Daily Mirror is a bit different than it was at latimes.com. After six years of marching through the daily papers (two with the 1947project and four with The Times) the focus has shifted to broader view. Much of this is because I have far less time for a blog, but I think it needed a change – at least I did. The good news is that now that I’m no longer restricted to Times staffers, I can add new voices on the blog and I am pleased that several members of the brain trust have stepped forward to share their writing. More readers have offered their work and I’m going to look everything over as soon as I come up for air. So many stories, only one Larry Harnisch.
Now it’s time to ask for your suggestions. Do you prefer daily posts from a particular year or something more overarching? What would you like to see?
And thanks for reading. Tell your friends!

This postcard of the new Arroyo Seco Parkway, a name that has been restored after decades of being called the Pasadena Freeway, has been listed on EBay. For more than a year, drivers have had to contend with construction of a concrete divider that replaced metal guardrails installed years ago, so it may come as a surprise that the parkway originally had nothing to keep cars from crossing into oncoming traffic. Highway engineers eventually learned that this was a bad idea, and after long experimentation with guardrails, customarily include center dividers in their plans. Bidding starts at $2.66.

Photo: IBM Selectric commemorative stamp. Credit: U.S. Postal Service
Today’s post on the IBM Selectric got me to thinking about the variety of interchangeable typeballs that were used for fonts. The most memorable was ORATOR, which looked like this: