Reminder: Boxie and I will be doing a live “Ask Me Anything” on George Hodel and Steve Hodel on Tuesday, December 16, at 10 a.m. Pacific time on YouTube.
Can’t make the live session? Email me your questions and I’ll answer them! The video will be posted once the session ends so you can watch it later. Remember, this is ask me anything, so please remember to ask questions rather than make comments. Thanks!
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
December 9, 1907
Los Angeles
Mayor Harper has restored E.J. Bowen to his old job in the Fire Department after the rookie police officer was fired for allegedly being a coward—a charge that Bowen, who is Black, blames on racism.
Bowen transferred to the Police Department almost six months ago and his probationary period was almost over when he was accused of cowardice in two instances. In the first incident, Bowen allegedly refused to enter a house where burglars had been reported and in the second, he would not enter an unlocked store until another officer accompanied him.
He gave the following accounts: Two daughters of an attorney named Sturgis [possibly Alonzo A. Sturgis] thought they heard burglars in their home on Chicago Street, which was apparently in Boyle Heights. They ran out of the house and told a streetcar crew, who reported the incident to Bowen. Bowen allegedly was afraid to go into the house unless a streetcar motorman accompanied him, but the officer said he went to the home at once and searched it. The motorman came along on his own initiative, Bowen said.
Cineastes and film lovers of all ages looking for further education into movies and filmmakers during this holiday season have several new books from which to choose in advancing their knowledge of silent film, Pre-Code, and film criticism. All offer a plethora of information and insight as they dissect and define their possibilities and construction. Continue reading
December 8, 1941: The FBI begins rounding up 200 “alien Japanese suspected of subversive activities.”
Several truckloads of Japanese were seen passing through Brea toward Pomona, Brea police reported, and orders to stop all cars bearing Japanese and to confiscate maps and binoculars or radios were given.
Gen. H.H. “Hap” Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps, was hunting quail in Kern County with Donald Douglas, president of Douglas Aircraft, when he learned of the attack from notes dropped by the sheriff’s aviation squadron.
Times artist Charles Owens draws a map of Oahu, showing the location of Pearl Harbor and other military installations.
Tom Treanor, who was killed covering the liberation of France, reflects on his stint as a movie critic and interviews Jack Oakie at his Northridge home in hopes of finding some humor in the U.S. entry into World War II.
“Dumbo” is opening at the Carthay Circle Theatre on Dec. 19.
Jimmie Fidler says: Weeds have so overrun the Clark Gable-Carole Lombard garden they’re offering cuttings of tuberous burdock and night-blooming pigweeds to friends.
This week’s “unsuitable” mystery movie was the 1934 MGM film The Gay Bride, with Carole Lombard, Chester Morris, Zasu Pitts, Leo Carrillo, Nat Pendleton, Sam Hardy and Walter Walker. And get a load of all those fonts crammed into one title. Continue reading
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
December 8, 1907
Los Angeles
I’ll apologize now, for this is an account with more questions than answers; a story of heartbreak and hope without an ending.
The Times features three members of the Schiffman family who are Jewish refugees from Baku, Russia (now part of Azerbaijan): Sigmund, the father; Benjamin, the 15-year-old son, and Emella [or Emelia], the 10-year-old daughter. The Schiffmans have been brought to Los Angeles as part of the Galveston Plan, in which Jews were taken to Galveston, Texas, for dispersal throughout the West because New York was overcrowded.
Note: This is a repost from 2011.
In 1962, I was a seventh-grader at Washington Junior High School in Naperville, Ill. On Dec. 7, Mr. Humbert, our social studies teacher, put aside the regular curriculum to give his young pupils a firsthand account of Pearl Harbor.
Many years later, I contacted Mr. Humbert. He didn’t remember me (I was not a stellar student) but he was thrilled to get a phone call from one of his former charges who wanted to hear once more about Pearl Harbor.
Rene P. Humbert died in 2002 at the age of 81. I was his student in a much more formal era of American life. Male teachers wore coats and ties, and didn’t share much about their personal lives. I don’t even remember him mentioning that his brother’s fighter plane had been shot down in June 1944 over France.
What I learned many years later was that Mr. Humbert joined the Navy at 19, went through all of World War II and was called back for the Korean War. Perhaps one reason he was a little hard on us Baby Boomers in the wealthy suburbs of Chicago was because he didn’t graduate from high school, but got a GED and started college at the age of 31 under the G.I. Bill
Mr. Humbert was on the San Francisco, a heavy cruiser, during the Pearl Harbor attack and the ship was untouched except for shrapnel because the Japanese were concentrating on the larger ships. He was also in the Battles of the Coral Sea, Midway and Guadalcanal. In one battle, Rear Adm. Dan Callaghan and Capt. Cassin Young were killed by a 14-inch shell that hit the San Francisco’s bridge.
What follows is his account. I have edited his brief biography very lightly after scanning a typewritten copy with my optical character recognition software. And I have incorporated portions of his Pearl Harbor account from the Pearl Harbor Survivors website.
Photo 1: Rene Humbert, Washington Junior High, 1964.
Photo 2: Rene Humbert, no date.
December 3, 1941: I have been reading old newspapers for years and very little about Los Angeles history surprises me anymore, but this one amazed me.
To reduce the welfare rolls, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approves paying $100 [$1,441.19 USD 2009] to immigrants to move back to Mexico. Families were to receive $10 a month for 10 months either through the Mexican government or the U.S. consul, The Times said.
[Update, Dec. 5, 2010, 3:57 p.m.: A headline and previous version of this post said payments would be offered to illegal immigrants. Further research in The Times’ clips shows that in 1941, legal and illegal immigrants were apparently eligible for relief (see the above story from March 15, 1941, in which the state Legislature tried to ban welfare to illegal immigrants). However, it appears that payments were to be offered to all immigrants, regardless of legal status.]
The story is on the jump.
Continue reading
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
December 5, 1907
St. Louis
A Los Angeles couple have a novel way of making money: Antonio Thompson and his wife sell their daughter Marie to the Gypsies, then go to court to get her back. According to statements taken in St. Louis, Marie has been sold off several times as a Gypsy princess.
The girl’s father obtained a writ of habeas corpus to get custody of Marie, 16, who was living with “King” Peter Adams, 17, in a local Gypsy encampment, The Times said. Thompson claimed that a Gypsy named Leon Lehan eloped with Marie when she was 12 and sold her to man named Elihi. The father says that as soon as Marie eloped, he and his wife set out after her and have traveled thousands of miles trying to get her back.
Half a century hasn’t dulled the tragedy of these Christmas stories.
Top public relations executives took a long, searching look at themselves and what they referred to as “continuing attacks” on their work at their recent Miami Beach convention and their conclusions are succinctly reported in the four-page PRSA (Public Relations Society of America) Convention News.
In his keynote speech, the new president, Kenneth Youel, said the society’s job primarily was to raise the stature of public relations as a profession.
“The greatest area for accomplishment,” he said, “the great challenge to public relations leadership is this: How can we attract more of the right kind of young men and women into public relations? How can they themselves be prepared for leadership? I have thought about this many times and inevitably I return to the same starting point — people.” Continue reading
Roger (The Terrible) Touhy, prohibition era gangland boss who was released from Illinois State Penitentiary last week, is remembered most for his kidnapping of John (Jake the Barber) Factor. That crime earned him a 99-year sentence back in ’34.
But the Touhy story which melted that one into insignificance happened in 1942. That’s when he and six fellow Statesville inmates practically drove World War II out of the Chicago newspapers by pulling off one of the most implausible prison escapes in penal history.
After smuggling a small arsenal into the pen, Touhy commandeered a prison garbage truck, which he couldn’t get started until some by-standing inmates rocked it back and forth for him. Continue reading
Mickey Cohen is booked on suspicion of murder in the shooting of Jack “the Enforcer” Whalen, along with George Piscitelle and Sandy Hashagen, 18, who was found by The Times at 2284 1/2 Holly Drive. Continue reading
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
December 4, 1911
Clarence Westfall, 22 years old, was taken into custody at San Pedro yesterday afternoon when a boat from San Diego docked. He was arrested for having masqueraded in female attire and was taken to the Central Police Station, where he told a story that nearly resulted in his being liberated. When the police received the report from the station at San Pedro, however, that Westfall, in posing as a woman, had endeavored to be assigned to a woman’s stateroom, he was locked up.
He said he was frequently obsessed with the desire to don women’s clothing, do fancy work and generally “act like a girl.” He had about convinced the detectives that he was a fit subject for alienists to examine when he was recognized as a former prisoner. He was locked up on a charge of vagrancy.
A random discovery too good not to share.
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
December 4, 1907
Arcadia
Charley Chew, the water superintendent on the Lucky Baldwin ranch, had fired two Mexican workers several months ago and one dark night near the Unruh residence, they ambushed him, shooting him in the back. Chew drew his pistol and shot Francisco Ramirez and Miguel Palamoratz in the stomach, then fled.
Badly wounded, Ramirez and Palamoratz struggled to walk about a mile to a friend’s house in a small settlement near the Baldwin store in Santa Anita, leaving a trail of blood along the railway tracks through Baldwin’s vineyard.
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
December 3, 1907
Los Angeles
Officer Patrick Lyons had been on the force for four months when he was shot in the head while trying to arrest two robbers a little after 11 p.m. at Central Avenue and 14th Street.
People v. Feasby (1960) 178 Cal.App.2d 723 [3 Cal.Rptr. 230]
[Crim. No. 6783.Second Dist., Div. Three.
Mar. 9, 1960.]
THE PEOPLE, Respondent, v. GERALD BYRON FEASBY, Appellant.
COUNSEL
Ellery E. Cuff, Public Defender (Los Angeles), Richard S. Buckley and Richard W. Erskine, Deputy Public Defenders, for Appellant. {Page 178 Cal.App.2d 726}
Stanley Mosk, Attorney General, William E. James, Assistant Attorney General, and Jack K. Weber, Deputy Attorney General, for Respondent.
OPINION
VALLEE, J. Continue reading
In the December Ask Me Anything on the Black Dahlia case, I gave an update on my work in progress, Heaven Is Here!
I also discussed: Continue reading
Recommended for your gift lists: Mary Mallory’s latest, First Women of Hollywood.
Available at:
—Book Soup.
And from Amazon.
Lee Shippey sat smiling at a table in the Broadway Department Store yesterday, chatting with friends and autographing copies of his new book, his 11th, “The Luckiest Man Alive.” Lee, a glowing, healthy 76, means himself. The book is autobiographical.
Lee, columnist for The Times for 30 years, now living in Del Mar, writes near the end of his book,
“I have been able to do what I wished to do and live as I wished to live. I have a house full of good books and a world full of friends.
“It is only through our appreciations that we live. Without them we would be mere clods, even if wealthy and powerful clods. The man who can appreciate kindness, courage, faith and beauty is very rich. Continue reading
ladailymirror.com 