#genealogy, #history, 7|25|2011

Amsterdam Map

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.

The L.A. Daily Mirror and L.A. Crime Beat lovingly prepared by bots from Twitter feeds at paper.li

Posted in Crime and Courts, Genealogy, History | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Eve Golden: Queen of the Dead

Ford hearse

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.

 

Continue reading →

Posted in Books and Authors, Brain Trust, Eve Golden, Film, Hollywood, Music, Nightclubs, Obituaries, Queen of the Dead | 1 Comment

Photos That Make Us Wonder

July 24, 2011, Shalikashvilli

OK, does anyone else wonder about the main picture in the Shalikashvili obituary in The Times?

Continue reading →

Posted in Obituaries, Photography | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

#architecture, #books, #history, #museums, 7|23|2011 [Updated]

Mengele Notebook, Cover Mengele Notebook

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.

The L.A. Daily Mirror and L.A. Crime Beat lovingly prepared by bots from Twitter feeds by paper.li.

[Correction: An earlier version of this post credited the Mengele notebook photos to Alexander Auctions. The firm is Alexander Autographs.]

Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Books and Authors, History, Immigration, Museums, Religion, World War II | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on #architecture, #books, #history, #museums, 7|23|2011 [Updated]

El Segundo Revisited

1958_0714_gagnon

1958_0714_page Dropcap_n_nash26 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.

Email me

Posted in 1958, Cold Cases, Crime and Courts, Homicide | Tagged , , | Comments Off on El Segundo Revisited

Found on EBay – Hoffman’s Cafe

Hofman's Cafe

South Spring

The 700 block of South Spring Street via Google maps’ street view.

Levy's Cafe, Aug. 25, 1915 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

Posted in Downtown, Food and Drink, Found on EBay, Interior Design | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Found on EBay – Hoffman’s Cafe

Nixon Library Releases New Recordings

Dictabelt EBay 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.

Here they are!

Photo: Dictaphone ad for sale on EBay at $5.99.

Posted in Libraries, Politics, Richard Nixon | Tagged , | Comments Off on Nixon Library Releases New Recordings

Death in El Segundo

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 →

Posted in 1957, Cold Cases, Crime and Courts, Homicide | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

L.A. Daily Mirror’s Discerning Readers

Nude Witzel IBM Selectric Stamp

selectric_font_ocr 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

Posted in Art & Artists, Found on EBay, Photography, Witzel | Tagged , | 4 Comments

The L.A. Daily Mirror Is 39 (Days) Old!

The Horn Blows at Midnight

Photo: Jack Benny,  forever 39. 


dropcap_w_1904e’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!

Posted in 1939 | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

Found on EBay – Arroyo Seco Parkway

Arroyo Seco Parkway

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.

Posted in Found on EBay, Freeways, Transportation | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

For Font Freaks

image7

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:

Continue reading →

Posted in 1961, Art & Artists | Tagged | 10 Comments

#history, #museum, 7|21|2011

Selectric Stamp
Photo: IBM Selectric stamp. Credit: U.S. Postal Service

SPOTLIGHT

Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller reflects on the 50th anniversary of the IBM Selectric typewriter, which is being honored with a commemorative stamp. [Does anyone remember the ORATOR font?]

She writes: Fifty years ago this month, an electric typewriter called the Selectric was introduced by IBM. To celebrate the birth of a device that changed not only business practices but also our ideas of how utilitarian objects can double as eye candy, the United States Postal Service has released a new stamp featuring the Selectric.

And in a bit of symmetry that befits a natty gadget such as the Selectric, the woman who designed the stamp — the aforementioned Derry Noyes — is the daughter of the man who gave the Selectric its captivating contours: Eliot Noyes (1910-1977), celebrated American architect and industrial designer.

Arnie Cooper, writing in the Wall Street Journal, has an update on Afghanistan’s giant Buddhas, which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.

Peace for London’s Pearlies? Alistair MacDonald writes about  it in the Wall Street Journal.

NEWS

A jury in Philadelphia found that the U.S. did not act illegally in seizing gold coins from a woman who said they belonged to her late father. AP via Washington Post.

The 38-acre site of the proposed United States National Slavery Museum is being sold at a tax auction, with more than $215,000 overdue. Kate Taylor in the New York Times.

The Port Huron, Mich., Museum is closing the World War II-era Coast Guard cutter Bramble and offering it for $300,000, according to the Port Huron Times Herald.

Jodie Jacobs, writing in the Chicago Tribune, takes a look at the upcoming Jewish Heritage Day being honored in Europe on Sept. 4.

L.A. Daily Mirror and L.A. Crime Beat, lovingly assembled from Twitter by bots, on paper.li

Posted in 1961, Architecture, History, Museums | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Marion Eisenmann: Artist’s Notebook

Marion Eisenmann, Olvera Street

Olvera Street by Marion Eisenmann, Aug. 8, 2009


Note: I’m reposting artwork that Marion Eisenmann did for the Daily Mirror when it was with the L.A. Times.

To visit the old Plaza is to stand at the crossroads of the city’s past and present — and maybe even its future. I wonder what the preservationists who envisioned “a Mexican street of yesterday in a city of today” — like a Colonial Williamsburg with sombreros and castanets — would think of the crowded sidewalks and live performances with calls of “Viva Mexico!”

Talking about Olvera Street is a bit like the old fable of the blind men describing the elephant. To some, it may be the parade of proud parents with their beautifully dressed little girls in their christening outfits headed for church, or perhaps it’s the teenagers, in elegant quinceanera outfits, posing for pictures. Maybe it’s one of the restaurants, the life-size burro on wheels used in the souvenir photos, people lounging around the bandstand listening to live music, the ringing bells of the pushcart vendors or the booths selling masks, marionettes and miniature guitars. I even found a Frida Kahlo mesh shopping bag for sale at one stall.

Continue reading →

Posted in 2009, Art & Artists, Artist's Notebook, Downtown, Marion Eisenmann | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Marion Eisenmann: Artist’s Notebook

Found on EBay – Nudes by Witzel

Nudes, Witzel

Nudes, Witzel Nudes, Witzel

A set of five nude photos (this is the tamest one) by the Witzel studio has been listed on EBay. Witzel was one of the leading portrait studios in Los Angeles and did many early publicity photos for the theater and films. These are listed as Buy It Now for $975. As with anything on EBay, an item and vendor should be evaluated thoroughly before submitting a bid.

Posted in 1911, Found on EBay, Photography, Witzel | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Found on EBay – Biscailuz Badge

Sheriff's Badge

An example of what is sometimes known as a “Biscailuz badge” has been listed on EBay. These are presentation badges that weren’t intended for deputies, but were only given to celebrities and other notables by Los Angeles County Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz. This one is inscribed to H.S. Grove.

According to the website badgehistory.com Nelson Eddy had one of these badges and all of them apparently had a serial number ending in “A.”

Biscailuz was quite generous with badges and gave them to reporters and photographers in lieu of press passes. When Peter Pitchess became sheriff, he sent deputies to reclaim (almost) all of them. The late Chuck Hillinger of The Times told me that he still had his (he was probably on the road when the officers came for it).

The LAPD was also generous with celebrity badges in the 1930s and solved the problem by adopting the current shield design in the 1940s as part of the reforms under Chief Arthur Hohmann.

This item sold for $325.

Posted in Crime and Courts, Found on EBay, LAPD | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Found on EBay – Biscailuz Badge

Time Traveling With the L.A. Daily Mirror [Updated]

Pier Angeli, Clock

Photo: Pier Angeli and friend with a reminder on Daylight Saving Time, 1958


I decided to import my old lmharnisch blog, devoted mainly to dissecting “The Black Dahlia Files” by Donald “Fake Document” Wolfe. Now there are posts going back to 2005 – with some major gaps. There may also be some copies of posts I did for the 1947project. None of the posts are tagged, so I’ll have to go back and do that manually…. Enjoy!

[Update: Here’s one of my favorites posts from the archives: Steve Hodel’s “Black Dahlia Avenger,” inscribed to James Ellroy, for sale on EBay in 2006. No really!]

Posted in 1947, 2008, 2009, Another Good Story Ruined, Black Dahlia, Books and Authors, Cold Cases, Crime and Courts, Donald Wolfe, Film, History, Hollywood, Homicide, LAPD, Photography | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Found on EBay – Mt. Lowe Railway

Mt. Lowe Car EBay

Postcards and photos of the railway trip to Mt. Lowe, with its hairpin turns around the mountains, are quite common – but a brass model of the car in HO gauge? That’s a new one on me. This intriguing item, with the original box, has been listed on EBay. Bidding starts at $33 but there is a reserve.

Posted in Found on EBay, Streetcars, Transportation | Tagged , | 10 Comments

Coming Tomorrow: Marion Eisenmann

July 3, 2009, City Hall

City Hall, July 3, 2009, by Marion Eisenmann


I’m going to be reposting the artwork Marion Eisenmann did for the Daily Mirror when it was with the L.A. Times. Tomorrow’s sketch will feature Olvera Street. You can contact Marion here.

Posted in 2009, Art & Artists, Artist's Notebook, City Hall, Marion Eisenmann | Tagged , | Comments Off on Coming Tomorrow: Marion Eisenmann

paper.li: Not Ready for Primetime

The bots at paper.li that automatically assemble “newspapers”  from Twitter feeds had an attack of the vapors,  so after two days of nothing I deleted the paper and started over. If you have bookmarked it, replace it with this one.

Posted in History, Museums | Comments Off on paper.li: Not Ready for Primetime