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March 29, 1961: Brendan Behan’s play “The Hostage” is opening in Los Angeles and Matt Weinstock has a few lines about the playwright … The gagged-up menu at the Writers Guild awards dinner included "Great Impasta," "Aspartacus with Hollandaise Sauce," "Pie Alamo" and "Elmer Gan Tea." |
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March 29, 1961: A fellow gives up his charitable pastime after going for a walk in Beverly Hills. Irving Iscoe used to carry a pocket full of pennies when he went for a walk and would feed a few to parking meters that had expired to save drivers from getting tickets. He left a mimeographed note on the windshields, telling the drivers what he had done and telling them that they could repay him by donating to the Foundation for the Junior Blind. After a jaunt in Beverly Hills, however, he was warned by the police that he was soliciting without a license, Paul Coates says. |
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March 29, 1941: Jan Valtin (Richard Krebs), the author of the controversial book “Out of the Night,” is arrested on charges of being an illegal immigrant. I’m almost 100 pages into “Out of the Night” and it’s quite an interesting book. I’ll have more to say about it later but definitely put it on your Zombie Reading List. There's an item on Ozro W. Childs, for whom Childs Avenue is named…. and Tom Treanor has an encounter with Thomas Mann when introducing him at a speaking engagement. HOLLYWOOD AFTER DARK: Olivia De Havilland and Jock Whitney, surprise twosome at the Beverly Tropics, pondering how to oblige a fan who requested their autographs on a coconut shell. Also on the jump: New midnite show at the Follies! |
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March 29, 1961: Jim Murray on Otto Graham: Crazy Otto is still bucking a trend. Where Bob Waterfield, Norm Van Brocklin and other of his contemporaries in the NFL have chosen glamour jobs in the pro game, Crazy Otto has picked the head coaching job and athletic directorship at the Coast Guard Academy, a football power about on a par with the Harvard Frosh, which is to say they could give Glendale High a good game. |
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March 29, 1961: College as a finishing school that makes women the perfect accessory for their ambitious, upwardly mobile husbands – but many can’t take the pressure. ALSO |
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March 28, 1961: Matt Weinstock has the story of a young fellow getting the best of a police officer who cited him for having a car that was too close to the ground. Also on the jump, a column by Al Capp on the Kennedy administration. |
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March 28, 1961: Memphis Harry Lee Ward, one of Paul Coates’ regular correspondents, sends a copy of “Highways of Literature.” Coates pages through the book and finds some interesting items…. |
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March 28, 1941 — Lee Shippey has a letter from England: “My daughter is nursing at a hospital. Among others they are caring for wounded German airmen. But that didn't prevent six bombs being aimed at the hospital. One fell on the front steps as a little boy was delivering the local paper. He was carried into the hospital with a broken spine and died soon. But now another little lad is delivering the papers. Not only the men and women but the children are carrying on." Remember to kid Johnny Weismuller about golfing in his bare tootsies to harden his feet for the new "Tarzan" film, Jimmie Fidler says. |
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[Update: Yes, this is Portland Hoffa, the wife of radio comedian Fred Allen. I discovered Allen’s radio shows after his death in 1956 and always wondered about the women named Portland Hoffa. In scanning these pictures, I came across news photos that were taken after Allen collapsed and died while out for a walk in New York. He was 62.] Nobody identified last weekend’s mystery lady and these are all the photos I had. What to do? Answer: Mystery companion!] Here’s our weekend mystery lady…. There’s a new photo on the jump! |
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March 28, 1961: Here’s a lesson from the great Jim Murray in how to take down a major sports figure (Sonny Liston) with style and class: But, the story goes, it was the cop who asked for it, went out of his way to make trouble for Sonny and called him names. All I can say is, if you ever got a good look at Sonny Liston, you would have to conclude this cop is one of the all-time brave me. To pick an argument with Sonny Liston on a St. Louis street corner at night with anything less than a Gatling gun is a new form of suicide. Sonny even had a friend — and two girls — with him. The cop is lucky he only lost a leg. In fact, I'm glad Sonny can't read this. |
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| “Vamonos Con Pancho Villa!” (“Let’s Go With Pancho Villa!”) is the surprisingly dark, roughly hewn story of six friends who call themselves “the lions of San Pablo” and join the Mexican Revolution as much for the adventure as the idealism. “Vamonos” is a study in the progression from loyalty to blind obedience and from courage to being tragically foolhardy.
(At right, writer Rafael F. Muñoz plays Martín Espinosa, who is shot to death while lighting bombs and throwing them at a fort.) |
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March 28, 1961: A group of young women asked USC sociology professor James A. Peterson to have lunch with them while he was lecturing on a local campus. "We are all graduating at the end of this semester and none of us is engaged or even pinned,” they said. “We know we will never get married now and we want your advice to help us adjust to a life of being single." At first, he thought they were kidding, but "they were dead serious,” he said. Emphasizing the confusion facing young women, Peterson said: "Are they supposed to be career women, competing with men, clawing their way to the top in business? Or are they just supposed to be available when needed?" ALSO |
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March 27, 1961: Matt Weinstock has a story about a penniless drunk who gets a bottle from a liquor store in the era when credit cards were a novelty. His father used to beat his mother up so bad she would land in the hospital. He has a brother who slaps his wife around too. Is this a sickness that runs in their family? I never thought I could put up with the beatings I have taken (and over absolutely nothing). I don't want to raise our three children in a fatherless home, but what is a wife supposed to do when she is afraid to open her mouth for fear she'll get her teeth knocked out? |
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March 27, 1961: Paul Coates has the story of two students who went on vacation to Mexico and came back with a 12-year-old orphan. |
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March 27, 1941: I'm delighted to see that four speakers at a Japanese meeting here declared the Japanese people to be loyal to America. The Rev. Kengo Tajina declared that his son, though born in Japan, was "120 percent American" because this country had given him education, privileges and opportunity, Lee Shippey says. Tom Treanor, who died covering World War II for The Times, writes about the concentration camps in Free France and the challenges that an aid group has in getting help for refugees. "The job is all the more difficult because everybody has had just about enough of refugee and concentration camp problems. People shrink from them now. Or are we misjudging you?" Vic Mature was robbed twice in a week in New York, losing the ruby and gold cufflinks Lana gave him, Jimmie Fidler says. |
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March 27, 1961: Philip Toll Hill Jr., the Santa Monican who won the Sebring sports car endurance race over the weekend for the third time, is a bachelor and a wiry, nervous, cold intellectual type who reads 10-pound books and plays the kind of music on his stereo set that even Stravinsky never heard of, Jim Murray says. |
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March 27, 1961: Parts of this series on young women are patronizing and naive, and perhaps reflect the first tremors of what was called the Generation Gap. Some of the attitudes about college being a marriage factory for young women are fairly musty – although certainly true in the 1940s and ’50s. "She wants to go to college because it will make her a more interesting person and enable her to keep up with her husband — a college-educated husband, of course." Still I wonder if the daughters of some of these women have any better idea of where they are headed: One mother, whose daughter begins college next year, said: "They look and act so grown up in so many ways and yet they don't really know what they want to do. And you know, it's sometimes very difficult to help and advise them. You look and think, now what did mother do in similar circumstances? And then you realize those problems never existed in mother's time.” And a young woman says: "I hate being called a teenager. It's a horrible, nasty, talking down to you word. If only my mother would listen to me sometimes when I want to talk about something instead of saying 'yes dear, no dear.' "
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This sun dress from the Collegienne department at Bullock’s Wilshire has been listed on EBay. Bidding starts at $8, but there is a reserve. |
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March 26, 1941: Tom Treanor wonders why women in defense plants are only being given office jobs, and he expects that to change before the year is out. Titles of Robert Montgomery's next two pictures are worth a chuckle: "Unfinished Business" and "Heaven Can Wait," Jimmie Fidler says. |
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July 13, 1984– The Times’ Karen Tumulty profiles the Democratic vice presidential candidate: “Geraldine A. Ferraro likes to refer to herself as ‘a housewife from Queens,’ the conservative, blue-collar borough of New York where the television show "All in the Family was set." But if it's Archie Bunker's district that she represents in Congress, her supporters say, it was the big-hearted Edith Bunkers of her district who elected her." |
