1944 in Print — Hollywood News and Gossip by Louella Parsons, September 3, 1944

Sept. 3, 1944, MGM Novel Award

“Green Dolphin Street” wins MGM’s annual novel award. The movie was released in 1947, starring Lana Turner and Van Heflin, directed by Victor Saville with a script by Samson Raphaelson.


Sept. 3, 1944

Louella Parsons is pushed off Page 1 of the Entertainment section by a review of Eugene Ormandy on a three-month conducting tour of Australia. Ormandy is the longtime conductor in Philadelphia, so it makes perfect sense.

Parsons says: Phil Terry, the tall bespectacled young man whose career took a terrific nose dive just before and after his marriage to Joan Crawford, is on the beam again. For no good reason, after Phil made “The Parson of Panamint” a success, he was never able again to get on his starring feet. He was put in “Sweater Girl,” a B picture and almost crowded out of “Wake Island,” an “AA.” In fact, you couldn’t see him unless you looked quickly.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer via Fultonhistory.com.

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September 3, 1943: Los Angeles Tattoo Shops

tattoo_last_supper_ebay

This is one of my favorite discoveries from the city archives, a description of tattoo shops in Los Angeles by an anonymous citizen.

Los Angeles City Council File 15670

September 2, 1943

Dear Sir,

1943_september_03_tattoosI recently made an investigation of the tattoo shops here and the persons who operate them, for a friend of mine, whose young son, age 13, had been marked up like a circus freak by a so called (professor) Freaser.

Of course I knew nothing and cared less about this business until I saw the filthy conditions under which they operate, which are just about as filthy and unsanitary as the restaurants in which I am compelled to eat. Of course I know that no one in the city or state govt. is interested in their sanitation or the filth of the foods they serve. As long as they pay their license they can poison any one they want to and get away with it.

Sept. 3, 1943: Councilman Ira McDonald’s attempt to regulate tattoo shops brought this anonymous response, which I unearthed in the city archives.

Photo: Undated postcard showing Artoria, tattooed by C.W. Gibbons, Los Angeles

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September 3, 1941: Widow Accused of Killing Ft. MacArthur Officer

Sept. 3, 1941, Comics
Sept. 3, 1941, Marie Tucker
September 3, 1941: OK, Maj. Tucker,  let me get this straight.

You and your wife, Marie, got home from  a party, where both of you had been drinking. She was in the bedroom and you were in the kitchen making yourself a ham sandwich and slicing the bread — or the ham — which you were holding against your abdomen.

The knife slipped and you realized you stabbed yourself. And you thought you pulled the knife out — only you hadn’t got it out all the way.

Then you fell against a kitchen drawer and the knife went back in a second time.

So you fell to the floor, reached for the knife — and rolled over onto it.

Well, if that’s your story. Only your wife says there was no ham or bread in the house. She also says she “might have done it,” but was too drunk to remember exactly what happened.


Marie Tucker was indicted in the killing of Maj. George A. Tucker, battalion commander at Ft. MacArthur, and released on $5,000 bail. The charges were dropped in 1947 because the witnesses, all military officers, were scattered around the world, The Times said.

Also on the jump: Lee Shippey and Tom Treanor.

Leatrice Gilbert, 17-year-old daughter of Leatrice Joy and the late John Gilbert, does not want the screen career mamma wants for her, Jimmie Fidler says.

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September 3, 1907: A Oration for Labor Day

Note: This is an encore post from 2006.

September 3, 1907
Editorial, Los Angeles Times

“I have no patience with the prejudices which exist between alleged classes when the classes themselves do not exist. There is no reason for hostility between employer and employee, between capitalist and wage earner. A condition of class hatred, such as has developed in Colorado, is a curse to this country.”

The utterer of these excellent sentiments was W.R. Hearst, orator of the day at the Jamestown Exposition yesterday—whose string of yellow socialistic newspapers and magazines has done more than any other agency existing to foment prejudice and class hatred and arouse reasonless hostility between capitalists and wage earners.

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September 2, 1959: Paul V. Coates — Confidential File

September 2, 1959: E.A. Gillmann provides song to the forlorn mob of Pershing Square, hauling a piano and Gospel songbooks in a 1941 Chrysler and, with help, wheeling the piano into the square, Paul Coates says.

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Black Dahlia: Ask Me Anything, September 2025

In the September 2025 Ask Me Anything on the Black Dahlia case, I talk about my work in progress, Heaven Is HERE!

In addition to the absurdity of the “Black Dahlia edition” of “Clue” and the infamous list of 22 suspects, I discussed:
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September 2, 1947: Miss Muscle Beach of 1947

L.A. Times, 1947, Miss Muscle Beach

image

Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project.

Muscle Beach began in the early 1930s as a program of the Federal Works Progress Administration, part of the government’s effort to recover from the Great Depression. It was later taken over by the Santa Monica Recreation Department.

Although already well-established, Muscle Beach was first mentioned in The Times in 1946, when a human pyramid collapsed and the young woman at the top suffered a dislocated shoulder.

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1944 in Print — Hollywood News and Gossip by Louella Parsons, September 2, 1944

Sept. 2, 1944, comics

September 2, 1944

Danton Walker (who turns out to have been Alexander Woollcott’s secretary for a couple of years), says: Several magazines are racing to put out German editions which would be the first published works to give occupied Germany the truth in the news …

Louella Parsons says: The dynamic and resourceful Mike Todd unearthed an unpublished score by Victor Herbert and kept it under wraps for over a year. He refused $350,000 for it because he believed he had something special. And this is what happens. He has signed Jeannette MacDonald to star in the operetta, which he says will be his greatest producing venture.

She reports for rehearsals in New York Jan. 1, and opens in Boston early in February. That gives Jeanette a very full schedule, with her three grand opera programs in Chicago and her 10 concert and solo appearances with the Cincinnati Symphony.

[I am unable to find any trace of this production being staged — lrh].

From the Philadelphia Inquirer via Fultonhistory.com.

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September 2, 1910: Police Quell Labor Riot Over Body of Ironworker Killed at Alexandria Hotel

 
September 2, 1910, the Herald publishes its version of the incident.
September 2, 1910: Louis Jeffries, a Baker Iron Works employee, is crushed by a steel girder during construction of the Alexandra Hotel Annex. Workers carrying his body to an ambulance on Spring Street are assaulted by union supporters who are picketing the building.”Around the still warm body of the accident victim the frenzied ruffians swarmed. Vile invectives were hurled at the peaceable workmen who were trying to protect the corpse, and even the dead was not spared,” The Times said.

The Herald didn’t devote as much space to the story but it certainly depicted the violence that erupted. This incident is often cited in later stories about The Times bombing, showing the acute tensions between the labor and open shop factions.

The next day, the Herald published an editorial about the incident. Notice how much more moderate it is than The Times and actually supports workers’ right to organize. Nonetheless, it also condemns labor violence.

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September 1, 1959: Paul V. Coates — Confidential File

September 1, 1959: Paul Coates tells the story of Jean Elizabeth Wood, 26, an attractive young woman wearing a black party dress who stood in the middle of a darkened desert highway and refused to move out of the way of an oncoming truck.

Three Los Angeles-area men admitted leaving Wood by a desert highway because she was drunk and obnoxious, but went back to get her. Just as they arrived, she was run down by the truck.

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September 1, 1949: L.A. Warned on Water

September 1, 1949: Surrender of Reds Near, Cover of Los Angeles MirrorSept. 1, 1949: The early days of the Mirror, when it was a tabloid.


I thought it would be fun to dip into the 1949 editions of the Mirror, if only briefly. At that time, Paul Coates was mostly covering nightclubs and had yet to become the columnist we know from the 1950s. I don’t plan to run many of these columns because they are fairly dated, but I figured a week’s worth would offer an interesting insight on a writer in progress.
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September 1, 1947: 1,000 World War II Veterans Now in LAPD Uniforms

Sept. 1, 1947, L.A. Times, LAPD

L.A. Times, Sept. 1, 1947, LAPD

Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project.

They are building a new, young, military Police Department for Los Angeles these days with the men who helped to win the war on foreign battlefields and in the sky making up its backbone.

Already there are more than 1,000 new police officers who once were G.I.’s An additional 1,175 are authorized by the City Council.

“We’re going to have a young and strong Police Department,” Joseph F. Reed, assistant chief of police, said yesterday, “but it will take us at least five years to make professional career officers of the same caliber as the older and more experienced men who gradually are attaining retirement age.”

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Schaber’s Cafeteria and Einar Petersen

schaber_cafeteria

This remarkable postcard postmarked 1941 of Schaber’s Cafeteria at 620 S. Broadway, showing an Einar Petersen mural,  has been listed on EBay at Buy It Now for $6.99.


Note: This is an encore post from 2012.

The Schaber Cafeteria at 620 S. Broadway was built in 1928 by the Schaber Cafeteria Co. (Alfred T. Schaber, president) on the site of Platt Music Co. with an adjoining See’s Candy at 622 S. Broadway and a Bellin’s Tie Shop at 618 S. Broadway. The cafeteria could serve 10,000 people a day, The Times said.


Hollywood Heights: Mary Mallory on Einar Petersen

620 S. Broadway
620 S. Broadway as shown by Google Street View.

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September 1, 1941: Jimmie Fidler in Hollywood

Sept. 1, 1941, Traffic

Sept. 1, 1941, Comics
September 1, 1941: I thought it would be interesting to check in with our friends in 1941, since Pearl Harbor is only three months away.

Times editorial cartoonist Bruce Russell’s Labor Day drawing says that it’s unpatriotic to strike in these uncertain days.

Lee Shippey writes about Donoho Hall, technical advisor on “Sergeant York,” who says “the problem of the 5 million uneducated hillbillies in the South should be more America’s problem than any foreign missions.”

Tom Treanor on the French army, citing RAF Col. Charles Sweeny: “Months after the war had begun, in fact in the spring just before the blitz, French regiments all over the front were heated up over an inter-regimental competition — to see who could grow the prize flower garden.”

Lunched today with an exhibitor friend who cried into every dish, from soup to dessert, over MGM’s reported decision to discontinue the “Maisie” series, Jimmie Fidler says.

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Movieland Mystery Photo – Silent Version (Updated + + + +)

Main Title: Lettering on a black background

This week’s silent mystery movie was the 1915 film Double Trouble, with Douglas Fairbanks, Richard Cummings, Margery Wilson, Gladys Brockwell, Olga Grey, Tom Kennedy, Lillian Langdon, Don Likes, William Lowery, Billy Quirk, Monroe Salisbury, Charles Stevens, Mary Thurman and Kate Toncray. Continue reading

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Movieland Mystery Photo – Talkie Version (Updated + + + +)

Main title: Lettering over artwork of forest

This week’s mystery movie was the 1933 film Scarlet River, with Tom Keene, Dorothy Wilson, Creighton Chaney, Betty Furness, Rosco Ates, Edgar Kennedy, Billy Butts, Hooper Atchley, Jack Raymond, James Mason and Yakima Canutt.  Continue reading

Posted in 1933, Film, Hollywood, Mystery Photo | Tagged , , , , , , , | 33 Comments

August 31, 1959: Paul V. Coates — Confidential File

August 13, 1959: Paul Coates has the story of a man who submitted lyrics titled "Cold Campfire Ashes" to one of those songwriting ads you see in the pulp magazines.

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August 31, 1958: Woman kills husband as children sleep, Giants win over Dodgers

August 31, 1958: Lillian Kella admits stabbing her husband to death after a swim party. Woman with short hair in sleeveless top, blood on her toreador pants. Lillian loved Ed. She loved him even though he beat her. She loved him even though he was on probation for beating her. And she loved him even when he lay dying on the kitchen floor after she stabbed him in the heart. “I didn’t want him to hurt me anymore,” she said.

On the night of the killing, Lillian and Ed had hired a babysitter for their two children and gone to a party in Sierra Madre. By the time they left, both had been drinking heavily.
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August 31, 1947: Herbert Kline Shoots ‘Palestine’s First Feature Film Drama’

Aug. 31, 1947, L.A. Times
Note: My original post from 2005 on the 1947project was essentially a transcription of the 1947 L.A. Times story. Kline died in 1999. The film was released as “Beit Avi.” More on the film here.

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August 31, 1907: The Year in Liquor — 20 Gallons of Beer for Every Man, Woman and Child in U.S.


Note: This is an encore post from 2006.

Aug. 31, 1907
Los Angeles

The ugly statistics should dishearten even the most ardent temperance worker. According to federal tax data for the last fiscal year, distillers produced 20 gallons of beer and 1.4 gallons of whiskey for every man, woman and child in America, a 5% increase and 8% increase respectively over 1906.

Cigar, cigarette and snuff production also showed similar increases. “The country being prosperous, cigar smoking grew at an amazing pace,” The Times said. Referring to cigars weighing more than 3 pounds per thousand, The Times said: “The public smoked about a billion and a third more of these cigars in the fiscal year just ended than it did the year before.”

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