|
|
|
April 30, 1940: “Look for screams from stellar biggies when Los Angeles fire officials start enforcing the new ordinance banning trailer dressing rooms from sound stages,” Jimmie Fidler says. Wot’s this about Italian envoy Dino “The Charmer” Alfieri and a certain Nazi officer’s wife? More on the jump. |
| Los Angeles Times file photo Our mystery guest is Vera Lewis, above, in a photo dated Aug. 27, 1916.
Feb. 12, 1956: Lewis dies at the age of 82.
June 14 1925: Elinor Glyn says Vera Lewis is the reincarnation of Empress Sophia Maria! |
|
|
| Trout season opens – and The Times’ Saturday sports cover features a cartoon by Alex Perez. |
|
April 30, 1960: Caryl Chessman’s long fight to avoid the gas chamber is just about over. On the jump: Dick Clark tells a congressional panel that he never took payola … and Chuck Dressen says, “ Don Drysdale really studies the hitters. You don't have to tell him how to pitch to the hitters. He tells you.” |
|
|
April 30, 1910: I’ve seen lots of peculiar stories in the old papers, but this is the first account I have ever read of cannibals eating missionaries, in this case the Rev. Horatio Hopkins and the Rev. Hector Laurie McPherson of the Presbyterian Polynesian Mission. There’s also a story about white slavery in New York and a violent strike in Mount Vernon, Ill. Quite a news day. On the jump, a wife stabs her neglectful husband in the back with a paring knife during an argument, but he forgives her. It’s only a flesh wound, after all. |
|
|
Sinatra Admirer Undaunted by Threats
Several weeks ago he was playing them, no more and no less than usual, on his programs on station KRHM-FM but suddenly things were different. He was assailed by a deluge of vicious phone calls and mail. What did he mean, playing Sinatra's records? Didn't he know about Sinatra? Some attacked Evans personally. Others threatened picketing and boycott. As always, the threateners were anonymous. The usual identification was "A Loyal American" or "Commie Hater" or "A Patriot," as if those who refused to accept their weird irrelevance were not. The reason, of course, was that Sinatra had hired Albert Maltz to write the screenplay of "The Execution of Private Slovik." Maltz was convicted of contempt of Congress 10 years ago and served a year in jail for refusing to tell a committee if he were a Communist. |
|
|
We Are Told You're Nothing but a Procal
But the unpleasant realization is slowly awakening within me that the first major decision of my journalistic career — after venturing west some dozen years ago — was a wrong one. I decided then I should write for the entertainment of the local folks. Become one of them. Adapt myself. So instead of standing around and gawking at the native sand marveling at their curious mores, I did my level best to blend into the Southern California landscape. I never once let on that I was thunderstruck by the behavior patterns of my new neighbors. Not even in letters home to Mom did I admit that Southern Californians were different than their forefathers east of the Alleghenies. (If I had, she probably would have sent me a bus ticket and made me go home.)
|
| The Wasp is commissioned at Boston Navy Yard. It sank in the Solomon Islands after being torpedoed by the Japanese on Sept. 15, 1942.
|
|
April 29, 1940: “Artie Shaw is making no new friends fast at MGM, where the Missus (Lana Turner) slaves,” Jimmie Fidler says. |
|
|
|
April 29, 1980: Director Sir Alfred Hitchcock dies in his Bel-Air home at the age of 80. On the jump, former Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski calls Ronald Reagan an "extremist" and backs George Bush as the Republican candidate for president. |
|
East 45th Street, via Google maps’ street view.
|
|
April 29, 1910: A mother finds her teenage daughter unconscious and bleeding after being struck in the head, and police question Frank Allen, a “boy of peculiar habits,” who lives next door. "Allen showed many marks of the youthful degenerate," The Times says. "He is fairly tall for his age, narrow through the shoulders. His face is rather thin, and only the ruddy color from work in the open serves to hide the marks of viciousness. The boy's eyes appear very tired, and the lids and corners are wrinkled. His face shows weakness. The under lip is set back considerably from the upper one, and the face recedes abruptly until there is little or no chin, and even this is cleft by a great dimple. The skin is drawn and pimply." The youth (he was apparently 14, although his age varies in stories) was sent to the Preston State School of Industry at Ione until he turned 21. The Times said the victim recovered from her injuries, but name never again appears in the paper. |
| “We Failed Miserably!” |
Time for a Final Note of Appreciation
How's your humility today? Well, suppose we share mine.
I am haunted by a note from a longtime reader, particularly the last sentence: "I have cancer and it will only be a matter of weeks now and I thought that I should tell you that you have made the years a bit more pleasant for me." I don't mean to spoil anyone's day with somber thoughts but here is a cheerful man, awaiting the big adventure, taking a moment of his allotted time to be gracious as he sets his house in order. Vaya con dios, H.C.A.
::
LIFE CAN ALSO be frustrating for bail bondsmen, those liberators of people in jams, who most persons think have "got it made."
|
|
Let's Not Be Too Hasty in Judgments
On my way to work yesterday morning, I developed a sudden dislike for Citrus Municipal Court Judge William M. Martin. And I imagine that, throughout the day, a lot of other people did, too.
At least, they did if they were listening to the same newscasts that I was tuned in on.
Judge Martin, I learned shortly after flicking on my car radio, had sentenced a 102-year-old Baldwin Park man to 30 days in jail for being a bad housekeeper. The centenarian, Charles McKaughan, was guilty of permitting too much rubbish to gather around his small shack — the report continued — and he was slapped with 30 days in spite of his plea that at his age being tidy just wasn't that important anymore.
By the time I reached the office, I had my tirade against the judge and his brand of justice mentally composed, just waiting to be put down on copy paper. Jailing a 102-year-old man for a month because his humble home didn't have the Good Housekeeping seal of approval struck me as a pretty ruthless kind of justice.
I'm afraid Judge Roy Bean is going to have to wait a while longer for a successor.
|
|
|
|
April 28, 1941: “That George Raft-Edward G. Robinson feud has become so venomous that their portable dressing rooms have now been moved to opposite sides of the stage,” Jimmie Fidler says. |
|
|
|
April 28, 1960: The Lakers became the newest member of Los Angeles' growing collection of sports teams, agreeing to move from Minneapolis in time for the 1960-61 season. Owner Robert Short and the Coliseum Commission agreed on playing dates and rent at the Sports Arena, Mal Florence reported in The Times. This was a very different NBA than the current league. Florence reported that the Lakers would play 28 games in the Sports Arena (capacity 14,500) and a few games in the Los Angeles State gym (capacity all of 5,200). That doesn't sound major league at all by current standards. And the Lakers planned to play a few games in San Francisco to ease travel. The Lakers did play two games in San Francisco, as well as two games in Portland (no, not against the Trail Blazers). And they even played the Celtics away from Boston Garden, at Providence R.I. –Keith Thursby |
|
|
|
April 28, 1960: Bill Stout, a fixture of early Los Angeles TV, looks at how Southern California might fare in a nuclear attack. Stout, who died in 1989 at the age of 62, once said that television news, "in some ways is quicker and better than newspapers. The Symbionese Liberation Army shoot-out (in 1974, which followed by a few months the Patty Hearst kidnapping) in South L.A. was a good example. We covered it live. Newspapers covered it later in the day. They had great stuff, but not as good . . . not with the immediate wallop of TV.” On the jump, one employer opens a parking lot just for compact cars. |
|
|
|
April 28, 1910: Rituals of the Alpha Alpha high school sorority, long before the invention of pregaming and beer pong. |
| This Batchelder tile of a cockatoo has been listed on EBay. Although I’ve listed other Batchelder tiles of animals (which featured a rabbit, a deer, a lion and birds), this doesn’t seem to be part of that series. Bidding starts at $69.99. |
| “You Flopped, Not I!” |
The 'Other' Eddie Fisher Finds Life Never Dull
Eddie Fisher, 49, a special effects man at MGM, has accepted with patience and good humor the fact that he is frequently confused with Eddie Fisher, the singer. He gets phone calls intended for singer Eddie, he gets his fan and pan mail.
At the time singer Eddie was breaking up with Debbie Reynolds in favor of Elizabeth Taylor, the other Eddie, who lives on Cattaraugus Ave., in Culver City, received a call from a New York newspaper asking if he had anything to say. When he said singer Eddie wasn't there the reporter asked what the real dope was, confidentially.
::
MOST OF THE CALLS by the way, are from elementary school girls, not teenagers, who ask breathlessly if he is Eddie Fisher. When he says yes they say, "How about singing for us?" There is always a twittering in the background. The reason he gets these calls is simple — his number is listed, singer Eddie's isn't.
|
|
Tragedy in Curtain Call for Sad Mother
For Billy Monk's mother, tragedy took a curtain call last week.
But this time, unlike the others, she was prepared. She had warning — which is more than what she had with her other two sons and her only daughter.
First, it was her daughter, Merna Jean, who died four days after birth. That was in the '30s.
And a few years after that, when Billy was an infant, his brother Walter died, at the age of 3, of tubercular spinal meningitis. That left Billy and Lester.
"They were two fine boys," Billy's mother will tell you now.
But on Oct. 9, 1957, Lester fell off the back of a moving pickup truck, grabbing for a hat which wind had blown off his head. He never regained consciousness.
And now, the tragedy of Billy.
|
| Hey, it’s Betty Rowland! |
|
April 27, 1940: “Judy Garland has penned a book of poems which will be privately published under a nom de plume,” Jimmie Fidler’s staff says. |
|
|
|
April 27, 1980: Sir Alec Guinness says, "I don't know what advantages there are to getting older except perhaps learning to pare down one's performance; learning to cut out the flourishes. That's what I'm always trying to do. Occasionally, I'm afraid, I overdo it and become positively bleak. I hate anyone watching me on a film set for this reason. If I appear to be simply standing there doing nothing, they're always so disappointed." |
For many years as a disc jockey and program director Frank Evans has played the records of Frank Sinatra. He knows and admires him.
I'm not complaining. I'm perfectly happy with my job. I enjoy these daily tete-a-tetes with you.
ladailymirror.com 
