Paul V. Coates — Confidential File, Aug. 8, 1959

Posted on August 8, 2025 by lmharnisch

Confidential File

Mash Notes and Comments

(Press Release) “COOK’S MUSICAL NOTES, by Ira Cook:

“If you’re statistically-minded about your music, just tune to the Ira Cook Show on KMPC, and we’ll keep you posted on the progress of the never ending parade of platters.

“To date, I have received just over 3,000 45-speed records and 660 albums.

“Now, just for fun, let’s see what we can do with these figures . . .

“If I had started stacking up my 45-speed records on Jan. 1, 1959, I would have, today, a stack 20 feet high!” . . .(signed) Publicity Department, KMPC, Hollywood.
— Well, Ira, there’s no use crying over spilt milk.

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L.A. Welcomes Harbor Freeway Extension With Four-Block Traffic Jam

Posted on August 8, 2025 by lmharnisch

Aug. 8, 1953: An extension of the Harbor Freeway carrying traffic into downtown Los Angeles opens — and is jammed immediately. Traffic engineers say the backup was caused by the timing of the signals at 6th Street and Figueroa.

Movie critics don’t like the current crop of 3-D films, the latest opus being “The Stranger Wore a Gun.”

A stunning example of racial stereotyping in the comics

Benjamin Ward Tims Jr., a 22-year-old Marine from Long Beach Naval Station, thought he would rob a liquor store at 3540 Santa Barbara Ave. (now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard).

About 10:30 p.m., while his girlfriend, Sue Ann Cook, 22, waited in the getaway car, Tims entered the store, wearing a brown tweed jacket, yellow T-shirt, white gloves and a straw hat.

Carl Baggett, 23, and his wife, Virginia, 21, who bought the liquor store in January, were watching TV in the rear of the building when Tims entered. Virginia nudged her husband because she thought Tims looked suspicious. They had been robbed of $268 the previous day and were taking extra precautions.

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Posted in 1953, African Americans, Comics, Film, Freeways, Hollywood, LAPD, Transportation | Tagged 1953, African Americans, comics, film, hollywood, lapd | Comments Off

Aug. 8, 1947: Two Years of Peace Haven’t Healed Wounds of World War II

Posted on August 8, 2025 by lmharnisch

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

The Times runs a picture page, taking stock of changes since the end of the war. In Nijmegen, Holland, townspeople adopt the graves of men from the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions who died taking Nijmegen Bridge.

In Essen, Germany, mothers struggle to feed their children one meal a day. At the current rate, it will take 130 years to rebuild Essen, The Times says. Elsewhere, women at the Dachau war trials hide their faces from news photographers.

On Corregidor, the jungle is overgrowing military emplacements. “The rock-strewn tunnels still hold bones of Americans,” The Times says.

And then there’s Paris, where Christian Dior is unveiling what will become known as his “New Look,” creating a terrible scandal not only because his creations use so much fabric—but because his model’s dress is unbuttoned to the waist, revealing a pink brassiere.

“The audience of sophisticates—buyers and fashion writers, many from the United States—gasped. Unbelievers, they thought the mannequin had forgotten to button up. But she tossed her head and swung slowly around.”

“The men like it, you know,” a Dior saleswoman whispered to the dubious.

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1944 in Print — Hollywood News and Gossip by Louella Parsons, Aug. 8, 1944.

Posted on August 8, 2025 by lmharnisch

Aug. 8, 1944

If the Indians ever pick out a tribe name for Joyce Reynolds it should be “Little Miss Sittin’ Pretty.” Not only is Joyce zooming to fame, but she is by way of becoming the richest junior miss in pictures. The Reynolds girl, now 19, inherited the $200,000 estate of her aunt and bachelor uncle, Belle and Fred Reynolds, and she comes into control of the money when she is 21. As though that weren’t enough of a nest egg for such a young girl, she will get the Texas oil properties of her late father when she is 24.

But Joyce is getting 10 times as much of a thrill out of her good fortune at Warners as from her cash fortune. She has two terrific pictures coming up, “Janie,” which is being released right away, and the well-touted “Junior Miss,” for which Jack Warner paid a small fortune.

Clark Gable has never looked as handsome as he does now with the little touch of gray in his hair. We played gin rummy the other evening, Clark, Kay Williams, Virginia Zanuck and myself, and he told me how interested he is in doing “Lucky Baldwin.” He knows the story of California’s fabulously wealthy character so well he could write a book himself. “Who told you so much?” I asked. He said, “Horace McCoy, who is writing the screenplay.” This is the first time I felt Clark has shown interest in returning to the screen. He goes to Washington with his Army film before he actually gets started at MGM.

LEO: Cheerful outlook for ambitious, venturesome Leo, especially if you take cognizance of practical angles and necessary details. Private and outside interests rate.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer via Fultonhistory.com

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Posted in 1944, Columnists, Comics, Film, Hollywood, World War II | Tagged 1944, comics, film, hollywood, Louella, World War II | Comments Off

Aug. 7, 1947: Marriage of Elizabeth Sheedy to Timothy Doheny a Highlight of Social Season

Posted on August 7, 2025 by lmharnisch

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

BY CHRISTY FOX

Outstanding on the summer bridal calendar was the wedding yesterday of Elizabeth Sheedy, daughter of Mrs. Martin Sheedy and Frank Ainsworth Sheedy, to Timothy Michael Doheny, son of Mrs. Leigh M. Battson of Beverly Hills and the late Edward Laurence Doheny Jr. The ceremony took place at 4:30 p.m. in All Saints Episcopal Church, Beverly Hills.

Rev. Herbert J. Smith officiated in the presence of assembled friends and relatives. The church was beautifully decorated in all-white flowers with candles and clusters of gardenias marking the aisle and gardenias and dahlias at the altar. A reception followed at Los Angeles Country Club where bridal white flowers were used similarly.

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Posted in 1947, Obituaries | Tagged #weddings, 1947, Elizabeth Sheedy, obituaries, Timothy Doheny | Comments Off

Matt Weinstock, Aug. 7, 1959

Posted on August 7, 2025 by lmharnisch

Disturbed Jalopy

A tired old car died suddenly Tuesday while stopped for the signal on Olympic Blvd. at Georgia St. It was first in line in the center lane with the blinkers flashing for a left turn. The driver tried to start it but the engine wouldn’t catch.

Meanwhile, those backed up behind were becoming impatient. Of course, the driver immediately behind made no offer of a shove. This simply isn’t done, except by drivers of other old cars. And so the disgusted driver got out and pushed the weary old bus to the
curb, miraculously avoiding being clobbered by cars approaching in the other lanes.

He let it get its breath and after a while, with considerable wear and tear on the battery, it started. It has been running since. Continue reading →

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Paul V. Coates — Confidential File, Aug. 7, 1959

Posted on August 7, 2025 by lmharnisch

Confidential File

This May Make You Really Flip Fedora

One of the more humiliating aspects of my personality is that I am hopelessly under the influence of advertising slogans.

The persuasive power of Madison Avenue guides my destiny and shatters my ego.

And that’s the way it’s been since my tenderest years.

I felt, for example, that I suffered from the creeping darkness of 5 O’clock Shadow years before I was even ready for my first shave.

When research scientists at the Listerine Laboratories announced to the world that they had discovered a brand new social disease called Halitosis, it suddenly dawned on me that girls were always friendly at first but when the evening was over they never asked me for another date.

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1944 in Print — Hollywood News and Gossip by Louella Parsons, Aug. 7, 1944

Posted on August 7, 2025 by lmharnisch

Aug. 7, 1944

The honeymoon is over when the bride has to go back to work. At least, that is what Gail Patrick laughingly told me when I talked with her on the telephone. She got back in Hollywood to report for a top role in “Brewster’s Millions” yesterday. The picture gets underway a week from Monday with Dennis O’Keefe and funnyman Garry Moore, and while Gail likes her role and is excited about making the comedy you can’t listen to her five minutes without realizing her heart is somewhere “down South” with a Lt. Arnold White.

LEO: Some A.M. benefic influences, that’s about all today. Press to clean up urgent items, bringing all your native resources into play. This campaign should help you click.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer via Fultonhistory.com.

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Posted in 1944, Columnists, Comics, Film, Hollywood, World War II | Tagged 1944, comics, film, hollywood, Louella Parsons, World War II | 2 Comments

1944 in Print — Life Magazine, Aug. 7, 1944

Posted on August 7, 2025 by lmharnisch

Geraldine Fitzgerald was born in Dublin, Ireland, and is a product of that city’s famous Gate Theatre. Her initial appearance on Broadway in Shaw’s “Heartbreak House” brought offers from all major Hollywood studios. Now under contract to Warner Bros., she is currently appearing in 20th Century-Fox’s lavish $5-million production of “Wilson.” As the second Mrs. Wilson, she handles with skill the role of a mature and dignified first lady.

Aug. 7, 1944

Geraldine Fitzgerald is the cover photo as Life features the rarely seen movie “Wilson.”

Lonnie Smith, a Houston dentist, casts a ballot after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that African Americans could not be barred from voting in Texas Democratic primaries.

Life reports on the unsuccessful July 20 bomb plot to kill Adolf Hitler.

This week’s photo essay by photographer Ralph Crane shows various techniques of making movies. Above, a set of what is identified as Warner Bros.’ remake of “The Petrified Forest.” Presumably this is “Escape in the Desert.”

From Google Books.

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Posted in 1944, Film, Hollywood, Photography, World War II | Tagged 1944, film, hollywood, photography, World War II | Comments Off

Aug. 7, 1907: Too Late for Wife to Repent Marriage to Abusive Husband, Judge Rules

Posted on August 7, 2025 by lmharnisch

Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
Aug. 7, 1907
Los Angeles

He swore at her and told her to go to hell. He rarely worked and only helped her run their boarding house when he felt like it. She hid all the butcher knives to keep him from killing her and their little girl. She hid his pistol in a bag of rags and sold it. She threw his razor down between two houses.

Finally, she sought a divorce after he came home drunk Feb. 22, 1907, and began hammering on the doors, threatening to break them down, and promising to kill her and their daughter, who had sought refuge with one of the lodgers in their boarding house.

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Posted in 1907, Black Dahlia, Books and Authors, Crime and Courts, Streetcars | Tagged 1907, crime and courts, divorce, domestic violence | Comments Off

Matt Weinstock, Aug. 6, 1959

Posted on August 6, 2025 by lmharnisch

Of Men and Machines

Man’s dependence on mechanical devices was chaotically demonstrated again the other day in a huge market in San Fernando Valley.

A motorist rammed into a power pole outside the store, disrupting the electricity inside. Suddenly the customers were groping around in semidarkness, grabbing cabbages when they wanted lettuces.

Amid frantic phoning to get the power restored, a few crank handles were found to operate the registers manually. The rest of the cashiers had to get back to basic pencil-and-paper arithmetic.

All in all, it was a harrowing reminder that life without juice is not sweet.

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Paul V. Coates — Confidential File, Aug. 6, 1959

Posted on August 6, 2025 by lmharnisch

Confidential File

Here Is How Stupid One Can Easily Get

An old “fad” is making a comeback among Southern California teen-agers.

It’s a seemingly harmless kick, but unless the kids are wised up, and fast, tragedy could very easily be the result.

The fad — inhaling gasoline fumes and fumes from glue-soaked rags — sounds ridiculously innocuous. But it isn’t.

It can be as fatal as Russian roulette.

Just how widespread it has become, I don’t know.

But I do know that during the last week I’ve received a few calls with the information that the kids are at it again.

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Posted in Columnists, Paul Coates | 1 Comment

Aug. 6, 1947: Asian Americans Sue Over Deed Restrictions Forcing Them Out of White Neighborhoods

Posted on August 6, 2025 by lmharnisch

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

Petitions were filed in the Supreme Court of California here yesterday seeking to restrain the Superior Court from hearing injunction suits against two American-Orientals to restrain them from continuing to occupy their present homes.

The petitioners are Tom D. Amer, Chinese-American citizen and war veteran, who lives with his family at 127 W. 56th St., and Yin Kim, also a veteran, who is of Korean descent and who lives at 1201 S. Gramercy Place.

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1944 in Print — Hollywood News and Gossip by Louella Parsons, Aug. 6, 1944

Posted on August 6, 2025 by lmharnisch

Aug. 6, 1944

Jennifer Jones is a strange, restrained, shy girl with little of the small talk and frivolous comments on life that characterize the average young woman of her years. Talking to her, you get the impression she is telling you just what she wants you to know and not one thing more. She isn’t given to early confidences and you have to know her well to get under her skin, so to speak.

Jennifer and I got off to a very bad start. Our first interview was held in my home after she had won the coveted “Bernadette” role in “Song of Bernadette.” She either forgot to say or she had been warned not to mention that she was married to Robert Walker and is the mother of two little boys.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer via Fultonhistory.com.

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Posted in 1944, Columnists, Film, Hollywood | Tagged 1944, film, hollywood, Louella Parsons | Comments Off

Black Dahlia: Ask Me Anything, August 2025

Posted on August 5, 2025 by lmharnisch

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

I took a brief look at William Mann’s forthcoming book “Black Dahlia: Murders, Monsters and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood.”
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Posted in 1947, Black Dahlia, Cold Cases, Homicide, LAPD | Tagged Ask Me Anything, Black Dahlia, Cleveland Torso Killings, Elizabeth Short, John Gilmore, lapd | Comments Off

Aug. 5, 1947: Hitchhiking Couple Confess to ‘Kiss of Death’ Murder

Posted on August 5, 2025 by lmharnisch

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

“Last Wednesday, I killed a man.”

Joseph stood tall for the news photographers, with his wife, Lois, by his side, a shock of hair swept down over his forehead, but otherwise neat and trim. They look like somebody’s parents in an old photo at your childhood friend’s house.

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1944 in Print — Hollywood News and Gossip by Louella Parsons, Aug. 5, 1944

Posted on August 5, 2025 by lmharnisch

Aug. 5, 1944

Veronica Lake may not get that chance to walk across the Paramount lot to RKO for Niven Busch’s “Duel in the Sun” for the reason that she will have the top role in “Miss Susie Slagle’s” at her home studio. She doesn’t play the aging boardinghouse keeper, Miss Slagle, but she will be seen as a glamorous nurse with whom the hero falls in love.

Betty Field has bowed out as Miss Slagle and today Lillian Gish was tested for the park. She’d be wonderful and it seems more than likely she’ll get it. Joan Caufield of “Kiss and Tell” fame plays another nurse, and Sonny Tufts is her doctor-boyfriend. The book, by Augusta Tucker, has been changed considerably, but the interest at Johns Hopkins Hospital and University is still high.

LEO: Things may appear a little difficult and people you meet unfeeling. That means you have a job on your hands, must treat it with unfaltering will, calmly, patiently.

The Philadelphia Inquirer via Fultonhistory.com.

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Posted in 1944, Columnists, Comics, Film, Hollywood | Tagged 1944, comics, film, hollywood, horoscope, Louella Parsons | Comments Off

Matt Weinstock, Aug. 4, 1959

Posted on August 4, 2025 by lmharnisch

‘Lady’ and the Mails

As you may have read, “Lady Chatterly’s Lover,” the controversial novel by David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930), is okay again. At least for the moment.

Postmaster General Arthur F. Summerfield banned it from the mails several months ago as “obscene and filthy.” Critics and writers protested. (Read Alfred Kazin’s blistering comments in the July Atlantic.) The book’s publishers invited the Post Office “into the 20th century.”

Last week Federal Judge Frederick Bryan of New York overruled Summerfield’s
order. He stated, “The postmaster general has no special competence which qualifies him to render an informal judgment” and held that Summerfield’s ban order violated the guarantee of speech and press in the First Amendment.

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Paul V. Coates — Confidential File, Aug. 4, 1959

Posted on August 4, 2025 by lmharnisch

Confidential File

Maybe This Is Way Simon Built Towers

Whether his towers stand or fall, Simon Rodia, the little immigrant stonemason from Watts, has added another hue to the kaleidoscope that is Southern California.

He can take his place now alongside such contributors to the local color as Peter the Hermit, Mad Man Muntz, Memphis Harry Lee Ward and Lucky Baldwin.

Still alive, he has already become legend in a locale where screwballs and fanatics and mystics are so common that, by their very number, they crowd each other into obscurity.

I don’t mean to infer that Rodia fits any of the above classifications. In fact, I’m sure now that he doesn’t — although I once had my doubts.

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Aug. 4, 1947: Patsy, Teenage Polio Patient, Dreams of Going to a Rodeo

Posted on August 4, 2025 by lmharnisch

Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project. It reflects the research resources that were available 20 years ago.

Fourteen-year-old Patsy Pfeifer has two ambitions in life. One is to see a rodeo. Like many teenage girls, she is crazy about horses. When she’s not reading about them in stories by Will James, the straight-A student paints pictures of them.

Her other ambition is to walk. Patsy has been bedridden since she got polio around Christmas 1942. One day, after she had been in the hospital for a few months, she was surprised to see actress Shirley Temple at her bedside, giving her an award for her essay on “What Florence Nightingale’s Life Means to Children.”

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Posted in 1947, Animals, Medicine | Tagged #Polio, 1947, Animals, Patsy Pfeifer, rodeo | Comments Off