Confidential File

Harry Karl's Barber Is Pro Tem Leftist

When
he's not busy totaling the day's receipts, Harry Karl, the shoe tycoon,
is a member in good standing of a social class known as the idle rich.

He is, so to speak, loaded.

Unlike you or me, he doesn't wait until the "January white" sales are announced to replenish his home linen supply.

If
his neighborhood supermarket is featuring ground round as a week-end
special, he's the kind of guy who'll shrug it off and plop a seven-bone
roast into his push-cart.

You get the idea? Money, with Harry, is no object.

Take haircuts. I know, and you know, that at $1.75 a head, barbers are getting away with daring daylight robbery.

But that's not Harry's feelings. For a perfect trim and the proper swivel-chair treatment, he'll go as high as $1,000.

You don't believe me? Well, sit down and hear me out.

Recently,
Karl was sitting in Maury's chair at the Beverly-Wilshire Health Club,
pondering a problem of relatively immense proportions, considering the
moment.

He was about to leave on an extended vacation to Hawaii.
While there, he would need a haircut. And Maury, his barber for 22
years, wouldn't be available, obviously, to perform the ritual.

"The only answer," Karl sighed finally, "is for you to fly over after me."

Maury, a man quick to oblige the whims of his customers, agreed to make the trip.

On
schedule, Maury arrived in Honolulu. Karl's chauffeur met him at the
airport and drove him to the hotel. Although it was still before 7
a.m., the barber went directly to his customer's hotel suite.

He
banged on the door until Karl woke up and opened it. The shoe magnate
muttered a sleepy greeting, yawned luxuriously and rubbed his eyes
until he could see reasonably well. What he saw made him turn pale. The
barber's right arm was neatly encased in a plaster cast.

"Maury!" he cried, pointing at it in horror. "What's that?"

"My arm," the barber replied. "I broke it three days ago."

"You
can't do that to me," Karl screamed. "Look at my hair. Three weeks I've
been waiting for you to come over here and cut it. And whatta you do? You break your arm."

"I didn't do it on purpose," Maury pleaded.

"A
thousand bucks it cost me to get you over here," Karl raged, pacing up
and down. "Why didn't you call and tell me you broke your arm? Why did
you come all the way over here?"

Maury shrugged. "You got me the ticket, I figured I might as well use it. I never been to Honolulu before."

Karl
collapsed into a chair and buried his uncut head in his hands. Maury
patted him on the back with his good arm. "Look," he said soothingly,
"we'll go to the hotel barber and I'll give him directions how to cut."

"Directions!" Karl shouted. "You could've done that on the telephone. A thousand dollars you cost me. You're a rat, Maury. You hear me? A rat."

Karl
continued pacing and furiously banging a fist into his hand. Finally,
with an exasperated sigh, he said: "As long as you're here, you might
as well stay for a day."

"No hard feelings?" the barber asked meekly.

"My luck," Karl muttered bitterly. "I got to wind up with a one-arm barber."

Guy Needs Some Killing

"No hard feelings?" Maury repeated. "Let's shake on it."

With
a flourish, he thrust out the "broken" arm. "See? It isn't broken," he
said brightly. "It was just a gag I thought up before I left."

I'd
like to end this story by telling you that Karl took the barber's arm
and broke it. But he didn't. If he had, it would mean flying in Maury's
partner from the mainland.

And, after all, who ever heard of paying $2,000 for one haircut.

Confidential File

Life Must Go On, Even After Murder

On Feb. 19 of this year, Robert L. Mason, 40, went wild with a gun.

He entered the Glendale home of jazz musician Johnny Zorro. He shot Zorro's wife, 31-year-old Mrs. Rona Porrazzo, critically wounding her. And, with two more bullets, he killed Zorro's mother-in-law, Mrs. Susan Jamerson, 52.

At the time of the shooting, Zorro was working in Las Vegas. His son, Page, 5, was the man of the house, and a witness to the murder.

These
facts have all been reported and recorded — by the police, by the
press and by the courts which eventually decided that Mason should die
for his crime.

But what hasn't been reported is the lingering aftermath of the headline case of murder in the first degree.

Yesterday
I met Johnny Zorro for the first time since we were together in the
Glendale Police Station, where Mason was being booked following his
return from Winslow, Ariz.

Zorro was crying at Mason, an acquaintance of five years: "C'mon and face me. Aren't you man enough?"

He
was pounding the table in front of Mason's chair and shouting: "You've
ruined my wife's life, my son's life. My mother-in-law is gone."

Zorro's conversation
with me yesterday bore out too much of his prophecy. A front-page
murder may be forgotten by the public, but its aftermath is still there
to be lived out.

Zorro told me, first of all, about his wife.

"You'll remember," he said softly, "that nobody expected her to live. The bullet had lodged behind her right ear.

"She
was six weeks in the hospital and in bed three months. One side of her
face is still paralyzed. Now, we'll just have to wait."

The young musician added: "Already she's done so many things the doctors said were impossible."

Today, Mrs. Porrazzo
walks unaided. But the vision in one eye blurs frequently. She becomes
dizzy quickly. There's always the noise of a roar in her right ear.

"She
wants to get back in her church work. She was real active in it before
the shooting," Zorro told me. "More than anything, though, little Pagie's the reason she's alive today. She wants to live for the boy, for his sake."

Pagie, named by his parents for their friend, Page Cavanaugh, has his memories of the tragedy, too.

"Like
in our telephone number list, we had Mason's name and phone number.
Written in a long time ago," Zorro said. "Without saying anything to
us, little Pagie got a pencil the other day and scratched it out.

"The kid talks about what happened sometimes and he asks me, 'Daddy, do you think he can break out of jail?'"

There's
also a price tag on tragedy, the musician admitted — a tag way out of
line with the family's income. Zorro's wife has undergone three
operations.

"We had two cars," he said. "I sold one. I sold some
furniture. Right now, I guess I still owe about $2,500. I'll just pay
it off little by little."

Family Must Be Preserved

Zorro, a singer who plays the electric guitar, added that he's worked only a couple of times since the shooting.

"Naturally,
I had to be both mother and father to Page when Rona was in the
hospital. I still like to stay home a lot, to be around if I'm needed.

"I know I've got to get back working," he added. "I've been trying, looking around. But things sure seem quiet now. It's tight.

"I'll
stay in the music business," Zorro explained. "I've been supporting
myself in it since I was 16. But I don't know about all the traveling.

"The main thing now," he concluded, "is to keep my family together."

Note: Here are some clippings on the Daily Mirror about the Porrazzo case.

July 13, 1959: California, the welfare magnet.

Confidential File

Are Juveniles Really Delinquent?

Let me speak for the record. I'm against juvenile delinquents.

They're a menace. No question about it.

Not only are they constantly getting into trouble themselves, they're setting a very bad example for all the rest of us.

So, I'm against them. I think they should be avoided at every turn.

The trouble is, however, I no longer can be certain whom to avoid.

It
wasn't long ago that "juvenile delinquent" was a badge of dishonor
pinned on kids whose behavior was, clearly, criminally antisocial.

Today, though, we're applying it recklessly to any youngster whose behavior is just mildly annoying.

A teen-ager
doesn't have to swipe hubcaps in order to earn the delinquent label any
more. He can get one for bothering the neighbors by playing ball in the
street.

In the dear, dim, dead days of my youth, I was
frequently smeared by irate neighbors and not just a few relatives as a
"brat" or an "ill-mannered punk."

These are not the softest
terms in the world. But certainly they are less dire and ominous than
being called a "juvenile delinquent."

I think we've developed a kind of hysterical fear about our kids. We interpret much of the natural mischief and experimentation of growing up as a sure sign of criminal tendency.

When
I was a kid, swiping an apple was almost socially acceptable.
(Provided, of course, you took it from a neighbor's tree. Only cops
could snitch them from fruit stands.)

Today, it constitutes petty theft.

Sneaking into the movies was a regular Saturday ritual. If you got caught you got booted out, and that was it.

Now, you'd probably be arrested for breaking and entering.

Perhaps I exaggerate. But not much. Not when I read about a U.S. attorney in Honolulu named Louis Blissard.

He's a gentleman, I think, who clearly portrays the weird way we are misbehaving toward our kids in this enlightened age.

Last week Blissard
became involved in a case concerning two L.A. area girls, ages 13 and
16, who stowed away on the ocean liner Lurline when it embarked for
Hawaii.

With their parents, the girls had gone to bid some
voyager friends good-by, but apparently became so enraptured with the
farewell festivities that they laid low aboard ship until it was safely
away from dock.

Immediately on their discovery, the family's
friends saw to it that the pair became paid-up passengers, with a
stateroom. They were well-chaperoned and, except for their initial sin
of stowing away, well-behaved.

But on arrival in Honolulu they were, according to dispatches, taken into custody by police, fingerprinted and charged with juvenile delinquency by U.S. Atty. Blissard.

Lays Down Law

Blissard
then made it clear that — chaperoned or not, and regardless of their
parents' wishes — the girls would be prosecuted as delinquents if they
weren't sent back home on the first available plane.

Obviously,
there was no malicious intent on the part of the girls. Nobody was
hurt, except their parents — in the pocketbook. And their parents, I'd
guess, are capable of dealing out whatever punishment was necessary on
that score.

However, if those two kids are — as U.S. Atty. Blissard
apparently feels they are — candidates for a juvenile detention home,
then we better get busy right now putting up more barbed wire.

About 90% of today's kids ought to be locked up.

And as for us parents, we should be damned thankful that we were brought up in an era when adults differentiated between mischief and maliciousness, or we'd have prison records instead of happy memories to look back on.