The Case of Judge Pfaff

This was the week of Superior Court Judge Roger Alton Pfaff’s great disillusionment.

On
receiving what he considered an unjustified speeding citation (45 in a
25) he said angrily, "In 12 years on the bench I’ve been accepting the
word of police officers. Now I’m shocked that any of them would so
falsify a citation."

He insisted he was going between 30 and
35 when he passed the police car. He announced he will plead not guilty
when he appears in traffic court Monday.

The officers, Gerald Jackson and Terry Lewis, insist it was just another ticket and they called it as they saw it.

Meanwhile, back among the common people, the affair was viewed as high comedy.

WHEN HE SAT in traffic court, Judge Pfaff
earned a reputation for severity. It was said of him that he would
sentence his mother to jail if the evidence showed she was guilty.

Now
some motorists whose wings he clipped are bubbling with delight. They
came away from his court feeling they’d been unfairly two-timed — by
the gendarmes and by the judge.

The way things are going this could be the ticket that launched a thousand quips.

One reader insists the trial should be held in the Coliseum and motorists who feel they have been bum-rapped admitted free.

Another wonders if Judge Pfaff will sacrifice a day’s pay, as others must do, when he goes to trial.

Another
hopes that some kindly old motorist will take him for a long walk and
tell him the facts of life about traffic valentines.

Another
hopes that out of the case may come an awareness that the LAPD, under
the lash of the master, gives out too many tickets for minor offenses.

However, let us not stoop to one editorial writer’s paraphrased appraisal of the case — jug not that ye be not jugged.

MENTION HERE that the gyp artist who poses as a toaster repair man and makes off with expensive hotel bread browners is amok again reminded a fun-loving friend of the time a toaster almost broke up his happy home.

The
little lady complained that the darn thing wouldn’t pop out the toast
far enough, causing it to burn. Inspired, he prevailed upon a repair
man to put an extra strong spring in it. When she tried it the toast
hit the ceiling.

He thought this was very funny but she
didn’t. And when she took the toaster back to the repair man for
adjustment the blabbermouth said her husband ordered it that way. So,
the doghouse.

WELL WE LOST another
one. A note signed Texas Tom states, "This town is no good. Even the
bums here are no good. L.A. has more bums in high and low places than
anywhere else. I’m going back to Texas."

Betcha our brand of muscatel is better than your brand of muscatel.

DIFFERENT VERSION
It takes a lot of living
To make a house to suit,
Yup, it takes a lot of living
Plus an awful lot of loot.
— TERRI MCDANIEL

TRAFFIC DETAIL — Those five car-pool fellows, young exec types, who play cards in the back of a Volkswagen Microbus,
were at it again on Whittier Boulevard the other morning en route to
work . . . An ABC-TV exec is glad the legislature revised the vehicle
code number for drunken driving. He had extension 502 and took some
teasing.

FOOTNOTES — A Hollywoodian
got a call the other night asking if he’d watched a certain TV program.
He said he had, briefly, then turned it off. And then he wanted to know
how the caller had gotten his unlisted phone number. The battle still
rages . . . People in East L.A. find it appropriate that Lou Costello
will be buried in Calvary Cemetery in their area. His Junior Foundation
on E Olympic Boulevard is a landmark to his philanthropy . . . A
onetime high-bracket movie star was seen at the $2 show window at Santa
Anita and Walt Hackett couldn’t help observing, "That’s show business."   

Lost Chords

A PTA meeting at Center Avenue Elementary School in Inglewood opened
Tuesday with a salute to the flag, after which the audience remained
hushed as a Girl Scout choral group assembled for a song and the
accompanist approached the baby grand piano.

The accompanist raised the keyboard cover. She lifted the movable music rack. A puzzled expression came over her face.

She tried them again, then crouched and peered underneath, then into
the instrument. She was no longer merely puzzled, she was baffled, even
desperate.

At this point Principal Irene Hoban went to the rescue and, amid laughter from the many community youth groups present, joined in the search.

In a moment Miss Hoban announced that some men scheduled to give
the auditorium a much-needed renovation had apparently started the job
that afternoon without her knowledge, by removing the piano keys.

But all went well nevertheless. The choral group sang without
accompaniment and the proceedings were graced throughout with a nice
light tone.

ANYONE WHO has visited General Hospital knows about the
colored lines on the floors and sidewalks which help people find their
way from one section to another.

The other day staff members at the City Health Department’s new center at 2032 N Marengo
Street, a short distance from the hospital, were surprised to see
several persons dodging traffic in the middle of the street. They
turned out to be patients instructed to follow a line from the main
hospital to the children’s unit. Somehow they’d gotten off the line and
onto the center white line. They were retrieved in the nick of time or
doubtless they would be hiking out Highway 66.

CORRECTION
He who hesitates is lost,
They taught me that in school.
But that is wrong I learned today-
They hadn’t filled the pool.
G. C. McHose

WHEN HE WAS 16, Steve Allen writes in Look, he bummed around the country and learned what hunger and poverty meant.

"I remember walking along a road in California one day and finding a
half-empty can of beans by the side of the road. I picked it up but was
disappointed to see that it was crawling with ants. Within seconds I
had shaken and blown the ants out of the can and finished the beans."

A
remarkably forthright statement from a man in a realm where everyone is
supposed to have a fairy godmother arranging his life.

BANK NOTES — Two
women met in a Sunset Boulevard bank and Frank Barron heard one say,
"Isn’t it funny, the only time I ever see you lately is either here or
at the drugstore." "Yeah," the other said wryly, "every time I make a
withdrawal I get sick" . . .  A woman cashing a check in a Westwood
Village bank asked for new $1 bills. The teller told her she didn’t
have 25 new ones but could give her new fives. "Oh no," the woman said,
"then I’d have to take dirty bills in change somewhere else."

AROUND TOWN–
Larry Brown of the SC golf team misfired a ball over the fence at
Wilshire Country Club and was looking forlornly at it when an officer
in a patrol car came along Beverly Boulevard, took in the situation,
stopped and tossed it over the fence. Yep, the long arm of the law . .
. As anyone could have guessed, votes against the death penalty in this
paper’s poll on capital punishment have been received from rogues
signing Caryl Chessman, Harvey Glatman , Stephen Nash and Elizabeth
Duncan . . . Anyone else notice that the newspaper photos of the
collapsing Vanderbilt Apartments, 334 S Figueroa St., showed a scrawled
"Z for Zorro" on it? . . . The magazine Thy Kingdom Come, which
circulates among flying saucer groups, has the slogan "Be active today
or radioactive tomorrow" . . . A mortuary ad in El Pueblo offers a
"courtesy discount" to city employees.  

CONFIDENTIAL FILE

Big Money Bonanza Fails to Pay Off

LeRoy McFarland of Huntington Park, has a money mine.

It’s in his back yard. He just discovered it.

It’s a lively one — chock full of coins, thousands of them.

From France, India, Burma, China, Germany, the United States, Mexico. Even Russia.

Big coins. Little coins. Copper coins. Silver coins.

Some of them real old. They date back to 1802.

Valuable, no doubt.

Looking at it objectively, it’s about as good a money mine as anyone could ask to find in his back yard.

But those aren’t exactly LeRoy’s sentiments.

LeRoy hates his money mine. Hates it with a vengeance.

Little Treasure Island

LeRoy,
who’s 32, manages an apartment court at 5917 Compton Avenue. The way it
happened — the way he stumbled onto his cache — is that last Sunday
night he was cleaning up one of the carports at the rear of his
property.

There was a piece of tin dividing two of the ports which he wanted to remove.

He got a shovel and started digging.

When he got about a foot deep, he noticed that there were a few coins mixed in with the dirt. Nothing much.

A British farthing or two. A ten-franc piece. Some Mexican centavos.

But is whetted LeRoy’s curiosity.

He dug deeper. And he found more coins.

Tenants Join In

About
a foot and half down he began running into little bags of them. Some
were wrapped in a plastic material. Others in rotting burlap.

Several of LeRoy’s tenants — surprised to see him digging and working so diligently — were attracted to the scene.

They pitched right in and helped him.

Within an hour, LeRoy had a five-gallon can full to the brim with dirty money.

Figuring
he’d done enough spading for the night, he closed up his money mine
with loose dirt, and lugged the can of treasure inside. There, he
washed it, filling a dishpan with about 40 pounds of clean coins.

Then, with his sister, Ida May, and a girlfriend of hers, he headed to the home of his father-in-law, Bert Johnson, at 5124 E 60th Place, Maywood.

Bert,
an amateur coin collector, got out his magnifying glass. Some of the
pieces were badly worn. Others were mutilated. There were a few with
the face of a U.S. penny on one side and the tail of a dime on the
other.

There was one inscribed "Gold Cup Handicap, one free play, Ocean Park," plus some streetcar tokens and some kids’ play money.

Mr. Johnson suggested that LeRoy take the whole dishpanful to the police.

LeRoy took his advice, and that’s when his troubles started.

With the two girls, he arrived at the Huntington Park Police Station at about nine o’clock.

The whole station house was fascinated by LeRoy’s discovery.

A
sergeant contacted the FBI, and then, in turn, some Secret Service
agents for the Treasury Department. The agents told the police to hold LeRoy and his friends until they got there. 

LeRoy was led back to an interrogation room, while the girls remained up front. It was getting late.

Ida May, LeRoy’s sister explained to one of the officers that she had to get up at five in the morning to go to work.

"Do I have to stay here, too?" she asked.

"Everybody stays," replied the officer. "Those federal boys have it over us. If they say hold you, we hold you."

Ida May Talks

Ida
May is a very pretty girl. She’s a good talker, too. She explained her
problem to a couple of sergeants, and finally, they relented. She and
her friend could go home.

"Now, if I could just see my brother for a minute," she said. "I need to borrow a dollar from him for my bus fare tomorrow."

"Oh, no," answered the officer. "Nobody’s talking to him until the feds do."

"In that case," Ida May cried indignantly, "when I go home, I’ll get a shovel and just dig up another dollar."

The police let Ida May borrow a dollar from her brother.

An officer drove the two girls home. When he returned to the station, the federal agents were there, busy with LeRoy.

There’s More

The officer broke into the interrogation session and sprinkled two more handfuls of coins into the dishpan.

"He’s got a real mint back there in the yard," beamed the officer. "I got this just turning that shovel a couple of times."

At midnight, the Treasury agents were through with LeRoy. "We’ll take the coins," they explained.

"All right," LeRoy agreed. "Would you give me a receipt for them?"

"No, sir," answered the agent. "Those belong to the government now."

"But I found them," protested LeRoy. "You can keep the mutilated ones, I just want the foreign coins back."

Peril of Jail

"No,"
was the final answer. "And if you dig up any more coins, you’ve got to
give them to us. Understand? If you hold out so much as one coin, you
can get 10 years in jail for it."

LeRoy understood. Meekly, he requested his dishpan back. Here, the agents conceded.

Then
they followed him home, briefly examined his money mine, and told him
that they suspected the bulk of the loot came from vending machines.

"The foreign coins too?" LeRoy
asked. "Most of them were foreign coins." Then he related a story about
what happened to him when he was digging in the rear of the car port
two weeks earlier.

Stacks of Bills

"It might be
significant," he said, "although I didn’t think anything about it at
the time. I dug up two bundles of moldy paper. Shaped just like stacks
of bills. I didn’t examine them, though. I just shoveled them into the
trash."

The Secret Service here today indicated it has been
busy on several major counterfeiting investigations — and was a little
amazed at some of the stories going around about the coins.

"Nobody asked for a receipt and the man seemed anxious to get rid of his find," Special Agent Guy Spaman said.

"We
haven’t had a chance to go through much of the stuff, but so far we
haven’t found more than 15 cents in actual U.S. money value," he
continued. "Whether some of the foreign coins might be worth more than
their face value, I don’t know."

Felony Angle

What interests the Feds, and they figure McFarland should be interested, too. Possession of coinlike pieces of metal that could be used in a coin machine is a felony.

In
fact, they theorize that somebody who operates such machines probably
buried the collection of slugs and coins to make sure they didn’t show
up in his coin machines again.

"Nobody said he couldn’t dig any more," Spaman said. "But if he finds that type of mutilated coins or coin shapes again, the law remains the same."