Nov. 28, 1907
Los Angeles

• Ocean Park banned serving alcohol to soldiers in uniform because drunk Civil War veterans from the soldiers home in Sawtelle “were seen reeling about the saloons.”

• A racing team preparing for the upcoming hill climb on the Box Springs Grade hit a horse and buggy at 45 mph. The Times says the horse veered into the path of the auto, which struck the animal broadside, carrying it 40 feet and throwing it into a ditch. The badly injured animal was shot. Neither the buggy driver nor the men in the car were seriously hurt.

• Dick Malone, a handicapped man from Sioux City, Iowa, befriended by the Rev. T. Tracy of Church of the Sacred Heart, was arrested at 3rd and Los Angeles on charges of passing forged checks drawn on Tracy’s account.

• A noisy rooster on Olive Street has provoked a dispute between two neighbors. Former Indianapolis Police Chief David Powell, 80, complained that a rooster owned by a man named Murphy begins crowing at 3 a.m. Murphy moved his chickens back from the neighbor’s residence, and in revenge has constructed a “spite fence” out of quilts and old clothes that blocks all sunlight going into Powell’s room.

• Miss Godberg, a housekeeper at the home of W.G. Cochran, 1559 W. 2nd St., heard a noise at the front door and upon opening it discovered a man with a handkerchief over his face. She struggled to close the door, but the man forced his way in, so she ripped off his handkerchief and threw him to the floor. The man drew a gun, freed himself from Godberg and fled into the night, The Times says.

• George Spence, a solicitor for Collier’s Weekly, was taken to the Receiving Hospital after falling into a hole in the street at 2nd and San Pedro, cutting his head and shoulders and bruising his back.

• Workers digging a deep trench at Avalon on Santa Catalina Island discovered prehistoric Indian remains. “Visitors eagerly awaited to snatch every available opportunity and oftentimes even urged the Mexican workers into quicker action so that they could triumphantly carry off as curiosities pieces of the dead and sacred remains of an extinct race,” The Times says.

• Walter P. Temple has sued L.F. Lewis over desecration of the family cemetery on the old Workman homestead. The lawsuit says the Workmans, who owned Rancho La Puente, dedicated a portion of the property as a family cemetery, but that Lewis tore down a brick wall, allowing cattle to roam on his ancestors’ graves. Temple’s suit asks that Lewis be barred from any more damage and from plowing over or removing the remains.

An undercover vice investigation went badly wrong when “lady barber” Mary Fisher fled her shop at 451½ S. Main St. clutching a fistful of hair. Police Officer Cook, investigating whether Fisher was offering haircuts and massages as a front for illegal activities, arranged for the full treatment: shave, massage, shoe shine and anything else.

According to The Times, Fisher put steamed towels on Cook’s face, had given him a facial massage and started shaving him when she straightened his hair, only to have his toupee come off in her hand.

“The woman gave one look at the handful of hair sticking to her hand and another at the bald head of her customer and, with a shriek, she dashed for the stairs,” The Times says.

“Hey,” yelled Cook, “give me that hair. I need it!”

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Nov. 22, 1907
Los Angeles

Weeping and heavily bandaged from where her drunk, enraged husband had shot her in the head, Ellen Larkin, 38, rose from her hospital bed, staggered to a nearby room and threw herself into the arms of her injured spouse. She covered him with kisses, vowing that she still loved him, and promised that he could come home as soon as he recovered from shooting himself and being nearly beaten to death with a baseball bat by their oldest son.

According to The Times, Jefferson B. Larkin, 45, a sometime teamster, horse player and “remittance man,” had returned to Los Angeles after spending four months in San Francisco while John, 16, the oldest of the Larkins’ four children, supported the family. As Larkin got thoroughly drunk, someone told him that his wife had been unfaithful, so he went to a pawnshop and bought a cheap revolver.

Larkin went in the backdoor of the home at 417 S. Colyton and found his wife in the kitchen with their four children: John, Isabelle, 10; Effie, 6; and Helen, 14 months. “He accused his wife of every vile thing he could lay his tongue to,” The Times said.

Larkin fired and missed, then shot his wife in the head as she leaped to grab the gun, with the bullet entering her scalp above the left ear and coming out the skin at the back of her head. Before he could fire again, John returned from taking his younger siblings to safety and struck his father in the head with a baseball bat with all his strength, then continued hitting him on the shoulders and in the chest.

Staggering to the door, Larkin walked to 7^th Street, where he shot himself twice, then wandered to a rooming house, rented a room for $1 and called a doctor. He was expected to survive.

“I am not sorry that I hit him,” John said. “He intended to shoot mother again, but I hit him just in time to daze him. I hardly knew what I had done until after it was all over. I hope he don’t die now that mamma is not hurt.”

At the hospital, Larkin said: “I heard that she intended to get a divorce from me and I came to Los Angeles yesterday to settle matters. I decided to kill her and myself, too. I knew if I did this my mother and father who are in New York would take care of the children.”

Ellen left her husband’s hospital room after they vowed eternal love and affection, The Times said. Meanwhile, John went to the police station to swear out a complaint against his father. “I want to know when he leaves the hospital so that he won’t have a chance to get away from me,” he said. “I’ll put him where he belongs.”

There’s no further record of this case. However, The Times reported next year that a penniless youth named John Larkin had made the trip from Los Angeles to Patterson, N.J., to visit his grandparents. He started out riding on top of a passenger train, but was thrown off in San Bernardino, then snuck a ride on a train to Salt Lake City, where he earned dinner by washing dishes in a restaurant.

Arrested in Ogden, Utah, he served a 10-day sentence as water boy for the chain gang, caught an express train to Cheyenne, Wyo., worked his way to Chicago and then Cleveland. He finally snuck a ride on a train to New York, begged a ticket on the ferry and rode to Patterson on the trucks of the Erie Railroad’s dining car. He was 13.

Mark Twain defines “remittance man” in “Following the Equator.”

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Nov. 17, 1907
New York by direct wire to The Times

Something curious seems to be going on with opera tenors in the monkey house at New York’s Central Park; perhaps there’s an atmosphere that lends itself to “annoying” people, for the problem of mashers at the monkey house has even inspired a 1907 movie by Biograph.

Luckily, Detective J.J. Cain is on the lookout for malefactors who make lewd advances, having arrested Enrico Caruso the year before.

Cain’s latest arrests are Leon Cazauran, “a slender young man with pale face and large brown eyes” brought to New York to sing in “Thais” at Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Operahouse, and his companion, Claude Modjeska, “a copper-colored young man,” The Times says.

“The charge against both was that of attempting to corrupt the morals of little boys,” The Times says. Cain said he was suspicious of the men because they had visited the monkey house several times before “in the company of small boys.”

Despite the language handicap (Cazauran didn’t speak English and while Modjeska only knew a bit of English, he was able to act as a translator) the men protested their innocence. Modjeska was fined $10 and the men vanished.

Caruso had not been so fortunate the previous year. Although his alleged victim at first refused to testify, Cain pressed the complaint and gave the following account:

The tenor had followed two girls, one of them about 12, and annoyed them. He then turned his attention to three women, one of whom was black, Cain said.

Cain said he saw Caruso move close to Mrs. Hannah Graham of the Bronx, N.Y. “He said he saw Caruso move up close to Mrs. Graham and then saw one of Caruso’s hands glide stealthily through a slit in his overcoat and then saw Caruso pinch the woman. Mrs. Graham turned swiftly and struck Caruso in the chest, crying aloud: ‘You brute! You beast!’ ”

The detective said he intervened after Graham hit Caruso in the chest. Cain added that he had seen Caruso commit other offenses, but “wanted to get him good.”

The spectacular trial ended with Caruso being fined $10. Hmmmm. According to news accounts, Caruso later “attempted to take certain liberties” with a woman in an automobile and in 1913 got in trouble in London, when he pointed at a young woman in the crowded lobby of the Savoy Hotel and said: “You! You!”

When reproved by an American who said: “You shouldn’t do that,” the singer replied: “I am Caruso and I do as I please.”

Bonus fact: Caruso was in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake.

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Nov. 11, 1907
Los Angeles

On a trip to Topeka, Kans., to visit relatives, Lena River Packard of Los Angeles met Edgar (or Edwin) Campbell Arnold, a wealthy wholesale druggist who quickly became her constant companion and ardent suitor. Love soon blossomed and in a few months, Edgar arrived in Los Angeles to claim his bride.

A lavish wedding was arranged, bridal showers were given for Lena and the minister was brought to town from Ventura, where the Packards once lived. Edgar gave her a diamond-studded bracelet as a token of their upcoming marriage.

And then the night before the ceremony, “he said goodnight to his fiancee with unusual fervor and left for his hotel at a late hour,” The Times said. Nothing was heard from him the next day and finally the Packards “began to entertain misgivings.”

The betrothed woman shut herself in her room and refused to see anyone, and there were rumors that Edgar left a heart-breaking farewell note. Her father, F.M. Packard, said: “There will be some queer developments before long.”

Reporters located Edgar back home in Kansas and asked if he would comment on rumors that he left a farewell note saying that he was unworthy of Lena. His doctor refused to let him speak.

Attorneys eventually disclosed that six days before his disappearance was reported in The Times, Edgar wrote: “Lena, for God’s sake think kindly of me for what I am doing. It is best for both of us. I don’t ask you to forgive, you can’t. Only when the pain has worn out, thank me for not going on and making your life miserable. I have tried until I am completely worn out, sick mentally and bodily. God forgive me; I am going out of your life. I am not worthy of any good woman’s love. I could never make you happy. Put me out of your existence.”

Lena replied in a letter to Edgar’s mother:

“I just got up from my bed, where I have been since Tuesday evening, and resolved to write you the whole truth. You know how things were in Topeka—you know how Edgar came out to see me. In May, when we became engaged he gave me a beautiful diamond ring and also some diamond earrings. The day after we became engaged, he asked my parents for my hand, and they gave their consent. I loved Edgar with all my heart and I never loved anyone before in my life. Edgar said he loved me and proved it in every way.

“I have stayed home all summer long and worked with love and patience over my wedding clothes. My dear mother and I have worked so hard. Father has spent hundreds of dollars just to have me fixed to be Edgar’s wife. My clothes are beautiful and God only knows what I’ll do with them now.

“He came on the 3^rd, Sunday, getting in at 11:30 o’clock and came right to our home. I was overjoyed to see him and he seemed just as glad to see me. We stayed home all that afternoon and talked. He wanted to see my clothes, so I showed him a few dresses and waists, just as much as I thought proper. He seemed to like every one and seemed to feel bad because I had worked so hard on them. He asked me if I put all that work on the wedding gown just because I loved him and I told him ‘Yes.’ In the afternoon, Monday, he gave me a beautiful bracelet set with five diamonds.”

“My life is blighted,” she wrote, “by the man I thought would make me a kind and loving husband.”

The Packards filed a suit for $25,000 ($494,782.31 USD 2005) in 1908, only to discover that Edgar’s claims of being wealthy were lies. In truth, every penny of the family fortune was controlled by his mother, “a woman with an iron will and a sharp tongue who bitterly opposed the marriage.” Edgar feared that he would be disinherited if he went through with the wedding. The Packards received a $3,000 settlement.

Whether she kept the diamonds is a mystery that will never be answered. Of course, the real question is whether Lena ever married. Unfortunately, Proquest is no help here. Edgar was right about one thing: he wasn’t worthy.

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Nov. 9, 1907
Los Angeles

Local sympathizers, anarchists and socialists are organizing a mass meeting to protest the imprisonment of Ricardo Flores Magon, Librado Rivera, Antonio Villareal and L. Gutierrez De Lara, who are being held on charges of trying to overthrow the Mexican government.

After years of avoiding capture, Magon, Rivera and Villareal were arrested Aug. 23 at 111 E. Pico St. after a brawl with Thomas Furlong of the Furlong Secret Service Bureau of St. Louis, along with Los Angeles Police Detectives Felipe Talamantes, [Thomas F.?] Rico and two deputies. De Lara was arrested by U.S. marshals at 420 W. 4th St. on Sept. 27.

The Times said of the August incident: “The street was filling with people. Men and women crowded before the house just in time to see a light survey and a coupe dash up before the door. Then the door opened and out into the light staggered the officers and their prisoners. They fought on the steps and in the street.”


“ ‘We are revolutionists! We are patriots! We are being kidnapped! Help! Help!’ they shrieked.”

In a 1921 letter to his attorney, Magon wrote: “We avoided being kidnapped into Mexico by voicing in the street the intentions of our captors. A big crowd gathered, and it was necessary for our abductors to take us to the police station, and to rapidly manufacture a charge against us.”

The men were defended by Job Harriman, described by The Times as a Socialist agitator.

De Lara said upon his arrest: “I am a student, a writer and, if need be, a martyr. I have written many books. I am now on a cycle of novels in which socialistic questions are discussed. Like Balzac or Zola, I have a mission. I am arrested and thrown into a dungeon. I care not for that, if they furnish me paper, ink and a light.”

To be continued.

Ricardo Flores Magon site

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