Oct. 11,1907
Los Angeles

Perhaps John Bryson’s early life was something out of Horatio Alger, but the death of the Los Angeles developer and self-made millionaire could have easily been taken from the pages of Charles Dickens.

Born in Lancaster, Pa., in 1819 and one of 13 children, Bryson served an apprenticeship as a carpenter and cabinetmaker. Lured by the opportunities of the West, Bryson and his wife, Emeline, moved to Ohio in 1845. From there, the couple moved to Muscatine, Iowa, and then to Los Angeles.

Arriving about 1879, Bryson used his knowledge of construction and the lumber industry to begin as a developer. One of his main projects was the Bryson Block on the northwest corner of Spring and 2nd Streets, a site now occupied by the Los Angeles Times. Active in local affairs, he was elected mayor in 1888 and served one term.


But by 1907, his life had unraveled. Aged and ill, he had separated from his wife and was almost constantly in the company of his longtime nurse, Gladys Lamberton. At odds with his family, Bryson fought constant legal battles with his wife and children, who were seeking to declare him mentally incompetent and under Lamberton’s control so they could obtain control of his vast financial holdings.

Granting an interview to reporters from his bed at the Hotel Alexandria, Bryson answered when asked about Lamberton’s purported influence over him:

“Why, what on earth do you think I am?” Then, bending forward and shaking a bony finger at the reporter, he said: “I paid her for what work she did and for things she purchased for me and not one cent more. To tell the truth, I lived cheaper with her than I did before I left my wife. It used to cost me at the least estimate $1,000 ($20,523.57 USD 2005) a month to run the house before my separation from my wife, and afterward less than $400 a month covered my expenses.

“Hell, man, this thing makes me mad. Here I have lived in this city for over 25 years and have been spoken of as having the usual amount of common sense. The people of Los Angeles elected me mayor. I have amassed a comfortable competence in this city and then someone says that a woman makes me follow her about like a dog and that I take orders from her, and, in short, that I am crazy and a fool. Well they will find out that I am not. I made my money and I am going to keep it to the end.”

I don’t claim to be intimately familiar with Alger’s works, but I doubt his heroes talk this way.

Sadly, the fighting between the nurse and the family continued after Bryson’s death. He was hurriedly buried in a secret ceremony at Rosedale Cemetery.

Lmharnisch.com
Lmharnisch.blogspot.com

Oct. 2, 1907
Los Angeles

If you have back problems, you might try this method, used by “Dr.” Thomas H. Storey, an unlicensed chiropractor : Have the patient lie down with his head on one chair and his knees on another. Then get on the patient’s back so all your weight is resting on the spine. Next, put your knee in the small of the patient’s back. Then twist the patient’s neck.

And for good measure, you might put a drill between the vertebrae and whack it with a mallet a few times.

Unfortunately, this treatment didn’t help a San Bernardino farmer named Dominick Premus. In fact, it killed him, according to his widow and the California State Medical Board.

But Storey said: “Just allow me to give a practical demonstration of my simple apparatus. I will show that a treatment could not be injurious. I do not use heavy tools. The mallet with which I drive back adhering vertebrae does not weigh more than half a pound. It really doesn’t hurt to any great extent. I have a drill covered with rubber. That is laid against the vertebrae that are pushed up and a blow with the mallet sends the offending ones back into place. In the Premus case, his vertebrae were apparently immovable. I worked on him for some time but, unfortunately, was unable to dislodge the vertebrae.”

“Why is it any worse to tap a man’s spine lightly with a drill and a mallet than it is to use the knife?”

Storey also noted that another doctor was the last one to treat Premus, giving him an injection close to the heart.

“I do not fear prosecution or persecution,” he told The Times. “Jealousy of other doctors has caused me much annoyance, it is true.”

Storey took an impromptu vacation in Mexico and didn’t return to Los Angeles until the next year, when he surrendered to authorities. He was ordered to pay a $500 fine and serve 60 days in jail for practicing medicine without a license, but the sentence was overturned on appeal in 1909.

Lmharnisch.com
Lmharnisch.blogspot.com

Sept. 30, 1907
Los Angeles

Who says research can’t be any fun? I wonder what the WCTU would say about five dozen liquor jugs.

Dr. J.Z. Quack? Not a reassuring name, is it?

Bonus factoid: In French, it’s “Voyez le brique geant que j’examine pres du wharfe.”

Lmharnisch.com

Lmharnisch.blogspot.com

Sept. 28, 1907
Los Angeles

Members of the Los Angeles Motorcycle Club have written to officials in support of a measure banning loud exhaust pipes on motorcycles.

“The motorcycle club says that it has been making a direct crusade against open mufflers and that all members of the club are forbidden to open their cycle mufflers within any city or town limits,” The Times said.

“We wish it generally understood that those riders of motorcycles making this ‘popgun’ noise, which causes so many complaints, are not members of the Los Angeles Motorcycle Club,” the group said.

Lmharnisch.com

Lmharnisch.blogspot.com

Sept. 24, 1907
Los Angeles

A First Day in Los Angeles

Roving, roving, ever restless, drifting
On from strand to strand.

Have I see the years slip by me,
Seeking for the promised land.

From the palm trees of Jamaica and
The Golden Spanish main.

To the gray and sullen northland when
The snow was on the plain.

But today I cease from roaming and
My soul is well content—

For the gypsy came among you and
He pitches his world-worn tent.

But the old desire was silenced for he
Found his long-sought rest.

In the City of Angeles, in the
Sunset of the West.

Walter Adolf Roberts
557 Crocker St., Los Angeles.

Lmharnisch.com

Lmharnisch.blogspot.com

Sept. 23, 1907
Los Angeles

A crowd of 2,000—the faithful and the doubters—gathered at Echo Park Lake as black evangelist the Rev. J.L. Griffin prepared to baptize five believers in the cold water. Children climbed in the trees to get a better view, while other people trolled in rowboats to watch.

The rite was supposed to begin at 4 p.m., but several of the people were delayed and Griffin, who had been holding tent revival meetings in Los Angeles all summer, addressed the increasingly impatient throng.

“Some of you colored men have criticized me because I am friendly with white people,” Griffin said, according to The Times. “I tell you the Lord loves us all, white or black. We are on the watch for sanctification and separation.”

“What is separation, Mr. Preacher?” a skeptic yelled.

“I’ll tell you what separation means for you, my friend,” Griffin replied. “It means separation from your devilment, that’s what.”

Born in the days of slavery, Griffin, 48, of Dallas, was an imposing, powerful man who began preaching at an early age. In 1868, he went to live on a Louisiana farm and while there, learned to read from an old green-backed Webster’s speller.

“Then I read the Testament, lots of times, from cover to cover, and some of the colored folks, they heard me talk about it. In them days the big preachers came into the country to preach sometimes and get a good collection. Finally some of the folks asked why I don’t preach and I did; I began at 9 years old.”

(Of course, The Times wrote it in dialect: “Den I read de Testament lots o’ times, from cover to cover an’ some o’ de colored folks dey heah me talk about it. Dem days de big preachers come into de country to preach sometimes and get a good collection. Finally some o’ de folks ask why I don’t preach, an’ I did; I begin at 9 years old.” )

Griffin frequently engaged the congregation in his sermons:

“You, Sam, you always done shot craps, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You going to do it any more?”

“Lord, no sir.”

The Times quoted one sermon: “We don’t want equality. We want religion; religion dat’ll make you niggahs wake up to the fac’ dat you all is bound fo’ hell faster’n Maud S. could go in her best days.”

For the baptism, Griffin and his followers erected a small disrobing tent in the park. The first to emerge was Annie Childs, wearing a white robe and a white handkerchief over her head. “She seemed unconscious of the onlookers and broke into an ecstatic song as she walked to the water’s edge,” The Times said.

When the five believers (three black, one white and one Latino) were ready, Griffin changed into a white robe and plunged into the lake, followed by two deacons who winced at the coldness of the water. While three of them wore white robes, two of the men wore blue overalls and “thin outing shirts.”



The crowd hushed as Child’s face dipped below the surface of the lake. “In an instant she reappeared, spluttering and sobbing in excitement. Once out of the lake, she went into a spasm. Her garments, saturated with water, clung tightly to her slight figure. Her eyes were closed. Suddenly she began to cry and laugh and to shout religious phrases that gave evidence to the glory that was hers,” The Times said.

Several hecklers steered their rowboats near Griffin, but he cautioned them: “You boys had better get away or I might give you a different kind of baptism.”

With the ceremony concluded, Griffin invited the crowd to attend his tent revival meetings at 9th Street and Mateo.

“It won’t harm you to come and it may do you a power of good. I guess we can all be a mite better than we are.”

Lmharnsich.com

Lmharnisch.blogspot.com

Sept. 20, 1907
Los Angeles

For weeks, Colorado mining investor John Geisel, 57, had confided in his diary as he felt his mind and his life coming unraveled “Good God,” he wrote, “for the first time today I began to fear that I could not control my thoughts.”

At last, he took a walk from the Natick Hotel, 108 W. 1st St. Crossing the Los Angeles River, Geisel found a large pepper tree on Pecan Street, and sat down. That’s where some neighborhood boys found him, sprawled next to a bottle of poison mixed with whisky. A note in his pocket said: “I wish my son Charles was here to comfort me, but he cannot know that I wish it. I hope everyone will forgive me. I would not tell what I was about to do for I knew they would interfere with me. I knew that I would never be right again and I could not stand that.”

Investigation showed that Geisel had lived a forthright life, but had recently become obsessed with the idea that he was dishonest and he brooded on it night and day. His diary, found in his room at the Natick, revealed his chronicle of mental collapse. “It seems a man can be off in the head and very few people know it,” he wrote.

Elsewhere, he wrote: “Everything is boiling and bubbling and I can’t think straight.”

He hid his troubles from everyone. “At times he would be unnaturally cheerful and again he would silently spend hours at a time in his room, scribbling away on scraps of paper,” The Times said.

“His failing mind began to force upon him the idea that he was dishonest. At points in his diary his sentences were pathetic. It was the fight of a man who had been honest all his life against what he considered a dishonest thing. He seemed to be horrified at the idea of being dishonest,” The Times said.

Less than a week before his suicide, Geisel came to Los Angeles from Denver with his son Charles to discuss some mining property and while they were in the desert, Geisel suffered from sunstroke, The Times said.

“If I made a mistake about those claims, I don’t want to live any more,” he wrote. “Why should a man bring his friends and even his son into the God-forsaken desert for nothing.”

His last entry: “I am sure I am going wrong and I will not stand for it.”

Contents of the Natick Hotel, built in 1883, were auctioned off in 1950, with marble-topped washstands and dressers selling for $15-$20. The building where Teddy Roosevelt and Enrico Caruso once stayed was demolished to make way for—a parking lot.

Lmharnisch.com

Lmharnisch.blogspot.com