Death Before Dishonor, Your Honor

 ghost

August 12, 1927
Los Angeles

leapAlice Miller, 24, was hanging out with her buddies Helen Myers, Norman Myers and Robert Wilkenson—the four of them all out on bail on various charges of grand larceny, pickpocketing, and vagrancy—in her little room at the Hillman Apartments, 1010 Ingraham Street.  

There’s a knock on the door.  Seems that Robert Seaner, the bondsman who’d bailed Alice out when she got pinched for pickpocketing in downtown department stores, has just received some disturbing news from Chief of Police Laubenhemer out in Milwaukee.  Was it true, Alice, that back in Milwaukee, where you were known as Mrs. Mary Becker, you escaped from the Industrial Home for Women at Taycheedah?  Would you be so kind as to come with me down to the station so we can sort this thing out?  Sure thing, says Alice, let me go in the other room for a moment and change into my street clothes.

aliceBut the moments come and go and the collected find the room empty.  She’s chosen death over jail:  through the open window, they see her broken body lying four stories below.

Despite the basal skull fracture, broken nose and arm, and assorted internal injuries, Alice survives to stand trial.  On November 26, Alice is freed on the charge of shoplifting, due to insufficient evidence; she is promptly rearrested by Milwaukee officers, who set off with their prisoner.
 taycheedah

Hit Records Make a Splash

August 11, 1927
Los Angeles
blasts

 

 

 

Three terrific explosions ripped through the Hall of Records to-day!  Who could have committed such a dastardly act?  Anarchists?  Bolsheviks?  Theosophists?  Vegetarians?
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The twelfth-floor room in which the blasts took place were stained and dripping a deep crimson red.  Surely the blood of the innocent!  Splattered across our noble governing offices by devious dynamiting moustachio’d malcontents!
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On further investigation, all that dripping gore was discovered to be just red wine…for the Hall of Records, it seems, is a pretty swell place to stash some wine kegs. 

Until they burst.

The Little Klansman That Couldn’t

August 4, 1927ousterdamage
San Pedro

That Ernest M. Branson just couldn’t leave well enough alone.  He was a member in good standing of San Pedro 51, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and all was fine and hunky-dory, until he started stirring the pot with his talk.  So from under the sheet came a big boot, and out went Ernest; now, Ernest says he was libeled in the written order that banished him from the Kluxers.

What was it ever did Ernest say?  To hell with the flag?  Hooray for Hebrews?  Eucharist is yummy?  Thomas Jefferson got it on with Sally Hemmings?

No, all he did was stir up some internal dissension inside the Klan, which resulted in his ouster (maybe he sided with Madge over DC.)  That’s gotta be the worst libel of all—accused of making mishegas in the klavern!

So now Ernest has filed a $25,000 ($275,749 USD2006) libel suit against none other than Exalted Cyclops Karl K. Keller.  

(Yes, Karl K. Keller.  I bet his real name was Herman Flork.)

Jeremiah 48:10

 heldformurder

July 29, 1927
Long Beach

Reverend W. R. Hardy, pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church of Long Beach, had a little quarrel with one Joe Dianty, Montegrin bootblack, in front of Dianty’s home at 1225 California Avenue.

diantyshouseOf the two things a pastor can draw from his waistband—his bible or his revolver—Rev. Hardy elected to draw the latter.  He shot Dianty in the abdomen, and when Dianty turned the other cheek (to run away) Hardy shot him again in the neck and shoulder.  Dianty died on the sidewalk.

On October 13, Hardy is convicted of manslaughter after a week-long trial involving thirty witnesses for the prosecution and half that number for the defense; on October 27 he is given one to ten in San Quentin.

 

Now, would that he have had the jawbone of an ass…

Monkeywrench Today, Pocket Doors Tomorrow

It’s been a while since we’ve checked in with our friends down South.  

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For horrors beyond your wildest imagination, please go here.

Comrades of the Crescent, if you own a shotgun, I suggest you buy a shotgun.  And I don’t mean the bracketed kind.  Not that I mean to imply you should take up arms against your government, well, yes I do.

Dada Comes to Pasadena

July 22, 1927
Pasadena
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Pasadenans, beware!  If you’re Japanese, anyway.  See, there’s a “giant Negro” on the loose, and he’s a criminal.  His crime?  Hanging the Japanese upside-down.  

Seriously.  George Shimanouchi was minding his own business in the garage of his home at 126 Elevado Drive (now Del Mar) when the aforementioned giant negro (hey, not my nomenclature) arrived unbidden and hung the boy upside-down from a rafter.  

A Mrs. C. Duncan, 105 Elevado, heard someone yelling for help across the street and called it in; either she took her own sweet time about it or the authorities did, because when Detective Seargeants Mansell and Cheek arrived, Shimanouchi, now semiconscious, had been suspended head-down for nearly an hour.  

The boy held the opinion that his assailant planned to rob the house after tying him to the rafter, but officers found no evidence of entry.

(While Hippocrates was a firm believer in inversion therapy, practitioners evidently went to absurd lengths in sharing their craft before its popularization via American Gigolo.)

Only Two Years, Three Months, & One Week til this Whole Thing Blows Over

July 22, 1927
Anaheim

costshomeMrs. Geraldine Haster was a product of her time—too bad her time was so terribly and sinfully debased!  It was bad enough that she had taken to wearing cosmetics (!) but then she had even gone so far as to bob her hair (!!)!  Why not just tattoo "SCAPEGRACE" across your forehead, Geraldine?

When Geraldine returned with her mother and a party of friends from a motor trip to Tijuana (need we say more?) she found herself locked out of the home she shared with her husband, prominent Anaheim rancher Richard Haster.  Geraldine filed for divorce, charging cruelty.

On the stand today Geraldine alleged that life with ol’ Dick was no picnic either:  he took liberties with other women, was adverse to frequent bathing, read magazines while guests were in the house (!!!), stayed at the lodge until 4am, and, most hurtful of all, when she wore cosmetics, was told by her husband that she looked like a “Piute Indian.”  She thus demands division of property valued at $100,000 ($1,102,998 USD 2006).

lutherans!Yes, the twenties were a time of tumult and turmoil as conventions unraveled, exposing lots of hypocrisy and kicked-up heels.  Lutherans took especial offence at all this gayety, closing their thirty-fifth annual convention today with the adoption of a resolution deploring the tendency of American youth toward “extravagance, immodesty, and disrespect.”

Lutherans sleep easy tonight knowing that American youth turned out just fine.

Well, That Seems Like a Good Idea

July 21, 1927
Across the Mighty United States 

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stuntdriver2 

Sadly, there’s no follow-up story about Burns’ journey.  We like to believe it involved something other than broken bones and twisted metal—“what a shame, the poor boy got all the way out here and crashed.”

Driving in Los Angeles is a far cry from the corn-flanked roads of Lawrence, Jimmy.

Widow Warfare!!!

July 15, 1927
The Southland

arachattack

Of our common cohort Latrodectus—the black widow—there is in the Times no mention whatsoever until this day in 1927.  For it was on this day that Bureau of Housing and Sanitation officials were alerted to the presence of one lone lady in a pile of trash lumber at 147 North Hoover Street—a specimen believed to have come in a crate of fruit from Hawaii.  

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But worry not! general public, says M. S. Siegel, Chief Supervisor of the Department, for we have destroyed the specimen, burned the lumber, and saturated the ground with gasoline!  No other reports of the spiders have been made in Los Angeles, and so far as Siegel knows, there are no more of the type in our geographic region. 

 

But he spoke too soon:  it was the beginning of the end.  July 19, 1927:

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From here, the paper goes spider-nutty. 147 North Hoover was apparently our arachnid Alamogordo, for few days passed in the late 20s without mention of some terrible arachattack: 

spidertime spiderwarpath

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 spider4spider1

spider2

 

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(Personally, I’m of the opinion that the area always had the spiders hanging about in our privies and junk cars and whatnot, and the Times just felt it needed something new to harp on.  And what better?  After all, they’re colored…[they’ve got “black” right in the name!]  And they’re women.) 

(And that whole sexual cannibalism thing is a little suspect.)