Beach Cities – Page 3

And You Say You’ve Got it Rough

badluck
May 6, 1927
Huntington Beach

Mr. Henry Graw: orphaned at four, never knew his real name, went to Alaska and struck it rich. Lost all that money in Seattle. Then he married, and then she died.

So he came to Huntington Beach and secured a good job with a company that quickly folded and as such didn’t pay him. He found a less-good job, but at least it paid, until a pipe fell and crushed his hand. So he got good and drunk to deal with the pain in his soul (and hand) and promptly landed in the hoosegow.

After relating this saga, acting City Recorder of Huntington Beach, Andrew Wilson, elected to release Graw on probation; Graw stated to the court that he is leaving for Alaska as soon as possible.

The Street Crime of the Day

May 1, 1927
Los Angeles

In the Times today, a round-up of street crime incidents calculated to terrorize city residents, or at least discourage freelance musicians, good Samaritans and lingering outside a lady’s home in an open car–sheesh, buddy, get a room.

Clarinetist Antonio Cili thought he was being hired to play a gig when three gentlemen picked him up at Sixth and Broadway, drove to Fourth and Pecan, tossed him from the car, beat him silly and stole his instrument and $20.

Jennie Emerson of 2611 Vallejo Street was nearly run down in the street while crossing at Daly and Manitou in Lincoln Heights, and while recovering her wits confronted by the armed driver and his pal, who threatened to kill her before stealing her purse.

A bandit robbed J. Maganuma of $40 cash and a serving of chop suey at his restaurant at 4911 South Broadway. It was not reported if Mr. Maganuma spat in the food, but we certainly hope so.

A. Eisner was carjacked at First and New Hampshire, forced to drive to Sixth and Lucas and relieved of his $100 stick pin, $40 watch and $8 cash. Maybe it’s Eisner’s home address of 5579 Santa Monica Boulevard or the fancy stick pin that gives this brief tale the whiff of rough trade, or possibly we just have dirty minds.

Joseph Michael, while strolling by a doorway near First and Main was lassoed by a couple of rope-wielding miscreants who strangled Michael into unconsciousness and stole $35, this just two blocks from Central Police HQ.

Kindly Arthur Roper was driving along (now defunct) California Street near Figueroa when he spied a fashionably garbed young lady in apparent distress in the middle of the road. He stopped to lend aid and her friend hopped onto Roper’s running board with a revolver, which was clapped to Roper’s chest while the gal riffled his pockets of $53 cash.

And then there was Jacob L. Johannes of 228 South Rodeo Drive, who was sitting in a car with Miss Marie Boucher outside her home at 5806 Carlton Way when a fiend with a revolver relieved the lady of a $1000 fur coat, $75 watch and $50 bar pin. Johannes lost $6 cash. Buddy, you can’t afford a room… or Miss Boucher.

Now be careful out there!

Wither Sim Cross?

April 27, 1927
Los Angeles

Sim Cross is alive, ALIVE! The Los Angeles man, resident of 4195 Third Avenue, was believed a suicide by pals after a full suit of clothes but the underpants were found on the beach at Redondo on April 19. Mugs were raised, his good and bad points debated, and perhaps the pals even parcelled out his nicest ties among them. But on the 21st there came a telegram, signed Sim and sent from San Francisco, announcing that reports of his demise were not to be believed.

In time, he returned home, bearing a singularly peculiar tale. The last thing he remembered, see, he was fighting a riptide. And then, inky darkness. He came to 48 hours later in an SF hotel room, with bruised feet and no idea how he got there. In the room, clothes and a suitcase he’d never seen before. He dressed, and stepped into the street, where two men accosted him. It was thanks to them, they said, that Sim was in this spot. And now all they needed was for him to take someone’s place in a hospital for a few more days and…

Here Sim drew the curtain over one of the most perfect descriptions of cliche detective’s peril as we’ve ever read. He claims that he simply demured and came home.

Was it all fantasy? Or did once there dwell strangely maleable hoodlums, who would conk a guy while he swam and spirit him away to play a part in a bandage opera, then let him go when he said he wasn’t in the mood? We’ll never know, for after this one extraordinary incident, Sim Cross vanished from the record, but never from our hearts.

Raymond Chandler Tour offered in Long Beach Public Library Foundation Auction

It’s fundraising time for the Long Beach Public Library, and Esotouric is there, with a pair of tickets good for our upcoming Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles tour (July 21st) or any of the Esotouric Bus Adventures tours. The opening bid for two seats is a bargain at just $37, so why not raise your paddle, and help out a great local library?

Diver Down

April 20, 1927
Los Angeles

When evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, the anointed queen of Echo Park’s Angelus Temple, went to Ocean Park Beach last May 18 and faked her own disappearance so she could run off with a boyfriend, even she could not have anticipated the hysteria that followed. For while her theological appearances were occasion for outpourings of public adoration, in vanishing, she moved into a new realm of fame.

Congregants promptly offered a $25,000 reward for the return of their favorite alive, though she was widely presumed drowned. Word of the reward passed like quicksilver among the community of professional divers, perhaps without the "alive" clause appended. One of these, Edgar Harrison, was already in town from Catalina to testify in an insanity case, and stopped off on his way home to take a dive off the end of amusement laden Lick Pier on May 25, where no sign of the missing woman was found. The water pressure exacerbated an attack of appendicitis, and Harrison died in agony. By the time Aimee stumbled out of the desert crying kidnap (a lie that was soon exposed), Edgar Harrison was in his grave.

Today, his widow Edna sat in court seeking $500 in death benefits that had been denied by the State Industrial Accident Commission, which claimed that Harrison was acting as a private citizen when he went diving for Aimee’s reward. Edna countered that her husband was operating under orders when he received his injuries, and further that she had been receiving threatening letters, ostensibly from the City of Los Angeles, suggesting that she seek payment from McPherson and Angelus Temple, and leave the city out of it.

McPherson’s mother Minnie Kennedy took the stand, and said she had known nothing of Edgar Harrison’s dive until she was invited to attend his funeral, and that she had sent flowers and $500 to the widow, the latter which was returned. Edna countered that indeed $500 had been proffered, by two "impudent" representatives of the Temple, but that when she suggested they talk with her lawyer they had snatched the money away, called her "a bitter woman" and stalked off.

Edgar Harrison was survived by two young children, Edgar Jr. and Lois.

No Mermaid She

April 10, 1927
Venice

It was motorist S.H. Henry who saw it first, bobbing in the Grand Canal with slow, horrible motions. He leaned in and saw a middle aged woman’s body, fully clothed save for her hat, bound round with rope. He ran for the cops. When they hauled her out, they found there were no ropes, but long strands of seaweed that had caught round the body as it floated through the gentle waterways.

A bruise on the brow suggested violence, but ultimately it was determined that the victim, Mrs. Margaret Kelly of Chicago, had killed herself after long despondency over ill health. Perhaps she vainly hoped the balmy winds and lovely vistas of Venice-by-the-Sea would sooth her worries. She had $207 cash when found, more than enough for her passage first to Sharp & Nolan undertakers (beachside specialists in these messy water cases), thence to Chicago and the afterlife.

When Dry Agents Go Wet

April 7, 1927
Los Angeles dryagentsgowethed

A Coroner’s inquest commenced today in an effort to determine just what happened when two inebriates—Frank Farley and George H. Hudson—pixilatedly plowed their car head-on into the auto driven by Union Oil bigwig E. Percy Ingmire & wife near Wilmington. Two things are certain: Ingmire is dead, and the two sots being held for murder are Prohibition Agents, drunkenly driving a government car on government business.

Seems our Boys of the Eighteenth, Farley and Hudson, were out carousing (with liquor in the car on the wrong side of the road and with excessive speed) in the company of three seamen from the steamer Pomona and a Mrs. Margaret “Bessie” McCallister (at whose home they’d earlier had a drinking party) when the accident occurred. ingmire Normally, drunken vehicular homicides under the auspices of Volstead-Feds get swept under the rug, but unfortunately Ingmire was former president of the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce, Past Master of the San Pedro Masonic Lodge, Past Exalted Ruler of San Pedro Elks’ Lodge, President of the San Pedro Industrial Association, ad infinitum. As such, all and sundry jumped into the fray: the DA appeared for the State, the Dep US Atty for the Feds, the prohibition administrators for themselves—the last of which entering into a fray with folks from the Customs Dept, who are fond of hampering prohibition enforcement in California. (The Department of Justice and the Intelligence Section of the Treasury Department are on deck.)

Dry Agent Farley, driver of the killer flivver, is a real catch. He had been arrested for a street holdup in 1923, was caught sneaking onto the Dutch steamer Eemdyk looking for booze (outside the official capacity of his employment, that is) and, according to Customs officials, was often insolent and acted beyond his authority. Of course, those Wet Agents from Customs would say that.

bailhead

On September 20, a US District Judge gave Farley one to ten in San Quentin. Of course, the Federal Comptroller refused to pay Farley’s railroad fare to Q, on the grounds that Farley was a State Prisoner. The State controller stated that Farley is a Federal prisoner and if anyone was going to pay his fare, it was the Feds. So Farley stayed a spell in County, where he made pals with one Maj. Donald McRae, on trial for robbing government liquor warehouses. Inside County they got liquor all the time, until Farley went up north and subsequently testified about his involvement in McRae’s phony alibis, whereafter McRae threatened his life. And so go our drunken, fallen Feds.

A Professional Man Ought Not Dally

April 5, 1927
Santa Monica

Serial burglar E.M. Peterson is presently cooling his heels in Santa Monica Jail, having carelessly cooled his tonsils in the course of knocking over the Radio Pharmacy on Washington Boulevard recently. Fingerprint man Barlow discovered an incriminating imprint on a silver sundae cup at the soda fountain, and when confronted with the stain, Peterson admitted both to stealing an icy cold confection, and to no less than fifty Westside burglaries and seventy in Los Angeles. This is once again, proof positive that between meal snacks are bad for a bad man’s health.

But enough about crime. Please join us, gentle reader, in wishing a most joyous 95th birthday to the beaming gentleman at left, Mr. Harry Cooper, my grandpa. Born in Philly in 1912, he served in Havai’i (as he pronounces it) during the early 1930s where he saved a fellow soldier from a riptide, came out to LA and drove a pickle truck, met and wooed my grandma Barbara on the tennis courts, and together they briefly ran a chicken ranch, then were for many years in the discount shoe business at the Beverly Bootery, a shop located where the El Coyote parking lot is today. Harry is a gentle fellow with a passion for tinkering in his garage workshop (ask him about his moss topiary projects or the steering wheel shelf he made so he can read National Geographics in the car while Barbara is shopping), odd scientific and natural history facts, golfing and exotic foods. Here’s wishing a perfect day to a lovely fellow!

A Tasty Tide

September 22, 1907
Venice

Someone–perhaps a drunken and disgruntled cook who was fired last night–snuck into the larder of the Ship Hotel around midnight and brought forth a great quantity of luxury foodstuffs, which were cast into the surf. It was no easy job. Three whole loins of beef, 200 pounds in weight, 250 pounds of clams and a number of oysters from eastern climes were among the waste found on the sand with dawn’s light.

Vice in Venice

August 30, 1907 invadelair
Venice

Get talked up by a booster…wend your way through the hall…step on the special stair which emits a loud buzz, warning those you approach. You’re one your way into the Venice Club, Windward Avenue, Venice, California.

The windows are covered in black oilcloth to keep out light and sound and prying eyes. Inside there’s a roulette wheel, stacked high with gold and silver, emitting its seductive clicky whir, counterposed by the atonal, plangent clack of chips. Verdant young society men huddle around the faro layout. You may or may not notice—they’re all losing. Certainly your luck can’t be as bad!

Your luck would be bad indeed this night, as Deputy District Attorney John North kicks in the door and announces that everyone is under arrest. This would not phase the roulette dealer: “He looked coldly at the officers and his slender gambler fingers toyed idly with the stack of chips at the edge of the table; his little, ratty, sharp face was a slight sneer, half of amusement.”

The Venice Club, run by an aggregation of Arizona sure-thing men, is as crooked as they come. It is said that the reason the faro dealer has one eye is due to time spent having to look crooked at the bent ends of marked cards.

As the room was pinched, a sudden epidemic of sick wives befell Los Angeles. But the cops would have none of it, and everyone was hauled in. The gamblers were allowed to kitty their boodle—some $1486 ($30,498 2006 USD).

The club kept a register of all the tenderfoot gilded youth they’d fished, and, amusingly, the paper printed it in full:
listofbadmen
Ah, would that the story should end there. The bust of the Venice Club opened wide a scandal that shed no new good light on the already suspect “beach towns.”

crooksgive

The Venice police were as fixed as the card games, and got fat from the brace games that lined the seashore. (During Fiesta week, the same underworld figures who ran the Venice Club ran a crooked [and police protected] gambling hall downtown on Broadway between First and Second.) Venice men “higher up” had cemented relationships with blind pigs, dens of ruination for young girls, and that special element adept in fixing elections. Abbot Kinney and (Ocean Park magnate) G. M. Jones battled it out and the cops pledged their various allegiances in the war.

The corruption scandal lingered long and luscious…September 11, 1907:
knifehilt