Month: July 2007

1947project Podcast #4, July 22 2007

The 4th biweekly 1947project podcast is now online, and can be accessed at the internet archive, at our new MOLI.com page (a new site offering free hosting for all your bulky media along with a personalized profile) or at iTunes. Pick yer poison.

About this episode: This edition of the true crime time travel podcast has a bare bones cast, following Crimebo’s horrific clown car spill on the 405 and Mary’s escape to the shore. But Kim, Nathan and Joan are on hand to share several daffy bits of 1927 Southern Californiana, including the tale of a business partnership severed by a hammer, the couple with two legs between ’em caught driving drunk down Riverside way, and a rumination on the timely fad of flagpole sitting. The 1927 and 2007 events calendars are shared and new advertisers come aboard, including the League of Bloated Plutocrats, Masonic Jars and a corrective school for girls whose mothers think they’re fast. Join us on your
computational device! Today!

Esotouric Named Best Tours by the Downtown News

We’re very happy to announce that the best of issue of the Downtown News is on the stands, and Esotouric has been named Best Tours.

In 2005, Kim Cooper, Larry Harnisch and Nathan Marsak created the 1947project, a blog that chronicled a different L.A. crime for each day of that year. The project was such a success that they followed up with a similar blog detailing the sordid affairs of 1907 and 1927. Now, Cooper and others lead excursions for a tour bus company called Esotouric. The four- or five-hour adventures canvass the city, highlighting crime sites from the heinous to the quirky. This summer, Esotouric debuted "John Fante’s Dreams of Bunker Hill," which visited the Downtown haunts of Arturo Bandini, the protagonist of Fante’s 1939 novel Ask the Dust. In August, don’t miss the Charles Bukowski birthday tour, which celebrates what would have been the author’s 87th birthday. At esotouric.com.-LL

Well, if the Downtown News thinks we’re doing something right with our Black Dahlia, John Fante and other downtown-centered tours, the least we can do to say thanks is to offer two new bus tours celebrating the neighborhood as it was in the wild old days.

So on September 8, we’ll launch our first 90-minute Crime Bus tours, the back-to-back Hotel Horrors and Main Street Vice, with a cocktail/snack break between. You can ride one for $25 or both for $45, and we hope the lower price and shorter running time will be an opportunity for folks who’ve been wanting to ride for a while to join us. See you on the bus!

Dada Comes to Pasadena

July 22, 1927
Pasadena
heels
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 

stuntdriver1

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.

The Height of Mystery

July 19, 1927
Los Angeles

Who’s that bobbing in the wind high atop the Rose Room Ballroom at 8th and Spring? Why, it’s The Phantom of the Flagpole, a mask-wearing fella who swears he’ll break the flagpole sitting record of 17 days and 2 hours set by V.H. Crouch of New Bedford, MA. Just hours after Crouch came down from his eastern pole, The Phantom climbed his. Oh, heavy hangs the crown of the nation’s greatest flagpole sitter.

The Times reports that The Phantom is shaving and eating three meals a day (unsaid is what he does with these meals once he’s finished with them, if you catch our drift). He smokes 100 cigarettes a day and gulps black coffee most of the night, when he ties himself to the pole, just in case. He’s reading fiction magazines and would like an adventure novel sent up.

On July 26, The Phantom will call for a cork helmet to avert the awful rays of the sun. When The Phantom of the Flagpole finally comes down to earth on August 5th, he is revealed as Captain Robert Hull, and happily takes possession of a $2500 prize from Rose Room manager Joseph Lederer.

But while you cheer the achievement of our local pigeon, spare a kind thought for poor "Hold Em Joe" Powers, whose perch over the Morrison Hotel in Chicago ended at a disappointing 16 days and two hours on July 15, and unaccountably left him missing six teeth. (Scurvy? An excess of chattering? Only Joe knows, and he ain’t talking.)

Their Mothers Must Be Proud

churchrobbers
 
Thomas Costello, 27, and Valentine Mezzeta, 32, came before a judge today on robbery charges.  Their preferred targets?  Church poor boxes.  But before you start thinking Thomas and Valentine are soulless, diabolical fiends, stealing food from the mouths of widows and orphans, read a little further.
 
It turns out that the pair used wires covered with adhesive gum to fish coins out of the boxes of local churches, leaving the boxes themselves undamaged so they could return for another swipe without arousing suspicion.  This sneaky, though inefficient method of theft never yielded more than a few dollars from any one box, mostly in loose change.
 
Officer Prayter caught the men red-handed at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, 6657 Sunset Blvd., and discovered that their church-robbing was more than a casual pasttime.  After all, one has to pinch a lot of pennies to pay the rent.
 
Bail was fixed at $3000 for each man.

Ice Cream: It’s What’s For Dinner.

July 17, 1927

Health and Diet Advice

In an effort to redeem a luscious dairy treat’s good name after being caught in a bootlegging scandal last week--or perhaps because it was a slow news day--Dr. Frank McCoy today announced that “ICE CREAM IS A REAL FOOD.”

This is the good news we’ve been waiting for, folks. According to Dr. McCoy (author of the Los Angeles Times’s “Health and Diet Advice” column), ice cream “should at all times be considered a real food and not a delicacy.” Besides being rich in vitamin A and calcium, a half-pint of ice cream has as much lime as a half-pound of butter, four pounds of meat, or three-and-a-half pounds of potatoes. Never heard about the importance of lime in your diet? Me either--but if we eat enough ice cream, we’ll never have to worry about it again.

Dr. McCoy also has a word or two for those who criticize manufacturers for adding gelatin to their ice creams. “- I would suggest that the laws be changed to admit the use of even more gelatin, as this is an excellent food product which makes the ice cream still more palatable and delicious.”

Packed with all that lime and gelatin, ice cream is a veritable superfood. Dr. McCoy “suggest[s] that you try some summer lunches with ice cream as the principal part of the meal, using with it any one kind of the acid fruits – or – cooked and raw nonstarchy vegetables.” Ice cream salad, anyone?

Should you find your pants getting a little tight after all that healthfulness, you might want to take a look at Dr. McCoy’s book, The Fast Way to Health.

If I Had a Hammer

If I Had a Hammer headline

July 16, 1927
Los Angeles

“If I had a hammer
I’d hammer in the morning
I’d hammer in the evening…”
— “If I Had a Hammer”, written by Lee Hayes and Pete Seeger

Jacob Goldstein, President of Rothschild Mortgage and Finance, permanently ended his business partnership with the firm’s Vice President,Jacob Goldstein Joseph Stern, by bashing him four times over the head with a hammer and firing three bullets from a revolver into his body. It would have been less messy if only Goldstein had let an attorney handle the dissolution.

Goldstein denied premeditating the attack, which occurred in the company’s elaborately furnished offices at 505 Hellman Bank Building, and swore to police that he had acted in self-defense. According to Goldstein, Stern had behaved like a lunatic and had menaced him with a hammer during a quarrel over business matters. Goldstein further stated that he was in fear of his life when he wrenched the hammer away from his future former partner, and then used the tool to crush the man’s skull. The coup de grace was delivered with the revolver he had purchased the day before.

Police found Goldstein’s explanation unbelievable and charged him with first degree murder. Goldstein entered a not guilty plea at his arraignment but was later allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter, for which he received a sentence of from one to ten years in the state pen.

It’s not easy to get kicked out of California forever, but Jacob Goldstein managed it. On the condition that he would move to Forest Hills, New York to live with friends, 63-year-old Goldstein was paroled from San Quentin on February 24, 1933.