Category: Kim Cooper

Circus freaks and balloon walks

August 3, 1927

On this slow news day, readers of the Los Angeles Times were treated to a pair of interesting stories on page A8. The first was a five paragraph reprint from American Druggist magazine introducing Ben D. Rinehart, acting pharmacist for the Ringling-Barnum & Bailey circus. You probably never stopped to think that a 600-pound fat lady might need three times the normal dose for a sleeping potion to work, but Ben has. He’s also proud of his rickets treatments for elephants, who consume quarts of cod liver oil and are wrapped in bandages the size of bedsheets.

More whimsical still was the piece entitled "How To Walk On Air." How, you ask? Why, via that new and enervating sport of Balloon Jumping, as proposed in The Forum Magazine. Just grab hold of a big balloon with just slightly less lift than your weight and LEAP, over buildings, lakes and elephants with rickets! Mr. (wait for it) Frederick S. Hoppin is convinced that we’re at the outset of an age of shoulder-mounted gaspacks when everyone will have the ability to gambol about bearing just a portion of their natural weight. "Our whole present-day world would be turned upside-down. Legislatures will be busily engaged in passing laws prohibiting people from leaving the earth too freely, or rules for the right of way up and down and sideways, or regulations against landing on the head of a fellow citizen or planting a foot on any part of him as you rise. And then there would be the new rule of etiquette: should you pass over or around a lady?"

All right, class: discuss. 

The minute my back was turned, you drank all the hair tonic.

Two Black Crows

August 2, 1927
Hollywood 

A line stretched halfway down the block from the lobby of the Pantages Theater as eager fans waited their chance to be amused by Moran and Mack, popular blackface performers better known as Two Black Crows. Once they got inside, the audience enjoyed such trifles as a man who played Liszt on the banjo, a tap dancing sister act and the great Van Cello, who balances barrels on his feet.

Moran and Mack were a great hit, and indulged the cheering crowd with two skits, a comic boxing match and Mack’s signature "lazy shuffle." The evening closed with a screening of Colleen starring Madge Bellamy, in which Irish people were painted with a brush nearly as broad as the tar-dipped one that coats Two Black Crows. Just another night of fun and frolic in Movietown USA!  

Hear Two Black Crows in action here.

Death of the Tamale Lady

She was 52, a mother and grandmother, a vendor of tamales. She lived quietly on the east side of the L.A. River, in an ugly stucco apartment house with concrete all around. Then one Sunday night, as she came home after delivering an order of tamales, she was attacked in the street, stabbed twice and left to die just steps from her home. She was found quickly, but it was too late for any aid. Doña Rosa died, and no one but the killer knew who had done it, or why. Oh, there were rumors, there always are, but for most people on her street, life went on just as it had, just without Doña Rosa’s tasty tamales or her soft smile.

This is not a story from 1927. "Doña" Rosa Cruz, wife of Joel Mejía, mother of Nancy, native of El Salvador, was murdered in Lincoln Heights on Sunday, July 22. As of today, this crime has received no coverage in the English language newspapers or broadcast media. It has not appeared on the LA Times’ Homicide Report Blog. Detectives were in the neighborhood yesterday, asking questions and looking for an answer. And on the corner of Albion and Avenue 20, the people who loved Doña Rosa continue to gather, bringing fresh flowers and seeking comfort in community, on the open sidewalk where she walked on that last night.

On this blog we remember the forgotten dead from long ago, people who came to Los Angeles and found, not whatever improved life they were seeking, but too often an anonymous or notorious death. We should never forget that these people left families and loved ones, and that these crimes resonate in large ripples out over the decades, in those who knew the victim and far beyond. RIP Doña Rosa, and we hope peace can be found by those who loved her.

dona rosa memorial

Exit of a Thirsty Man

July 26, 1927
Beverly Hills 

Architect Fred W. Maack was well prepared when he appeared before City Recorder/ Judge Seth Strelinger to answer to a charge of drunkeness and disorderly conduct. He was willing, he read from a most unusual statement, to voluntarily exile himself for a period of four years from the municipality of Beverly Hills (unless granted permission to enter by the BHPD), during which time he would not partake of any intoxicating liquors. Further, he was under the care of a psychiatrist, and would remain so until the doctor deemed him sane.

"In consideration of the above," Maack read, "I beg to request that I be given a suspended sentence and be permitted to forfeit my bail and that the medical staff of the Beverly Hills Health Department abstain from interfering with my case on the grounds that they are acquainted with the worst phases of my character only–" (and here the statement deteriorates somewhat into possibly pixilated confusion) "–and will unintentionally be acting for the good of my family than for my own good and will not be here to bother my family in the future. This is not meant as a criticism, but voices my honest desire to start over, quit drinking and get to work in another community. I have a job waiting for me and if all official record of my being under observation is omitted I will be highly appreciative of the fact."

Judge Strelinger was impressed by Maack’s plea, and not only granted the suspended sentence, but ruled that his $100 bail be returned. Here’s hoping the gentleman stayed dry and built some fine structures, wherever he next settled.

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!

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.)