No Impulse Control

December 4, 1947
Los Angeles

Mark Lima, 16, could hardly dispute mother Estelle’s opinion that he was a lousy student: his latest report card showed failing grades in spelling and in math. But why did she have to harp at him like that, first about school, then about leaving a door open?

Barely thinking, he loaded the .22 rifle his father Alfred, a Tijuana chemist, had given him when he turned 14 and he shot Estelle once in the back. Then, horrified, he called the ambulance to their little home at 412 1/2 W. 68th Street.

Even in her agonies, Estelle, 41, sought to protect her son, “Don’t hurt Mark… he’s a good boy!” Her condition is critical, and Mark is in juvenile custody.

412 W. 68th To-day

Seems like just a few days ago there was some attempted matricide up on 46th. ‘Course, that was a middle-aged shmoe wielding a washboard. Here we’ve got a juvie shooting his mother in the back. And to think, in just a year and a few days, Burbank’s own Every Mother’s Son, Edmund Kemper, will be born.

So I set out to see where Mark, this budding Nero, grew up.

But here, in 1947, in what was known as Los Angeles Judicial Township, a stone’s throw from the Goodyear Rubber Plant, there was no “South Flower” or “South Grand.” Just a stretch of homes from Figueroa to Broadway:

And that, children, explains where 412 W. 68th Street went–that’s 428 in the picture, and as far as the addresses go.

The Sad Case of the Model and Her Baby

December 3, 1947
Toluca Lake/ Hermosa Beach

It took police some time to piece it all together, but when they did, they found that familiar tragedy of a man of mature years, the young, troubled model he married, a love that burned but briefly, the child caught between them, and money. Always money.

The tale unraveled when Sam Wartnik, 45, sportswear manufacturer with offices at 1020 Wall Street, had his attorney ask Wartnik’s partner Al Hirschfeld and employee Clifford Jones to drop by the house where his wife and son had been living solo since the he filed for divorce last week. Wartnik, in San Francisco on business, had been unable to get Lena Mae, 30, on the phone, and was concerned she might have done something rash.

This was the gal, after all, who he painted in his divorce suit as a drunk and drug abuser, a person who had once tried and several times threatened to kill him. All the same, he’d left baby Neil Ellis in Lena Mae’s care.

On the door of the little Cape Cod-style house at 4545 Clybourn Avenue they found a note: “Have gone to spend week-end with friends.” They broke in.

Lena Mae was big on notes. Along with the blood splattered in every room they found the one that said “Sam, here are the keys. Now you can sell the home and gloat over your MONEY.”

And the one on the back of Lena Mae’s summons to a custody suit that was to be held this morning. It said “Sam, this summons is my reward for standing by you through thick and thin. Well, this is what you’ve often begged me to do so I’m doing it–and taking my sweet, precious Neil with me. Too bad, cause we both did love life since you left us broke but happy together. We got well together with your beat-up presence away. Good bye…”

And they found Neil, dressed only in a diaper and his own congealed blood, strangled on a bed. He’d been that way for a couple of days. Propped on another bed, a whimsical book for expectant fathers.

The hotel manager found Lena Mae in the Hermosa Biltmore, covered in hesitation cuts, ultimately dead perhaps of poison. And more notes. “Bleeding to death is so slow but I do want my baby buried in my arms.” And in her wallet, beside the season pass to Santa Anita, on the back of a mailing receipt for something sent to her husband at his office on November 10, a day after they separated, “I am Mrs. Sam Wartnik. Notify Los Angeles Police.”

Sam and Lena Mae were married in Las Vegas on May 19, 1946. Baby Neil was born on January 24, and died around December 1.

2005 intrudes, happily

1947project got a little contemporary notice today, in a piece in the L.A. Times exploring the bloggers of Los Angeles, and in a pre-nomination for an Urb Award from Gridskipper. To stay in the running for that Best L.A. Blog Urb (Urbie?), we need to get seconded and thirded, so if you like this blog, please drop by Gridskipper and let them know, in an email or comment, that you think 1947project deserves to be considered in our category.

We thank you. And now, back to your regularly scheduled 1940s.

Cops Clean House in Watts

December 2, 1947
Watts

Police at the 77th Street Station are wrapping up a two-day sweep of neighborhood nogoodniks, having dragged 31 suspected robbers (male) and 8 grand theft person suspects (female) out of bars at 10218 and 10224 Graham Ave. A number of those arrested were armed with knives. No additional details were provided.

Further neighborhood reading:

Bars of Graham

Knives have their jobs. And the knife’s custodian has his. Things to do. Getting popped in a Watts bar isn’t on either’s list.

The bars were here, just across those tracks.

Washington Court, aka Washington Village Park Apts., have taken up the area, wiping out the 10200 block north of 103rd.

Judging by what I saw go down there, I’d say the community was better off with the cocktail lounges.

Lou Costello’s Mama Gets Robbed

December 1, 1947
Studio City

It was 2 am, but the lights were blazing in Mrs. Helen Cristillo’s home at 4037 Coldwater Canyon. Helen and her sister Mrs. Alma Kelly were in the kitchen, preparing gifts for the Lou Costello Jr. Foundation Benefit Bazaar, when they heard a noise in a guest room and discovered the furniture in disarray. A ladder propped outside the window and the missing screen made it clear that they were dealing with thieves, not poltergeists, and the cops were called.

When houseguests Mr. and Mrs. Louis Failla came home soon after, Mrs. Failla discovered her jewelry box and its contents valued at $3715 was missing. And Helen Cristillo found that her purse, which had contained eight hundred dollar bills and a $7000 pair of diamond and platinum earscrews (a gift from Helen’s proud son, comic Lou, last Christmas), was also missing.

Not a bad haul for a few minutes work, but assuredly the act of someone without any holiday spirit. Phooey!

4037 Coldwater Cyn., To-day

Costello must’ve gotten one hell of a paycheck for 1948’s-Meet Frankenstein. (1947’s $7,000 has 2005’s purchasing power of $62,529.) This, despite Bud Abbot famously signing lousy contracts while liquored to the gills (he was combating epilepsy-it was medicinal).

So-did Costello skim from the Lou Costello Jr. Foundation? Not likely. Costello bordered on the Christlike, as he-after his 3-yr-old son drowned in daddy’s Los Angeles pool-became obsessed with building churches and sending terminally ill children to world-class doctors. Every child a potential Lazarus.

Valley landmark, the LCJF:

(As for Bud Abbot, by Costello’s death in ’59 [there was no resurrection], Abbot had become penniless and forgotten, excepting some work voicing himself in the 1966 Hanna-Barbera A&C cartoon.)

Hurrah for the telephone!

November 30, 1947
Los Angeles

Hurrah for the telephone!

First, Mrs. L.B. Beddoe, 4587 Date Ave., La Mesa, received a call from daughter Pamela Evans, who said she was going to kill herself. Mama called the LAPD business office and asked if someone could please stop her.

Radio patrolmen J.P. Hooper and T.A. Gibson raced to Pamela’s pad at 104 N. Catalina, where the 19-year-old department store worker was passed out beside an empty pill box. The officers rushed her to Hollywood Receiving Hospital for a stomach pumping. Pamela presently revived, and murmured of the financial woes that had inspired her act.

But happily the phone had still been working, and so the lady lives. Moral: always pay your phone bill first.

104 North Catalina To-day

104, where Pamela worked at turning suicide from a verb to a noun, is no more.

The evolution of a neighborhood. From left to right, a nice Italian Renaissance/Spanish Eclectic, ca. 1935; some dingbatian boxitude ca. 1955; and our friend 100 Catalina with the Mexican lamp, Colonial S-bracket and Mansardisme, ca. 1975.

And look, here’s a copper blazing through the red, off to go help some wayward lass with a belly full of Seconal. We presume.

Whether suicide is an act of weakness or strength is beyond the scope of this post, but what’s certain is that in telephoning her mother, Pamela has revealed her attempt to be merely a parasuicidal gesture. I say neglect the phone bill!