Fat ‘n’ Sassy

February 24, 1947
Compton

Little Patti Sue Roeder, stricken with polio before she turned two, has become the pet of the Textile Association of Los Angeles. The group vowed to donate the child’s weight in ten cent pieces to the March of Dimes. When she stepped onto the scale today, it read 33 pounds… and while the TALA had raised 37 pounds of coinage, they decided to let the difference slide. The total: $8700.

They’ve vowed to repeat the gesture in 1948, and Patti Sue promises to be quite fat when the next weigh-in comes. The girl lives at 620 S. Chester Street.

A New Club Dedicated To Historic SoCal Dining Lore

A message from our pal Jonathon at the essential L.A. Time Machines site, who is speaking at this March 18 event:
The group we are forming will focus on Los Angeles Restaurant History in general, with an emphasis on restaurant memorabilia collectors, writers on restaurant history and the oral history of classic restaurant employees and owners. Scheduled to speak at our first meeting are Jim Heimann, author of “Out With the Stars” and “May I Take Your Order”, as well as countless other books on Los Angeles and Pop Culture of the 30s to 70s. Also Charles Perry, the renown columnist for the Los Angeles Times and Food Historian. And Filomena D’Amore, owner of Patsy’s Pizza, whose father Patsy D’Amore owned the Villa Capri restaurant in Hollywood along with Frank Sinatra (and it was James Dean’s favorite place). Our first meeting is at the Hollywood Heritage Museum on March 18 at 10AM.
Most of this is on the attachment hopefully. The principal organizer is Chris Nichols who you might know from ModCom or LA magazine.

A Terrible Blast

February 21, 1947
Los Angeles

The city continues to reel under the horrific impact of yesterday’s chemical explosion at the O’Connor Electro-Plating Company, 926 E. Pico Blvd., which leveled the factory, damaged 116 homes, injured hundreds and killed more than a dozen persons.

City officials scattered rat poison around the blast site to deter vermin, while others condemned the contents of local restaurants and bakeries, lest glass fragments find their way onto plates. And into the night, the bulldozers made their silent, constant grab at the debris, dislodging severed limbs, dead cats and dogs, and the ruins of countless lives.

The aftermath of the explosion was carried live on local television station W6XYZ, with narration by reporter Dick Lane.

It is believed that staff chemist Robert Magee was experimenting with using volatile perchloric acid to polish aluminum when the blast occurred. The formula was his own secret recipe, and a patent had reportedly been applied for. Magee and his newly-hired assistant, Alice Iba, are both missing and presumed dead.

926 East Pico, To-day

I don’t know about you, no, really, I don’t know about you, but I get hot for chemical journals what discuss that unpredictably violent and violently unpredictable perchloric acid. You’d think Bob O’Connor, as manager/secretary of O’Connor Electro-Plating Corp., would be similarly obsesssed. You’d think wrong. Bob was a sales and business tool. When some other cat named Bob–they stick together, you know, those Bobs–when Bob Magee told him about the magic to be had from exciting your perchloric stew with electrolytes writ large, Bob O’Connor bit and bit hard. To the detriment of a few city blocks.

Let’s say it was an isolated incident. And let’s say we were wrong again.

Toss a stone in this town. Hit, say, Pasadena. Let’s see what that stone wrought.

A simple plating factory (the Crown City plating factory, at 28 West Union):
very nearly took out all of what’s now “Old Town” on 22 February, 1925. The Los Angeles Times reported that but then the next near mishap, well, that got bumped up a bit:

In quiet little Pasadena, Calif, one day last week a blast almost materialized that would have shaken the sober townfolk out of their skins. Two blocks from Pasadena’s busiest corner, Crown City Plating Co. electroplates chromium, gold, brass, silver, copper. A swart little man named Wallace Foreman was mixing sulphuric acid and glycerin to make an electrolyte for plating. Already in the tank were 75 gal. of acid and 2 gal. of glycerin. Thinking to add more acid, Wallace Foreman picked up a 3-gal. container, dumped in the contents. Unluckily the container held not sulphuric but nitric acid….
Time Magazine, 27 August 1934

I mean, you can mix sulphuric acid with glycerin all you want. Nitric acid, well, that makes nitro-glycerin. The rest writes itself. A smoldering hole three blocks wide.

Here’s where everyone and their brother nearly died:

But we’re not here to talk about happy people eating the iced creams, unaware of the giant smoldering hole from where they couldabeen eating ’em: we’re here to discuss the Continent of Death that encircled the 900 block of Pico that February day in 1947.

And now, from our “nie wieder” files, compare and contrast:

Yes, they’ve renamed Ground Zero “Lucky.”

My people call this “hubris,” though I know not how the Chinese would term such, should they care to. Which they won’t.

It had been reported that there was a particularly beautiful, and occupied, house just behind on 14th — the house was blown apart like so many tragically electroplated child’s limbs —-

This was mentioned as a particularly sticky rescue area, given this area had at the time held a giant and absurdly intricate Queen Anne mansion. The developerclass blesses every day which includes Victorian spindlework thrown sixty some-odd blocks as if touched by the Finger of God.

Nigh-on sixty years in, we still talk about this kind of “keep acid under refrigeration” dictate.

Anyone who’s been following the ConocoPhillips buyout of Unocal knows that Texans live to oneup Californians…

*Hic!* Zoom!

February 20, 1947
Los Angeles

When Walter John Munro, 29-year-old plumber and amateur pilot, lurched out of his new plane at the Torrance Airport, after an erratic low altitude flight over Hawthorne last December 8, he claimed that air sickness and not alcohol was the cause. He was so anxious to land that he touched down in Torrance, and not Compton, where he’d begun his flight.

Clifford Cottam, manager of the Torrance airdrome, testified before Superior Judge Edward Brand today that Munro had skimmed houses and power lines, and staggered when administered a sobrietry test by sheriff’s deputies.

Munro is home at 238 E. 139th Street on $1000 bail pending sentencing on March 13. He faces 1-5 years imprisonment if convicted.

The Stone Man Burns

February 19, 1947
Pasadena

Harry L. Roberts, 53, died today in a fire that began when a cigarette fell into his bedclothes. The one-time Forest Lawn advertising manager and Tournament of Roses publicist had spent the past four years struggling with a mysterious illness that gradually paralyzed his limbs, and had most recently been laboriously typing a memoir of his sickness in hopes of discovering its cause.

Mr. and Mrs. Paul Murray, in-home aids to Roberts since his wife died two years ago, noticed smoke pouring from the den at 1020 Linda Vista Ave. and called the fire department, but Roberts was already unconscious and could not be revived.

Also destroyed in the fire was his hard-wrought manuscript, which was completed earlier this week.