March 16, 1927
Los Angeles

If the drys are gonna catch the wets, they’re gonna have to wet themselves. So to speak.

At the trial of John H. Wyncoop, former chief field agent for the boys of the California/Arizona Federal Prohibition Enforcement Department, Wyncoop said “I knew that if I had liquor in my possession I could more easily get bootleggers to believe that I was handling booze and therefore make it easier to arrest bootleggers.”

Uh-huh.

Wyncoop is on trial because he turned twenty-nine bottles of liquor to his own use, instead of turning it into the government warehouse. Can’t those government know-nothings see that you need that hooch to go under deep cover? That he only took home that demon rum in the solemn performance of his duty?

(Convicted by a jury of illegal conversion, he was given a short term in the county jail.)

March 16, 1927
Los Angeles

Clarence and Ona Brown were married in 1922, but now Ona wants a divorce. “When I married him,” said Mrs. Brown, while weeping bitterly during her testimony before Judge Summerfield, “he was a second-rate assistant director, and I made a director out of him. That cost me my home, for he got to thinking so well of himself he attempted to boss the house. He went nearly a year without even speaking to me.”

(She may have a point; see this page under "salary.")

Ona's testimony was neither denied nor contested, and she won her decree.

Think of that the next time you watch "Garbo's favorite director".

March 15, 1927
Los Angeles

Traditionally, the term greengrocer refers to a retail tradesperson who sells fresh fruits and vegetables. Should you be down on Temple Street, you might find grocer Edith Green to be a greengrocer of the green meat variety. Mmmm. Heck, even her Temple Street neighbor Abraham Margolis purveys criminally suspect comestibles.

Edith, at 922 Temple, and Abraham, at 937, were both charged with selling adulterated and contaminated foodstuffs. Stock amounting to $2,500 ($29,055 currentUSD) were ordered destroyed, she given thirty and he 180 days in the hoosegow, suspended on the condition that they clean up their act. And their stores.

As much fun as it would be to venture in to those structures now to see what eighty year-old smells lingered from the putrid pigs feet and bad borscht, we’ll have to content ourselves with visualizing such while whizzing under the one-ten:

March 9, 1927
Borneo

On the one hand, the Dutch government’s Eurocentric cultural imperialism is wiping out the native culture of Borneo; on the other, they’re teaching headhunters the benefits of recycling.

The Dyak have long needed a nice fresh human caput for any and every sort of local ritual, but the generations-long war against the practice by their clogphilic, decapitated-headphobic overlords, has shown them the benefits of conservation (long practiced in the densely populated liberal parliamentary democracy that is Holland).

It is reported that now, the Dyak just borrow heads from neighbors for celebrations such as the birth of a child or the ending of a period of mourning. In fact, a paltry few heads are passed around in a tribe where just a generation ago each family had a bag of its own.

(According to Dr. William O. Krohn, Chicago alienist, there’s still no lack of headhunting when absolutely necessary—a rajah’s death demands craniums, for example, and victims thus beheaded are regarded as members of the monarch’s heavenly retinue.)

Despite the Dyak's newfound respect for Westernized ideals, Borneo’s 1957 independence from windmills and tulips removed such colonialist standards of civility. The wild and wooly Americas, though, never had a break from her fascination with beheading.

Closer to home, LAPD became head-hunters of another kind when in January 1939, Cleveland Chief of Police George Matowitz received a letter postmarked from Los Angeles that read in part:

(Relatedly, while there are few great films about Los Angeles, there are fewer great films about headhunting. And Los Angeles.)

March 2, 1927
Los Angeles

The Wonderly shooting of Emerson over an elephant's affection has been continued until March 15th.

George “Scotty” Wonderly is the keeper of the bloodhounds for the studios, George Emerson, trainer of the lions at Universal City.

The story has a Old West theme to it to boot: on 15 February last, the two were arguing over the affections of said elephant at Universal. Wonderly called Emerson out; Wonderly strapped on his single shot .45 and there, on a rain-soaked muddy street, surrounded by wooden shacks and gambling dens and dance halls, Emerson staggered and twisted and slowly fell, a bullet through his breast, out his back, and lodged into the Last Chance Saloon. Elephants and the Old West, together again.

Here, Wonderly shows how his beloved raised its trunk...and went on to maintain that he acted in self-defense.

And of the love that dare not trumpet its name...the true heart’s desire of the elephant remains a sweet mystery.

March 1, 1927

“Feminism is destructive of women’s happiness,” declares Gina Lombroso Ferrero, Italy’s first woman physician and daughter of Cesare Lombroso (who, with Gina’s husband, wrote The Female Offender). You may know Gina as author of the Italian 1922 antifeminist classic The Soul of Woman.

“It endeavors to bring women to the enjoyment of all privileges enjoyed by man; it encourages woman to copy man in the understanding that in this way woman will enjoy all pleasures which she formerly enjoyed as well as those which only man enjoys.

"Woman and man are different,” states the plucky Gina, "and suffer and derive pleasure from different things. Aspirations which are in the one case strong and permanent are in the other case minor and transitory. The aspirations toward glory, independence, riches, power are permanent and powerful in man, incremental and impermanent in woman, whereas aspiration to love and of loving, or reuniting one’s self to continuous life are stable elements in woman and comparatively passing and irrational impulses in man.” Therefore, woman can never fine happiness in doing man’s work, because it is too alien to her real interests.

Ya see, "once the man has ceased to love the woman from the viewpoint of the usefulness she can have for him, her altruism, her gentleness, her devotion to him, then he ceases to desire woman because of gratitude for the services she can render him, casts her aside as a permanent companion and sees in her only the female who can excite and satisfy his senses.”

She may sound terrifically reactionary, but take solace in knowing that Mussolini exiled her in 1930 for being antifascist. Although to be honest, she was only exiled for being terrifically reactionary; GLF was also a staunch and vocal opponent of the wonders of the machine age.

February 24, 1927
Los Angeles

In what the papers have dubbed the “Mustard-Seed Murder,” we see once again that, gentlemen, your sartorial decisions are always of importance. (Damn trouser cuffs! Were this 1960, this condemned man would’ve walked free.)

The murder in question dates back to October 20, 1926, when one Charles O. Westcott, 63 years of age and scion of General Grant, opened his door at 909 S. Cochran St. only to met by a gun-wielding assailant. Blam! Blam!—one to the heart, one in the stomach. Unfortunately for Charles’ son Carl, Charles’ dying words to his new wife were “Carl shot me.”

Apparently Carl, 40, was vexed that his father left a $300,000 ($3,486,687 USD2007) trust to the aforementioned new wife Hazel. And then there was the matter of the $100,000 trust that Carl’s grandfather was to leave to his son Charles…but with Carl’s father Charles out of the way…it would go straight to Carl.

Detectives didn’t really buy Carl’s long and rambling alibi, involving a gambler’s den at Seventh and San Pedro, and a dance hall on Hill off Sixth. Nor did they take his alibi’s verification for much, given as it came from a bootlegger and some other underworld habitués. Despite Carl’s regal upbringing, he’s a part-time barber with a record, having done time in Folsom and Stillwater on forgery charges.

And so today begins Westcott the Younger’s trial. The crux of the trial comes down to the mustard seeds found in his trouser cuffs—the assassin was spotted escaping through the the vacant lot to the north (now 905 South Cochran, not built upon til 1928), and dang’d if Carl wasn’t found with a few inconspicuous mustard seeds and a half-dozen broken blades of grass, indentical to those from the lot, in his cuffs. (Westcott also contended that he tore his trousers at the knee while tripping on the rough steps of that Sixth Street dive; investigation revealed those steps to be carpeted; the prosecution points to a plank with in the lot with matching fibers.)

He is convicted March 2, and March 9 sentenced to life imprisonment at Folsom; two more trials on points of law (and a botched suicide attempt) failed to free him. But his March 1929 sanity trial got him sprung from Folsom and committed to the State Hospital at Norwalk, to be held until such time as he was mentally competent to go on trial again for the murder charge.

As there’s no further mention of Westcott again, we can only assume he elected to stay put.

February 17, 1927
Santa Ana

The widow Alice Hanmore has a bone to pick with Evangelists, or, more specifically, the College of Medical Evangelists.  Truth be told, evangelists should be, oh, evangelical, and leave the application of Röntgen rays to the professionals.  

In March of 1926 Alice's husband M. J. Hanmore, a Fullerton oil worker, began experiencing stomach pains and loss of appetite; Drs. Claude E. Steen, Emerald J. Steen and John A. Whalen of the CME/White Memorial Hospital decided that an intensive course of that ever-beneficial ionizing radiation would do the trick.  Today, Alice is charging in court that “negligent and unskillful” employment of X-rays resulted in severe fatal burns—she’s asking for $30,000 ($348,669 USD2007).

(Our evangelical docs Steen & Steen will make the papers again in March, charged of malpractice by one Mary A. Greene of Fullerton—she goes in for an ingrown toenail, so they take that portion of the nail.  So far so good.  Steen & Steen subsequently amputate her big toe.  Then they amputate much of her leg.  Further operations result in anthropy of Mary's thigh muscles.  She’ll ask for $25,000.)

February 16, 1927
Los Angeles

Those junkies and hopheads that once provided the occasional bruise on this perfect ripe plum that is Los Angeles—shall be no more!  Though alcoholism was cured in 1908, drug addiction still remains to blight the landscape.  But Narcosan has arrived to save the day!  

Drs. E. H. Anthony and Benjamin Blank, their committee of peace officers and other physicians in tow, have at their disposal the first shipment from New York of this new European wonder drug.  

Any addicted Angeleno can trot down to Blank’s offices in the Quinby Building, Seventh and Grand, and take the cure free of charge.  They’ve got fifteen addicts lined up to undergo treatment and are looking to administer to at least another ten, so get down there you, you narc-addled fiend!

(Despite liberal Narcosan administration to the lucky souls who so evidently deserved it,  apparently the wonder drug didn’t work out so well.)

February 10, 1927
Los Angeles

Ho!  Wuxtry!

Those mockery-making purveyors of pasquinade Pi Delta Epsilon are at it again—it’s the new issue of the Razzberry!  Not to be confused with a Bruinite’s Hell’s Bells, the Razzberry is the Trojaninny’s main road to mirth, and boulevard to bellylaughs!  

Yes, the new ish of USC lampoon rag The Razzberry is out, and you should pick one up.  You’ll know the rag by its scent of scandal and journalistic tinge of yellow.  And by those gents dressed as prison inmates hawking 'em!  (As jailbirds stand, you see, in direct opposition of all that college and higher education hold dear, these lettered loons gave gab garbed as hostages…of hilarity!)

But be stout of heart…”Stories range from an exposé of supposed corruption to accounts of wild orgies staged in fraternity houses.” 

I’m sure those stories were just somethin’.  Of course reference to the fraternal wild orgy failed to carry the same import eighty years ago as it does to-day.  And the cub reporter of USC's 1927 scandal sheet could only conjecture that in the future, there'd be no lack of diverting folly to make with the waggery over!

February 9, 1927
Los Angeles

Sure, while we’ve repeatedly reported to you about blindfolded drivings—today was announced something that actually guarantees splintering wood and crunching metal.  

Finley Henderson has a really good idea:  dive an airplane from a height of 1,000 feet, clip the wings from the machine between two telegraph poles, and crash into a bungalow with the remains of his plane at sixty miles an hour.

Don’t worry:  he wears the shoulder and shin guards of the football field, the breast pad of the baseball umpire and a catcher’s mask.  Kids, try this at home.  Above your home.  Into your home.

Sponsored by Earl L. White and KELW!  Come on out to Burbank’s Magnolia Park and watch the fun!

For the record, when the stunt was performed on February 20, Finley emerged unscathed, smoking a cigarette.  And then noted for the wowed crowd and boys of the press “The stunt is easy if you know how to do it.”

Finley made the news again in June, when, at the Glendale Airport Air Rodeo, just as he was stepping into his plane (this time, to crash into a barn), in front of all those eager spectators, United States Deputy Marshal Charles F. “Spoil Sport” Walsh served Finley a summons.  Hot on Walsh's heels were pansy Capts. Walter F. Parkin and William B. Breingan, of the recently created Aeronautics Branch, United States Department of Commerce (oh, Mary), there to enforce their writ of injunction restraining Finley from performing the stunt.

Apparently, these hi-falutin’ aeronautics fellows have just made stunting within five miles of a regularly established and operated air line against the law…apparently also is flying a plane that is wholly unsafe, and is likely to collapse upon the audience when in flight.

But wasn’t that part of the thrill?  No wonder we went into a depression.

February 9, 1927
Los Angeles

It’s a pretty simple scheme. 

You own some stock.  I approach and inform you that your stock is about to hit bottom.  I suggest a trade—your stock for some of mine.  The stock I’m offering you is about to go up, up, up, ya see.  (Honestly, that’s the long and short of my plan; we swap my stock worth a penny for your stock worth a dollar—your greed does all the heavy lifting.)

When Mrs. Frances L. Derby of 502 North Ardmore was approached by some very nice men, she parted with 102 shares of John C. Frey & Assoc. worth $1,020, and 124 shares of California Guarantee Assoc. worth $498, and in exchange was given 4,700 shares of Silas Frank Mining.  The Very Nice Men “talked down” her crummy old stock and represented the mining company stock as being worth $1 a share—when in fact it was worth 1 cent a share, or $47.  Mrs. Derby was no ordinary rube, though, got wise, and alerted the authorities.

The aforementioned pleasant fellows being Leon F. Wessling, 36, and J. L. Johannes, 38.  Detective Lieutenants Davis and Edwards of bunko detail say these two have, from their brokerage firm—a prestigious suite of offices in the Merritt Building—similarly swindled Los Angeles residents out of $75,000 in the past week.

According to Wessling and Johannes’ records, the duo finagled $18,000 out of one poor old widow alone.

Sad, true, but at least in a few years there’ll be a lot less stock to swindle.

February 3, 1927
Seemingly Everywhere

It was another olla podrida fulla banditry in Los Angeles, which bubbled over and burned something fierce at El Molino and Ninth when a gent approached Frank Merlo, robbed him of $50 ($551 USD2006) cash and forced him to swap clothing.  

Elsewhere, a truck containing $4,000 worth of cigars and tobacco, parked in front of the Glaser Brother’s establishment at 1028 Wall Street, just up and disappeared; a burglar capable of squeezing through a window not more than seven inches wide entered the Wrede Drug Company at 1327 Fairfax and made off with $200; persons unknown jimmied a rear door of Brunswig Drug at 4922 Santa Monica and btained $500 worth of cigarettes and delicious narcotics.

In residential news, Mrs. Elba Burdick was lightened of $1,000 worth of clothing, rugs and pesky jewelry that were cluttering up her place at 232 Carmelina Avenue; Nathan Lack now lacks one $600 diamond stickpin, formerly in residence at 831 South Harvard; Torato Nishlo was relieved of $500 in jewelry from 925 Hemlock; Dr. H. C. Hill of 806 Golden, also relieved of $500 in jewelry; Nathan Berger, of 2010 Brooklyn Avenue, also relieved of $500 in jewelry; and loot valued at less than $300 was pilfered from a dozen other residences, according to police reports.

Daylight is a good time to work as well—Sam Stone got his register rifled while looking the other way, Stone Furniture Company, 2711 Brooklyn Avenue.

But fret not people of Los Angeles!  The bulls have pinched (another) gang of li’luns, ages 15 to 18, who now make the Alhambra pokey their new clubhouse.  Their leader was busting into the home of an F. R. Lee on North Wilson when popped, and quickly gave up his younger cohorts—they of reputable local families—and location of purloined rugs, cameras, revolvers, and the black masks (cute—last year) they wore during their heists.  The youth of these masked marauders may account for the ability to slip through Wrede Drug's tiny window.  Unless it was those fabled fascistic interwar little people.  

January 2, 1927
Los Angeles

The good people of Los Angeles were reminded today of a quieter, simpler time—a time known as "1921".  A magical time of Teapot Domes, and Tulsa Tumults, and shotgun blasts to the face.  We collectively remembered the sensational trial of Arthur C. Burch and Madalynne Obenchain, dismissed following jury disagreements, regarding the August 6, 1921 Beverly Glen shooting and .12 gauge buckshot that took apart J. Belton Kennedy’s head.  (And now, our obligatory Kennedy "Gaelic For Ugly Head" Kennedy evidence:  the shots were fired from a clump of bushes [California:  growing better grassy knolls since 1850]; the first shot missed; there was a beautiful woman at the scene, and mysterious tramps...anyway.)

Seems that J. Belton’s father, John D. Kennedy, of 844 South Westlake, never got over the death of his son, or the exoneration of the accused.  So today the sixty two year-old is in court on the charge of assault and battery.  He headed over to the Terminal Warehouse Building on East 7th where Burch worked in the insurance game.  As Burch was innocently hauling some fire extinguishers from one place to another, he suddenly heard “I’ve been waiting a long time but now I’ve got you!” – and was then struck in the face and seized by the throat, but was rescued before he felt the last bit of life choked from him.  

Authorities were summoned, and said Kennedy the Elder, later, “The affair occurred when my emotions overcame me.  I have no regrets and will gladly account for my actions at the proper time and place.  When I went in the building no such idea entered my mind, but when I saw him [Burch] coming down the hall I could not restrain myself.
“This is the fist time I have met him fact to face since his trials for the murder of my boy.  At the sight of him I was seized with a frenzy and choked him until he began squealing and they came and separated us.”

“I believe he has some pathetic obsession toward me,” Burch declared.

Mrs. Obenchain, living in seclusion in Los Angeles, declined to comment on the matter. 

On February 21, John D. Kennedy changed his plea from not guilty to guilty and Municipal Judge Richardson gave him thirty days, suspended, with the caveat:  that if Kennedy saw Burch coming, Kennedy was to “go to the other side of the street.”

That, Kennedy said, he could do.

January 27, 1927
Los Angeles

Hayward Thompson toured Los Angeles today, and pronounced on KFWB this evening (through the courtesy of the Times and Gartzman, Inc, your friendly local Oakland distributor) that driving through Los Angeles was going to be a snap.  Without the use of his eyes, of course.  Seems he doesn’t need them—Thompson was blinded when a German shell took out part of his brain at Bois de Belleau, and then miraculously regained his sight—and he’s been able to read, golf, shoot rifle matches, since then, while blindfolded.

Thompson, 47 years of age though who reportedly looks 30, has made 332 paroptic public exhibhibitions, in every great city of America and Europe, and will make this, his Los Angeles trip, at one hundred miles, his last.

Thompson states that he has more competition here than anywhere else in the world.  “Driving around Los Angeles I find a good many blind drivers,” he said.  “I even encountered one who was blind drunk.”

On January 31st, his 333rd exhibition (spooky) Thompson was blindfolded by Deputy Chief of Police Spellman, and did indeed motor one hundred miles through the congested centers of Los Angeles, Hollywood and Pasadena, obeying all signals and laws, without a hitch.

And now he’s ceased.  He’s had to stop because in having only two layers of skin (as opposed to the three you and I have), in conjunction with the fasting he must undergo to sharpen his dermoptic wits, has proven bad for his health.  

In retirement, Thompson plans on devoting the rest of his life to hypnotizing people over the radio, via Mesmer’s system of suggestion.