Month: April 2005

“No Regrets,” Says Boy Who Killed Sweetheart

April 20, 1947
Los Angeles

For as long as there’s been a highway into the hills, young lovers have gone up into Angeles National Forest on Saturday nights to be alone in the dark. Gerald Snow Welch brought his beloved Dolores Fewkes, 16-year-old Montebello High student, to the deserted Horse Flats picnic grounds. He also brought his .22 rifle.

What Welch swore was a suicide pact went awry when both shells he had brought proved necessary to extinguish the young lady’s existence. In fact, he had to beat her roundly with both stock and barrel of his gun to finish the job. Then he carried her body down the mountain to the cops, stated his “purpose in life had been completed,” and expressed impatience for the State to execute him.

From suicide watch in a padded Pasadena Police Station cell, Welch told officers that it was he who wished to die; Dolores had begged to join him. His depression could immediately be blamed on three miserable months spent in the Navy, which culminated in a medical discharge. In service, suffering “religious disillusionment,” Welch came to doubt the things he’d been told in Sunday school. He went to the library and read Plato, Schopenhauer and Emerson. In Schopenhauer, he found justification for suicide. Bu the roots of Welch’s troubles go back a decade, when the then-eight-year-old saw a neighbor, fleeing police after murdering her husband, blow her brains out in front of him.

Welch said he loved Miss Fewkes and longed to join her in heaven. For now, he appreciated the padded cell, a quiet place where he could be alone with his thoughts. And if the State declined to kill him, he would be happy to finish the job himself.

Young Love

Proof positive. Emerson is a loaded weapon in the hands of children. And Schopenhauer, a loaded weapon with a skull-fracturing buttstock.

The Fewkes’ lived in the back house, at 5941 Gage —

and it was here where Dolores lived her life, dreamed her dreams, and let her heart beat for a budding existentialist who had issues with Christianity and women. A potent combo. “In the last five years my mother’s attitude toward me changed,” said Welch. “There wasn’t the same kind of affection as there used to be. And the church didn’t live up to what it was supposed to.” Who wouldn’t adopt what the papers called “the immature philosophy of pessimism?”

Maybe part of his escape to Horse Flats had to do with feeling confined in this newly-dense urban environment. The likes of Huntington Park, Walnut Park, Bell Gardens and South Gate had been, just previous to his birth, endless acres of grazing sheep and cauliflower fields (Amelia Earhart learned to fly in one such South Gate expanse of dirt). In the early 20s cities were incorporated, every inch was parceled out, and frame buildings went up like mad.

Welch lived in this one, at 7501 Whitsett:

And it was here, during his post-Navy freakout, he argued religion, thought his dark thoughts, and formulated a philosophy based on a common youthful misreading of Schopenhauer (seemingly endemic to the postwar geist).

Like get hip. Murder-suicide is no answer in an absurd vacuum, dad.

Parents’ Part in Juvenile Delinquency

April 19, 1947
Washington, D.C.

Myron E. Gurnea, the F.B.I.’s Washington expert on matters of juvenile delinquency, released a statement today describing it as the nation’s biggest criminal problem.

Gurnea blames the rise in delinquency during the war years, when the stabilizing influence of fathers, mothers and older siblings was lost, as the former went to war and the latter into the factories. Those bad kids are now aged 17-21, and are being arrested in droves.

Pointing a finger at neglectful families who shirk their disciplinary responsibilities and expect government agencies to control their children, Gurnea notes that very few parents accompany their brats into traffic court. The answer may be to hold more parents financially responsible for their children’s crimes, a tact that is stymied by the growing number of broken homes.

Additionally, Gurnea sniffs at fears that returning soldiers are monsters “trained for crime,” stating that it was a big army, with criminals and ordinary people, but the criminals were already so disposed.

Gang Beating Victim Attacked In Own Yard

April 18, 1947
Los Angeles

Arriving at his home at 7143 Hollywood Blvd. tonight, James Utley, 43, tangled with Herbert Robertson, 45, who was lurking in the yard. Hearing gunfire, Utley’s wife and daughter called police. Utley’s is a name well known among crime crusaders, so Detective G.L. Smith went to the scene with patrol officers.

Utley refused to sign a complaint against Robertson, who he admitted had recently written him a letter demanding $500. Nevertheless, police arrested Robertson on suspicion of robbery. Robertson told officers that he was also a resident of 7143 Hollywood Blvd., although the address on his social security card read 1907 W. Sixth Street.

Utley claimed Robertson had pulled a revolver, which Utley deflected, causing the shot to go wild. Robertson countered that Utley had fired the shot. The gun was found in a car parked in the yard.

James Utley is best remembered for a shocking incident on August, 16, 1946, when two men followed him into popular Hollywood watering hole Lucey’s Restaurant (5444 Melrose Ave.) during the lunch rush. While one man held the other diners –among them Joel McCrea, Eddie Cantor, Stephen Crane and Joan Davis-at gunpoint, the other administered a thorough blackjacking to Utley. This was assumed by many diners to be a movie stunt. The assailants then fled through the crowd of autograph hunters outside the restaurant.

Utley, former operator of the bingo concession on Tony Cornero’s Lux gambling ship (and then under indictment for these activities), former investigator for politically ambitious Clifton’s Cafeteria owner Clifford E. Clinton, acquitted in 1939 on charges of extortion and bribery, convicted two years later of violating Federal Narcotics laws and sentenced to two years in prison, refused to identify his attackers, suggest any reason for the attack or in fact to make any statement at all.

7143 Hollywood Blvd. To-day

Ah, Utley. Anyone shot at and repeatedly beaten, who refuses to sign a complaint, is OK in my book. Me and all of Cornero’s boys say so.

Cornero was the rumrunner-turned-Pioneer of Vegas, Father of the Stardust. LA County deputies were fond of boarding his ships off Santa Monica (Cornero often turned the firehoses on Earl Warren’s boys) to hack up roulette wheels for the photographers-in-tow. Cornero survived Cohen-ordered assassination attempts in Beverly Hills the way others survive headaches, until he was finally, in 1955, whacked in Vegas by Moe Dalitz (with a poison 7&7 – how else would you want to go?)-

-the fate of Utley, Cornero’s long-suffering concessionaire, is a mystery. All we’ve got is that he may or may not have lived with this Robertson character at 7143. The fate of 7143 is, of course, evident. I picture it as a rambling rough-hewn shingle affair with wide eaves and cross gables, maybe replaced in the mid-50s by a short-lived Polynesian themed apartment complex, who knows. All we have with certainty is that in 1965 somebody erected this fourteen-story concrete warehouse, converted in 1990 to the Hollywood Versailles Tower condominium complex.

A taste of old Hollywood: behind the Hollywood Versailles, across a parking lot, hides this piece of American Foursquare Edwardiana. How this pattern-book prairie box survived is another mystery.

Bus Driver Plus Wine Blamed For Wild Ride

April 17, 1947
Santa Monica

Mrs. Thomas Wright of 2425 29th St., Santa Monica, only intended a short trip by bus, but driver F.O. Rogers, 27, was loaded and wanted company. He compelled the lady to remain on his bus as he looped erratically through downtown Santa Monica and back to her home.

“It was the wildest ride I ever had!” said Mrs. Wright, once safely in the company of Officers Robert Chapman and Kenneth Aitken. A bottle of wine was found in driver Rogers’ possession, and investigation physician Dr. R. J. O’Donnell determined that he was intoxicated.

Pleading guilty before Judge Thurlow Taft of the Santa Monica Municipal Court (bail set at $250, probationary hearing scheduled for April 30), Rogers blamed his Mr. Toad-like behavior on “war nerves,” which had bedevilled him since suffering injury in the South Pacific with the Navy.

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Brawl Aboard Airliner Results in Jail Term

April 15, 1947
Las Vegas

William E. Barrett, 33, and Franklin T. Murphy, 32, were in high spirits Monday afternoon, when they boarded a Western Air Lines flight bound for Las Vegas at Los Angeles Airport. Those spirits only rose as the pair began imbibing from an open liquor bottle, in violation of WAL and Civil Aeronautics Board regulations.

The men became rambunctious, and other passengers joined in the fray, some in panic, others in amusement. The fracas was ended by the intervention of off-duty Los Angeles Police Sgt. E. A. Duarte, who presented the men to local authorities when the four-engine plane landed, ten minutes late due to the commotion.

In Justice of the Peace Harvey McDonald’s court today, Barrett (of 1123 Pine St., Pasadena) pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in the Las Vegas jail, the maximum possible penalty. McDonald stated that he wished he could make the sentence longer. Murphy, of Oklahoma City, denied guilt, and will stand trial tomorrow on a charge of misconduct in a public conveyance.

Don’t Light Up in Court if You Hope to Get Divorce

April 14, 1947
Los Angeles

Everything was going swimmingly in would-be divorcee Fanny S. Greenwald’s case against jewelry-jobber husband Isador in Superior Court Judge Paul Vallee’s courtroom today. She’d just described Izzy’s insulting treatment of her before their friends and children, and their 19-year-old son was being sworn in to corraborate. That’s when the lady, seated with counsel, lit a cigarette.

“Mr. Clerk!” raged Judge Vallee, “eject this person from the courtroom. You will have to leave the courtroom, madam!”

The Judge continued the case for six weeks, explaining, “I do not want to decide it now. Her smoking so irritated me that I might do the woman an injustice.”

Holdup Men Menace Bel-Air Hotel Guests

April 13, 1947
Bel Air

A pair of snazzy robbers in sports coats, shades and gloves shook down the Bel-Air Hotel’s lobby at gunpoint yesterday morning, divesting the hotel and five guests of nearly $2400 in cash.

The theft began when the two men crossed the hotel’s bridged moat and accosted bellhop Charles Berg, showing their weapons and demanding to see the manager. The pair vaulted the counter and held employees hostage as they ransacked the office. While stuffing the $1500 take from the till into a laundry sack, the shorter of the men sighed to his associate, “Well, Joe, this haul isn’t a very hot deal.”

They then turned their attention to the guests in the lobby, relieving Richard L. Casselman (of 15905 Chase Street, San Fernando) of $18, B. Charles Gould (650 Ocean Ave., Brooklyn) of $250, Paul Payette (414 St. James Place, Montreal) of $540, Davis H. Hannah ( 11024 Strathmore Street) of $40 and Charles Carroll (231 N. Oxford Street) of $20.

Bellhop Berg told police that he recognized at least one of men, and the hotel guests said they would be able to indentify their assailants.