Month: June 2005

Temple of Doom

God help us should Huelsman have bred. If he did have a children, then a pox upon their houses. Hopefully Judge Wolford imposed some arcane eugenics law, justly used to weed defectives like Manir from what’s left of our civilization.

Huelsman’s house, and Mrs. Eastin’s just around the corner on Encinita:

The tar pit was likely adjacent Rio Hondo Wash, now site of the Arcadia Par-3 Golf Course. Or it could have been about here, at Tyler and West Hondo Parkway:

Doubly disturbing is the distance between the two points – three and a half miles of lo-speed driving. Huelsman motoring along, the dog on the seat next to him-did he talk to it? Did it whimper? Did it lick him? Hell, he may have even walked it there.

Obviously documenting this post was a difficult task. Luckily, driving down Encinita I could take some small solace in Quonset huts and a ’49 Ford.

Firemen Rescue Woman Locked in Cafeteria

June 4, 1947
Downtown

Gloria Hale’s first day on the job at the Los Angeles County Employees Cafeteria ended dramatically when she got herself locked into the second floor dining room at 224 North Main Street after closing time. She rapped on the interior door for a couple of hours before attracting attention; somebody summoned police.

Unfortunately neither of the keys obtained from the County Employees offices on Maple Street fit the locks, so Sgt. Goldsberry called the hook and ladder men, who proposed an aerial escape. A crowd gathered as the ladder was extended to the Cafeteria window. But Miss Gale wouldn’t dream of descending. If she was wearing slacks the ladder would be no bother, but, really… all those looky loos would see right up her skirt!

No problem: a fireman went down rung by rung just behind her, protecting the lady’s modesty. Miss Hale called her rescuers angels and scurried home to 953 Arapahoe Street to sleep off her embarrassment.

224 North Main To-day

Good for Gloria. She hasn’t gone the way of those slacks-wearing ladies. Why, women who garb themselves in pants likely smoke and perforce drink and, for the love of all that’s holy, back Henry Wallace. Of course, there are concessions to be made. Mashers are always wandering the city looking for ladies trapped in cafeterias, whose underthings could well be visible during ladder descent…but the alternative…trousers? (The winter of our time indeed, Mr. Yockey!) Thank heaven for the wide-quadricep fireman, who presses ever so close to Gloria on her rescue:

But what of the cafeteria itself? Note the buildings bottom center here:

Which have been replaced thus:

With this:

The covered skybridge has a semi-fantastic air to it, though that is unlikely what A. C. Martin & Assoc. intended in ‘66.

Bad Good Bowler

June 3, 1947
Los Angeles

Max Stein may be the American Bowling Congress all-events record holder, but that hasn’t stopped Charley Bragg, president of the Los Angeles Bowling Association, from suspending Stein’s membership.

The trouble started during the recent $10,000 tournament at Hollywood’s Sunset Center, when Stein was found to have listed two fake (and doubtless high scoring!) names among the leaders. These names were discovered before the close of competition, and all winners were paid off.

Stein was called before L.A.B.A.’s executive committee on May 28 based on a complaint filed by the tournament’s sponsor, Mort Luby. Luby is publisher of The National Bowler’s Journal and Billiard Review. During the hearing, Stein admitted inserting the fictitious names. The transcripts are being forwarded to the A.B.C.’s head offices in Milwaukee for a final ruling on Stein’s status. Stein himself is en route to St. Louis, and plans to drop in on the A.B.C.’s leaders to discuss his case.

The Belleville, Illinois-bred Stein settled in Los Angeles in 1939, and has been employed as an instructor at the Sunset Center alleys. His lifetime average in 1939 was 202, and he averaged 231 when he set the all-time high score record for nine games in 1937. Reporting on his astonishing 855 series rolled at Pico Palace in October 1939 (the second highest score in forty years of A.B.C. record keeping), the Times dubbed him “the sensational Jewish kegler.”

The sensational Mr. Stein seems to have felt he was too good a bowler to be limited to a single prize package. We’ll have to wait and see if the bosses of bowldom agree.

Sunset Center et al

We tend to think of bowling alleys as full of googiefied grandeur, replete with folded-plate roofs and flagcrete walls, tapering pylons and swiss-cheesed I-beams, the assorted amoeboid whatnot and odd illuminated starburst, surmounted, or course, with a giant neon bowling pin. (America’s arguably most famous of such bowling alleys, the giant neon bowling pin-surmounted Hollywood Star Lanes, star of The Big Lebowski, was recently demo’d by the LAUSD to build Planet-Killer Elementary #6.)

But there was a time when bowling alleys were of Italianate design, or Moderne, or, in the case of the Sunset Center, grand Neoclassical affairs with giant fluted columns.



The eagle-eye’d may ascertain where the coffee shop neon was once affixed to what is now the HQ of Tribune Entertainment:

There are fewer bowling alleys in LA than bald eagles, and’re twice as endangered. An endangered, passing world. A world you’ll never know. A world where the damn rep from Red Crown Ten Pins is late; he’ll wanna try and talk you into replacing your Ebonites with his Mineralite balls again, and the American guy hasn’t fixed the Backus pin spotter so you’re gonna call Brunswick for a quote on a 20th spotter and a Telescore projector while you’re at it, and hey, maybe that cat from Acme Billiard who plays league games Tuesday can give you the skinny on refinishing your maple.




Crazy Like A Fox

June 2, 1947
Los Angeles

Congenital insanity compounded by war jitters is the desperate claim of Erwin M. Walker, 29, confessed slayer of California Highway Patrolman Loren C. Roosevelt on June 5 of last year. Roosevelt was fatally shot when he approached Walker, who was casing a market at Los Feliz Blvd. and Brunswick Ave., and asked for identification; Walker also admitted to wounding Det. Lt. Colin C. Forbes last April 25, when Forbes sought to arrest Walker, a pre-war civilian employee of the Glendale Police Department, on a charge of seeking to unload $40,000 in “hot” motion-picture equipment to Willard Starr, sound engineer of 1347 Fifth Ave. Starr had called police to stake out salesman “Paul C. Norris” when he came by with the goods.

All true, says Erwin, but wait-there are mitigating circumstances. Like dear old grandmama on dad’s side, a mental patient for these last 32 years, her case described by Erwin’s father Weston, a County Flood Control worker residing at 1013 Cordova St., Glendale. Or the half dozen other nuts on the family tree. As for Erwin, so what that three psychiatrists say he’s sane? The family knows otherwise. He’s been hinky ever since coming home from the South Pacific. Mrs. Irene L. Walker, Erwin’s mother, contrasted the affectionate boy she turned over to Uncle Sam with the weird loner who returned.

Erwin himself described his guilt over his best friend’s bayoneting on Leyte Island, an attack he believed might have been averted had he given an order to dig foxholes. His colleagues agreed, and shunned him thereafter.

Erwin was finally arrested December 20 at his apartment at 1831 ½ N. Argyle Ave. after a gun battle with detectives who surprised the sleeping ex-GI as he cradled a sub-machine gun and .45 caliber automatic. They shot him a couple of times. At the hospital, he was found to have old bullet wounds, a souvenir of the April battle with Forbes’ partner, Sgt. S, W. Johnson. These Erwin said he had treated himself.

After returning from service, Erwin refused to return to his dispatcher’s gig at the Glendale P.D., citing the lousy pay scale. Instead, it is alleged, he entered into a career of robbery, safecracking and hold ups, obtaining approximately $70,000 in these fields until the time of his arrest.

In addition to his daffy relatives, the enterprising Erwin is the nephew of former Deputy District Attorney Herbert Walker.

The case inspired an acclaimed noir film starring Richard Basehart.

Medium Image

Scenes of Shootouts

No market left at Los Feliz and Brunswick; of the four corners, there’s a Chevron and a 76 and a Del Taco. I’ve elected to upload the car wash on the NW corner for no other reason than my horror at seeing they’d sheared off four of the populuxe pylons to make way for a goddamned billboard-a horror I thought I’d share.

The scene of the other shoot-out, halfway up the 1800 block of North Argyle has, as have so many of 47project’s subjects, become freeway fodder:

Some Skipper!

June 1, 1947
offshore

How did that doggie get in the drink? wondered Mr. and Mrs. Fred Linstrum of 444 ½ S. Maple Drive, Beverly Hills, when they slowed their boat so they could pluck the cocker spaniel out of the ocean off Catalina. The lucky foundling got his picture and story in the Times, and tonight was home with his owners Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Watson and daughter Dabney, 6, at 528 Locust Street. Long Beach.

The Watsons explained that Skipper has always been a scaredy-dog, hiding under a bunk on their cabin cruiser. But last week, as they lay at anchor off Catalina, Skipper took to promenading on deck. They figure he must have headed above decks during the trip back to Long Beach and fallen overboard without anyone seeing him, spending about an hour dog-paddling before his rescuers found him.

Pasadenan Enters Mortuary, Drinks Poison, Falls Dead

May 31, 1947
Pasadena

Mrs. Vida Dell, employed by Ives & Warren Mortuary at 100 N. Hill Ave., is used to dealing with the dead and the bereaved. But she wasn’t prepared for today’s frugal visitor, Joseph Arthur Rawles, who apparently saw no point in incuring the cost of two rides in a hearse.

The 70-year-old jewelry store worker, despondent over poor health and fading eyesight, entered the mortuary, tapped on the office glass to get Mrs. Dell’s attention, then drank from a bottle of poison and collapsed. A note on his body explained Rawles’ reasons. The deceased lived at 650. N. Madison Ave.

Ives & Warren To-day

Whether suicide is at the top of your list of things to do, or a few items down, believe me, there are worse places to do it than at Ives & Warren. Frederick Kennedy designed this gorgeous Spanish Eclectic basilica in 1929-for once, we applaud stucco-and it remained Ives & Warren until taken over by the Pasadena Conservatory of Music in 2001. (Kennedy is best known for his work on Pasadena’s 1925 First Baptist, National Register, sure, though that hasn’t half the cool lyricism of this building.)

Much of the interior has been gutted, save for a few interior columns with some nice curvilinear ornament. The thirty-foot central nave got a dropped ceiling, turning it two story:

The building is still lovely, though, and the courtyard with its arcaded gallery still enchants, despite part of the mortuary being turned into a nail salon, and Hill having become a major thoroughfare. I can assure you, though, that Mr. Rawles had a beautiful service.