Month: February 2006

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.

A Mysterious Drive

February 18, 1947
Los Angeles

All evidence suggests that, while driving west on Washington Boulevard under the overpass near Santa Fe Avenue, trucker Robert Frazer was struck by a piece of falling concrete. He then drove more than eight miles, in heavy traffic, before careening onto the sidewalk at his place of employ, at Firestone and Paramount Blvds. Co-workers rushed to his aid, and found Frazer unconscious, with a wound over his eye. On awakening, he had no memory of anything after the concrete bounced off his hood and shattered his window.

SMASH! …. SPLAT!

February 17, 1947Long Beach

The truck filled with empty milk bottles hit the car on Santa Fe near 23rd Street yesterday, and both drivers were launched forward through space, where they smashed together as surely as their machines had. Truck driver Abner Teachout, 49, is in Compton Clinic, his condition serious, while 24-year-old Phil Meyers is in critical condition at Seaside Hospital, Long Beach.

Where is the body?

February 16, 1947
Los Angeles

Police and railroad officials continue their search today for Eugene Hamilton White, 31, tool company executive missing since Valentine’s Eve, when he cashed his paycheck and left his office en route to his Woodland Hills home.

His bloodstained car was discovered near a Southern Pacific loading spur and warehouse, between 50th and 51st Streets, Long Beach Avenue and Alameda Street, its top ripped open and window shattered. Inside, the man’s empty wallet, eyeglasses, overcoat and jacket, a heart-shaped box of Valentine’s candy, a silver belt, and a blood-soaked handkerchief wrapped around the end of a tire iron.

Police suspect the man was beaten and robbed, then thrown into a passing freight car. His distraught wife Elizabeth, waiting at 22034 Providencia with little Bette Gene and Eugene Jr., says her husband was devoted to the family, and she can think of no reason for him to disappear.

And on this day in 1929….

Our friends at the LAist are blogging one of the more notorious crimes in Beverly Hills history, the mysterious Ned Doheny killing, when the son of the oil heir ended up dead steps away from his similarly gun-shot male secretary. Was it a simple murder-suicide, a lover’s quarrel, or the work of Doheny’s spurned bride? Carolyn Kellogg looks into the mussed clues and controversy, and shares an especially awful photo on the LAist flickr feed.

If you haven’t visited Greystone (now a public park, though the house is off limits save for special events bookings), do!

You Never Know

February 15, 1947
San Fernando

Leila Nichols, 18, had dated 22-year-old William Hunter once prior to their interaction this evening. Hunter, who spent 3 1/2 years in a Japanese prison camp, accosted the girl as she crossed a vacant lot after midnight, en route to her home, bashing her in the head with a lead pipe. The assault was interrupted when Nichols’ brother-in-law John T. Rust drove by and heard her screams. Hunter ran home to his mother and said, “I just killed a girl with a pipe; I don’t know what prompted me to do it.” Mom turned him in.

Leila Nichols is recovering in San Fernando Hospital, while Hunter has been charged on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon. He has refused to say anything but his name, rank and serial number. The girl lives at 11327 Tamarack Street, her assailant at 15431 Romer Street.