Month: March 2006

A first blog entry.

Kim set up my very own blog here and now I’m scratching my head at the glorious potentialities swirling like a bloggy gyre.

This is therefore just something of a test entry, I suppose.

For example, from my list of topics, I could use “defenestration” and “drowning” in one glorious tale, couldn’t I? And of posting pictures, would I do it like this –?

Well, I suppose I would. Now I just have to work defenestration and drowning into the tale of the Linda Lea, and we’ll be all set.

Fatal Heroics

March 5, 1947
Venice

His curtains blazing, Charles Mason, 71, raced towards the heat of the flames and fought bravely to extinguish them. He gave no thought to his blindness and merely did all he could to staunch the fire and save his furnishings–and succeeded, though not without injury. When his roomate William H. Watson came home to the flat at 1126 Washington Blvd., he found Charles terribly burned, and he died soon after at Santa Monica Hospital.

Not Firestone and Maie, To-day

I’ve been thinking a lot about trains since they started building that mighty railroad over in Griffith Park. You know, from the paper three days ago. So I’m on my way down to South Gate to watch the derailed trains roll by, maybe get a piece of fence stuck in me, when I became entranced by some car fire near Hoover and Venice.

When it dawns, do you really want to see another serene scene of some train tracks and their friend the sickly ficus? So I came home and’ve furnished you with these Examiner images of the Southern Pacific Owl wreck, January 18, 1947, when seven died in the freezing dark north of Bakersfield, after five southbound passenger train coaches were hurled off the track by a broken rail.

Now aren’t you glad I spared you the sight of sickly fici. Despite that nagging feeling you have that there’s something contemptible, nay, pitiable about your attraction to destruction? Well, beats the landscape of South Gate.

The Case of the Divorcee in the Elevator

March 3, 1947
Los Angeles

Since 1944, Sarah Shirley Ruenker, 32, has suffered crippling claustrophobia, an ailment that today nearly kept her from filing for divorce against her machinist husband Carl. Accompanied by her attorney Barry Woodmansee, she bravely stepped into the tiny elevator at City Hall… then crumpled in tears and had to be carried out by Woodmansee and the operator. After quieting her, Woodmansee rode alone to the 19th floor, where he explained to Judge Paul Vallee the reason for Sarah’s nonappearance. A sympathetic man, the judge agreed to hear the case on the ground floor of the Probate Courts Building, and granted the lady her divorce on grounds of non-support.

Lucky Penny

March 2, 1947
Los Angeles

Cabbie Clifford Brown is fortunate to be alive tonight after an encounter with an armed robber at 110th and Central. A fare asked him to wait there while he picked up a buddy, but the buddy came packing heat. Before Brown had a chance to respond, the gunman’s finger twitched, and a bullet tore into the cabbie’s breast pocket. The pocket was stuffed full of change, which made an improvised shield as its contents flew wildly away from the shocked victim. The original fare, a cool sorta cucumber, suggested, “Don’t be so nervous there, Joe. Get down and pick that money off the floor.”

Brown, who lives at 1683 1/2 Palm Lane, lost $58 and was bruised around the chest, but is otherwise unharmed.

No relation:
Medium Image

Whoooo whooooo!

March 1, 1947
Los Feliz

The long-awaited midget railroad in Griffith Park is nearing completion, and wee tykes citywide can scarcely hold their water as they anticipate the thrill of circling the figure-eight-shaped, half-mile track near the Riverside Drive side of the Park.

The new concession is work of Floyd Wells and Sam Bornstein, its $50,000 cost covered by the city in return for $150 monthly rent and 25% of the gross income. Mr. Bornstein is the proprietor of miniature railways in Cleveland, Kansas City and Toledo. The cost for a ride will be 14 cents for adults, 9 cents for kids.

Floyd and Sam, Your Conductors to the End

No, these men aren’t burying children, they’re building a railroad-for now. Don’t they know what railroads do? Don’t they know that all trains are capable of is buckling and derailment? Wait til they read the papers on March 4 to see what happened to Helen Gil. Here, an earthen roof will be put over this cut to make a tiny tunnel, where a tiny Taggart Transcontinental can-you know the rest.

How many budding Cherryl Brookses will leap from this bridge?

We here at 1947project know only danger and distress whilst bringing you danger and distress, so I took it upon myself to risk riding the Griffith Park “Choo”-“choo” and after making certain we weren’t carrying chlorine gas (though I wasn’t sure some of those kids didn’t have Sarin on them), I boarded, uncertain that there was to be no repeat of Nowy Dwor, 1949; there was not. I was still nervous, though. That whole Auschwitz thing has given me an aversion to mass transit.

Here we are in the Floyd & Sam’s tunnel. Thinking Salerno, 1944.

And crossing the bridge:

I thought of the train that plunged off just such a bridge into the Baghmati River, killing 500. The driver had braked to avoid hitting a cow. So here I was. Praying our driver wasn’t Hindu. (Actually, he and I stood around after and shot the bull about the B-24s that took off from Atwater, and the nearby Rancho stables, and his hopping on the Glendale Red Car to go see movies downtown as a child-you’d go to Broadway, I asked, heck no, he replied, you go to Main Street, and see movies at places where you sat on old crates.)

So that’s the tale of the Griffith Park Train. One last note. I don’t know why, but rolling past these things made me think of some lonely children’s cemetery.

Oh, and that kidnapped girl…

February 28, 1947
near Long Beach

’tis the season for faked abductions, with yesterday’s nude 17-year-old found bound in her underpants with a cigarette burn on her wrist confessing to police that she had “dreamed up” the sinister man who attacked her, and had tied and injured herself. She’s Jacqueline Mae Stang of 2009 Chestnut Ave., Long Beach, currently in custody of the Long Beach juvenile division as investigators satisfy themselves that there really is not a kidnapper loose in their community.

Must be all that Black Dahlia coverage putting weird ideas in folks’ heads.