Author: Kim Cooper

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.

’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.

Fiends are loose in the city, and no girl or woman is safe! The latest victim is a 17-year-old high school girl–found naked and bound with her own underclothes, with a cigarette burn on her wrist–near the Union Pacific underpass at Willow Street. After treatment at Seaside Hospital, which revealed no sign of criminal assault, the shaken girl recovered sufficiently to describe being followed by a strange man and then grabbed in an alley, after which her memory was mercifully blank.

Police records show the same girl reported being followed by a man in a car with no license plates on February 5.

Remember Eugene White, the businessman who disappeared on Valentine’s Eve, leaving his coat, wallet, bloodstained car and gifts for the Missus? Police speculated he’d been robbed, beaten and tossed into a passing freight car, but it turns out he’s fine and well, and camped out with a pal in Seattle. It was the wife of that friend, Jay Stevens, who convinced White to phone his worried wife. She called the cops.

White explained that he was feeling overwhelmed after years of working 14 hour days, and so faked his own disappearance. “I felt I couldn’t go on. I wanted to go to sea or work in a lumber camp.” So he cut his hand with a razor and stage set his own abduction.

A shocked Mrs. White told reporters that if Eugene didn’t come home, she guessed she’d take the kids and go home to mama in Michigan. Then she asked to be left alone to figure things out.

Ten hours after the plating factory explosion on East Pico Blvd., 20-year-old Charles Batye turned on a machine at the creamery at 1120 Towne Avenue and was badly injured when a shard of glass, a by-product of the explosion, flew out and hit him in the left eye.

The city continues to reel under the horrific impact of yesterday’s chemical explosion at the O’Connor Electro-Plating Company, 926 E. Pico Blvd., which leveled the factory, damaged 116 homes, injured hundreds and killed more than a dozen persons.

City officials scattered rat poison around the blast site to deter vermin, while others condemned the contents of local restaurants and bakeries, lest glass fragments find their way onto plates. And into the night, the bulldozers made their silent, constant grab at the debris, dislodging severed limbs, dead cats and dogs, and the ruins of countless lives.

The aftermath of the explosion was carried live on local television station W6XYZ, with narration by reporter Dick Lane.

It is believed that staff chemist Robert Magee was experimenting with using volatile perchloric acid to polish aluminum when the blast occurred. The formula was his own secret recipe, and a patent had reportedly been applied for. Magee and his newly-hired assistant, Alice Iba, are both missing and presumed dead.