Author: Kim Cooper

It was a year ago that prosperous dentist Jules Goldsmith, 42, packed up his wife and three kids and moved them to 201 S. Hamel Drive, Beverly Hills. The good DDS wanted to be not dentist to the stars, but a star himself.

And so he burned through the family’s savings, returning to Detroit alone several weeks ago, when he saw how dire circumstances had become. His sister’s maid found him hanging from a basement beam, with a note that read: “Big mistake in leaving hometown and all my friends. Lack of work all my fault. Motion pictures just a gag. We have good children. Betty should remain on the coast.”

Betty and the children were on their way to Detroit at last report.

Suggested reading for starstruck fang-polishers: How to Make it in Hollywood : Second Edition

Based on three polls conducted over the past five years by Princeton, N.J. based American Institute of Public Opinion, non-farm families are spending nearly twice as much on their weekly food budgets as they were in 1942 (national median has risen from $11 to $21). However, professional and business class families are spending more than both white collar and manual laboring ones ($24 versus $20), suggesting that some of that increase is by choice, not necessity.

Hmm, honey, how about we send the kids to the movies, you grill a couple steaks and I’ll mix up a pitcher of mai tais…?

Further reading: Beachbum Berry’s Grog Log and The American Century Cookbook: The Most Popular Recipies of the 20th Century

According to a poll conducted by the California Committee for the Study of Transient Youth at the state borders and in 15 California cities, up to 400 young people, 18-22, are entering California each day without their families. Most have left jobs in their home states in the belief that prospects for employment are better in California, and are “puzzled and resentful” to find this is not the case.

Further reading: A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970

Suggested listening for prospective flashlight bandits: Waiting for the Electrician Or Someone Like Him (Firesign Theater)

18-month-old Robin Maria Dier found a little piece of metal, a bolt or a screw, at her home at 6323 Primrose Ave., and playfully stuck it in her mouth. Her mother saw her do it, and tried to take it away, but the child toddled off without releasing her prize.

A few moments later, she was gasping and turning blue. The Fire Department inhalator squad arrived and fed oxygen to Robin for 90 minutes, while Dr. Nicholas Mamulario of Hollywood Receiving Hospital performed a tracheotomy. Her condition appeared to be improving, so the technicians prepared the child for the trip to Children’s Hospital. Then she died.

Suggested reading: How to Baby-Proof Your Home

She’s home!

Ruth Alice McLaren, 15-year-old runaway, has turned up in Ann Arbor, Michigan after her overly generous tips to a beautician raised the snipper’s suspicions. Now her mother is heading East to reclaim the young lady from the local juvenile hall, while Ruth’s invalid father Russell steams at home at 23 Fano Street.

What of the $2400 in cash (meant for the girl’s college education) that she pinched from the fruit jar last time she left the house? While the girl initially told officers she was a war widow on the run from her in-laws, she quickly ‘fessed up. Seems she met a man in a Pasadena movie theater, and agreed to pay both their ways to Ann Arbor, where her friend said he planned to enroll at the University.

Ruth was a big spender-but mainly on herself. In addition to visiting the beauty parlor, she bought a fur coat, flashy duds and a radio. So who can blame her pal for taking a powder with $1000 of the fruit jar bounty soon after they reached the Mitten State?

But there’s $402 left in the kitty. Which should be just about enough, after travel expenses, to pay Ruth’s way through beauty school, where if she’s very lucky she’ll run into tippers as big as herself.

Suggested reading: Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures

Mothers-in-law are bad enough-but no one ever told David Richard, 22, what a pain in the caboose his STEP mother-in-law would be.

When young David left his room at 424 N. Alfred Ave. today on his way to the wholesale house where he works, he discovered his wife’s stepmother, Mrs. Rose Wolfeld, 54, snoozing in his car.

In retrospect, he ought to have taken a trolley, but he woke the woman–and was she ever in a mood. She began by berating him for failing to provide a home for her poor grayed head, and when he got behind the wheel she whipped out a metal bar and clocked him a few times on the noggin. He ran to the house with step-mamma in mad pursuit, while wife Louise, 19, watched in horror.

The victim never did make it to work, spending the day at the Hollywood Receiving Hospital getting stitches in his scalp and on his right wrist (defensive wounds). Mrs. Wolfeld meanwhile was booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon.

David told police that he and Louise married last March, and had been fending off Mrs. Wolfeld ever since. She insisted the couple provide a home for her, but when they moved into the single room on Alfred Ave. three weeks ago, they made it clear that there was no room for the extended family.

Mind you, if Mrs. W had gotten in a couple more whacks, there just might have been-.

Suggested reading: Mothers-In-Law Do Everything Wrong: M.I.L.D.E.W.

Police are investigating the strange death of Mrs. Susanne Smith Castillo, 23-year-old bride of Dr. Manuel De J. Castillo, who operates “medical clinics” at his home at 480 West Vernon Ave. and at 1250 West Santa Barbara Ave. Mrs. Castillo, a native of Charlottesville, VA and widow of a wealthy New York patent attorney, was discovered dead in a half-filled bath at the Vernon Ave. address by Jesus M. Castillo, her brother-in-law and a technician at the clinic. There were bruises on her head and a laceration near her temple. An autopsy is pending