Author: Nathan Marsak

Strictly speaking, Betty isn’t an arsonist; she isn’t after revenge or monetary gain, nor is she plain old psychotic. No, she’s a true pyromaniac, with a probable paraphilia for fire and its attendant accouterements-fire trucks, foam, and fun. That, and she just loves to set fire to curtains, but who doesn’t?

After having set four blazes at the Palms Wilshire, it’s a wonder it’s still standing:

She also did some drape-ignitin’ here, or perhaps near. The address in the Times is 1272, and the address on this building is 1250, putting 1272 about where the TV-VCR repair bunker quivers behind the tree.

And on Oak, where we picture her writhing in ecstacy over burning case headings and bubbling pencil pleats. How her blood would boil as hot as the flames engulfing the valances! How only oceans of beer could quell the inferno in her soul!

But revisiting that room, to feel the hot madness of her throes- I don’t have to tell you that Oak, which used to run blithely up to Pico, got wiped out north of the 1400 block by the Arroyo Seco Parkway.

Flickaphile McDowall was a Brit-in-LA at the same time Waugh’s 1947 Brit-in-LA novel The Loved One is published; McDowall goes on to star in the 1965 film version (featuring Lionel Stander, another member of our 47p community [cf. October 23]).

A couple of snaps not of the actual incident, but from the greater 47 collection, and which, we feel, get the spirit of the event across.

Sure, you’re thinking “a cop named Elmer Kunkle gets beat up by a lady named Esther and a guy named Angus-this is a gag, right?” Wrong. This is a town of degeneracy and vice, depravity and vicious reprobate gangs reeling in cops like Elmer and throwing them back like fish too small for Satan’s game warden.

To you, the uninitiated, “Se Rentan Mesas y Sillas” might mean these reg’lar folk rent tables and chairs. In actuality, it’s really a depraved shorthand for “We Throw Cops Off Porches.” Word to the wise.

What could be more un-American than strongarming businesses to pony up cash for a collection of plastic manger scenes? After all, not everybody believes in that sort of thing. Why, here’s a congregation that aren’t son worshippers, they’re sun worshippers!

Yes, apparently the folk who’ve inhabited the Academy Theater (S. Charles Lee, 1939) are sun worshippers. Whether they believe Sol will be devoured by Skoll at Ragnarock, or that Ra must defeat Apep every morning, they’re part of the community, just like you and me.

So, friends, fight the power-the electrical power, that is!

Ah, Broadway. (Here, looking west on 7th across B’way, the Bank of America on your far right at the NE corner.)

Scroll back to November 29 for Ms. Bertha getting a little loot lifted. And today Vets, without even the decency to toss a little water in their faces, are sticking pistols at people. In the future, of course, bank robberies will be graciously moved to the Valley.

I’ve been on the wrong end of a piece, and while it’s unpleasant, it’s nothing compared to the terror you will feel at the horror you are about to witness:

If you dare-scroll down to see what happens when we turn to peer back east on 7th at the Bank of America building-

Seems like just a few days ago there was some attempted matricide up on 46th. ‘Course, that was a middle-aged shmoe wielding a washboard. Here we’ve got a juvie shooting his mother in the back. And to think, in just a year and a few days, Burbank’s own Every Mother’s Son, Edmund Kemper, will be born.

So I set out to see where Mark, this budding Nero, grew up.

But here, in 1947, in what was known as Los Angeles Judicial Township, a stone’s throw from the Goodyear Rubber Plant, there was no “South Flower” or “South Grand.” Just a stretch of homes from Figueroa to Broadway:

And that, children, explains where 412 W. 68th Street went–that’s 428 in the picture, and as far as the addresses go.

104, where Pamela worked at turning suicide from a verb to a noun, is no more.

The evolution of a neighborhood. From left to right, a nice Italian Renaissance/Spanish Eclectic, ca. 1935; some dingbatian boxitude ca. 1955; and our friend 100 Catalina with the Mexican lamp, Colonial S-bracket and Mansardisme, ca. 1975.

And look, here’s a copper blazing through the red, off to go help some wayward lass with a belly full of Seconal. We presume.

Whether suicide is an act of weakness or strength is beyond the scope of this post, but what’s certain is that in telephoning her mother, Pamela has revealed her attempt to be merely a parasuicidal gesture. I say neglect the phone bill!