above: Nathan Marsak and Crimebo the Clown prepare for the debut performance of The Jack Parsons Story as presented by the Crimebo Players. Weird Sex! Rocketships! Space Creatures! Warlocks! Sex Slaves! Is this the Pasadena the Chamber of Commerce wants us talking about? Hmmm…. maybe not. But we sure had fun.
Below, a visit to Mitchell Books, where John Mitchell held us rapt with tales of real and fictional murder.
In anticipation of our upcoming Esotouric bus adventure John Fante: Dreams of Bunker Hill, we will be hosting the inaugural meeting of the Nobody Reads In L.A. book club at Lost Souls Cafe in downtown Los Angeles. The book under discussion: John Fante’s classic tale of a downtown writer’s struggles, Ask The Dust. Buy your copy at Metropolis Books around the corner from Los Souls, say you are a friend of Bandini’s, and get 10% off the cover price.
Nico, Mary, Kim and Richard will arrive at 6:30 to jump start the event, and we officially begin at 7:00.
Crack that spine, and we’ll see you there!
One Thomas Little was attempting to raid the fabled Utt avocado groves down in Lemon Heights when he ran afoul of ‘cado guard George Henning. The two struggled for possession of a revolver while the two careened down a hillside in Litttle’s truck before Little was at last apprehended.
But, with Little having stolen nothing, how could it be proved that the value of what he intended to steal was more than $200? It was therefore up to Justice Morrison to determine the value of the accused man’s intended grand larcency haul. Dep. Dist.-Atty. Collins produced the fifteen empty sacks that Mr. Little had in tow; the court estimated these sacks would likely hold fifteen hundred pounds of the bewitching fruit, and further determined that these be worth more than the lowest grand larceny charge of $200.
All that notwithstanding, it was declared at the hearing that Little came quite close to being caught in a bear trap.
Above: Kelly Kuvo, the Blonde Dahlia
LOS ANGELES — A dismembered wannabe starlet. A girl buried under her family’s home. A rattlesnake used as a weapon.
The scenes of those crimes are stops on a series of Southern California bus tours that eschew the usual stars’ homes and theme parks to offer passengers a peak at the region’s dark side.
"They’re aimed at the history geek sort of people," said Kelly Kuvo, who wears a black veil and other vintage accouterments during the trips she leads for tour company Esotouric.
The company’s "crime bus" tours plumb the grisly, blood-soaked pasts of now quiet Southern California neighborhoods and nondescript strip malls.
Similar trips elsewhere take passengers deep into cities’ gory pasts, including Washington’s "Bad Olde Days" chronicling crime in the nation’s capital and "Sinister London" that follows the steps of Jack the Ripper.
"When people die in a place, it does change that place forever," said Esotouric guide and co-founder Kim Cooper. "Just because the people wandering around the neighborhood may not be aware of it, it doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea for people who are interested in history to revive those memories."
John G. Cawelti, who writes about the seductiveness of violent crime tales in his book "Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture," said the tours play into people’s fears of death and catastrophe.
"We live in an age where the worst kinds of things can happen to anybody," Cawelti said. "Walk down the street and something blows up and all of a sudden you lost your life or lost a leg. The fact that somebody else went through this becomes a surrogate – a magical way of charming away the fear of the possibility."
Esotouric’s most popular tour explores 1947 Los Angeles by zeroing in on the murder of Elizabeth Short – a.k.a. "Black Dahlia" – who came to Hollywood in search of fame but wound up the victim of an infamous unsolved murder.
One stop is a ground-floor storefront on a desolate downtown street that now boasts a sign reading, "Club Galaxy – 100 Beautiful Girls."
In 1947, when it was a bistro called "The Crown Grill," it was the last place Short was seen before her dismembered body was discovered miles away in a south Los Angeles neighborhood.
"She was friendly with the bartenders and with some of the waitresses, so people recognized her and remembered her," Cooper said. "The problem of course is that everybody at the Crown Grill immediately became suspects."
Passengers are also introduced to lesser known crimes from the same year, such as the attempted carjacking in Hollywood of an 18-year-old movie theater cashier named Ginevra Knight, who shot her assailant dead.
"It’s the criminal history of 1947 L.A. and how women felt going out at night in the hysteria of an unsolved murder," Cooper said.
The "Blood and Dumplings" tour through San Gabriel Valley suburbs, meanwhile, passes the home where a young bride-to-be was buried in 1969 by her uncle after he shot her to death in a jealous rage at the end of their affair.
It also cruises by an intersection where a man named Raymond James bought a rattlesnake he let bite his wife in 1935 so he could cash in on her insurance policy. When she didn’t die, he had an accomplice finish the job by drowning her in their fish pond.
Esotouric grew out of a Web log Cooper started in 2005, when she set out to retell a true-crime tale from each day of 1947. She and her collaborators soon started offering tours of those scenes and the sites of other crimes.
A tour that revisits the life and literature of Raymond Chandler, whose fictional characters inhabit the region’s underworld, was added to the menu of crime junkets when the company was started earlier this year.
Tour participant Bob Nickum, 59, a school district business manager, said seeing the sites of past crimes made him look at familiar places in a new way.
"It’s just very interesting to drive around the area and to see things I may have passed by many times and maybe not known what happened there," said Nickum, who, like most passengers, lives in Southern California.
"It makes things a little more interesting – vivid – to know about something that intense that took place in a calm, peaceful neighborhood," he said.
Nathan Marsak, chess shark Heather and Kelly at the Hotel Barclay
May 3, 1927
Pomona
Some call it extortion; we call it a rather clever short con. C.L. Jackson and R.W. Hedgreth, both 48 and old enough to know better, approached service station operators Harold K. Hemmingway and Norman Bliss in the guise of being Prohibition officers, and asked where ’round here one could wet one’s whistle. After being informed of the details, Jackson and Hedgreth threatened to alert the real Prohibition men of the illegal info being spread, and demanded a pair of tires, gasoline and $25 cash to keep quiet. But Hemmingway noted the serial numbers on the bills and called the law, and the crooks were soon nabbed.
Justice U.E. White must not have thought much of the victims in the case, for he sentenced the men to six months in County Jail, which he promptly suspended for good behavior.
Meanwhile, in Reno, Nevada’s first short residency divorce was granted to Sophia M. Ross of New York, who braved the desert winds and cultural drought for three months so she could be freed of her Albert, who ate mashed potatoes with his hands.
April 27, 1927
Los Angeles
Sim Cross is alive, ALIVE! The Los Angeles man, resident of 4195 Third Avenue, was believed a suicide by pals after a full suit of clothes but the underpants were found on the beach at Redondo on April 19. Mugs were raised, his good and bad points debated, and perhaps the pals even parcelled out his nicest ties among them. But on the 21st there came a telegram, signed Sim and sent from San Francisco, announcing that reports of his demise were not to be believed.
In time, he returned home, bearing a singularly peculiar tale. The last thing he remembered, see, he was fighting a riptide. And then, inky darkness. He came to 48 hours later in an SF hotel room, with bruised feet and no idea how he got there. In the room, clothes and a suitcase he’d never seen before. He dressed, and stepped into the street, where two men accosted him. It was thanks to them, they said, that Sim was in this spot. And now all they needed was for him to take someone’s place in a hospital for a few more days and…
Here Sim drew the curtain over one of the most perfect descriptions of cliche detective’s peril as we’ve ever read. He claims that he simply demured and came home.
Was it all fantasy? Or did once there dwell strangely maleable hoodlums, who would conk a guy while he swam and spirit him away to play a part in a bandage opera, then let him go when he said he wasn’t in the mood? We’ll never know, for after this one extraordinary incident, Sim Cross vanished from the record, but never from our hearts.
And back in the fair city of Burbank, 17-year-old Mignon Jones parachuted from a height of 2000 feet clad only in a sailor suit. Jones’s mother had discovered her daughter’s plan, and notified the police in the hopes of stopping her. However, by the time Burbank police officers arrived at the airport, Jones had already made a perfect landing and vacated the premises. She was later found at a local skating rink.April 15, 1927
L
adies of Los Angeles! Do your cakes fall? Is your husband weary of tough pot roast? Do the words, "Company’s coming" fill you with dread? Never fear, because Mabelle E. Wyman is here!
Throughout the 1920s, master chef A.L. Wyman answered the questions near and dear to the hearts of Times readers in his weekly column, "Practical Recipes: Helps for Epicures and All Who Appreciate Good Cooking," supplemented by the popular daily feature, "Suggestions for Tomorrow’s Menu." After Wyman’s death in 1926, his widow, Mabelle, immediately took over the columns. Then, she did him one better, announcing free cooking classes to be offered weekly under the auspices of the Los Angeles Times. 
Approximately 1000 Angelenos crowded into Wyman’s lecture room at the Southern California Manufacturers’ Exhibit at 130 S. Broadway for the inaugural class on April 15, some of them sitting on window sills and even under the enamel sink on the stage. Within a week, the Times announced that classes would be offered on Tuesdays and Fridays to accommodate the demand.
Domestic science was a relatively young discipline, and like many burgeoning fields, sought legitimacy in its early days by emphasizing the ‘science.’ Nutrition, economy, efficiency, and tidy presentation were prized, sometimes over taste. While this era in culinary history gave us the icebox cake, it also ushered is a parade of congealed horrors like the tomato frappe (the less said of this unholy mixture of condensed soup and iceberg lettuce the better).
Wyman’s culinary focus was typical for the time, if quirkier. She emphasized meatless dishes, like her Potato and Peanut Sausages, as well as foods grown or produced in Southern California. Popular demonstrations included recipes for Spanish omelettes, cucumber loaf, orange cookies, and the ubiquitous tamale pie.
After the first class, Wyman encouraged her audience to submit questions to a question box, and guaranteed answers either during the next class or in her "Practical Recipes" column. While most columns simply answered requests for particular recipes, others were more cryptic. One can only wonder at the query that prompted Wyman to write, "Mrs. S., Los Angeles: I am sorry but the law prohibits my either printing the recipe you ask for or sending it through the mail." Bathtub julep, anyone?
Wyman seems to have been as good as her word, frequently humoring readers who requested recipe reprints. Despite being demonstrated several times at her lectures, and appearing in A.L. Wyman’s posthumous Daily Health Menus (available for check out at the Los Angeles Public Library), Mabelle printed the recipe for tamale pie no less than 10 times during her tenure with the Times.
The classes remained popular until Wyman’s sudden death on January 23, 1931. She was found at her home at 424 Arden Ave. in Glendale (also the mailing address listed in her column for A.L. Wyman Laboratory Kitchen), having suffered a heart attack. Her estate, including a collection of over 200 cookbooks, was auctioned February 8, 1931.
Recommended reading: Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad, a lively study of domestic science and city cooking schools around the turn of the century, and Sylvia Lovegren’s Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads, a collection of trendy, eyebrow-raising recipes (including one for the ubiquitous tamale pie).
Also of interest: The Food Timeline, a culinary history project created and maintained by a librarian (woot!), featuring landmark foods trends through the ages. Peking duck to hummingbird cake, it’s all here.
April 5, 1927
Santa Monica
Serial burglar E.M. Peterson is presently cooling his heels in Santa Monica Jail, having carelessly cooled his tonsils in the course of knocking over the Radio Pharmacy on Washington Boulevard recently. Fingerprint man Barlow discovered an incriminating imprint on a silver sundae cup at the soda fountain, and when confronted with the stain, Peterson admitted both to stealing an icy cold confection, and to no less than fifty Westside burglaries and seventy in Los Angeles. This is once again, proof positive that between meal snacks are bad for a bad man’s health.
But enough about crime. Please join us, gentle reader, in wishing a most joyous 95th birthday to the beaming gentleman at left, Mr. Harry Cooper, my grandpa. Born in Philly in 1912, he served in Havai’i (as he pronounces it) during the early 1930s where he saved a fellow soldier from a riptide, came out to LA and drove a pickle truck, met and wooed my grandma Barbara on the tennis courts, and together they briefly ran a chicken ranch, then were for many years in the discount shoe business at the Beverly Bootery, a shop located where the El Coyote parking lot is today. Harry is a gentle fellow with a passion for tinkering in his garage workshop (ask him about his moss topiary projects or the steering wheel shelf he made so he can read National Geographics in the car while Barbara is shopping), odd scientific and natural history facts, golfing and exotic foods. Here’s wishing a perfect day to a lovely fellow!
March 31, 1927
Pasadena
Fourteen year-old Wilbur Garner had a lady-friend, and an older one at that, his inamoratette a fifteen year-old Eula Rittgers. They showed great attachment to one another at their Seventh Day Adventist School. When they decided to exchange biblical dullsville for the world”™s treasures, they outfoxed the Man by turning li”™l Eula into a
boy. Inside a church wastebasket was found the Eula’s hair, and persons conforming to the two young boys’ description were spotted in Eagle Rock. A fashionable bobbed ‘do meets a Joan of Arc act. Appropriately observant. Guess they were absent the day they covered Deuteronomy 22:5.
In yet more fifteen year-old news, or, that is to say, further news of fifteen year-olds, fifteen year-old Jimmy Davis and an unnamed pal of his broke into the Monterey Park home of John W. Hardman, stealing fountain pens and trinkets and, more absurdly, did Jimmy garb himself in Hardman”™s best suit, silk shirt and black & white scarf. Figuring himself too conspicuous for his own good, Jimmy and pal returned to the house, threw the clothes on the floor and, afraid of being traced through fingerprints (his being known to local authorities for his repeated burglaries and check forgings), lit fire to the house. The house smoldered for some time before being rescued by the fire department, and Jimmy is now cooling his heels in juvenile hall.
