Category: fads

The Hot Roddin’ Bartimaeus

January 27, 1927
Los Angeles

elasticizeHayward Thompson toured Los Angeles today, and pronounced on KFWB this evening (through the courtesy of the Times and Gartzman, Inc, your friendly local Oakland distributor) that driving through Los Angeles was going to be a snap.  Without the use of his eyes, of course.  Seems he doesn’t need them—Thompson was blinded when a German shell took out part of his brain at Bois de Belleau, and then miraculously regained his sight—and he’s been able to read, golf, shoot rifle matches, since then, while blindfolded.

Thompson, 47 years of age though who reportedly looks 30, has made 332 paroptic public exhibhibitions, in every great city of America and Europe, and will make this, his Los Angeles trip, at one hundred miles, his last.

Thompson states that he has more competition here than anywhere else in the world.  “Driving around Los Angeles I find a good many blind drivers,” he said.  “I even encountered one who was blind drunk.”

On January 31st, his 333rd exhibition (spooky) Thompson was blindfolded by Deputy Chief of Police Spellman, and did indeed motor one hundred miles through the congested centers of Los Angeles, Hollywood and Pasadena, obeying all signals and laws, without a hitch.

And now he’s ceased.  He’s had to stop because in having only two layers of skin (as opposed to the three you and I have), in conjunction with the fasting he must undergo to sharpen his dermoptic wits, has proven bad for his health.  

In retirement, Thompson plans on devoting the rest of his life to hypnotizing people over the radio, via Mesmer’s system of suggestion.

Belshazzar only had a Thousand

January 26, 1927
Los Angeles

Scientists and composers, having long toiled in vain to produce color symphonies, have been bested by, of course, an ingenious Angeleno.  

tomorrowtheworldLeo Geasland, an electrician at the El Patio Ballroom, has finally perfected the synchronization of color and music.  

Geasland’s invention consists of a ten-key keyboard on his right, and a switchboard on his left.  These he operate in rhythm to the orchtestra, throwing changing rhythmic combinations to 6,000 incandescent bulbs.  With an unlimited combination of 280 major colors, he controls 1,800 rose, 1,500 red, 1,000 amber and 2,000 blue lights.  (Green was omitted from Geasland’s color scheme because of its effect on the complexion; this we applaud.)  The contraption’s 1,400 wires and 100 circuits is about adequate to light a city of 30,000.  Writes the Times, “As the fingers of Geasland move over the keys, the colors flash and dance on the walls, ceiling and pillars of the ballroom in perfect synchronization to the music, producing an effect of beauty and harmony that is unusual.”

Because there were no contemporary accounts of what it was like to witness the spectacle of the “color piano,” I’m just going to go ahead and make one up:

Woodrow Harrelson, an employee at Imperial Valley Hemp, waxed rhapsodic about the new process.  “It was swell, I’ll tell you.  We heard—saw?—‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ and ‘Breezin’ Along with the Breeze’ and such, and some zorchy new rags like the ‘Kinkajou.’  But when they banged out that new Jelly Roll Morton jazz, we said, hotcha!  Even the long-hair stuff was the berries, and how!  Who woulda thought Busoni would make you all nutty?”  Judging from Mr. Harrelson, it is apparent that a peculiar side-effect of the Color Piano is a glassy quality and "bloodshottedness" of the eye.

ElPatio1927In a 1933 article about Geasland’s apparatus, it’s noted that the blind and deaf are admitted for free every Monday evening to the Rainbow Gardens (the El Patio became the Rainbow in 1930, and thereafter the Palomar Ballroom).  The deaf would dance to the base and time beats of the music in rhythm to the lights, as other lights would carry on the harmony.  The blind could just dance to the music, but Geasland declared that they, too, were noticeably affected by the lights they could not see.  “They seem to feel them,” said Geasland.  “Often a blind couple will get right under a circle of the base lights and keep dancing around and around right there.  I have watched them many times, and feel sure they feel they rhythm of the lights they cannot see.”

Geasland goes on to say that in time, big orchestras everywhere will have light players as well as instrument players.  “They make rhythm visible…so they help people feel and appreciate the music.”

Sadly, on October 2, 1939, the bass viol player dropped his resin rag on a 150-watt floodlight during Lionel Kaye’s “daffy auction,” and the Patio/Rainbow/Palomar burned to the ground, Gaesland’s invention therein.

Hair Today…

October 27, 1927
Los Angeles

naughtygirl

Of course we know that pigtails have gone the way of the dodo for the li’l ‘uns, torn asunder by the terrible rake of modernity, but we never thought the bob would be stomped extinct by carnality and venality, modernity’s ugly little twins.  But the bob is gone!  Long live the permanent wave!

Here, five year-old Dottie Landvogt, of the Seventy-Sixty Street Landvogts, sits at Johanna’s Permanent Wave Shop in the Pantages Building on Broadway.  She’s hooked up to one of those Charles Nessler contraptions—a crazy of octopus holding two-pound brass rollers on a system of counterweights, suspended from a chandelier; the curlers, filled with a Borax paste reagent, are electrically heated to 200+ degrees to boil and steam the hair and, because Nessler didn’t have a shop in Los Angeles, this was probably one of the many cheap knock-off machines.  Which meant Dot likely ended up with a nicely burned scalp to match her ‘do.

But such is the price of beauty.

By the time Dorothy is ten, heatless waves will be all the rage, so we wish her the best of luck in still having hair. 

Well, That Seems Like a Good Idea

July 21, 1927
Across the Mighty United States 

stuntdriver1

stuntdriver2 

Sadly, there’s no follow-up story about Burns’ journey.  We like to believe it involved something other than broken bones and twisted metal—“what a shame, the poor boy got all the way out here and crashed.”

Driving in Los Angeles is a far cry from the corn-flanked roads of Lawrence, Jimmy.

The Height of Mystery

July 19, 1927
Los Angeles

Who’s that bobbing in the wind high atop the Rose Room Ballroom at 8th and Spring? Why, it’s The Phantom of the Flagpole, a mask-wearing fella who swears he’ll break the flagpole sitting record of 17 days and 2 hours set by V.H. Crouch of New Bedford, MA. Just hours after Crouch came down from his eastern pole, The Phantom climbed his. Oh, heavy hangs the crown of the nation’s greatest flagpole sitter.

The Times reports that The Phantom is shaving and eating three meals a day (unsaid is what he does with these meals once he’s finished with them, if you catch our drift). He smokes 100 cigarettes a day and gulps black coffee most of the night, when he ties himself to the pole, just in case. He’s reading fiction magazines and would like an adventure novel sent up.

On July 26, The Phantom will call for a cork helmet to avert the awful rays of the sun. When The Phantom of the Flagpole finally comes down to earth on August 5th, he is revealed as Captain Robert Hull, and happily takes possession of a $2500 prize from Rose Room manager Joseph Lederer.

But while you cheer the achievement of our local pigeon, spare a kind thought for poor "Hold Em Joe" Powers, whose perch over the Morrison Hotel in Chicago ended at a disappointing 16 days and two hours on July 15, and unaccountably left him missing six teeth. (Scurvy? An excess of chattering? Only Joe knows, and he ain’t talking.)