While busting Robert Chelsea Putter, 49, on a forgery charge, officers made a delightful discovery. Putter had written an 18-page booklet instructing would-be forgers on the rules of the trade. Unfortunately, he had neglected to follow his own advice, and landed in the pokey.
The specific rules not followed? “When you don’t succeed in passing a check, get out of town but fast.” And “chain markets keep a list of names that have been used in past forgeries.”
In the course of fining a driver who admitted to driving 38mph in a 20mph zone, Judge J.J. Quillin quipped that he admired the fellow’s forbearance, for he was the first California driver he’d ever known to drive under 50!
His curtains blazing, Charles Mason, 71, raced towards the heat of the flames and fought bravely to extinguish them. He gave no thought to his blindness and merely did all he could to staunch the fire and save his furnishings–and succeeded, though not without injury. When his roomate William H. Watson came home to the flat at 1126 Washington Blvd., he found Charles terribly burned, and he died soon after at Santa Monica Hospital.
When two Pacific Electric freight cars derailed near Firestone Blvd. and Maie Avenue, Helen Gil, 25, observed the carnage from a prudent 40 yards away… prudent, that is, until the fence beside which she was standing crumpled under the weight of the cars and collapsed, fracturing her ankle and giving her a possible concussion.
Since 1944, Sarah Shirley Ruenker, 32, has suffered crippling claustrophobia, an ailment that today nearly kept her from filing for divorce against her machinist husband Carl. Accompanied by her attorney Barry Woodmansee, she bravely stepped into the tiny elevator at City Hall… then crumpled in tears and had to be carried out by Woodmansee and the operator. After quieting her, Woodmansee rode alone to the 19th floor, where he explained to Judge Paul Vallee the reason for Sarah’s nonappearance. A sympathetic man, the judge agreed to hear the case on the ground floor of the Probate Courts Building, and granted the lady her divorce on grounds of non-support.
Cabbie Clifford Brown is fortunate to be alive tonight after an encounter with an armed robber at 110th and Central. A fare asked him to wait there while he picked up a buddy, but the buddy came packing heat. Before Brown had a chance to respond, the gunman’s finger twitched, and a bullet tore into the cabbie’s breast pocket. The pocket was stuffed full of change, which made an improvised shield as its contents flew wildly away from the shocked victim. The original fare, a cool sorta cucumber, suggested, “Don’t be so nervous there, Joe. Get down and pick that money off the floor.”
Brown, who lives at 1683 1/2 Palm Lane, lost $58 and was bruised around the chest, but is otherwise unharmed.
No relation:
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.
