Category: nathan marsak

Forget About the Law

volubleMay 12, 1927
Los Angeles

Archie Quinzey appeared as his own defense today before Superior Judge Stephens, on the charge of unlawfully entering a local home, proceeding to the cupboard, and gorging himself on the comestibles therein.  

Normally, it is said, he who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client, but such was not the case with Mr. Quinzey.  Stephens heard and considered Quinzey’s plea, glanced out the window at a restaurant, considered and cogitated a spell, and stated that while he could impose a heavier sentence, he would not, and felt that a mere six months in County would teach Quinzey to ignore the savory odors emanating from other persons’ kitchens.

Quinzey’s plea, a mixture of erudition and ignoratio elenchi, is printed in the Times with all the characteristic argot endemic to the Good Olde Days:

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And You Say You’ve Got it Rough

 

 badluck
May 6, 1927
Huntington Beach

Mr. Henry Graw:  orphaned at four, never knew his real name, went to Alaska and struck it rich.  Lost all that money in Seattle.  Then he married, and then she died. 

So he came to Huntington Beach and secured a good job with a company that quickly folded and as such didn’t pay him.  He found a less-good job, but at least it paid, until a pipe fell and crushed his hand.  So he got good and drunk to deal with the pain in his soul (and hand) and promptly landed in the hoosegow.  

After relating this saga, acting City Recorder of Huntington Beach, Andrew Wilson, elected to release Graw on probation; Graw stated to the court that he is leaving for Alaska as soon as possible.

Flood World

May 6, 1927
Coolidge America 

Let’s keep abreast of the rising waters, shall we?  The men in top-hats and diamond stick-pins are upset that cotton and cotton related goods are on the downswing, and the decline of trade/farmwork/rail freight is destroying the country, and the dollar is weakening.

Of course, the less elaborately garbed cannot muster quite the concern: 

floodworld

But enterprising folk around Memphis have begun erecting tree houses in the great cottonwoods and willows, where they build their stills to keep a thirsty populace sated.  Sheriff Knight has seized a dozen giant hooch-hatcheries from the treetops, placed there by ingenious bootleggers.

Here in the southland, the Orange County Fruit Exchange began sending citrus, and the stars came out to raise 125g’s (1,475,000 USD2005).

dempseyandthewaters 

Delicious Nuts

May 5, 1927
Around the Globe

Los Angeles, world renowned for its disproportionate share of eccentrics, was reminded in the press to-day that she is not alone when it comes to the care and feeding of such.

xray
House of Brunswick-era London was of course known for feverish devotees of Joanna Southcott, domestic servant turned prophetess, who claimed supernatural powers and dictated prophecy in rhyme.  (Southcottians numbered over 100,000 at one time but practically disappeared overnight in 1890.)  On Southcott’s death in 1814 she left a mysterious box to Rebecca Pengarth, sole companion, who promised it would never be opened except in a national crisis and in the presence of twenty-four bishops.  (The episcopate were pressed to open the thing during the Crimean War, and again during the Great War, but they demurred.)  Southcott claimed to be “the mother of the new Messiah,” and you wouldn’t want to screw that up, so don’t worry, the National Laboratory of Psychical Research didn’t open it; they had it X-rayed.  Noted psychic investigator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle declined an invitation.  The box, after an application of the ol’ Röntgen, showed it to contain a skull, scissors, a horse pistol, a beaded bag, rings, coins, pins, some other whatnot, and what appears to be a roll of manuscript.  Could that hold the secret of messianic return?

Well, no.  When finally opened, the parchment turned out to be a lottery ticket. (And there was in fact no skull—everybody knows that when you cobble together a Mystery Box, you include a skull.)  Southcott descended into House of Windsor-era obscurity, save for the attentions poured upon her by the Panacea Society.

cometSpeaking of the Great War, it was announced today in Washington by by Dr. F. Homer Curtis, founder of the Order of Christian Mystics, that blame for the World War was to be placed solely on gaseous trails left in the earth’s atmosphere by Halley’s comet in 1910.  It seems the gas made humanity nervous and suspicious; and, he noted, if there’s a World War in 1929, you can blame the Pons-Winnecke comet. 

Of course, PW passed by again in ’33 and ’39, and no one suffered from that, did they?

Nearer My God to Thee

 

MAburied 

 

 

 

April 30, 1927
Los Angeles

Nice funeral today for Harry “Mile-Away” Thomas at the Gulik Funeral Parlor.   A few days ago Mile-Away—the gangster known for always having been a “mile away” from whatever crime for which he was arrested—was boosting bootleg hooch and a car from the garage of Ora Lawson, 1408 West Thirty-Fifth Street. 

mileawayOfficers responded to her call about a prowler, and when they arrived, acclaimed hijacker Thomas went for his piece.  The cops opened up with a machine gun, a sawed-off shotgun and two large-caliber revolvers, and yet the twice-arrested-for-murder, “King of the Hi-Jackers” Mile-Away Thomas, filled with pounds of buckshot and slugs, ran from the garage straight at the cops.  

Mile-Away had been in the news just this last February, implicated in the murder of stockbroker/bootlegger Luther Green at Green’s home.  Cops chased Mile-Away around Los Angeles for two weeks before arresting him and, while detectives said on the stand they were certain it was our boy, he was let go for lack of evidence.

At the funeral today, upperworld and underworld hobnobbed, gawked at by the public throng, and Mile-Away’s lady friend, fellow carreer criminal Betty Carroll, swooned and collapsed for the collected.  The cortege moved on to Forest Lawn, and the crowd dispersed.  

Think of Mile-Away, won’t you, the next time you’re down near 35th and Normandie, where his ghost, bloodied but unbowed and his clanking not with chains but from a belly full of bullets, is charging at you with final terrifying resolution, coming to hi-jack your soul.

Silly Fads

graumanschinese

 

 

 
April 30, 1927
Los Angeles

 

 

 

This Sid Grauman character is one kooky kat. First he builds a theater in foo-dog replete Chinesque, and now he’s decided to record Pickford and Fairbanks in the forecourt’s cement—pedally, manually, and chirographiocally. When the theater opens in two weeks, will the paving stones be filled with yet more of these Bertillon hieroglyphics? We hope not.

 

 

 

 

In other news, while everyone knows that the area of greatest density in Los Angeles is centered around First and Flower, it is saidwestwardho that the center of population is moving horribly, inexorably westward. Alfred T. Pelton, president of Interstate Mortgage and Investment Company, feels that Los Angeles’ extremely low density is sadly due to there being too many single family homes. As people bleed west into the Wilshire, Westlake and Hollywood districts, Pelton and his ilk are stirring up builders and investors to erect multifamily structures. While there is talk of Hollywood and Highland becoming a corner of note, we here at the Project know it will never displace Los Angeles’ top thriving business center–Brooklyn and Soto.

The Long March Back

 leveesdynamited 

April 30, 1927 
La Louisiane

no27map

Governor Simpson declared today that the homes of thousands of French Acadiana and Spanish Creoles in St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes were tomorrow going to be deep underwater.  And not just because nature was being nature, but because Simpson was to dynamite the levees, sentencing a huge swath of hunters and trappers to homeless oblivion.

The folks of  “Evangeline,” who knew exile only too well, trudged away in a debouch forty miles long while the muddy water of thirty-one states poured past. 

floodedhouses4/30 

No Babies Wanted

pdmheadlineApril 29, 1927
Hollywood 

There’s nothin’ a kid likes more than a writ of habeus corpus! 

Darling Priscilla Dean Moran is being sought by Sheriff’s deputies to-day, after being kidnapped and spirited away by "new owners" John and Myrtle Ragland to some cottage in a Hollywood canyon.  Mrs. Margaret Becker of Long Beach has stated that she is the aunt and deserves custody, while an Ella Schaber of Tulsa has sent a message to the judge asking for possession.

PDAnd why is this sundry so all-fire interested in Priscilla?  Because the eight year-old lass is a juvenile star, and the small waif with large paycheck has been actively engaged in film work for some time, her last picture selling for 100k (1,180,180 USD2005).

The judge eventually ruled that Ragland and Schaber were trying to buy the child, and so she was, for better or worse, awarded to petitioner-for-the-writ Aunt Margaret.  Read all about it here.

 

 

Bid Goodbye to All You Know

1927.  Transatlantic telephone calls and transatlantic flight.  The Model T gives way to Model A which shoot through the Holland Tunnel.  Stalin takes control of Russian and Bavaria lifts its ban on Hitler”™s speeches.  It”™s a new world.

And here in Hollywood, while the pictures begin to talk at you, the old world crumbles away.

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Arthur Letts turned a bankrupt Los Angeles dry goods store into the mighty Broadway Department Store chain, and this was his home to prove it.

lettssr

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please do not confuse this, the Letts Sr. house (and its world-famous gardens, all obliterated in 1927) with the Arthur Letts Jr. home.

For that house, designed by Arthur Kelly and built in 1927, still stands to this day.

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And proudly.

The Leopard and Her Spots

 rentzheadline

April 22, 1927
Whittier

The 1924 Rentz-Rentz-Weible love triangle ended as love triangles so often do—with a corpse.  When Henry Rentz, 23, got a mysterious call at the Whittier Piggly Wiggly to get himself home, he found Mrs. Rentz, 21, in bed with 18 year-old oil worker Louis Weible.  As such, Rentz shot Weible in the stomach.  The judge declared thatrentzfamily Rentz “fired to protect the sanctity of his home” and exonerated the murderer.  The Rentz’ put the past aside and settled back into domestic bliss.

But Mrs. Rentz’ repentance was short-lived.  The Rentz’ were in court again yesterday, this time for divorce proceedings, and for the second time Henry had to relate the story of Louis Weible’s slaying.  Seems Myrtle Rentz, the little minx, had had a letter in her apron pocket:  “Baby, I’ll see you at noon, bye-bye, love.  Your Love Prof.” This was found by and was too much for Henry; he filed for divorce in short order.  He got it in shorter order, up to and including custody of their daughter.